Local author Wendelin Van Draanen has sent a skateboarding young sleuth into gritty cityscapes and wild forests. She’s put a fifth grader on the trail of a string of ne’er-do-wells, from a school bully all the way up to an enemy spy. And she’s paired a kid with a talking gecko and some superpower producing artifacts.
Those are just from the three series she’s created.
Her standalone novels have explored foster homes and runaways, young love and differing perspectives, dark secrets and true friendship.
Her Edgar Allan Poe award is one of many accolades she’s received for her writings, which sell around the world. The movie tie-in edition of her novel Flipped will come out in anticipation of the Rob Reiner-directed film version slated for 2010. She speaks at schools across the country, encourages kids to be strong and resourceful individuals, and successfully champions physical fitness and literacy through the Exercise the Right to Read campaign. This year, she was the first ever Honored Youth Author at Bouchercon, an annual World Mystery Convention held in October.
And though she’s been writing for years, she’s just getting started.
Van Draanen joked that the Bouchercon honor had a sort of “lifetime achievement” feel, but she’s certainly not done living it up.
“I have an aversion to the word ‘legacy,’” she said. “Don’t even use that word. I don’t want to think that.”
But while the former Santa Maria teacher is still hitting her literary stride, one part of her word-filled history is winding down. B. Dalton Booksellers in the Santa Maria Town Center—site of many a Van Draanen signing in the last decade—is closing on Jan. 16.
“The staff at Dalton’s has been great to me,” Van Draanen wrote in an announcement of her final signing at the shop. “And I’m going to miss seeing the people who have come out for every single signing. It’s been a wonderful 10 years.”
It’s sad, she later told the Sun, to see one of the last retail bookstores in Santa Maria shut its doors. She’ll be signing her books at the shop on Nov. 21. The latest volumes in her Sammy Keyes mystery series and Gecko and Sticky adventure books will be available.
More are on the way. Keep your eye out for four total volumes in the Gecko series, paperback versions of her most recent hardback novels soon, and a new standalone novel set for next year.
Currently, Van Draanen is working on refining Sammy Keyes and the Wedding Crasher, the 13th book in the series set in Santa Martina, a town with plenty of suspicious similarities to Santa Maria. As she writes, she explained, she creates a growing stack of chapters that have been printed out, edited, and printed out again to eventually become an entire book. As she progresses through the story, she constantly reassesses it, going back to update earlier chapters to “catch up with new ideas” she’s put in.
“By the time I get to the end of the rough draft, it’s really not that rough—especially at the beginning,” she said. “So now, where I am, I’m going through the entire manuscript for flow.”
This stage in the process actually moves pretty quickly, she explained, and that allows her to interject humor and take comedic opportunities missed while toiling in what she described as the trenches of her writing.
As for her commitment to literacy and her overall contribution to society … don’t call it a legacy, remember? … she said that while she’s caught up in the mechanics of writing, she’s not thinking of the book as a part of a larger world of novels and readers. The exception (there’s always an exception) comes in her Gecko and Sticky tales of a talking lizard (the latter) and an Aztec bracelet-wearing superhero boy (the former).
“What was different and really enjoyable to me in the writing of those books was how I could picture adults reading them to children,” she admitted, “and how much fun the adults would have sharing them with a child, like for bedtime stories.”
To that end, she revels in wordplay, filling the books with alliteration and other lingual acrobatics.
“Outside of that, when I’m writing a story, I’m just really involved with writing a story,” she said.
But aside from that writing, she’s really involved with a lot more than she lets on. Her nationwide school visits revolve around her getting kids excited about reading anything—not just her stories. And she encourages them to try writing on their own, beyond school assignments, as a way of expressing their own thoughts and feelings.
“I’m kinda crazy, and the kids really like it,” she said. “I’ll say things like, ‘When I was a kid, I never wanted to be an author, because authors were really, really old or really, really dead, and I didn’t want to be either of those things.”
Ultimately, her goal is to get students to think maybe they can write books about their childhoods, or even just let their imaginations go to create fantastical worlds and stories of their own.
Her other goal is to keep plugging away at her Edgar-winning creation that now generates fan fiction online (spunky Sammy and hunky Casey grow up and get married?!?) and prompts sighing readers to create iPod playlists for the teen characters.
“From here on, I want to get to the end of the Sammy Keyes series,” she explained, “because I want to get there before I’m 90. That’s my commitment to myself and to my editor—that I would write them more quickly.
“2009 was the first year there was no new Sammy Keyes, and I didn’t like that,” she added. “I got a lot of e-mails [asking] ‘Are you dead?’”
Thankfully, she isn’t, and you can verify that for yourself at the B. Dalton signing. Just be sure not to use the word “legacy” when you meet her.
Executive Editor Ryan Miller wishes he could have more than one superpower at once. Contact him at rmiller@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 19-26, 2009.
