Helena Coggan’s thrilling debut The Catalyst (Candlewick, Oct. 11, 2016) contains magic, danger, and terrible secrets. In a world segregated between the powerfully magical green-eyed Gifted and the nonmagical black-eyed Ashkind, 15-year-old Rose Elmsworth and her adoptive father, David, both work for a ruthless Gifted-run law enforcement agency. They harbor a terrible secret, however, and after a murderer escapes from prison and reveals that he knows what the Elmsworths are hiding, Rose's life—and her trust in her father—hang in the balance. Currently 17 years old, Coggan shared with SLJ her motivation for completing The Catalyst, what it’s like being a published author at a young age, and some advice for aspiring writers.   How does it feel having been a published author at 16? Has it been overwhelming at all, or are you just soaking it in?

Author Helena Coggan

Definitely still soaking it in. The book’s been out in Britain, where I live, for about a year and a half, so I suppose I’ve had plenty of time to get used to it, but it really doesn’t get any less weird. Whether it’s overwhelming or not…that kind of depends on the day and the occasion. Sometimes it can feel normal; mostly, it's just me, sitting at our table at home, typing and trying to get the cats to stop nuzzling my laptop screen. But then eventually, I’ll be in a meeting with the publishers, or I’ll see the book in a store, or someone will tell me they’ve read it, and I’ll realize for the hundredth time how utterly bizarre all of this is, how lucky I’ve been, how astonishingly kind everyone else is…. For a very long time after I found out it was going to be published, I kept making contingency plans for what would happen if I woke up one day and realized none of it was real: that there were no characters, no book, no story in my head—I’d dreamed it all. The whole thing still feels a bit like that—like it might vanish at any moment. Your bio says that you wrote the first draft for The Catalyst at the age of 13. Can you describe how much the novel changed from that first draft to the finished book? I think it’s safe to say it changed quite a lot. For one thing, the first draft of the book was 160,000 words; the final one was about 97,000. So a lot had to go. I remember spending one afternoon in March, just after I’d had my first meeting with my editor, going through the book and cutting out 70,000 words—extraneous characters, plotlines, you name it. I’d been slightly trigger-happy with creating new subplots when I first wrote it; I was so giddy with happiness that I’d found an idea that I could write into an actual novel, so high on the sheer magic of it, that I got a bit carried away. There were about 10 drafts of the book between the first time I wrote it out in the fall of 2012 and the version that’s coming out in the United States now. Characters appeared and disappeared; plotlines grew and shrank; we had about five different endings. That’s not to say that the first and final drafts were completely different. The three main characters—Rose, David, and Loren—were almost unchanged, and the first half of the book stayed pretty much the same. But it took a while to test out the different versions of the story to find which suited the characters best. And it’s definitely helped me edit English coursework. There are some heavy philosophical themes in the novel: the difference between choosing to do evil and having evil thrust upon you; the psychological impact of realizing that a parent lived a different life before you came along. Where did the inspiration for The Catalyst come from? I always find this question really difficult, because I wouldn’t say there was an inspiration for it, in the sense that I was walking to school one day and suddenly had an idea about a girl living in a world scarred by magical war. I’ve loved writing for as long as I can remember. I still have the notebooks from when I was five and six—half-finished scraps of fairy tales in jerky writing. So I’d known for years that it was something I was reasonably good at, something I wanted to do as much as I could. I promised myself when I was 10, after I’d won a couple of kids’ writing competitions, that I’d try to write a "full story" (I never used the word book until it was nearly finished; I was terrified of getting my own hopes up) before I turned 13, just because I thought it was worth trying to see if I could. I never thought I’d actually do it, of course; I was just trying to motivate myself, to put a deadline on it, because I knew I had a greater chance if I tried than if I didn’t. I spent all that time waiting for inspiration, for a bolt from the blue, scouring the back of my mind for a brainwave, but I found only the same old ideas. And then suddenly, my 13th birthday had passed, I still had nothing, and I realized that waiting for inspiration wasn’t getting me anywhere. I thought: well, I might as well try now, with what I have—what have I got to lose? So I went back to my old ideas for stories, the ones I’d never thought were any good. I took half a dozen mediocre ideas and made them into one decent one. And when I started writing it, I made it better. Do you identify with Rose, your main protagonist? Or is there another character you connected with most ? Some characters were definitely the most fun to write. Felix, the main antagonist, is—behind all his justifications and ideological precepts and long-held grudges—stark raving mad, in the sense that reason and empathy are no longer things he has any time for. That was interesting to play around with, to see what would happen when you gave someone like that power and charisma and an army. I’d say David, Rose’s adoptive father, was the most difficult to write, because he’s supposed to be a genius, and obviously I’m not, so that was definitely a challenging impression to create. My attitude to writing all of them was rather like that of a three-year-old with a chemistry set: I just wanted to see what would happen. That’s what I find exhilarating about writing, and that’s exactly why I wouldn’t say I identified with any of them; I didn’t base their thought processes on my own, because the whole point, for me, was seeing how those thought processes changed and watching them grow as I wrote them. That’s what makes writing fun, for me. I liked that Rose is not described as particularly beautiful, and there isn’t a strong romantic element in the book. It made me focus on her more than if she had been the Amazon warrior–type character whom we see so often in pop culture. Was that a conscious effort on your part, to break away from that norm? Originally, it wasn’t. In the first drafts, Rose was beautiful, tall, and confident, and I had planned for her to end up with one of the boys in the book. I suppose there was a rather immature instinct on my part to make all the teenager parts of being a teenager effortless for her—a desire to lift her above normal adolescent insecurities, just because I could. But as she developed, I started to realize that that didn’t make any sense. In the book, Rose and her father have a strange and dangerous power, one that would get them killed instantly if anyone—especially their close friends and colleagues—found out about it, and that they have, therefore, kept secret all Rose’s life. So, she has grown up with an unbreachable gulf between her and other children. She can trust none of them, because she knows that if they knew the truth about her, they would turn her in. They have conventional, untested ideas about right and wrong, whereas she has been raised by David, who works in a brutal law enforcement agency, who has killed more times than he can count, and whom she cares about more than anything in the world, including things like law and honor and justice. She doesn’t know how to relate to people or talk to them, so putting her in a romantic relationship—having her fall in love, be intimate, trust—just didn’t make sense with where she was as a character. The other thing I came to realize was that beauty is almost ubiquitous among teenage heroines in YA, as are romantic subplots with dark, knowledgeable, idolized boys—so much so that it can seem like a necessary part of their development, something without which they are not yet whole. And that idea can do real damage to the teenage girls who read those stories. It was completely unnecessary to Rose, so I decided she would be better off, more interesting, without it. And I think she is. A sequel is on the way! Can you tell me what it’s about, or is that being kept under wraps for now? Yes, I can! Without giving too much away… The second book, in my eyes, is about how Rose’s worldview changes after she starts to question what David has done to keep them alive. Was it all necessary? Was the seclusion he raised her in really all for her own good? Was he ever really honest with her about what he did before she was born, about what he did when she was growing up? As her world descends into chaos, she suddenly finds herself having to fight in her own corner, for her own life, in a fracturing world of war and intrigue and murder, without the protections she enjoyed as a child. Just as the question of the first book, for me, is, "Who will Rose decide to betray?," the question of the second is, "Who will she become?" Because, of course, in that kind of world, you have to make terrible decisions to survive, the kind of decisions that change you as a person. So will she decide to become more like David—clever, brutal, amoral, and dangerous? And if not, how will she survive? With school and writing and promoting your book seemingly taking up your life, what do you like to do for fun—if there’s time, that is? This is the thing—writing is fun, for me. I’ve never considered it work. It’s what makes me happiest, what I’m best at. It’s like playing a video game, like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, except you get to invent everything from scratch, conjure it from thin air. It’s like doing magic. I can’t imagine ever not writing, not even if I knew for certain that no one would ever read anything I wrote. That’s kind of an optional bonus, for me. Schoolwork is obviously harder, but in Britain you get to narrow down your subjects at 16, which means that I get to focus on maths and physics and chemistry. So, even on a bad day, when I have a deluge of homework, it’s at least on subjects I find interesting and satisfying. That’s not to say I don’t have hobbies, of course—I have my guitar and reading and TV—but normally, I just spend as much time as I can with my friends. I am inordinately lucky to have them. They have saved my sanity more times than I can count, and one day, I’ll have a shot at repaying them, but for the moment…they’ll just have to put up with my sarcasm and my terrible jokes. Sorry, guys. What does your writing process look like on any given day? Do you have a set schedule, or do you write when you have time? Mostly when I have time. I used to have a schedule, of sorts. I’d write on my lunch break (which was about half an hour) and do my homework after school, and then I’d spend mornings writing on the weekends. I liked that system, because it meant I got to write at least once a day. But schoolwork has ramped up a lot since then—we had really important exams at the end of 10th grade, and now even more important exams coming up at the end of senior year—so that kind of schedule doesn’t really work for me anymore. I tried writing whenever I had time last year, but the constant pressure of thinking that I had to write every moment that I wasn’t doing schoolwork made me tired and stressed, which meant nothing I wrote was worth reading. So now I just write when I feel like it. That makes me slower, of course, and that’s where I’ve been really lucky to have such kind and understanding publishers, who will give me more time if I ask. But it also makes my writing better, and it certainly makes me happier, so for me, it works. I don’t need that much to write—an Internet connection for Spotify (I hate silence), relative quiet otherwise, Word….someone to talk to, in breaks, or when I get tired. But otherwise, I can write pretty much anywhere. What is some of your best advice for aspiring novelists? Don’t start out wanting to publish a novel. It looks very, very daunting when you think of it like that. Think in milestones: a premise, characters, a thread of plot you want to follow, 1,000 words, 10,000, 50,000. Don’t think about how unlikely it is to be finished, to be published, because if you think about that for too long (my measure of "too long" is more than 10 seconds every two years), the most likely thing you’ll do is give up, and then you have no chance at all. Blind yourself to probability and keep going. Show people your work; get second and third opinions. I know it’s scary and nerve-wracking to expose it to other people’s judgement, but if you’re going to publish it, then a lot more people will be reading it, so it’s better to test the waters with kind people who care about you first. And most of all, give yourself a break. Don’t lock yourself in a room every day until you’ve dragged 1,000 words from yourself. Don’t shut yourself away from your friends. It won’t make you a better writer; it’ll just make you miserable. Be kind to yourself, forgive and laugh at your mistakes, cut extraneous words unhesitatingly and cheerfully, and absolutely make sure you’re happy, because that’s the point. Writing is magic. Revel in it; make sure it makes you feel better, more comfortable in yourself. And if it doesn’t, find something else that will—there are a hundred different ways to express your ideas and imaginary worlds that don’t involve hours spent typing. Don’t feel the need to write just because other people think it’s a good idea. Write because you want to. I do, at least.