As a teenager I was reading a huge mix of literary fiction and fiction. This was before YA became a genre of its own - before Harry Potter. I remember reading and loving E. M. Forster - A room with a view - and the classics like Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, The Age of Innocence, Gone with the Wind. I also loved Louis de Bernieres south american magical realism series, Brett Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland. Other contemporary novels The Secret History and Middlesex made me love more contemporary writers too. and I also read lots of commercial fiction too when I was younger - Jilly Cooper, Dan Brown and Bernard Cornwall being a favourite escapism of my younger years!
Would you say your reading as a teenager has had a distinct influence on how you write fiction now, and why?
I think I read really broadly - I studied English A'Level so read a lot of the classics and Shakespeare and then read a wide range of fiction. the only books I really don't read now are 'chick lit' or anything about shopping, finding a husband or weddings. More than books I think the medium of film and television has influenced my writing.
What did you do before you became a published teen/young adult novelist, and how did you come to write your first teen/young adult novel and get it published?
I worked in the non profit sector in London.
I never imagined being a writer. I didn’t staple paper together when I was 6 and write stories about fairies that lived at the bottom of the garden, I didn’t wile away time as a teenager writing angsty novels about loving and losing. Ok, I wrote some really, really awful poetry for a while which I think my ex boyfriend still has and hopefully won’t put on ebay when I’m famous. When I was about 10 I was asked to write a story about an invention – any invention that we could think of – and the page stayed blank. When I was 18 my English teacher told me not to bother applying to read English at university.
I did write other things despite these early warnings to take up maths instead; diaries, newsletters, amusing emails to friends, love letters (sent and unsent) an early blog at the start of the century, countless essays about the Renaissance, the resistance and neo realist cinema, and then once I started work I wrote millions of words of wildly creative nonsense in the form of funding reports and applications to government for large amounts of money.
I honed my creative writing on the battlefield of the British voluntary sector. And I won a lot. Anyway, the point is I never really aspired to be a writer, other than that vague notion in the back of my head to one day write a book which I think I shared with 99% of the population. Just one of those things I thought would be cool to do but which I would probably never get around to.
Then in 2009 I got sick of working and sick of living in London and my husband John and I decided that we’d pack up our lives and head off around the world with our then 3 year old daughter in tow to find a new place to live. That’s documented on the rest of this blog. About the time we were planning our route I started having panic attacks about what I’d do for money when we settled somewhere else. I was swimming one day and I thought to myself, right, gotta earn some money, or I’m screwed, so now, who’s rich? Richard Branson, but he’s a workaholic, oooh Stephanie Meyer, she ‘s rich and all for writing about vampires with angsty faces and quiffy hair, right I’m going to write a book.
And that, really is the first part of my story.
By the time I’d swum twenty lengths I had the kernel of a story idea. Every time I got stuck I’d think ‘what if…’ and so the story expanded and evolved. Having said that I always felt like the story already existed and that I was just tapping into it and writing it down. I’ll detail my writing process in another blog post later.
I started writing Hunting Lila in June. I wrote it naively, I wrote without really knowing what I was doing as is obvious by the final wordcount of my first draft (117,000 words – I had no clue that first novesl in YA should run 60-80K max – didn’t even think to google it). I finished it in November and started editing it. Then I began sending out letters to agents in London whose names I’d culled from the Writers’ and Artists’ Handbook.
I was good at writing letters – that was something I’d honed through long practice in the work place. I sent out my submissions and then I headed off with a backpack to India. Most people find themselves in India, and I was no exception, in India I realised that I wanted to be a writer, that writing was no longer just a means to an end but something that I couldn’t imagine not doing, it was my passion. I’d have daydreams where I had to choose what limbs to lose and I’d make pacts with myself that I’d be fine if I had an accident so long as I was left with my head and my right arm. If I lost my right arm I decided and could no longer write I would just want to die.
I hit the beach in Goa and started writing again – this time the sequel to Hunting Lila. I didn’t have a book deal, I didn’t have an agent but I had this story and these characters of Lila and Alex who I couldn’t let go. They haunted me. I felt like I was betraying them in some way just leaving them hanging, their story only partly told. They would actually talk away in my head, whole conversations with me as the eavesdropper and then I’d just write it down. It was an awesome way to write a book – feet buried in the sand, looking out over the Arabian sea.
Whilst I was there, I received replies from the agents I’d posted to. I had sent 12 letters. I received 9 rejections, 3 of which claimed to really like it but had no room on their lists, and I received 2 requests to read the entire manuscript.
I emailed the full manuscript through to these two agents in utter terror. At the point of getting an agent I could suddenly see the glint of light through the trees and with it came this sense that I would die if it came to nothing. (see melodrama in every aspect of my life, not just my writing). If you’ve ever got to this stage in writing you’ll appreciate how hellish the waiting is. Those points where I’ve been waiting – for an agent to get back to me, for a publisher to respond – have been the most stressful and godawful but also most exciting moments of my life, like being in the throes of labour but not knowing if the child you’re giving birth to is going to be born with a head or without one.
Anyway, both agents came back almost instantly to ask to represent me and I found myself in the amazing position of being able to choose my agent. I spoke to writer friends and asked them what I should ask and I scoured the net. Both were highly reputable, well established with excellent track records. Both were very excited about the book. It was an easy choice for me to make in the end after I spoke with both – I chose the person I got on with the most and who had clearly read the book more than once, knew it very well, and who loved the characters as much as I did.
So I signed with Amanda at Luigi Bonomi Associates and have had an amazing year working with her now. Having someone to whom I can dump creative ideas on and who knows the publishing world enough to tell me what to run with and what to ditch is more brilliant than I could have guessed. I will do a fuller blog post on literary agents later.
I spent about 2 months editing my mammoth manuscript down to 85,000 words and then after several more read throughs by Amanda we thought it was ready to send out. Amanda handles the publishers. My job was to wait. And finish work on the sequel.
She sent it to the top 11 publishers in the UK – Penguin, Hodder, Simon & Schuster, Harper, Orion etc – and then we waited for three weeks. And then another two weeks. And I got a lot of rejections that made me feel like puking. It came very close with publishers whose names I could barely whisper and only then in reverential awe. It’s an almost impossible thing to get my head around still – that editors at these publishing houses read my manuscript.
In July last year I received an offer from Simon & Schuster for Hunting Lila and its sequel.
It was a good offer, especially in this day and age, for a debut author. It wouldn’t have been enough to let me give up my day job in London (though maybe go part time) but it’s enough to live well on in Bali. We celebrated a lot. I think I may have cried.
In August we were on the final leg of our journey, a road trip of California. We were staying in a beautiful house in Montecito with friends and one day I started writing a new story. This time a stand alone novel. I’ve since found that after every book I need a 6 week break, at the end of which time I’m leaping to get back in front of a computer, almost feverish and manic with the need to write. So I started this new book and it came to me very quickly, needing very little rewriting. I had it finished by October and sent it to Amanda. She loved it but wasn’t sure that Simon & Schuster having taken such a big leap of faith on a two book deal with me already would buy a third book when the first two hadn’t yet been published.
But they did. I think I woke every person in our village in Bali, screaming about that one at 6am.
It’s November 2011 now. Hunting Lila was released in August and I have just signed a deal for the film rights. Losing Lila, the sequel will be released in summer 2012 and Fated is due for release by Simon Pulse (S&S’s paranormal imprint) in January 2012.
How would you describe your style of teen/young adult fiction or your approach to writing teen/young adult fiction?
People often comment on how authentic my teenage girl voice is. I'm not conscious of choosing a specific approach.
Who is another author whose teen/young adult fiction you admire and why?
JK Rowling. I'm in awe of how she managed to structure and plot seven extraordinarily detailed novels. Having written a series myself I know how difficult it must have been to draft all those plot lines without any recourse to go back and change anything in previous books. Harry Potter is a cultural phenomenon for a reason. She writes so well and created characters that were so believable that they have become absorbed into popular culture.
How would you summarise one of your teen/young adult novels in one paragraph?
17-year-old Lila has two secrets she's prepared to take to the grave. The first is that she can move things just by looking at them. The second is that she's been in love with her brother's best friend, Alex, since forever. Or thereabouts.After a mugging on the streets of South London goes horribly wrong and exposes her unique ability, Lila decides to run to the only people she can trust - her brother and Alex. They live in Southern California where they work for a secret organisation called The Unit, and Lila discovers that the two of them are hunting down the men who murdered her mother five years before. And that they've found them. Trying to uncover the truth of why her mother was killed, and the real remit of The Unit, Lila becomes a pawn in a dangerous game. Struggling to keep her secrets in a world where nothing and no one is quite as they seem, Lila quickly realises that she is not alone - there are others out there just like her - people with special powers -and her mother's killer is one of them...
How would you describe the appeal of this novel to teen/young adult readers?
From the reviews the appeal is three fold; the romance (particularly the lead character Alex), the X-men style action and the altogether different setting of a military base (which makes a change from the normal High school setting for YA romance).
How would you summarise a chapter from this novel in one paragraph?
About a third of the way through the novel Lila meets someone who tells her the truth about the mysterious organisation her brother works for and she discovers she is not alone in having a mind power.
How would you describe the contribution this chapter makes to the novel?
It's the main instigating chapter from where all the action pivots. It changes the tone and direction of the novel and from that point on the book becomes basically one long chase scene with a final explosive show down between all the characters in the book.
To what extent would you say fiction written primarily for young readers is different from fiction written primarily for adult readers?
I don't think it always is different but I would say that in YA you can stretch your imagination and write about things you wouldn't necessarily have an audience for in adult (paranormal, dystopia etc) which is why I like it. The protagonist in YA is usually someone of a similar age to the reader which is the main difference, it has a shorter word count generally and the themes addressed in YA tend to be more aimed at the key issues that come up at that age; identity, choosing your path, choosing between wrong and right. And it's always a journey of self-discovery and transformation for the main characters.
Author website: www.sarahalderson.com
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