holiday season, I thought, for a girl whose friends were awhirl in the high school social scene, but who, herself, could not make the debutante list! And what a good story idea!
I worked hard on that story and was pleased with the result. I’d decided to have my heroine, Lynn, forbidden to participate in the debutante season because her idealistic father did not feel it was democratic. Understandably, Lynn was resentful, and that resentment grew more intense when her steady boyfriend was drafted to escort the girl whose mother was organizing the ball. The story built to climax with the Presentation Ball, where a series of events helped Lynn regain her sense of values.
The story did not sell. I was bewildered. The situation was interesting and the characters believable. Still, back it came from one magazine after another, even from those who often published my work.
Finally one editor included a note of explanation.
“This is good material,” she wrote, “but it just doesn’t work as a short story. There is too much here that needs to be further developed. Have you considered writing a book?”
Had I considered writing a book? Yes, of course, I had. It was a dream for some distant day when I was more experienced. What scared me about the thought of tackling a book was the simple fact of its size. A short story might run up to fifteen pages or so, while a book would be over two hundred. How many years would it take to write one, and how could I help but get bogged down along the way?
But that suggestion kept nagging at my mind, and I couldn’t seem to let it go.
After all, I reminded myself, I did have a head start. “The Presentation Ball” was seventeen pages. If I cut it in half, I could call it two chapters. Then, if I tacked five chapters onto the beginning and five onto the end, I would have a twelve chapter book. I could do that by starting the book at the time of Lynn’s birth, and ending it when she got married.
Such were my thoughts when I purchased a new box of paper and sat down at the typewriter. Such were not my thoughts six weeks later when I read the chapters I had written and dropped them into the wastebasket. It took me that long to realize that what I was attempting was not working. Writing a novel by adding onto a short story was just about as feasible as trying to make an evening gown by adding taffeta to the top and bottom of a swimsuit.
There was little that I could add to either the beginning or end of “The Presentation Ball” that would have any bearing on the story, which was about a teenage girl’s reaction to a difficult social situation. Anything that happened before that point in Lynn’s life, (her childhood, elementary school experiences, summer trips with her family), or afterward, (college, a job, a husband and babies), was superfluous.
The confines of my story were set. I could not make it longer, only larger. And to do that I had to deepen it. The short story had a “plot,” a string of related events leading to a single climax. For a book, there would have to be a series of climaxes, each advancing the story and leading Lynn a little further along the road to maturity. Instead of a simple plot, a book must have a theme, and the one I decided upon was; “A year of difficult social change, although at first deeply resented, opens a girl’s eyes to ways of life other than her own and helps her mature into a better person.” Since the Presentation Ball was only one incident in the development of the theme, I changed the title of the novel to Debutante Hill.
I knew now what it was I was trying to accomplish; my next problem was how to accomplish it. How could Lynn’s difficult year change her radically as an individual? To work this out, I asked myself some questions: If Lynn can’t take part in the social activities in which her friends are involved, what does she do with her time? Does she sit home and brood? Does she make friends with girls who have not been selected for the debutante list? What is Lynn’s reaction when her steady is drafted to escort a deb to the parties? Does she retaliate against him or against her parents? If so, how? Does she attach herself, perhaps, to another boy, one she knows her parents won’t approve of?
When I reached this point, I’d become so interested in what was going to happen next that I could hardly bear to leave the typewriter long enough to go to the bathroom. That was when I knew the story was working.
It took me close to a year to turn “The Presentation Ball” into Debutante Hill. When I stood, at last, with my impressively bulky manuscript in my hands, I realized that I had never enjoyed writing so much, largely because the expanded framework of a novel had given me a chance to develop my characters. In “The Presentation Ball” I’d had Lynn’s father state simply, “No, you may not be part of this debutante thing. It’s ridiculous.” In Debutante Hill, I’d had the leeway to present this man in depth so that the reader could know the “why” behind his attitude.
Another character who appeared briefly and insignificantly in the short story was Lynn’s sister, Dodie. The reader was told only that Lynn and Dodie had little in common and did not get along. In the book there had been room to develop Dodie as a person, to see her in rivalry with her sister, to hear their arguments, to study their contrasting reactions to a variety of situations. As Lynn matured during the course of the year, we saw the two girls begin to grow closer. Lynn’s gradual acceptance of her sister had become a mark of her own change of character. Even though it was a subplot, it had furthered the main theme.
I entered the manuscript in “The Seventeenth Summer Literary Competition,” a contest for first-time novelists, held by Dodd Mead & Company. To my astonished delight, it not only won first prize—$1,000 (which was like $50,000 back then), hard-cover and paperback publication, and serialization in a popular magazine—but the contract contained an option to publish my next young adult novel.
My next novel! I couldn’t wait to get to the typewriter and roll in a new sheet of paper to start on a book that I planned to call The Middle Sister.
Like Lynn in my story, I now knew my true identity.
No longer was I just “a writer.” I was an author!
—Lois Duncan, July 2013
1
“Lynn! Hi, Lynn, wait for me!”
“Hi, Nancy! I didn’t see you back there.” Lynn Chambers turned with a smile for the bright-haired girl behind her. “In fact, I almost stopped at your house on the way by, but I thought you’d probably left for school already. You were always such an early bird last year.”
The September wind, still warm but with the faintest hint of autumn, whipped past the two girls, swirling Lynn’s plaid skirt around her legs and mussing the blonde hair that had recently been so carefully combed. The result was that she looked prettier than ever. There was something about Lynn Chambers, a fineness of bone, an ease of bearing, a graceful, unconscious little lift of the head, that made newcomers to Rivertown, who had never seen her before, nod approvingly and ask, “Who is that?”
And whichever long-time resident was asked would usually know.
“That’s the older Chambers’ girl,” he would say. “Nathan Chambers’ daughter. You know Dr. Chambers—they live on the Hill.”
“Oh, yes, of course.”
Even if someone did not know of Dr. Chambers, everyone in Rivertown knew about the Hill. The Hill Road ran at an easy slope down to the river, and along it lived the society families of Rivertown—in lovely homes, one above another, surrounded by spacious yards and green lawns with gardeners to cut them and shade trees and beds of flowers.
