Who Will It Be?

About Me

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I am a native North Dakotan, a professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, and a YA writer. My first book, The Predicteds, is due out from Sourcebooks Fire in September. I'm represented by Alyssa Eisner Henkin of Trident Media Group. When I'm not writing or teaching writing, I'm an avid reader and an enthusiastic listener of podcasts (especially podcasts about books). I'm a fan of taking long walks on sunny days, browsing through the library on Saturday afternoons, and watching embarrassingly bad TV at any time. My favorite color is lunch.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Where Do Writing Ideas Come From?

So a lot of people ask writers where the ideas come from. I can’t speak for all writers, but for me, the ideas—the good ones, the ones I want to pursue—come from questions I can’t answer. Everything springs forth from there.
My first novel, The Predicteds, is due out in September, and I’ve been reading some bloggers and Goodreads folks who are wondering what it’s about. I’ll post more about that later. For right now, there’s just a tag line: What if your boyfriend was destined to commit murder? That’s not the original question I had when I started, but it morphed into that, eventually.
My original questions went something like this: What if you knew someone was going to end up a murderer?  What would you do? Could you change that person? Could you change yourself?
The questions arose from a tragedy that happened here in Salt Lake City a few years ago. A high-school student walked into a mall and opened fire on a crowd of shoppers. It was a tragedy unlike any Salt Lake has known, yet it was hardly unusual. It seems like every time we turn around, there’s another shooting somewhere in the U.S. that looks just like this one.
The Predicteds isn’t about a mall shooting. It’s not even about murder  or crime really. It’s about what makes us who we are. Are we born into our destiny? Or do we make one for ourselves?

1 comment:

  1. I can hardly wait to read it. The book is about a question I've definitely had - especially as a parent.

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