Flying Starts

Teens already rule at the multiplex and the music store. Now, more than ever, they're also showing their clout at the bookstore. For our semi-annual Flying Starts feature, we profile three of the most exciting debut novelists writing for teens: An author whose plans to become a priest got derailed by a job at Booklist; another who took a writing class that saved her from "a really boring job at AT&T"; and a singer/songwriter whose childhood ambition to write a sequel to Star Wars eventually led her to create a novel that's all her own.

A few years ago, when freshly minted college grad John Green was contemplating his future, he probably didn't count on being linked in the public imagination with the use of a toothpaste tube to demonstrate the mechanics of a particular type of oral sex.

After all, the original plan was to become an Episcopal priest.

But Green's first novel, Looking for Alaska (Dutton, Mar.), includes one of the most-talked about scenes of the season, in which the title character, a doomed blonde babe named Alaska, gives the woefully naive 17-year-old narrator Miles "Pudge" Halter and his date some basic instruction in partner pleasuring. Alaska is sure to become one of those books teens eagerly pass around—with certain pages dog-eared.

Hopefully, they'll read the whole thing because, despite Miles's abundant self-deprecating humor, Alaska is also a profound book about wasted life—a topic Green found himself thinking about a lot after college, while working as a student chaplain in a children's hospital. "Watching children die," as he puts it, "for a living." Theological themes, the PW review noted, add an "introspective gloss" to Green's tale.

Now 27, Green, like Miles, grew up in Florida and left home as a teenager for boarding school in Alabama. Miles, looking for excitement, gets more than he bargained for, and a boatload of guilt and regret to process, when Alaska's self-destructive bad habits spiral downward.

The author's introspective nature was honed at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he double-majored in English and religious studies. After his stint as a chaplain, he planned to enroll in divinity school at the University of Chicago, but put school aside for a job as a production editor at Booklist. The editors there made quick use of his knowledge of world religions by giving him books about Islam to review. Children's book editor Ilene Cooper thought enough of his writing to take him to lunch to talk about his future.

"I told her I really wanted to write this book," Green said of Alaska. "And she gave me a deadline, which I failed to meet. Then she gave me another deadline, which I failed to meet. And then September 11th happened and I was very depressed and suddenly single [his girlfriend broke up with him on Sept. 13], and I just sat down and wrote the book."

Cooper sent it to Donna Brooks, then at Dutton, who had edited Jack, her biography of John F. Kennedy's youth. After Brooks left, the manuscript was passed along to editor Julie Strauss-Gabel, who Green called "an old-school type who pushed me on everything."

"I'd say 80 percent of the words in the original manuscript were changed," he said. "The real challenge was not selling it but writing it."

Still, Green calls himself "ridiculously lucky," and says it's a thrill to think that "someone who isn't in my family is reading my book." He gives all credit to Cooper, who he says acted as his agent, mentor, editor, goad and pal, rolled into one. "She's entirely responsible for my career."

He's leaving her anyway, however—heading to New York City on the arm of his fiancé, who plans to study art history at Columbia University beginning this fall. Green will be writing, or as he puts it, "finding ways to avoid writing." He is under contract with Dutton for his next two novels, the first of which is titled An Abundance of Katherines, about a washed-up child prodigy who has dated 19 girls, all named Katherine, each of whom dumped him.

Green describes it as "funny," but it will also deal with the nature of love and the power of grief, because those are the topics that engage him.

"Writing a novel is hard. You need something to sustain you," Green said. "I don't think I could do it if I wasn't writing about big issues."—Sue Corbett

Michael (Storky) Pomerantz, the endearingly nerdy hero of Storky: How I Lost My Nickname and Won the Girl (Putnam, Apr.), first emerged over two decades ago in an assignment that D.L. (Debbie) Garfinkle wrote for a creative writing class. "We were given seven words that we had to use in a one-page story," recalls Garfinkle, who was taking the class at Pierce College "just for fun" while working a "really boring job at AT&T." She says her teacher loved her description of Storky and asked to keep it to use as a writing sample for other students. "I never got the piece back," she said.

Although she always had a passion for writing, composing "lots of bad poetry" and some short stories (one of which got published in 1984), Garfinkle, a California native, chose to follow a "practical" career path. After receiving an economics degree at Brandeis University, she went to law school at Berkeley, became an attorney, got married and had two children without ever seriously entertaining thoughts of becoming an author.

It wasn't until 1999 when doctors mistakenly thought Garfinkle had a rare form of breast cancer that she began to take stock of her life and made some dramatic changes. "The tumor turned out to be benign, but throughout the ordeal I was forced to ask myself some questions, [such as] 'What accomplishments am I most proud of?' I came up with the answer 'having my two children and writing a story that got published.' Soon afterwards, I decided to quit my job as a lawyer."

While at home with her two children and pregnant with her third, Garfinkle began the 14-month process of writing her first YA novel. She structured her book in journal form, recounting high-school freshman Storky's hilarious, often embarrassing mishaps as he pursued the girl of his dreams and came to terms with his neglectful father.

"I enjoyed writing from a male perspective. I like the feeling of creating a separate persona and inhabiting a certain character. It's a lot like acting," says Garfinkle, who was involved with drama in high school and college. The author also said that when writing Storky, she appreciated the fact that she did not have to think about her own teenage years. However, she admitted that her long-legged, Brillo-pad-haired protagonist does bear a striking resemblance to someone she once knew. "He was the nicest boy I ever dated in high school, and I dumped him for a juvenile delinquent," she says with a laugh, recognizing the irony. "In high school, I was a mix of the two teenage girls in the story, Gina [who chooses a football player nicknamed Hunk over Storky] and Sydney [the nicer, less popular girl, who turns out to be Storky's perfect match]."

After completing Storky in 2001, Garfinkle submitted it to Laura Rennert, whose name she found in a book of literary agents. After the book was accepted by Rennert came a series of disheartening rejections from publishers, which continued even after Storky won the San Diego Book Award for an unpublished piece of work. "When editors took time to make comments, I did take them to heart," Garfinkle admits. "I was constantly rewriting sections of the book up until the time it was bought by Penguin in August 2003. After that, my editor, John Rudolph, said the book needed only 'minor revisions,' but his idea and my idea of minor revisions are obviously different. I was surprised when he sent me a seven-page, single-spaced letter explaining changes that had to be made." The finished novel was well-received; PW's starred review called Garfinkle's narrator "memorable," saying that "readers will cheer him on, relishing the rewards that await him at the end of his first trying year of high school."

Clearly, Garfinkle, who did experience a good working relationship with Rudolph, has no regrets in leaving the world of law and entering the realm of children's literature. Now a fulltime mother and writer, she is busy working on two new books for teens. "I love being a writer," she says enthusiastically. "I write every day. Life wouldn't be complete without it!" — Lynda Brill Comerford

Andy Warhol had a 15-minute theory; Cecil Castellucci has "a 10-year theory." Not about getting fame, exactly, but about getting a chance.

The author of Boy Proof (Candlewick, Mar.), who grew up in New York City and now lives in Los Angeles, said that she "got serious" about writing for young adults about 10 years ago. "In any art form, if you want to do something seriously, you have to realize that everyone's in line and you have to do your work—while you're in line—until it's your turn." While she waited her turn, Castellucci was also writing songs (she's recorded two CDs as a singer/songwriter) and doing movies (she wrote the screenplay for an as-yet-unreleased film called Happy Is Not Hard to Be). But she considers penninga book "the crown of writing."

By age four, she was trying to organize a neighborhood production of La Traviata, rather than the usual game of kickball. And at age seven, she had an epiphany: at the end of Star Wars, as Darth Vader hurtled through space, she realized there would be another story—and she wanted to write it. George Lucas may have had other plans, but this seems an appropriate beginning for a writer whose novel stars a science-fiction fanatic.

High school senior Victoria Jurgen, who narrates Boy Proof, calls herself "Egg," after the star of a favorite sci-fi movie. The extremely intelligent, self-styled outcast, finds herself drawn to a new student, Max Carter, who seems to "get" Egg.

Castellucci, a graduate of New York's LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts (think Fame) and Montreal's Concordia University, had made several attempts at writing books—all of them rejected. So she decided to take some royalties for one of her songs and enroll in a workshop on writing for children taught by Tim Wynne-Jones at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada. But to be admitted, she had to submit 40 pages of a novel. She took her dilemma to Steve Salardino, who works at her favorite L.A. bookstore, Skylight Books. "You should write a book called Boy Proof," Salardino told her, "and have a guy in it named Max." The author said with a laugh: "Steve loves me as a person but he thinks of me as boy proof." Still, she confessed, "When Steve said, 'boy proof,' it all came together."

Meanwhile, Castellucci had first come across Candlewick's Liz Bicknell when she signed up for a Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators retreat in 2001, at which Bicknell was scheduled to appear. But the retreat was right after 9/11, so Bicknell invited participants to send manuscripts instead. The two went back and forth on several projects to no avail. Then in 2003, Bicknell did attend a SCBWI retreat—when the author was working on Boy Proof. Bicknell introduced Castellucci to editor Kara LaReau, and they hit it off. The two worked together on Boy Proof, and LaReau also edited the author's next YA novel, Queen of Cool, about a popular girl who winds up working in the Los Angeles Zoo, due from Candlewick next spring. For Castellucci, the best thing about being a published writer is the entrée it has given her to a circle of fellow authors. "When I was growing up I was obsessed with Luis Buñuel. He had this autobiography where he'd talk about being out with Salvador Dalí, and I always wanted that to be my life. And I do have that now," she said citing the experience of meeting fellow writers, such as Libba Bray and Angela Johnson.

She said of the positive feedback she has received on Boy Proof (including a starred review from PW), "It's a nice boost. Otherwise you want to give up—and that goes back to my 10-year theory. I want to keep doing [this], even if I'm scratching my stories into dust."—Jennifer M. Brown