Favorite Author/Book: My top favorite authors are V.C. Andrews, J.D. Salinger, Victor Hugo, Judy Blume, John Saul, and Caroline B. Cooney. But it is the author V.C. Andrews I look up to most, for like me she liked to be different and wanted her stories to tread away from typical formulas and clichés. The thing she is known for was showing that all that consists in fairytales could consist without magic and all that happens in fairytales could happen here than just a far away place. But the fairytales she meant were the dark ones of the Brothers Grimm and not the chirpy ones of Disney.

Her novel, Flowers in the Attic, was a compelling novel that was also the most controversial. The novel was about four siblings, two brothers and two sisters, who after their father’s death they are forced to hide away in an attic of a grand mansion for four years by their mother so she could maintain her name on her dying father’s will. And instead of finding a magical world in some wardrobe, they create their own little world with paper flowers to escape to. Being absent of a mother and father, the two older siblings who are barely teens, take over those roles and try their best to provide their younger siblings with the love, care, and protection they should have had and were missing. The novel is life changing.

She had this unique writing style that drew in a young audience, speaking their language and playing upon their fantasies and fears. Her writing wasn’t literature because she wrote in character, wrote as a fifteen-year-old girl, and not as a well educated narrator who can read minds or the older version of the character looking back. She was a method writer, when a character of hers was starving, she would starve herself just to be authentic and capture all the true feelings of her character. And the author she looked up to was the author who originated genuine Teen Fiction and who paved the way for countless authors, J.D. Salinger.

Advice to aspiring young writers:

-It’s good to know yourself, but not good to give yourself a label and strictly live under it. You don’t have to have a label to understand yourself and be accepted.

-Write what you know, but also write what you want to know. Be yourself, but also become someone else. Venture into the world of “What if?” other than staying in the world of “What is”

-Have an open mind, throw away the all the rules and think outside of the box when writing. Don’t be afraid to be original.

-Clichés and formulas get you nowhere but forgotten.

-Be patient, don’t rush, and don’t give yourself deadlines.

-Write whenever you can, even if it’s for minutes at a time.

-When writing a story, if you are not having fun—stop. Start over and re-think you plot and characters. If you’re not having fun writing it, what makes you think your readers would have fun reading it enough to continue?

-Don’t let negative criticism stop you. Don’t let what other people think of you alter you writing for the worse. Not everyone is going to like your writing, accept that, you can’t please everyone. There’s ALWAYS going to be someone who hates your writing, no matter what. There is no author or book that everyone in the world likes and no one hates. When you get a negative review, remember, you’re not the only one getting negative reviews. When you’re a hero to one, you’re an enemy to another.

-ALWAYS keep in mind why people read fiction when writing. They read fiction to either escape, to learn about the extraordinary, to have fun, to seek thrill, to be reminded that they are not alone, or all of the above.