Jake Marcionette was never much of a reader.
“My mom always screamed at me to read, but I never really enjoyed it,” says the 13-year-old, lacrosse-playing Maryland resident - whose debut novel just got picked up by Penguin.
“A lot of middle-school books are too babyish,” he says. “Almost Disney-like. They talk down to the reader and dumb things down. They don’t take on enough day-today stuff, like bullies.”
Jake channeled his frustration into Just Jake, a 160-page middle-school story about Jake Ali Matthews, a sixth-grader struggling to adjust to a new school and fly under the radar of a bully.
“I feel like I can really capture middle school because I experience it every day,” he says. “It’s loosely based on my life.”
Just Jake, scheduled for a February release, is part of a growing collection of books by teen authors - some published through traditional houses, many of them self-published - that represent, in many ways, what it means to be a contemporary teenager.
“It’s no secret that disseminating the written word is so simple these days,” says Amy Pelman, digital services manager for the Arlington Heights (Ill.) Memorial Library, who writes for The Hub, the Young Adult Library Services Association’s blog. “It’s kind of a natural progression for this modern type of writing - blogging, websites - to attempt to be part of the traditional publishing world.
“Published books,” Pelman continues, “are perceived as having their own kind of authority and quality, and they also enjoy the possibility of becoming a blockbuster. So just as some teens dream of becoming famous pop stars, some dream of becoming famous authors.”
And thanks to a culture in which notions of privacy are ever-loosening, the innermost fantasies, observations and obsessions that used to live in locked and hidden journals are now, for many teens, fair game for audiences to lap up at their leisure.
“Many of them are simply unafraid to put themselves out there,” Pelman says. “I believe this is a direct effect of the Internet - that vast and powerful mode of expression in which you can be as anonymous as you choose, or cultivate a whole group of friends and followers.”
Katherine Ewell, an 18-year-old freshman at Stanford University, just landed a deal with Harper Collins for an April release of her debut novel, Dear Killer, the story of fictional, 17-year-old serial killer Kit Ward.
Dystopian fantasies make up a large chunk of the stories teens are churning out, says young adult novelist Stephanie Morrill, who runs a website called Go Teen Writers (goteenwriters.blogspot.com).
“These teens grew up reading Harry Potter,” Morrill says. “For a lot of them, writing is an escape from a mundane life. If you’re going to escape, why not create a really unique story world you can escape to?”
Such as the world of Ewell’s Ward, who chooses her prey through letters and cash that arrive in a secret mailbox.
“I’ve been writing for a lot of years,” Ewell says. “Dear Killer is something like my eighth book.”
She found the agent who led her to Harper Collins through her previous book, Bloodline of Queens, a science-fiction tale that became a semifinalist in Amazon’s 2011 Breakthrough Novel Award contest.
“A mutual friend, because I had done well in the contest, showed my book to her agent, and she picked me up as a writer,” Ewell says. “I wrote another book and sent it to her, and she started sending it out.”
She was working a summer job at the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, Calif., when she got the call from her agent that Dear Killer had been picked up by a publisher.
“I couldn’t actually pick up the phone until I got in the car to go home,” Ewell recalls. “I called her back and she told me Harper Collins wanted to publish my book. I kind of freaked out a lot. It was surreal.”
Morrill, who wrote The Reinvention of Skylar Hoyt(Revell) and The Revised Life of Ellie Sweet (Playlist), teamed up with fellow author Jill Williamson, best known for the Blood of Kings trilogy (Marcher Lord Press), to create Go Teen Writers. The site encourages and instructs teens throughout the writing and publishing process.
Morrill was inspired to launch the site after fielding repeated how-do-I-get-published questions from her teen readers.
“My advice is always, ‘Go to a writers conference; take some classes; pay a professional editor to give you a really good critique,’” she says.
“I was so focused on being published when I was a teenager that I didn’t realize how much I needed feedback that wasn’t from my parents, who thought I was wonderful.”
Morrill says the teens she talks to don’t see much risk in putting their early, unpolished work out there for the world to see, which partly explains their willingness to self-publish (along with the fact that self-publishing is easier than ever).
“In the next few years there will be so many people who’ve self-published who are looking for a literary agent or a traditional publisher,” she says. “If it is a risk to have a lousy book out there, it’s one that can easily be worked around.”
Back in 2006, science-fiction writer John Scalzi penned a much-visited item on his blog (whatever.scalzi.com), titled “10 Things Teenage Writers Should Know About Writing.” Item No. 1? “The bad news: Right now your writing sucks.”Item No. 2? “The good news: It’s OK that your writing sucks right now.”
Scalzi says he took some heat from teenage writers for his list (which also contains many pieces of salient advice about the importance of being well-read and learning the ins and outs of the publishing industry). But he stands by the advice.
“There have always been teenagers good enough or marketable enough - or some combination of the two - to be published,” Scalzi says. “But let’s be honest. Out of 1,000 teenage writers, there are going to be two or three who are genuinely, preternaturally good.”
Style, Pages 34 on 01/14/2014