Flying Starts

Siobhan Dowd styled herself as a writer from the age of seven, when she began embroidering biblical stories as a Catholic school student in London. After university she went into publishing, and then to work for PEN, along the way writing columns, articles, and short stories, and editing two anthologies.

But a suitable subject for a novel eluded her until she hit upon the snag: she hadn't found the right audience.

“Only when I turned my attention to writing for younger readers did it all fall into place,” she says.

In fact, Dowd hit a wellspring. Her first novel, A Swift Pure Cry (Random House/David Fickling, Mar.) has already been shortlisted for a number of prizes, and last month won Ireland's Eilís Dillon Award for a first novel.

Between acceptance speeches, she has completed and sold three more manuscripts. “It does seem like a lot but I spent so many years preparing for this,” Dowd says. “It's payback time.”

Dowd studied Latin and Greek at Oxford, but she says her formative period as a writer came in Manhattan in the 1990s, where she spent seven years directing PEN's Freedom-to-Write Center and—most significantly for her own work—getting feedback in a workshop led by Nancy Lemmon (Lives of the Saints).

The novel that sprang from that experience had its roots in her mother's childhood in County Waterford, and drew on two events involving young pregnant women in 1980s Ireland. Both women hid their pregnancies with tragic results, igniting furious debate. “It's something that has haunted Ireland ever since, and haunted me,” Dowd said.

In Dowd's fictional version, teenaged Michelle (“Shell”) Talent has been left to care for her much-younger siblings following the death of their beloved Mam. She takes up with her small town's notorious playboy, who leaves for America without knowing he has left Shell pregnant. In a starred review, PW called it a “beautifully realized account of one girl's loss of innocence, and her resilient recovery.”

Dowd's father grew up on a farm in County Kerry, and Dowd, though born in England, spent much of her childhood in the Irish countryside. “Even now, by the end of a visit, I'm speaking with an Irish brogue,” she said. "It's not hard for me to slip into that voice."

Her second novel, The London Eye Mystery, will be released in the U.K. this month, and her third book, a YA novel called Bog Child, is due out next February in the U.K. As an editor, Dowd says, Fickling “doesn't get into the nitty-gritty. He just gives me the big picture. He expects his authors to be intelligent, although sometimes I think he thinks we are more intelligent that we really are.”

Dowd writes 1000 words a day in the attic of the Oxford home she shares with her husband, Geoff Morgan, a librarian. She reads everything aloud to him before sending it to her agent—a winning formula thus far. “I wrote about 35 pages of Swift Pure Cry in first person and read it to Geoff. 'Turn it to third,' he said and I did and he was right,” she said. “I'm lucky to have him as a first critic. He gives very, very good advice.” —Sue Corbett

Lizabeth Zindel grew up in a literary family that included father Paul Zindel, a former high school chemistry teacher who became a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and young adult author.

Lizabeth was not even born when her father's first play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, opened off-Broadway in 1970. Shortly thereafter he was launched, with the help of Charlotte Zolotow, on a career of writing for young adults. He also began a family, marrying the novelist Bonnie Hildebrand in 1973. For his daughter, now 30 years old, writing came naturally, she says. On her Web site there is a picture of her penning her own work at age five.

Zindel grew up in New York City, attending the Dalton School. Ultimately, she majored in English and theater at Wesleyan. Now she has published her first novel: Girl of the Moment (Viking, Apr.), about Lily, who is hired as an intern for a talented—but highly demanding—young actress, Sabrina Snow.

Zindel says writing makes her feel close to her father, who died in 2003. He taught her how to find characters. “He would always be talking to strangers,” she says. “He saw stories in everything, even what may seem like a banal situation, he would zone in on the drama. I think I inherited that from him.”

After college, Zindel moved to Los Angeles, where she worked a series of assistant jobs at such companies as Creative Artists Agency and Maverick Records, which is how the idea of her novel was born. At one job, she remembers being excited when she was given a BlackBerry, which she quickly realized was actually a short leash. “I definitely found myself having to give up my own life,” she says. Even a subplot involving Lily's relationship with a depressed fan who writes to Sabrina was inspired by Zindel's own experience reading fan mail.

Hollywood also taught Zindel how to pitch. Suspecting that agents were not going to read a letter, she blasted a brief e-mail to 30 agents. She then overnighted her pages to the agents who expressed interest and got a message from Stephanie Lehmann at the Elaine Koster Literary Agency the next day, saying she wanted to represent her. Lehmann soon sold it to Viking in a three-book deal.

Zindel has learned that when it comes to writing, it's better to listen to only a few opinions. One of those belongs to her editor at Viking, Joy Peskin. “I have so much trust for my editor,” she says. For her part, Peskin says she recognized something unique about Zindel's work from her very first read. “She shows great literary promise, but she can also write a fast-paced story that's fun to read.”

An excerpt from Girl of the Moment will run in CosmoGIRL! and ICM is representing the film rights. For Zindel, though, the biggest thrills are more personal: she loves hearing from teens during school and library visits about the ways they've connected with her book. Plus, “there's that first moment when you actually get to walk into the bookstore and you see it on the shelf,” she says.

Currently, Zindel is working on her second novel, The Secret Rites of Social Butterflies, which will be published next summer. She says she is enjoying writing fulltime from her Manhattan home; her frequent walks through Central Park help her pick up details like interesting body language and snatches of dialogue. “It is spectacular—it is almost peaceful—to know that you're doing finally exactly what you want to be doing with your life.” —Kate Pavao

To the list of authors with eyebrow-raising credentials, add Melissa Marr, whose Wicked Lovely was published by HarperCollins this month: in high school, she was voted “most likely to end up in jail.” And she has the yearbook picture to prove it.

“I was the girl in the black leather jacket with the black fingernails, picked up after school by guys with loud cars and motorcycles,” says the mother of two. “I carried straight-A grades, but I had a little trouble with rules. I tended to have a bit of an authority problem.”

Marr graduated high school in 1990 in Pennsylvania and paid her way through college by serving drinks at biker bars. She started accumulating literary style (she wrote her master's thesis on rape narratives, with a specific focus on Faulkner's Sanctuary) and tattoos in equal measure: “I have an ivy vine that wraps around my torso, and it's still growing—there are berries that are about to sprout out of it.”

Two years ago, she started work on a short story that would eventually become Wicked Lovely. The story would sit on a shelf for more than a year—but it was never far from her mind. “It lingered with me,” she says. “I was very afraid to write a novel—it was a dream for a very long time, and it was one of the few things that I was afraid to try.”

Eventually she summoned the courage to rewrite the story and let it blossom into a novel. A 21st-century fairie tale, Wicked Lovely is the story of 16-year-old Aislinn, who is blessed/cursed with the ability to see the “bad fairies” that walk the world. One of them takes a special interest in her; he turns out to be fairie royalty.

Things happen quickly for Aislinn in the book; likewise, things happened quickly for Marr. “Over a four-month period, I sat down and wrote every day,” she says. “And then there was a novel, and all of a sudden there were agents and offers.”

It was a first novelist's dream come true: from the time she started the novel to the time of the sale, a mere six months passed. Marr now has a three-book deal, co-acquired with HarperCollins in the U.S. and U.K., with foreign rights sold to “a variety of countries.” And Tokyopop has ordered a manga series set in the novel's world.

Marr says her future books will likely be linked to Wicked Lovely in some form, but won't be sequels in the pure sense. She's drawn to framed narratives, and wants to explore using multiple timelines, though she is not limiting herself to writing fantasy. “My goals are less about genre and more about writing paths,” she says. “So I'll probably do some things that are realistic and some things that are fantasy. It's all up to whatever the muse wants me to do.The world is too fascinating to limit yourself to one path or one sort of people.”

—James Bickers