Lauren Oliver, author of Delirium trilogy: 'Writing is compulsive for me'

The bestselling young adult author wrote her first published novel on a BlackBerry while commuting. Now she has a fan base ardent enough to complain about the way she ended one bookLauren Oliver, a bestselling young adult writer whose latest book, Vanishing Girls, was published in the US last week, did not set out to write for teenagers – not originally. In fact, when she started out she wrote more than one novel for adults that she simply couldn’t sell to publishers. Talking about that early work, she is her own toughest critic: she calls the manuscripts “long” and “plotless”. “I kept getting the same feedback,” she said, “which was the writing was very good and the characters were great, but there was no story whatsoever.”Oliver is the daughter of English professors, and she’d attended the MFA program in creative writing at New York University. But, she says, for a long time, publishers’ feedback on her early work puzzled her: “It was honestly a criticism I didn’t totally understand.” Nothing in her background, she said, had prepared her to wield the mechanics of story. It took a job in a young adult division of Penguin to teach her that, where training under editors she learned the basics of structure. And it taught her “to tell a story, not just write character description and pretty sentences and stuff”. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2015-03-19 00:00:00 UTC ]

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