A picture book in the 4th grade called Baby May’s Birthday. I carry it with me to book signings. I even illustrated it, and if you’ve seen my self-portrait on the S&S website, you’ll know how good that turned out.
http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Lisa-McMann/45103601
Blogfest 2009
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Lisa McMann on “What was the first thing you wrote?”
Allison Van Diepen on “What was the first thing you wrote?”
I’m sure I wrote a lot of stories in my early years, but the one that stands out in my memory is a short story I wrote in grade six called, The Obsession. It was about a woman in her twenties who gets stalked and kidnapped by a madman, but manages to escape. At the end of the story, it’s clear that he’ll be back… I realize that’s a disturbing topic for a sixth grader but I got an A+ on it, and that motivated me to keep writing.
Neal Shusterman on “What was the first thing you wrote?”
The first thing I remember writing was a Halloween story in third grade. My teacher (who didn’t like me very much) gave me a D-minus on it, because in this story, the ground opened up, swallowed my third grade teacher, and closed up again, squirting blood everywhere (I didn’t like her much either.) She used to get so annoyed at me, she would throw me out of the classroom, and send me to the library just to get rid of me. That’s where I developed a love of reading, and eventually writing.
Robin Wasserman on “What was the first thing you wrote?”
I don’t remember the first thing I ever wrote, but I do remember the first thing that was ever published. My local library ran a “Write and Illustrate Your Own Book” contest, so a friend and I teamed up to produce Kenny. (I wrote; she illustrated. The contest nearly lasted longer than our friendship.) We won second prize, which meant the book got bound and placed in library circulation, where real live people checked it out. (I know, because I used to check up on it obsessively.) Kenny was basically an ET ripoff, about an alien who befriends a human boy and tries to find its way back home. You can read an (embarrassing) excerpt here: http://robinwasserman.com/images/hh_kenny_text.jpg.
The thing I should probably mention about Kenny is that it was about thirty pages long, double spaced, including several full page illustrations. Granted, I was eleven at the time, but these days I get emails from people that age who are writing novels. It makes me feel like a bit of a slacker.
On the other hand, given how derivative and snooze-worthy Kenny was, thirty pages was probably more than enough…
Oscar Hijuelos on “What was the first thing you wrote?”
A little paragraph, when I was 8 years old, about the content of the moon and the nature of money.
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