Best-Selling International Author Gayle Forman Tells SCRF of the Roller Coaster Ride of Writing for Young Adults

The worldwide best-selling author Gayle Forman, whose young adult novels have been translated into more than 40 languages, has been telling a packed audience at the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival about the path that has led her – and her characters – to cult status in so many countries.

After several years as a freelance journalist, latterly working on Seventeen Magazine, New York-based Forman believes that her early career gave her an excellent background for writing novels.

“It was a huge help, particularly in transcribing interviews where you really get used to the way people speak. With journalism, it’s almost as though you have the right to go out into the world and get to know and report things at a deeper level. Of, course, it also taught me the importance of meeting deadlines, which is crucial in writing of any sort. Travelling was a big advantage, to see so many cultures and open your mind to so many different perspectives.

“But now it’s so difficult to be a journalist, even on a practical level. When I was freelancing, a story which may have paid a couple of thousand dollars, would now only pay a few hundred. A lot of the magazines are suffering because of a lack of advertising and there is so much free content online, although I do think that’s going to come full circle as the need for more professional journalism grows.”

In arguably her most popular book, the groundbreaking ‘If I Stay’, the author wrote the story around a real life tragedy that happened eight years before.

“Eight years later, I started writing and obviously, this was an extremely close and extremely personal story. I believe that every writer has a special book inside them and this was mine. I didn’t have it mapped out, there was no real structure, I don’t even know what my intentions were as far as getting it published or even read, I just had to write it. There was just this outpouring of words and storylines that I couldn’t stop. I would suddenly think to myself ‘that’s a great direction to go’ and didn’t realise another major event would come along and it felt so right, to the point that I was heading towards the climax and still didn’t know how it would end.

“This was exceptional, though. This was my special book. I still try to not map my books too much or plan too far ahead. If I do, I feel that I’m married to my ideas and have to be faithful to them, but eventually I realise that I have to go back and start again – I have had to reverse back down so many dark alleys. The best way to write is to let your characters guide you and after all, that’s also the most enjoyable part of being an author.”

Answering one of the audience questions on being disciplined with her writing times, the author says it is something that has changed dramatically over the years.

“I used to literally get the kids off to school and sometimes not even get out of my pyjamas and would just start writing. Before I knew it, it was the afternoon I had to get dressed for the kids again.

“Now, I can’t do that though because I’m always going to meetings or going on tour, which I love, but it doesn’t give me the time to write that I used to have. On the plus side, when I do have that time, I have been thinking about all these ideas and when I can do some writing, it’s like a gush of energy bursting out onto the page. When we have the luxury of time, we can sometimes abuse it and there is nothing worse than spending the whole day writing one page and looking back at it the next day and tearing it up because it’s no good.”

On having ‘If I Stay’ turned into a major Hollywood film, the Los Angeles-born author said it can be a mixed experience.

“Having a book turned into a movie may be great or it may be horrific, but one thing it does is bring a new audience of readers to your work which is obviously fantastic. It’s not possible to write a book in the way that anticipates it being made into a movie, it’s the job of the Hollywood producers to make sure they can adapt the original material. At the beginning, I was very much on the periphery, but I became more and more involved and ended up loving it. It was so alien to think that all the people working on all the sets with all the crews were there just because I had written my book in the corner of my living room.”