Advice For Young Writers

by Robyn Schneider

PART I: WHAT IT’S LIKE TO PUBLISH YOUNG

I wrote my first novel when I was thirteen, so I can totally relate to teens who are interested in becoming authors. Here’s my story: Wrote four or five novels unpublished in high school. Read books constantly. Researched the publishing industry and sent query letters to literary agents the summer before college. Got a literary agent and a book deal my freshman year of college. Sold three more books the next year. (For the record, I sold four books total to major publishing houses while still in my teens.)

I didn’t have any connections to people in the publishing industry, and maybe a few people said I was really young, but they meant it as a compliment because I knew my stuff, and no one refused to look at my work because of my age. It was all based on talent, but I had to compete with adults, with people who had degrees in this stuff, and three or four times the amount of experience that I did.

Those are the facts, but this is the truth: I wish I’d waited. My first novel is fun, and it got great reviews, but there’s so much more I could have put into it if I’d had another year or two (or five) to become a better writer. There are so many young people getting books published these days, and it’s easy to obsess over that and compare yourself to them. But it’s not a race, and there are no winners. Focus on making yourself the best writer you can be, and when it’s meant to happen, you’ll succeed.

Also, for the record, being a teenager with a book deal doesn’t bring you instant fame or fortune, but it is a foolproof way to ensure major criticism. If you keep a blog, suddenly it’s the blog of a Published Author and people will scrutinize everything you say and call you out on the tiniest phrases, because you’re Published. Your friends or fellow classmates might become insanely jealous.

With success comes criticism, and not just on your writing, so you better have tough skin. People want to judge whether or not you’ve earned your success and how stuck up the success has made you. Getting published when you’re young changes things. It makes you different, even when you don’t want to be. There are so many weekends when I haven’t been able to go out with my friends because of copyedits, countless Spring Breaks spent pouring over a revision letter, and a number of awkward situations where friends have asked me to give their not-quite-good-enough book to my agent, or wanted to borrow $100 because they know I have the money.

Would I go back and change things, though, For Real? Probably not, but I wish I could go back and warn myself that writing is a real job–not a fame-and-fortune fairy tale—the kind of job where you have to work weekends and holidays, where sometimes you’re afraid what results Google will turn up when you type in your name. Sure, it’s rewarding, but so is having a fun night out without obsessing that a revision of your novel is due during midterms.

PART II COMING SOON!