Catching Up With Jacquelyn Mitchard

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• Author Discusses Foray Into Writing For Teens

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  Jacquelyn Mitchard is the author of many best-selling books. In fact, her first novel, “The Deep End of the Ocean,” was a New York Times Bestseller and was the first selection in Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.

  And while Mitchard has written many wonderful novels for adults, she has also written several books for young adults recently. Mitchard said that she is “attracted to the immediacy and the emotional geography of teenagers … They don’t live lives that are as large as adults’ lives, they don’t have the long view, but the emotional topography of the things that they go through, the experiences that they have. It’s like the Rocky Mountains.”

  As an author, Mitchard said she appreciates being drawn back into that mindset.

  “It’s thrilling to be able to look back in one’s own mind and participate in that time,” she said. “They live in dog years! A week is a month, a month is a year, and a year is like an era!” she said.

  With nine children, Mitchard has critics and advisors for every age group that she writes for. She said her three teenaged daughters provide perspective on what kinds of books and characters successfully draw young adult readers in.

  It might seem like writing for young adult readers would be very different than writing for adults, but not according to Mitchard.

  “It’s not that different in that you do your best writing,” she said, “and you have great respect for your audience because they are not stupid. And they will catch you as a phony immediately if you’re trying to reference things that you as a middle-aged person have no idea about. They’ll catch you right away.”

  Mitchard was afraid that it might be hard to go back in time mentally and emotionally to do her best writing for a young adult audience, but that wasn’t the case.

  “I thought it would hard to get in touch with my 16-year-old self again, but I found out that I haven’t matured much beyond that age at all!” she laughed. “So, it was very easy indeed.”

  Young readers are more intense when they get involved in a book or series of novels.

  “They fall in love with books and characters as though they were real people,” Mitchard explained. “They have a very immediate response and it’s a very passionate response.”

  As a result, she said, teen readers tend to love or hate an author which can be challenging to negotiate.

  An interesting career opportunity to come out of her young adult writing is that Mitchard now serves as editor for her own young adult imprint for publishing books, Merit Press.

  Mitchard lived for many years in Wisconsin and is coming back to the state to take part in the Writers’ Institute conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on April 4 through April 6.