Why I Write: Including why I write YA novels and don't go for the big bucks in "grown-up" books

Remember how I said I used to lie all the time? (If you understandably skipped the Bio page, quick update: I used to lie all the time. I don't lie anymore. Well, not much.) I lied because I was bored with my life. But I didn't really mind that my life was so boring or that I was pretty boring myself because I preferred vicarious pleasures, exploring other options through reading and writing. (Okay, now I think about it, it seems kind of pathetic. Maybe even like there's a clinical term for it. Please don't tell me if there is.) But anyway...

I've always loved to read, but I didn't think about wanting to write until eighth grade. I'm not exactly sure what triggered it. I was deep in a horsey-phase, reading everything I could get my mitts on that involved horses. The first book I wrote and completed was called CANDLES. It was about rich, horsey kids and their horsey troubles. I wrote it on one of those Red Chief tablets that I got out of the vending machine in the school lobby for fifty cents.

Over the next twenty-some years, I wrote tons of outrageous stuff, way too much of it involving the KGB, psychic rock stars and South American dictators. But never once did I consider writing anything other than young adult novels. (Yes, YA novels involving the KGB and dictators.)

I'd like to say I write young adult novels because I love the challenge of the spareness of the form. But I don't. It's very hard to write the way the modern YA genre demands. I write YA because those are the books that moved me the most. It's the age group that excites me the most. Think about what's going on in your life between the ages of 12 and 18. It's all about change inside and out. I'm not talking about your body. I'm talking about how you begin to see yourself fitting into the world. And it's about making choices. New, exciting, scary, etc. And since change and choice are conflict and conflict is the basis of great stories, what could be better to write about?

But mostly I'm writing the stories I want to read.

How I Write

Okay, so for twenty-some years, I wrote outrageous nonsense, hugged myself for a few weeks, went back and reread what I'd written, figured nobody would ever publish it, stuffed it in a drawer and went on writing more nonsense.

I never considered revising as a theory or practice. I figured if I couldn't do it right the first time, what kind of writer was I? It wasn't until I got on the Internet and started interacting with other real live writers that I started to understand how a book comes together. For most of us, anyway. You write something that looks like utter crap and then you carve and rearrange and prune and plump it up until it makes sense to someone other than you.

So now I try to let go of the idea that I'm going to write the perfect story in the first draft, knowing that I'm going to go back again and again and clean it up until it says what I want it to say as clear as I can make it. I lost count of the revisions on RAISING THE GRIFFIN. I have eight versions on my hard drive but I know that's not all of them. I stopped counting completely rewritten first chapters somewhere around fourteen.

It took me one year to write the first draft and then three years of revision. I'm hoping I'll be able to improve my time now that I have embraced this whole revision concept. I try to write every day (notice I said "try"), mostly in the late evenings and into the early mornings, when my kids are in bed. But I do a lot of "mental writing" all the time, which is why I walk into walls, forget why I went into the basement, stand at the sink with the water running, let dinner burn, etc.

Obviously, I don't follow the "write what you know" rule. I get ideas from all over the place. Sometimes just a face sparks an idea or overhearing something someone says or seeing someone doing something interesting. Sometimes it's a combination of lots of different things I've seen or read or heard that have piled up subconsciously so that I'm not sure where they came from. The idea for GRIFFIN came from a lifelong fascination with royalty and probably lots of old movies about royalty and duty like ROMAN HOLIDAY, THE STUDENT PRINCE, etc.

I don't use outlines or plot much in advance. I usually start with a character, a situation and a general idea of where things are going and where we're going to end up. But it can be frustrating, like when you have to try to make sense of it later or when you're stuck and nothing happens and then you have to actually think. I'm sure there are lots more efficient ways to go about putting a novel together. There are plenty of how-to books out there that think they can tell you the very best way. But if I've learned anything over the past four years, it's that you have to find the way that works for you, trust that it works even when it looks like a godawful mess, and be flexible.

How I Got Published (The Sweetened, Condensed Version)

Back in my bio, I said something about how I decided to get serious about getting published. I got too serious. I had plenty of story ideas that I wanted to write, but instead of writing those, I wrote stories that I thought editors would want to buy. I entered them in this contest and I got these rejection letters that said things like "We like this, but the main character is too glib. If you revise, we will take another look at it."

For the longest time, I couldn't figure out what glib meant. And then there was my aversion to revision. I tried to revise. I sat down with two novels that had been submitted to that contest and both received the "glib" comment. And...they were right. My characters were glib. They were glib because I didn't care about what I was writing. It was all surface junk. And going beneath the surface in revision meant the kind of work I wasn't willing to do for stories I didn't care about.

If I was going to work that hard and put my heart on the line for rejection, it was going to have to be for something I loved. So I pulled out a story I'd been dreaming about for years but wasn't sure was the kind of story that would sell. It was the story of a grumpy prince and the restoration of a monarchy. I wrote it because I loved it. I got it critiqued and I revised it. I got it critiqued again and I revised it again. I submitted it and got rejected. I learned everything I could about revision and I revised it again. And again. And again. I submitted it again and got asked to revise. I revised it and resubmitted and it sold. (And after it sold, I revised some more!)

For three years I revised and got critiqued and queried agents and editors and racked up rejections. I had the contacts you hear people say are so vital these days, but they weren't enough. In the end, I sold the book because I was determined to stick with a story I loved, found an editor who loved the story enough to want to work with me and because I was willing to revise and revise and revise. And I was willing because I loved the story.

 Copyright 2003 Melissa Wyatt