Sarah Dessen is my all-time favourite author, equal first with J.K. Rowling, and they are both the benchmark against which I measure the quality of any writing that I attempt. I just ordered half Sarah’s books from Amazon in December, with the other half sitting cheerfully in my Wish List, waiting for me to save enough to pay for the postage from America.
I’ve always loved young adult fiction and the themes they explore. Sarah Dessen’s books take it even further, away from the preconceived notions attached to YA by some as Twilight-esque high school drama and romance, into wonderful novels full of substance, style and good, old-fashioned entertainment, with characters you care about and that deftly explore the concepts of family, friendship and love.
And now I’ve started gushing. I did have a point here, I swear. I love reading Sarah’s blog, and a couple of days ago she posted an article which she’d written when she was fresh out of college, working as a waitress by night and writing her novel by day. She talks about how she was not self-confident enough to consider herself “a writer”, much less say it out loud, but decides in the end that there is no reason she should have to define herself by the label of an occupation at all.
It’s a funny and encouraging read, and I’ve printed it off and slid it into my desk drawer to take out whenever I have doubts, or when my fiction writing class is doing my head in, with part of the assignment for the semester to write concrete poems.
I’m now editing a short story I wrote about a girl working in a coffeehouse who fancies the handsome singer/guitarist, which I have to print out and distribute to my class for workshopping. This is it, my first workshopping experience! It’s like going into the lion’s den.
But today I feel good. The air is slightly crisp and cool, hinting at the first faint traces of autumn. Nights in in front of the heater with a book and a hot chocolate, here I come!
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