Middle-grade author Rachel Renée Russell may be a self-described dork, but it must be pretty cool to be uncool: Since its debut in 2009, her Dork Diaries series has sold more than 15 million copies, spent more than 230 weeks on The New York Times bestsellers list and been translated into almost 30 languages. To top that off, Lionsgate recently acquired the movie rights to the series, with a film set to release in 2016.
If it seems unbelievable that this type of success would burgeon in just over five years, that’s because it didn’t. Russell’s journey to becoming a bestselling author began around the age of 12.
Sometime in middle school in Saint Joseph, Mich., Russell decided to craft her first book for kids. She kept writing through college at Northwestern University. But after receiving harsh criticism from a creative writing professor there, her confidence to pursue the craft as a career waned, and she opted to go into law instead.
Russell knew, though, that the career she settled for was not the career she was meant for. In the late 2000s, after spending 20-plus years as a bankruptcy lawyer, raising two children and going through a divorce, Russell returned to her first love: writing.
The Dork Diaries are the humorous journals of Nikki Maxwell (named after Russell’s younger daughter), a socially awkward 14-year-old who’s adapting to life in a new city and a new school. Each book recounts one month of Nikki’s misadventures in the form of illustrated journal entries, which detail everything from her run-ins with resident snob MacKenzie to her desperate attempts to get her mom to buy her an iPhone—you know, typical middle-grade crises.
“The reason why I was motivated to write Dork Diaries was because of my own daughters,” Russell says. “I was in an upper-middle-class neighborhood with an upper-middle-class public school, and my kids just were weird. Actually, they weren’t weird—they were smart, they did their homework, they were really good kids. But for some reason, both of them got bullied.”
In addition to the regular series, Russell has written two companion books—Dork Diaries 3½: How to Dork Your Diary and Dork Diaries: OMG! All About Me Diary!—which encourage kids to express themselves through journaling.
Russell’s daughters, now adults, have become directly involved with creating the Dork Diaries: Erin contributes to the writing, while Nikki has taken over the illustrating.
The eighth book, Dork Diaries: Tales From a Not-So-Happily Ever After, hit shelves in September, and Book 9 is scheduled for a spring 2015 release.
In the full WD Interview with Russell, the soft-spoken 54-year-old talks about the challenges of writing for a young audience, future plans for her writing, and showing the publishing industry that it’s actually cool to be dorky. In these online exclusive outtakes, Russell discusses how she comes up with ideas, getting an agent, and why it’s important to connect with readers.
You’ve said the Dork Diaries was inspired by your daughters’ lives as middle schoolers. But wow do you come up with ideas for each book? What is your writing process like?
[My daughters and I] come up with a title, and basically the title is the theme of the book. … We’re basically pulling some of the major things that kids either go through in middle school, or their experiences, or things they would consider fun.
We work by chapters. As a matter of fact, we call them vignettes. We say vignettes more than chapters because since this is [protagonist Nikki Maxwell’s] diary, we can put in totally unrelated, crazy stuff. And that is what is really nice and refreshing about the books. We can just go off on a tangent for a chapter.
I can break it down for you: Each Dork Diary book is one month. So, technically, our books have either 30 chapters if there are 30 days in a month, or 31 chapters if there are 31 days. And, of course, there’s February. So when we begin a book, we have to end it by the 28th day, the 30th day or the 31st day, depending on how many days there are in a month. I’d say that that’s [one] challenge [of creating this series], to take whatever Dork Diaries story arc we have and present it in either 28 days, 30 days or 31 days.
What was the most challenging Dork Diaries book to write?
Book 8 [Tales From a Not-So-Happily Ever After]. It was more of a fantasy, because Nikki gets hit in the head with a volleyball and then she ends up going to Fairyland. That was hard! It was not set in middle school anymore; it was set in Fairyland. It’s one thing to write about lunch and gym and tests, because I had done that for seven books. But to take her out of the school environment and have her running around [the mythical] Fairyland was very challenging. Had I not been under contract [with Simon & Schuster], I probably would’ve said, “Forget this book. We’re putting her back in gym class!” But I couldn’t do that.
How did you find your agent?
About March or April [2008], I had put together about 75 pages [of a manuscript], and I sent it off to about a dozen literary agents, and I got responses from six of them. And that’s phenomenal! Usually you don’t get a response from even one, so that just kind of knocked my socks off. This was for the [first] Dork Diaries manuscript. I sent out other drafts, but I didn’t get any [responses]. It was like crickets. But when I sent out the Dork Diaries material, Dan Lazar [of Writers House] emailed me within a day or two. I sent it to him on a Monday, and I had a response from him on Wednesday—which, again, is really, really good to get an agent to respond so quickly. Writers House was my dream, so when he said that he loved it and that he was interested in representing me, I did go with Dan Lazar, though I got offers from several.
I will add this too. I’m not affiliated with it, but Agent Query [agentquery.com] was very, very helpful. Even now when people ask me, “How’d you find a literary agent?” I always point them to Agent Query. That’s how I found Dan Lazar. I went to Agent Query and read all the material and did a search. I searched “middle-grade” and read which agents were accepting [queries and manuscripts] and which ones weren’t. I didn’t want to do the mail thing—you know, [send the manuscript] by U.S. mail—I only wanted email. So Agent Query was really helpful in helping me get the queries out.
The Dork Diaries website is very tween friendly, with a blog “written” by Nikki Maxwell, plus a video diary that features her. Fans can even email you for advice on everything, from school to family to first crushes. How important is it for you to engage with your readers?
It’s very important. We know that we’re getting children who may have challenges with being a dork or not fitting in or being bullied, so we’re trying to offer more interaction more that what we normally would. We feel that we’re attracting kids that can benefit from a website where they can write in about a problem, or read advice—the advice column is once a week—and read about other people’s experiences, and hopefully use the information they receive to help make their own lives better or a little easier.
Do you ever use any of those fan letters in your books?
No. We’re not mining material from fan letters. My daughters had so much drama growing up, so we’re still using material from their lives!
Do you answer, or at least try to answer, all of the fan mail you receive?
We would like to answer every single letter we get. But [my daughters and I] usually read them over, then pick the best one we got for that week. It’s usually a letter that we feel that represents what other kids are probably thinking or wondering or going through.
If you enjoyed these outtakes with bestselling middle-grade author Rachel Renée Russell, be sure to check out the feature-length interview—full of valuable insights about the challenges of crafting a book series, writing out of your comfort zones, and much more—in the January 2015 issue of Writer’s Digest.
In the January 2015 Writer’s Digest, contributing editor and award-winning novelist Elizabeth Sims shares simple and effective techniques for polished character conversations in her article “How to Craft Flawless Dialogue.” Here, in this bonus online exclusive sidebar, she outlines her method for getting it written, then getting it right.
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If you’re the kind of writer who prefers to cut and polish after your first draft is done, here are a few tips to ease you over the uncertainties of dialogue:
- If, as you’re writing, a whole bunch of dialogue spurts from your pen, let it flow, even if you’re worried it’s too much or awful. Let it out; get it down no matter what.
- Opposite that, sometimes you know you need a great bit of dialogue here, but nothing’s coming to you. Just summarize and move on, knowing you’ll get back to it. Nancy tells Levi to buzz off. A sentence like this can serve as a summary of a whole breakup scene; all you need is the gist.
- When it comes time to flesh out that conversation, jot down what needs to be said, scene by scene. Try making mini lists with bullet points:
- Doug learns from Emily that Jasmine has a long police record.
- Auto theft? Prostitution?
- He argues to keep Jasmine in the gang anyway.
- Outstanding warrants?
- If a whole conversation seems like overkill for what you need to convey in the scene, you can let your narrator summarize, and add a line or two of talk.
When Emily and Doug met for dinner that night, she told him about Jasmine’s rap sheet. It was impressively long, she noted, peering at him over her wineglass, including grand larceny and soliciting. But that didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for keeping Jasmine on the burglary team. They needed her.
“As long as there’s no outstanding warrants against her, we’ll be OK,” he said, stabbing a chunk of steak. “Are there any?”
In the “Revising Out Loud” Inkwell article in the January 2015 Writer’s Digest, author and playwright Joe Stollenwerk offers an interesting alternative to quietly revising your work alone—by having friends and colleagues read your work aloud over food, drink and good company. Here, he shares another method of testing your writing’s mettle.
Reading Published Work
It is tremendously beneficial to read well-written published work aloud. If you are in a writing group, you might select some passages from published novels, nonfiction, poetry, etc., to read aloud and discuss as part of your get-togethers.
I recommend making a selection based on an element of writing that you want to focus on. This might be dialogue, or first chapters, or figurative language. It might be action or romance scenes.
If your writing group decides to take this on, I recommend choosing a selection ahead of time, something that is short enough to be read aloud during part of your group meeting, but long enough to accomplish what you are hoping it will do for the group. Have everyone read it ahead of time so that the reading aloud is not the first time the group has read it.
You might want to designate someone to lead discussion, or at least start it off, with a few pointed questions for the group to reflect on regarding this scene or passage.
If you enjoyed this helpful revision tip, be sure to check out the feature-length article “Revising Out Loud”—full of outside-the-box methods for whipping your WIP into shape—in the January 2015 Writer’s Digest.
What are real secrets to writing successful series novels? We brought together four bestsellers across a spectrum of genres to find out.
The idea of writing a series is tempting. After all, it seems as though half the bestsellers on today’s bookshelves are new installments in popular series—books that are all but guaranteed a readership before they’re even released. But how do you know whether or not your idea has series potential? Or if the work of sustaining a series is something you would even want to devote your career to?
We brought together Joel Goldman, Heather Graham, Brenda Novak and Ian Rankin—four of today’s most successful series novelists across a variety of genres—to discuss the secrets of writing multi-book characters, the perks and drawbacks of unwinding a story thread over the course of many years, and what they might have done differently if they could go back to Book One.
The full discussion with Goldman, Graham, Novak and Rankin appears in the January 2015 Writer’s Digest feature “Installment Plans.” In these online exclusive outtakes, the group talks about using setting as a starting point for a series and why they chose or created their respective series’ locations.
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Why did you select the locations you use for your books?
Rankin: As Rebus gets older he has a different take on life and morality. He can see the end. And at the same time he’s still fascinated by the city as I am, and the politics keep changing, in Scotland and in Edinburgh. You get a financial crash, that’s juice for another story, and Scottish independence is another story, and it’s all filtered through him. He’s very useful to hide behind because he gets to say things I wouldn’t say in public. He gets to be completely politically incorrect. And people love him for it. But when they come to Edinburgh looking for Rebus they’re always disappointed to find me.
Graham: The way you’re talking about Scotland and Edinburgh, how it’s such a part of that. And the way [Joel] and I were talking before about Kansas City, I put an awful lot of stories in New Orleans, which is a favorite place of mine, or in Key West or Salem, where there is a great deal of history that’s dark and fascinating and changing constantly.
Goldman: I’m the same way. All of my books have been set in Kansas City, for many of the same reasons Ian talked about. My roots there run so deep, through four generations, that I really feel like that’s part of my DNA. So I set the books in different parts of the city where there are distinct communities, and then I can put my characters in there.
So each of you in addition to your main characters, you could probably consider your location as a character as well in your series. Is that intentional or an accident of strong world-building?
Novak: For me, it is intentional. Using the location as the peg for a series like I do in [my] Whisky Creek [books] lets me explore many characters from varied and interesting backgrounds without having to devise a new setting or premise each time, by which I mean that this is a place readers have come to know, and these characters exist in that place and readers know the nature of the town, what the people are like, and I can place a whole and interesting character into that setting. But the town itself really does take on a life of its own, you know. It’s a comfortable place and I feel that readers and characters alike can be at home there, and that it’s a place you’d want to live, filled with people you’d want to know. … I don’t do that with every series, but I do think that in a particular kind of series, using setting as that peg that ties the books together is a way to bring readers in and keep it interesting, keep the stories moving, and to leave something open-ended so that I, as the author, can come back and add to it when I have an idea.
Graham: I don’t know if I decided to do it intentionally, but I do know that when I was growing up I read a great number of Gothics. You know the sort—Mary Stuart, Dorothy Eden, Phyllis Whitney. My mom had these books and I read them all, and I loved that I could see it. I could see people riding across the moors and people storming the castles, and to me that was half the pleasure of it. I really felt that I had been transported somewhere. And so I have a tendency to use places I really love a lot and want people to see why they are unique, why they are wonderful. Back to riding across the moors—that sensation of doing something you want to do because it’s so wonderfully alive for you.
Goldman: I started out with Kansas City because I was just a brand-new author. The only fiction I’d written at that point were the bills I sent my clients. And so I was comfortable writing about KC because I knew it, but frankly by the time I’d gotten to this latest Alex Stone book I was growing kind of tired of that. And you know how readers will say, “I’ve got a great idea! Here’s your next book!”? Well, one time I did get a great idea that way. This civil rights attorney reached out to me about Alex Stone and how much he liked the series, and we started emailing back and forth, and he says to me, “You know what you need to do, you need to send Alex to Guantanamo.” And I thought, That is a great idea! And so that’s what I’m doing. I’m doing it that third book, and it’s really sort of liberating to get her out of town. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with that.
Rankin: Scotland is always changing. In the very early books I tried to fictionalize Edinburgh as much as I could. So I had fictional bars, fictional streets, fictional police stations. And then people in Edinburgh would say, “Well, that’s obviously that police station,” and I thought, Why am I making it hard on myself? So then I started to bring in real areas, real places in the city. I burnt down the fictitious police station; I had Rebus reassigned to the real police station. I mentioned the street he lives on, which is real, I mentioned the place he drinks, which is a real bar, and what that means is that when fans come to Edinbugh now they can say, “We’re walking in Rebus’s footsteps.” The problem with that is—well, there are two problems: (1) If you make any mistakes, everyone will notice, and (2) If you use a part of town where bad things are happening, you don’t want to use those real places because you don’t want to diss people who are living there and doing their damndest to make it out or make it better.
Goldman: I haven’t done that. There are very identifiable areas of both Kansas Cities that have a much higher crime rate, and the demographic features you’d associate with that. And I couldn’t put that someplace else—that’s the east side of Kansas City, Missouri, and it wouldn’t work if I put it in another part of town. So I just do that, and there are some of those areas where that sort of tension is going on that enables me to work it into the books.
Graham: I use Miami every once in a while, and I can tell you that there’s a reason Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry are so well loved: They report the truth. It is not a normal place. For example—I always think of this—we have the death penalty in Florida and there was this guy, he was a really bad guy, the kind Dexter would have taken care of if the law had not, you know? He went to the electric chair, and I always assumed you were shaven for the electric chair, but he wasn’t. His hair caught fire. And it turned into a debate about humane punishment, and in their coverage, the Miami Herald had a headline that read “Electric Chair Deemed Dangerous.” The city is just not quite all there. It’s hard not to use some of the real events that happen there.
If you enjoyed these outtakes, be sure to check out the feature-length article “Installment Plans”—full of valuable insights about character creation, engaging readers, building a story arc over many books, and much more—in the January 2015 Writer’s Digest.