The gamecock. (Columbia, S.C.) 1908-2006, September 04, 1991, Page 3, Image 3
Publishing ho
college studei
By The College Press Service
If a lot of noise was in Lorri Hewett's dormitory toi
one morning last November, she's the one to blame. try
She ran down the halls of Emory University's
Hopkins Hall screaming "I got published!" after the shi
news came that Holloway House in Los Angeles, CA. to
r* _ _r i . . C _ *u:
atwtpicu iiti iiuvci turning oj Age iui iciease mis u?
summer.
The achievement defies conventional wisdom in the ha
publishing industry. coi
First of all, college students don't get novels published
? that's for seasoned writers, whose roads to scl
success are paved by rejection slips. of
Secondly, Hewett didn't have an agent; she sent her Af
manuscript by mail. Editors at some publishing houses els
won't talk to authors who don't have an agent He
And thirdly, Hewett's novel was accepted by the bo
first company she contacted. Often agented manuscripts
get passed from one publishing house to in
another for a year before one says yes. mc
So what happened here? "Perseverence and luck,"
18-year-old Hewett, a sophomore said. wa
Hewett is no naive literary romantic. She learned thr
the ropes by pounding out two other books. The first
was a 100-pager on pioneers in the 1800s, which she as
wrote at age 9. do
"I had just tinisned reading 'Little House on the un
Prairie,' and wanted to write something just like it,"
she said. "F
rer
At 15, she wrote a novel about high school racism
and submitted it in pursuit of the Delacorte First Qu
Young Adult Novel Prize. Her book didn't win, but ^
the editors were encouraging.
'They wrote me and said they thought I had a real wr
future in writing," Hewett said. on
Not everything the editors said was complimentary.
"They said I had a lot of stylistic problems," she ad
said. Hewett remembered she didn't even know what cit
style was, but she was going to find out. So she found
a copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. tur
pi
cttltt
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it's novel
By her last year at Chatfield High School in Littlei,
CO, she was ready to give novel writing another
"I was in the second semester of my senior year,"
e said. "I was just sitting around waiting for my life
begin, so I thought I'd write a book about people at
s point in their lives."
She wrote the first draft of Coming of Age in longnd
in six weeks. Then she revised it on her
mputer.
The book's three characters are all black high
100I seniors at crossroads in their lives. She writes
teens who don't know whether to embrace their
fican-American identities to the exclusion of all
e or to reject their heritage altogether. "Identity,"
iwett said, "is the theme that runs throughout the
ok."
Hewett, whose middle-class parents brought her up
a predominantly white suburb, has things in com>n
with each character, she said.
"There are times I felt I didn't know how to fit in. I
mted to write about young blacks who were going
ough what I was going through," she said.
Mfvtia imaaes stp.rpntvnina Afriran-Ampriran rpp.ns
drug dealers or young mothers frustrate HewetL So
es any brand of Afro-centrism sacrificing individual
iqueness for strict unity.
"There isn't one single black identity," she said,
or every black person in the country, there's a diffeit
black experience."
Now that Hewett is at Emory, she might write abt
the college experience. She is working on another
ok but didn't comment about it
Hewett still sees herself more as a student than a
iter. She doesn't have any illusions of fleeing Em/,
sans diploma, for the writing life.
"Unrealistic," she said. The day she received the
vance copies of her book in the mail, she "was exed
for about an hour."
Then she put the books back in their box and rened
to her course work.
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