Many cities now have teen book fests. If you haven’t been to one, you should try the nearest available. This is particularly true for anyone who is writing YA fiction, but, considering that authors speak about craft and their own experiences with finding agents and publishers, all writers can seek advice and fun.
This Saturday, I attended the Ontario Teen Book Fest, which is an annual event organized by the Ontario City Library. Because they have several sponsors, they are able to provide lunch in addition to a great day that includes keynote speakers, author sessions, and ‘speed date the author.’ Each year Once Upon a Time Bookstore sells titles available from each book fest author, giving everyone the opportunity to have books in hand at the end of the day for the book signing.
Teen Book Fest Keynote Speakers
This year, rather than have a panel discussion, the book fest featured three keynote speakers.
Keynote Speaker Stephanie Garber
Stephanie Garber discussed her belief that dreams come true when people are the heroes of their own stories. She described the four parts of every story (which appear to have some basis in Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey):
The Call to Adventure: the protagonists are faced with choices that will turn their lives into stories or propel them forward. (Sometimes people don’t accept the call, moving the story in another direction.)
The Midpoint: the point of no return, the point where a lot of people quit or believe, incorrectly, that they have completed their journey
The Darkest Moment: Exactly that and close to the end of the journey/story
The End
Garber’s Own Four Part Adventure
Garber discussed her own life in terms of these four parts. Although she had wanted a job with steady paychecks and insurance, when she was almost thirty years old, she was at the end of one career. She felt the call to adventure—to become an author—and decided to stay with her parents to write for six months. To do so required a “tiny leap of faith.”
She wrote for six months, but success came slowly. Garber says the midpoint brings a sense of being finished with the adventure, but she was far from done. In fact, her first five books didn’t sell. “I attended a lot of family functions where people questioned my life choices,” she reflected.
The thing that kept her writing was her own questioning of what was real and what was not. Her novel Caraval found an agent on New Years Eve, 2014. Yet that agent left the business immediately afterward.
She came to her darkest moment and said of that time, “My dream from childhood did not love me back the way I loved it. I was experiencing the worst sort of unrequited love.” Finally, her mother suggested she would not make it in writing/publishing and was worried about her daughter being rejected, wanting to stop seeing her in pain.
Advice for Writers
Garber found the courage to keep going and Caravel became a New York Times bestseller. She left the audience with something her sister would tell her: “Everything is all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it isn’t the end.”
Keynote Speaker Isabel Quintero
Isabel Quintero is the author of the William C Morris Award-winning Gabi: A Girl in Pieces. She discussed families and the value of imagining different realities. She talked of the importance of seeing dysfunctional families in novels because many people come from just such families. To paraphrase her: we all have those fears and those realities—the Nana who religious and reminds you that you are going to hell; the uncle fresh out of jail who has found Jesus and wants you to, the violent relative, the relative who embarrasses us in public. No family is perfect.
Families, Dysfunction, and Imagining New Possibilities
While Quintero is very proud that her parents worked hard (her dad as cabinet installer, her mom as a cook in the convalescent home), she credits her mom for holding it all together as her dad was an alcoholic. They weren’t allowed to talk about addiction in their home. To escape, she would spend the night in others’ homes, both friends and family. But she also escaped in books. Imagining different realities was a favorite pastime. “As a Mexican, we are always waiting for things to get worse.”
Quintero’s mom pushed literacy even though she had to stop school in third grade. She was a poet in her own youth, but lost her poetry when she immigrated from Mexico. Quintero’s father who couldn’t read or write, so she saw what the cost of illiteracy was to the family. “You have to give up your voice and rely on others. His voice was taken from him at a young age.”
Creating is a Lifelong Matter
It didn’t matter that she didn’t write her stories down when she was young, only that she was creating them. Poetry first called her—poems about trees and the grass—as she wrote what she thought poets should write. Later her subjects became the things she cared about—culture, family, questioning sexuality, and white supremacy among them. In grad school, Quintero became an editor for a literary journal and started writing prose.
Advice for Writers
“Your voice is the thing that is yours an anchor in an otherwise chaotic existence. . . . You matter, we matter . . . Our homes matters . . . I can’t wait to hear what you all come up with.”
Keynote Speaker Suzanne Young
Suzanne Young is the author of the newly released Girls with Sharp Sticks. She’s also a high school English teacher whose students don’t think about her being an author except when seeing reviews. She told a funny story about a student in her creative writing class who proclaimed that if she could become a writer, surely he could, too. Students and the school are supportive. Her school has a marketing class and her students have made trailers for her books. When she hit the New York Times bestseller list, fellow teachers celebrated, the principal announced it on the intercom, and Young’s student aide said, “We did it.” 🙂
Fan Fiction Beginnings
Young wrote what she thought of as fan fiction, but it was really murder mysteries about her friends, who loved it. (“Can you kill me next?”) However, an older girl read her stories and asked “What are you going to be famous or something?” She was so embarrassed that she hid her desire to write until college. She thought writing would be easy. (This got the biggest laugh of the morning.) Family members except grandmother didn’t believe in her chances, which Young understands. But her grandmother told her, “Susie, do whatever the hell you want.” When her grandmother was was sick and Young visited her, her asked that the first published work be dedicated to her. All of Young’s books are dedicated to her grandmother.
Another Difficult Publishing Journey
Young’s publishing journey was as difficult as Garber’s. She didn’t know how to publish or how to get an agent. She received 125 rejections over five books. When she finally found an agent, they dropped her four months later. Her first publisher cancelled her contract half way through; she then sold another series that was canceled. Now successful in her writing, she’s Published ten books with Simon and Schuster.
Advice for Writers
Young’s advice: “Write everything, write all the time.”
I’ll write next week about the breakout sessions and the ‘speed date the author,’ where authors had more good advice on craft, agents, and publishers. Meanwhile, have a look at my interview of YA novelist Gabrielle Prendergast for her take on her writing journey.