I wrote my first novel when I was thirteen, and I receive an overwhelming amount of emails from teens who want to follow the same path.  Here’s my story: Wrote four or five novels unpublished in high school. Read books constantly, mostly Harry Potter and classics. Researched the publishing industry and sent query letters to literary agents the summer before college. Got a literary agent and a book deal my freshman year of college. Sold six books while still in college.

I didn’t have any connections to people in the publishing industry, and maybe a few people said I was really young, but they meant it as a compliment because I knew my stuff, and no one refused to look at my work because of my age. It was all based on talent, but I had to compete with adults, with people who had degrees in this stuff, and three or four times the amount of experience that I did. Back then, there weren’t publishing blogs, and authors didn’t just hang out on Twitter all day. It was all a mystery, and the answers to my questions were typed up in faceless how-to-query guidebooks or not there at all.

Those are the facts about how I made it, but this is the truth: I wish I’d waited. My first novel is fun, and it got good reviews, but there’s so much more I could have put into it if I’d had another year or two (or five) to become a better writer. There are so many young people getting books published these days, and it’s easy to obsess over that and compare yourself to them. But it’s not a race, and there are no winners. Focus on making yourself the best writer you can be, and when it’s meant to happen, you’ll succeed.

Also, for the record, being a teenager with a book deal doesn’t always bring you instant fame or fortune, but it is a foolproof way to ensure major criticism. If you keep a blog, suddenly it’s the blog of a Published Author and people will scrutinize everything you say and call you out on the tiniest phrases, because you’re Published. Your friends or fellow classmates might become insanely jealous.

With success comes criticism, and not just on your writing, so you better have tough skin. People want to judge whether or not you’ve earned your success and how stuck up the success has made you. Getting published when you’re young changes things. It makes you different, even when you don’t want to be.

There are so many weekends when I wasn’t able to go out with my friends because of copyedits, countless Spring Breaks spent pouring over a revision letter, and a number of awkward situations where friends asked me to give their not-quite-good-enough book to my agent, or wanted to casually borrow a hundred bucks, because they knew I had the money.

Would I go back and change things, though, For Real? Probably not, but I wish I could go back and warn myself that writing is a real job–not a fame-and-fortune fairy tale–the kind of job where you have to work weekends and holidays, where sometimes you’re afraid what results Google will turn up when you type in your name. Publicity doesn’t come out of thin air—you have to work on promoting your writing, and you have to set up your own events. Sure, seeing your book on shelves is rewarding, but so is having a fun night out without obsessing that a revision of your novel is due during midterms week.

I suppose it’s no secret that I wasn’t exactly happy with my “newfound fame” as a published writer.  Back in 2007, when my first two books came out, I’d had it up to here with the publishing industry.  When my debut novel hit shelves, I had already changed my course of study from English Literature to Pre-Medicine. For a few years, I honestly thought I would never want to publish another book.

I was still writing, though, even if I no longer had a literary agent. I still lingered in the Teen section of Barnes & Noble on my way to the cafe, where I studied organic chemistry every weekend.

Finally, when I sent out my applications to graduate programs in medicine, I decided to give publishing a second try. Armed with knowledge I hadn’t had the first time, and with memories of what had gone wrong, I selected a new literary agent and wrote the book I’d always wanted to publish.

And it’s been surreal. Fantastic. Everything I’d always hoped being a writer would be like when I was a little girl. But I know that publishing hasn’t changed; I have. I made better decisions this time, anticipated problems rather than freaking out about them, and understood how it all worked. Instead of moping that my publisher wasn’t bringing me to BookExpo America to promote my forthcoming book, I got involved with programming at the Expo, hosting a huge book party and moderating a panel.  I took charge of my own career instead of hoping that one day I’d wake up with a multi-city book tour waiting for me.

Yeah, I’m still studying medicine, but that’s only because I’m lucky enough to have the chance to do both things I love.  This collection of writing advice is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.  It’s something I wish I had back when I was nineteen with three book deals, completely clueless that 10,000 people a week read my depressing, sarcastic LiveJournal.  These articles are supposed to be entertaining and informative and mildly silly at times, but most of all, they’re going to be the truth.  Here you’ll find honest answers to your questions about writing and publishing, and I hope that, by reading this, you’ll get everything right the first time.

Last weekend, I was hanging out with some book bloggers and we started talking about malfunctioning amusement park rides, as you do. One of the bloggers mentioned how this guy stood up on a ride and got decapitated, but what really sucked was being the kid two rows back, who had the luck to catch the severed head. We all laughed, but my mind started racing, and I asked if I could use the idea in a book.

“You want to put that in a novel?” he asked skeptically.

“Well, yeah,” I said, because, to me, it was obvious. “I have this secondary character called Beans, and I didn’t really know what to do with him, but that’s perfect: he’s legendary at his high school because he was the kid who caught the severed head on that roller coaster ride!”

Immediately, I knew Beans’ story: he’d been mildly traumatized by the whole thing, forced by his parents to see a shrink, who snickered at him until he blew off the appointments. His friends teased him about going to Disneyland all the time to watch him squirm, and he’d never really dealt with the unprepared tragedy of what had happened because everyone seemed to find the whole affair so incredibly hilarious.

You see, most professional writers have way more ideas than they have time in which to write them down. It’s not that their imaginations are superior–well, there are some obvious exceptions (I’m looking at you, JK Rowling). It’s that they’ve learned how to recognize potential ideas.

That anecdote about the Disneyland Decapitation? Case in point, yo.

So where do ideas come from, and how can you recognize them and turn them into stories? Read on, for the answers (or, at least, for my version of the answers, which is quite possibly someone else’s version of fail):

Q: Where do ideas come from?

A: Everywhere.

Q: That’s a cop-out answer.

A: I know. Ok, let’s break it down:

1. Random things people talk about.

I had a friend whose parents sent him away to some sort of juvenile delinquent camp one summer because he got a C+ in biology. He was quite a nerdy guy, definitely not a delinquent. His parents just panicked.  That’s a story idea right there. Listen to people’s annecdotes, and consider whether something that happened to them would be an interesting concept for a book. To clarify: I’m not saying that you should write books about your friends, because they might not be 100% flattered, but rather that you could take something that happened to a friend and put a made-up character in that situation, i.e. a nerdy kid whose panicked parents send him off to juvenile delinquent camp.

2. Random things you see.

A long time ago, I saw a snowman made out of tumbleweeds by the side of the freeway onramp during Chirstmas break. I wondered who had built the snowman, and why. The snowman thing is the beginning of the novel I’m working on, the spontaneous adventure that changes two kids’ lives forever.

3. Wishing a book had been about something else, or told from a different character’s point of view.

For some reason, I loved Catcher in the Rye but didn’t much like Holden Caulfield as the narrator. However, I thought Phoebe, his kid sister, was teriffic. I imagined her perspective: a kooky little kid whose messed up older brother is always sneaking home in the middle of the night to visit her before he breaks it to their parents that he’s been kicked out of another boarding school.

By changing the perspective, it’s a different story. Imagine Twilight told from Edward Cullen’s perspective–you’d know right away that it was a story about vampires, and the tension would come from whether or not Edward would be able to resist drinking Bella’s blood. Very different from the story about a girl who moves to a small town and becomes fascinated by a mysterous, beautiful boy who saves her life through some superhuman powers he refuses to acknoweldge, driving her on a quest to discover his secret. (or, just read the Midnight Sun excerpt after reading Twilight to see what I’m talking about)

But things that you’ve seen, heard, or read aren’t the only places to find ideas. You don’t have to start with a fully-formed concept. You can just have a vague idea of where you’re going and gradually add substance.

First thing’s first: the difference between an idea and a plot:

An idea is a direction for a story–what or who it’s about. A plot is more complicated. Plot is what happens–the challenges, the setbacks, the point of the story. We’ll get there in a couple days.

Ok, back to idea-land:

Some other ways to come up with ideas for a story:

* Genre. If you’re writing a fantasy story, does your character already know about the world where the story takes place (Lord of the Rings) or are they being brought into a magical world they had no idea even existed (Harry Potter)?

* Character. Come up with a situation, and place a person in that situation who would be particularly interesting to follow because their reaction is the opposite from what most people’s would be (ie The Princess Diaries, about a girl who really, really doesn’t want to be a princess).

* Setting. What would it be like to work at a carnival for the summer…at a carnival where people started disappearing on rides? Or to be a camp counselor…at a camp for detectives? Come up with a normal setting and think how it could be made more interesting.

* Schools. What would it be like to attend a school for wizards, or spies, or knights? Again, this goes back to character and genre: who is the most interesting character to write about at that particular school, and is the school somewhere they’ve always wanted to attend, or somewhere they’ve just found out exists?

* Romance. Think of the most embarrassing situation in which someone could possibly meet the perfect guy/girl, who would completely misjudge them.  How did each character wind up in that place? Go from there.

Okay, I’ll admit to what you all probably suspect: I’ve been putting off writing this article about plot. Not for the reasons you think (although I don’t exactly know what reasons you’d come up with, to be honest), but because I really, really don’t want to think about plot right now.

I’ve just had to email my editor the plot outline for the second book in the Knightley Academy series, and I don’t want to hear the word “plot” for a very long time.

Which sucks for me, but still doesn’t mean that I can weasel out of this.

I mentioned in the last “how to write a novel” article that an idea is a concept for a story—what or who it’s about, while plot is what happens—the challenges, the setbacks, the point of the story.

It’s easiest to see the difference between idea and plot by looking at a series of books. The Twilight books are about a human girl who is in love with a vampire. But the plot of Twilight is different from the plot its sequel, New Moon. Same concept of girl/vampire, but different things happen.

A lot of the time, aspiring writers sit down to write their masterpiece and get two or three chapters in before giving up because they don’t know what happens next. The problem isn’t that the idea sucks, but that they haven’t set the story up for anything specific to come next. You can put a bag of popcorn kernels in your microwave, but if you don’t hit the right buttons, nothing’s going to happen.

So how to do set up, or structure a story?

Settle in, here’s a somewhat detailed explanation of plot structure, followed by a pretty short non-technical explanation  if you just want a taste):

Detailed Explanation:

1. (Instigating Event) Main Character is living her life when something happens to throw everything off balance. A shift has occurred, and Main Character’s life will never be the same again.  (ex: Harry finds out that he’s a wizard, Edward saves Bella from being hit by the van)a. Now, Main Character has a goal or something they want. (ex: Harry wants to fit in, Bella wants to find out the truth about Edward)

2. (Conflict/Rising Action) A series of obstacles should prevent Main Character from getting what she wants. This is the conflict. All of these little conflicts should be leading up to a big turning point.

* This is where the stakes are raised. Everything becomes complicated as both the emotional and physical journeys of your Main Character advance. Main Character must deal with reversals of fortune, second thoughts, doubts, false leads, unexpected twists and turns.

* Main Character should alternately hope and despair that her goal will never be accomplished.

3. (Point of Deepest Despair) The moment when the stakes are highest and the danger is at its most critical level yet.

4. (Climax) Main Character seems beaten, but something happens to turn this around, making their goal suddenly reachable.

* Here, the character must use her new strengths and lessons learned to take action.

5. (Falling action) Shows how character is able to succeed.

6. (Resolution) Shows the outcome of the main character’s actions/success, the positive change in Main Character and how Main Character’s decisions throughout the story will impact her life.

An informal explanation:

You have a character who wants something, or has a problem. Your job as the author is to prevent them from getting it by throwing obstacles in their way. What your character tries won’t work, and maybe even makes the situation worse. The character despairs, and suddenly, something happens and, the combination of what the character has learned along the way, plus the personal growth they’ve attained, helps them to fix their problem in an unexpected way.