When author Madeleine L'Engle sat down to write a first draft of what would become A Wrinkle in Time, she had no plans to write a fantasy for teens. After all, until that moment she had always written realistic novels aimed at adults. Even as she was drafting and revising the now-classic tale of Meg Murry, her little brother Charles Wallace and her friend Calvin O'Keefe, L'Engle wasn't consciously writing to a particular market. She was simply writing the story that had insisted itself on her.
"I cannot possibly tell you how I came to write it," she said of A Wrinkle in Time in a 1983 interview. "It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice."
Unfortunately, her publisher didn't know what to do with it. A Wrinkle in Time was unlike anything L'Engle had ever written, unlike anything her editors had ever read. In the end they rejected it...as did 25 other publishers over the next two years.
It took vision to recognize not only Wrinkle's potential, but its potential readership: not the readers L'Engle had always written for, but younger readers. The rest, of course, is literary history. Once it was finally published, A Wrinkle in Time went on to win major awards and be translated into more than a dozen languages.
Today, A Wrinkle in Time is still in print and still popular – and not only with teens. I didn't discover the book until my late 30s, for example, when I was so powerfully affected by it that I went on to devour everything Madeleine L'Engle had ever written. All these years later, her life and work continue to have a powerful influence not only on how I write and teach but on how I live.
I often share versions of L'Engle's Wrinkle story, if only because her persistence in the face of relentless rejection is so inspiring. However, it's another aspect of her story that leapt to mind recently.
Unlike A Wrinkle in Time, The MoonQuest was my first novel...my first book. Yet despite the many rejections it shared with Wrinkle, that isn't the parallel that struck me.
You see, like A Wrinkle in Time, I didn't set out to write The MoonQuest for a particular audience. Nor did I have a conscious desire to write fantasy. It, too, was "a book I simply had to write." Like Madeleine L'Engle, I had no choice.
When I finally decided to self-publish, after nearly a decade of rejections, it never occurred to me to aim it at young adults, even though teens were and still are the biggest consumers of fantasy. To me, because of who I was and how I wrote it, The MoonQuest was "visionary fiction," a genre that didn't formally exist at the time. Yes, those teenagers who got hold of The MoonQuest lapped it up. But I never viewed the book in Wrinkle of Time terms, as a young adult fantasy that adults also happened to love.
Not until earlier this fall.
I was in the midst of conceiving new covers for all three books in The Legend of Q'ntana series (along with a cover for the fourth story, now in-progress) when the photographer friend whose images I would be using for the renewed editions said, totally out of the blue, "You should market these books to young adults. Those are your readers."
In that moment I remembered Madeleine L'Engle and A Wrinkle in Time, I thought of all the young adult fantasy that has crossed over to the adult market with astounding success (think Harry Potter and Twilight), and I knew she was right.
At the same time, I was astounded. How had I missed something so obvious for so long!? Then I realized I had missed nothing. It hadn't been time. Now it was.
In one sense, nothing has changed. The first three Q'ntana stories remain unaltered, and I'm not writing the fourth "to a market."
As I have always done, I continue to write the stories that call on me to tell them and to allow them to show me their primary audience.
Perhaps The Legend of Q'ntana has finally done that – either because I'm now ready to see it, because a larger readership is now ready to embrace it, because I'm ready to embrace a larger readership, or all of the above!
Whichever it is, I'm excited by this new, surprising direction, which feels like a sort of coming out – both within myself and out in the world. Suddenly, in addition to all the other kinds of writer I am, I'm also a YA author...something I never expected to call myself!
I'm also excited by these new covers, which, even though they were conceived before I was conscious of this shift in focus, feel perfectly suited to it. As as much as I have loved all the previous Q'ntana covers, including the brilliant, now-retired ones by the supremely gifted and always generous Richard Crookes, these new ones feel as though they express the power and depth of Q'ntana in ways that previous covers never fully managed to do...perhaps because I wasn't ready to embrace that power within myself!
Of course, these stories are no less for adults than they have ever been. After all, most of the books' dozens of rave reviews have been written by adults! This is simply a refocusing and an expansion. Now, not only can you pick up the books in this compelling series for yourself, you can gift them to the teens in your life – signed by me to you or them, should your order from my website.
Meantime, I continue work on Book 4, The Bard of Bryn Doon (my 19th book!), which I hope will be ready for you before winter's end, and I suspect there will be a Book 5 and Book 6 sometime after that. So you'd better start reading!!
• • • Look for the new-look editions of The MoonQuest, The StarQuest and The SunQuest here on the books page of my website (signed, if you prefer) or in paperback or ebook from your favorite bookseller • • •