A little-known fact about me: I used to write for the Sweet Valley High series. I was one of the select stable of writers who helped launch the series. I wrote five of the first dozen SVH books. The highest praise I had received as a writer to date at that time came from series’ creator herself, Francine Pascal, who told me after she’d read the first book I wrote for SVH, “It’s like you took what was in my head and put it on paper.” The series, as anyone who remembers the eighties knows, went on to become a phenomenal, worldwide success, which spawned spinoffs and a TV series.
Back in the eighties, I was newly arrived in New York, a divorced single mom struggling to make it on my own. I owned a typewriter and not much else. I had sold a few teen novels prior to SVH for the “Sweet Dreams” series—standalone teen romances. I call it my “bread-and-butter” writing. It paid the rent on a shabby walk-up deep in the heart of Brooklyn. Then the book packager who was behind “Sweet Dreams” informed me I’d been selected to write for a soon-to-be-launched series if I chose to accept my mission. Did I ever! I leapt at the opportunity. Six weeks later, I had a completed manuscript written from the plot summary provided by Ms. Pascal, which came in the form of a long prose poem. It would become Book #2 in the SVH series, titled “Secrets.”
Soon after, I got word that the writer of Book #1 had submitted a manuscript deemed “unacceptable.” I was called in to write a replacement for Book #1 which was due, like, yesterday. It was like a scene from the movie His Girl Friday. I came into the offices of the book packager every day and wrote furiously, tearing each page from my typewriter “hot off the press” as soon as it was written and running it to the conference room for the editor and company executives to read. They must have liked what I’d written because I kept going until I had a finished book, roughly two weeks later. Whew! That was the fastest I’ve ever written, before or since.
It was also the best training any writer could have. I learned to write fast and not overthink. I learned to “keep it simple, stupid.” I learned to hook the reader from page one and keep the tension going. Because kids, unlike adults who read for a variety of reasons, read for only two reasons: If it’s a book assigned in school or if it’s a book that holds their interest. SVH books never were and never will be assigned reading in school, but I made darn sure the books I wrote would hold the interest of the reader. That experience was the foundation of my career after I turned to writing adult fiction. It’s no accident my first adult novel, GARDEN OF LIES, went on to become a New York Times’ bestseller. Behind it, unseen, is the toil that went into each of the SVH titles I wrote and the series I subsequently wrote and created in my own name, “Seniors.” All in all, I published 34 YA novels, a number I find hard to believe when you add it to the 20 novels, and one cookbook, I’ve written for adults. I did that? Wow.
My experience writing for SVH led to an amusing tale. During the time I was in the offices of the book packager, I discovered the editors there kept a file of unsolicited submissions from writers that were so bad as to be laughable. One, in particular, I remember to this day: a sample from a novel that began with the entire high school football team being wiped out in a bus accident. “Just when they were on a winning streak,” the last line read. Still makes me chuckle to this day.
