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Frequently Asked Questions
How did you become a writer? I started writing poetry when I was in first or second grade, and that's all I really wrote for years and years. It wasn't until I was almost thirty that I started writing stories. I'd been re-reading some of my favorite children's books (like Harriet the Spy, and The Changeling by Zilpha Keatley Snyder) and decided that I wanted to write books for young people, too. I wrote a sort of practice novel (which is still at the bottom of a drawer somewhere) and a few months later wrote the first draft of Dovey Coe. It would be several years before I wrote a second draft. In the meantime, I worked at a variety of jobs, including motel housekeeper, legal secretary, and arts administrator. When one of my friends, a writer, met a children's book editor, she asked if I could send this editor some of my work to look at. The editor said yes. I sent her chapters from Dovey Coe and The Secret Language of Girls (which was the fourth book I wrote -- there was another book, too, the book I wrote after Dovey Coe (but way before Dovey Coe got published -- it's confusing, I know) that wasn't ultimately good enough to be published). She wrote me to say she was actually leaving book publishing to become a writer herself, but I should send the entire manuscript Dovey Coe to her colleague, Caitlyn Dlouhy, who at that time was also an editor at HarperCollins Children's Books. Caitlyn read Dovey Coe and rejected it. She wrote me a nice letter saying she liked Dovey, the character, a lot, but that the rest of the book needed work. She gave me some good advice for revising, and told me that if I did revise the book I should send the revision to her. Which I did, a year later. By then, Caitlyn was an editor at Atheneum Books for Young Readers, a division of Simon & Schuster. She liked the revision and agreed to publish it. She still made me do a bunch more revisions, though! (She always does.) I've been writing books (and Caitlyn's been editing my books) ever since. Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? No, although I always wrote (mostly poetry when I was younger). My career choices included cartoonist, painter (I can't paint, but that didn't stop me from wanting to be an artist), and radio disc jockey. In fact, I went to college thinking I would go into radio (I love music, but don't have much musical talent), but fell under the influence of poetry and ended up majoring in English. It wasn't until I was almost thirty that I decided I wanted to write children's books. Where do you get your ideas? I'm inspired by all sorts of things -- what I read in the paper, things that happened to me growing up, and just the stuff I wonder about when I'm driving around. What advice do you have for young writers? Read, read, read, write, write, write. Writing is like anything, you have to practice to get good at it. So if you're serious about writing, make time to write every day. If you don't know what to write about, write about your life. Keep a journal. Do character sketches of people you go to school with. I don't know many writers, even famous writers, who just sit down and write brilliant books without breaking a sweat. Most writers I know, including myself, write lousy or only so-so first drafts, make improvements, get feedback, and revise, revise, revise. All this to say: don't expect to be perfect. Let yourself make mistakes. Do a lousy job -- and then go back and do a better one. Can you visit my school? It depends. Sometimes it's hard for me to travel a lot, because I've got a lot of family commitments. But if you'd like me to visit, you can have your teacher or librarian e-mail Jodie Cohen at Atheneum and she can check my schedule, etc. Where and when do you write? I have two writing spots: my desk and my bed. Wherever I am, I write on a computer (laptop when I'm working on my bed), and mostly I write at night (my children are still pretty young and make it hard to write during the day). When I'm working on a book, I like to sit down at the same time every night so my imagination knows when to get going. | |||||
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books by Frances O'Roark Dowell
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Frances O'Roark Dowell |
