You may have noticed a book in the right column with a link to preorder--this is a blog entry from the author and my sister-in-law Sara Bennett Wealer! Check it out! And make sure you consider preordering her book!:)
It was probably always meant to come to this
/waves/ Hi, everybody! And hello to any new friends who may have found me thanks to early buzz about my book. RIVAL doesn't come out until February, and I'm only just now doing a few things to start getting the word out. One of those is dusting off this blog and starting to post stories people might actually be interested in reading. No promises that I'll be here every day - I have two small children, a day job and a husband who works insane hours, but I will be here more than usual. So whether you're new or an old friend, I hope you'll enjoy the new "posty" me.
Yay! So what's today's topic, Sara?
I thought I'd talk a little about how I came to write RIVAL, since I get asked that question a lot in interviews. People want to know what inspired the story, which is about two singers--once friends, now enemies--in an elite high school program who are getting ready to go up against each other in a major competition. I've also been asked whether the book is based on any of my own experiences.
The answer to that second question is no. People who grew up with me might recognize a couple of homages to our hometown, but the entire plot of RIVAL is fiction, as it should be or it wouldn't be fiction, right?
As for inspiration, well, I also was a singer in a pretty competitive program, so the memories of how that felt--the pressure, the practicing, the paranoia that somebody might do better--definitely informed what and how I wrote. But the truth is that I wrote RIVAL because I probably couldn't have written anything else, at least not as a debut author.
See, music and performing were my *thing* all through school. They were so much a part of me that I sort of had to get them out of my system before I could write about anything else.
I'm not sure where the urge to sing and perform came from. It's not like I come from a family of performers. I grew up in a small Kansas town and, in those days, we didn't have dozens of Nick and Disney shows telling kids they could all be stars. But my mom did teach at the high school, and she took me to all of the musicals. She also took me to concerts by the Pops Choir (MHS's version of "Glee"). Don't ask me how Manhattan, Kansas, got so many awesome singers over so many years, but those shows were GOOD! They might as well have been Broadway as far as I was concerned.
I remember it clicked for me in third grade when our music teacher held auditions for the class play, Alice in Wonderland. The girls trying out for Alice had to sing this song about giving themselves very good advice, and I just knew I could nail it. Guess what? I did. I got the lead and I was hopelessly lost after that.
Looking back, I imagine I was pretty obnoxious. I sang solos in church almost every other week. I wrote and choreographed shows for my friends to put on for our class. I couldn't wait to get up to high school so *I* could be in the musicals and Pops Choir. I got into the top choruses early and had leads in almost all of the shows. When the TV show "Glee" first came out, I saw a lot of myself in the ultra-driven character of Rachel Berry.
But where Rachel knows she's destined to be a star, strangely I don't remember having that vision. While I loved being on stage, somehow I think I knew I wasn't good enough to make it in the real world, against the millions of other singers who were light years better than me. Majoring in voice performance for a couple of years in college confirmed that. The dream died fairly quietly, to be replaced with the wonderful discovery that you don't have to be a pro to keep performing. I wrote and starred in shows for my sorority's Rock Chalk Revue. I sang with elite choruses in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.
And then, I used what I knew and loved to write a book. Like I said earlier, RIVAL sort of felt like it had to be - like I couldn't write about anything else until I wrote something about being a singer in high school. I hope girls who are like I was then will see themselves in it, and I hope the book rings true for them. I also hope people who don't know much about the arts will have their interests piqued as well.
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