By Christine M. Quirk — Christine@concordbridge.org
School was in session last Saturday as area authors — both published and aspiring — met at Concord-Carlisle High School for the first Young Adult Author Symposium.
“I love it,” freshman Meg Packard said. “I’m not really a writer, but I’m a big reader, and I love all the excitement and the energy about books.”
CCHS librarian Kip Wilson and Concord Free Public Library teen librarian Erick Gordy planned the event and recruited local kidlit authors, and “Wicked” author Gregory Maguire made a special appearance at the opening panel.
In addition to scheduled breakout sessions, attendees could meet their favorite writers, buy new books, and ask for autographs.
Peabody student Juniper Morabito, 11, had two of her new purchases signed.
“I was interested to go because I want to read more books,” she said.
Some of the writers have their Concord connections:
- Maguire lives in town with his family.
- Marcella Pixley teaches eighth grade in Carlisle, where her students will go on to CCHS.
- And Susan Tan is a CCHS alumna whose first job was at the Concord Free Public Library and who has set her latest book in a fictionalized version of her hometown. “It features archival work in the Concord Public Library, Peabody Middle School, and the town junkyard by Belknap Street — the old one where the bits of glass still come up,” she said.
The full author lineup also included Rebecca Caprara, Federico Erebia, Sara Farizan, Desmond Hall, Kendall Kulper, Rajani LaRocca, Vanessa Lillie, Rebecca Mahoney, Lisa Stringfellow, and Jonathan Todd.
Character building
One breakout session focused on crafting characters. Though panelists Erebia, Farizan, and Tan took different approaches to creating their protagonists, they all agreed that these characters must face challenges and show growth by the end of the story.
Farizan used “Shrek” as an example of how an inciting incident can pave the way for adventure and transformation.
“You meet him in the beginning. He’s happy in his mud hut,” she said. “And then this donkey comes because we got to get you out of the mud. … In any story, your character has to go through an arc, so they have to change in some way.”
Introducing conflict, the writers said, is a way to show both character development and improve the story’s pacing. And one way to do that is to “be mean,” Tan said.
“I love my characters. They’re amazing,” she said. “And also, as writers, our job is to torture our characters. Find out what our characters like and don’t like, and then do the thing that would drive them up the wall.”
Freshman Yvan Lipson asked questions of the panel and said that as a writer of dystopian fiction, she liked things “mysterious and dark.”
“I learned a lot about characters and how to organize them and develop them,” she said. “You’ve got to be mean to them.”
Sometimes, Farizan said, the characters tell the writer where they want to go.
“It’s really weird, because you’re creating them,” she said. “I know there’s so much that’s good about planning and making sure these things happen, but things change all the time.”
Doing the research
Another workshop discussed research’s importance, even in fiction writing.
Erebia’s novel, for instance, is semi-autobiographical, but he still had things to look up.
“I researched everything, even things I was sure I knew,” he said. “When you’re writing, the last thing you want a reader to complain about is that you got something wrong in terms of your research or your history.”
Sometimes, the research is hands-on. Farizan’s novel features a haunted pinball machine, and, as her book is set in the late ’80s and early ’90s, she found a machine from that era she could actually play. She enlisted a couple of friends to record her games and then made the trip to try it out.
“I wanted to physically play it and be like, ‘What happens when you do this or that?’” she said.
Words of advice
How do you become a better writer? By writing.
“I think this was a great day,” Wilson said. “We have people interested in all kinds of writing, and almost every attendee wanted to write, which is how you learn. You learn from reading books and talking with other writers, and the kinds of connections that were made today.”
She hopes YAAS becomes a yearly event.
“The kids are everything,” Hall said. “When they say this insightful stuff, you just begin to think, ‘You know what, what I do works, and I love it. It’s an honor to have been here.’”
