Lauren Myracle knew from the time she was in second grade that she wanted to be a writer--but the path to becoming a published author was long, and some tried to discourage her from pursuing her dream before she'd even begun to try.
As a college student, one professor told her she wasn't good enough to take an advanced creative writing class. "I cried," Myracle told Chicago-area fans who came to see her Sunday at Anderson's Bookshop Two Doors East in Naperville. Her dream had been to write for children, and so she read one of her favorite children's books, 'Ramona the Brave,' as she reeled from the sting of the professor's words. Reading that story of a spunky first-grader who must find a way to form a truce with the first-grade teacher who doesn't understand her gave Myracle the inspiration she needed to keep going. "I decided that teacher could tell me I couldn't take her class, but she couldn't tell me not to become a writer," Myracle said. Later, in graduate school, she was refused admittance into a graduate-level creative writing class--but kept writing, anyway.
After five failed novels and 118 rejections, Myracle found an editor who found something special in a novel she'd written and asked her to revise it--again, and again. "I wrote it five times in a two-year period," Myracle told Chicago-area readers, saying that she started the book over from scratch during her first attempt to revise it. Then came the night she received a call at home from the editor, Susan Van Metre, now vice president and publisher for Abrams Books for Young Readers and Amulet Books, and offered her a publishing contract.
"My heart dropped into my stomach, and I felt all dorky, as I often do," Myracle said of that phone call, as fans of her middle-grade and young adult books laughed.
Today, Myracle is one of the most popular and frequently banned children's authors of the 21st century (alongside Judy Blume). She is perhaps best known for her 'TTYL' series, written entirely in an instant-message format about three girls who are navigating high school. Her latest novel, 'Shine,' about a gay teen who is beaten and left for dead and his 16-year-old friend, Cat, who is determined to find out who did it, has been described as her finest to date.
"Whatever you hold onto that you want to do, and that other people tell you you are foolish to want to do--don't give up," Myracle told fans at Anderson's on Sunday. "If you keep plugging after it, I think perseverence is a big part" of whether you'll succeed, she said.
Connecting with Readers
During Sunday's presentation, Myracle opted to read from a middle-grade novel she's published, 'Violet in Bloom,' rather than 'Shine,' her latest young adult release, due to the age of the audience, which included four Chicago-area 10-year-olds who are best friends.
Myracle, whose parents divorced when she was just 4, split her summers between Atlanta, where she lived with her mother, and a small town in North Carolina where her father and step-mother lived. "I had my wealthy, screwed-up life in Atlanta and my screwed-up, very different world in North Carolina," she said.
Her step-mother, Sarah Lee, was young; "I think she was threatened by me," Myracle said, particularly since Myracle was the spitting image of her mother. Sarah Lee hated that Myracle read, and she tried to limit the amount of time Myracle could spend espcaping into fictional worlds. "She'd tell me, 'You can't read for more than an hour a day,'" Myracle remembers--so Myracle would climb a tree and hide with her books.
Her life in Atlanta was a stark contrast from summers in North Carolina. Myracle's father grew up "dirt poor"--"His whole house was 12' x 12'," she said. His parents "were sweeties," she said, but they did not practice dental hygiene; as a result, her father lost all his teeth by the time he was 18. As an adult, he tried to hide his impoverished background, studying how others his age spoke, what utensils they used, and more in an effort to blend in.
The setting for 'Shine'--a North Carolina rural, backwoods town with just over 700 people--reflects Myracle's experiences in and love for the rural South. "It's a world where, when kids do stay in high school past the age of 16, people wonder why they do," Myracle says of the novel's setting.
About the Book
In 'Shine,' 16-year-old Cat will have to push through the walls she’s built around herself while dealing with a secret hurt to uncover who is responsible for the assault on her former best friend. She’ll also have to face hard truths about her impoverished Southern town and her older brother and his band of redneck friends.
While the 'TTYL' series was the most difficult to write in regard to craft--"It's hard to write without exposition"--Myracle said, "From a content aspect, I think there's a reason this book was written 13 years into my career."
"For a long time, I wrote about happy girls with problems trying to be happy. And this book, 'Shine,' is dark," Myracle said.
Part of the inspiration for 'Shine' was Myracle's desire to write a mystery. "Every time I write a new book, I want to push myself to try something different," she said. "I'd ever really written a mystery, and I wanted to try."
So she read a lot of mysteries--'The Girl Who Stopped Swimming,' by Joshilyn Jackson, is one of her favorites--chose a model that she liked, and broke it down in an attempt to apply that model to her own story. When the first draft was complete, her editor, Susan, told her, "You need to 'Law & Order' it up,'" meaning that she needed to make everyone look like a potential suspect in Patrick's assault.
"How long does it take you to write a book?" one member of the audience asked. "Ideally, a year, but that hasn't happened in a long time," she said. Sometimes, she'll give herself a deadline of five months to create a first draft; with revision, the process takes longer. 'Shine' took two years to create, she said.
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