Which is a pretty unique story in itself! How did that happen? Was it really as easy as they make it sound?ĭefine “easy.” I’d been publishing for a while, so had a decent publishing bio built up, but I’d worked on it for years. It worked!Ī final question about Crank: Publishers Weekly has reported that you sold your debut verse novel on just the first 75 pages of the manuscript-and without an agent. Since I’d been writing poetry for decades, I decided to give it a try. It’s about her sister’s descent into schizophrenia, and it struck me that that sort of deep interior monologue might work for the book. I tried it in prose first, and the voice was mine, not “Kristina’s.” So I put the book away and did a workshop with Sonya Sones, whose verse novel, Stop Pretending, had just been published. But how (and why) did you come to the decision that it needed to be written as narrative poetry? You’ve said that it’s about 60% “truth,” and that you chose to write from Kristina’s point of view so that you could work through the choices your own daughter made. That Crank was based on your family’s real experiences with crystal meth is something you’ve talked about fairly extensively. Who was first into the sky? Who was the first woman into the sky? How did they fly? (Kites and balloons, in case you’re interested.)įirst book to now, every time I see a cover with my name on it, there’s an immense sense of satisfaction. I’ve always loved flight, so writing about air racing made me think about the history of flight through man’s love of competition. Some of the articles I wrote as a freelancer required heavy research, and through that, the subject matter drew me to write about it deeper.
How did you make the move from writing articles to writing books? And what was it like when your very first book came out? Though your big splash was Crank, you actually published over 20 nonfiction books for children before your first novel in verse (and YA bestseller) came out, and before that you were a freelance journalist.
She is also currently raising three grandchildren under twelve, but was kind enough to make time for this interview over email. Verse novels and “difficult” subjects have become her trademark over the past fifteen years since Crank, she has published twelve more YA novels in verse, tackling topics from suicide to sex trafficking to eating disorders, and three adult novels, two of which are also in verse.Įllen lives on 1.25 acres of Nevada hills overlooking Washoe Lake, on her website, and-for about a hundred days each year-on the road. Ellen Hopkins is a life-long writer who exploded onto the New York Times’ bestseller list in 2004 with Crank, a novel written in free verse that was loosely based on her daughter’s real struggles with “the monster”-crystal meth.
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