Teenage sleepovers and the beginnings of my writing by Stephanie Cowell

I never fail to read the acknowledgements on the back pages of novels, seeing the lists of those who helped to bring the book together. I am always amazed at the number of them and wonder what each one contributed. Writing my own thanks, I am swept back to teenage sleepovers in an old apartment building by the chilly wind-blowing Hudson River on New York City’s Upper West Side.

The river wind blew, and the windows rattled, and we huddled on my friend Renée’s bed, wrapped in blankets, eating chocolates, and reading our precious stories to each other. We were perhaps fourteen or fifteen. We had promised each other to write something to share, and we did, sometimes banged out on 1940 typewriters or scribbled with dull pencils in black-and-white school notebooks. There were three to five of us girls at the sleepovers, and at the moment, I can only remember that I wrote a novel about pirates. I am sure it was dreadful and derivative, and my historical research lacked something. I had little sense of geography, and I think some characters rode horseback from England to France.  I would do better three or four years later when I twice won the national Seventeen short story contest.

Sometimes Renée and I and one or two of the others would cram into her father’s Volkswagen bug and drive to the country house they shared with many other German refugees who had escaped to America in the 1930s. We would read our stories in an old white house under heavy trees. It was a wooded area with fields and streams and my first experience of a country house. There was a mystery there, feeling protected by the trees, the house, and Renée’s gentle parents.

Two girls moved away, leaving Renée, our friend Christine, and me. My friends saw the earliest stages of my writing until years passed, and they read a more developed me. More than sixty years after those first sleepovers, they are still helping me with my writing. Christine is an actress, novelist and poet who now reads countless versions of my novels. Her manner of writing is very different: one major draft and some light revisions, whereas I can go on for twenty years and 87 drafts on one book because I can always see a way to make it better. Even now that THE BOY IN THE RAIN is published, I would revise it again if my publisher allowed it. Christine and I now send each other our work by e-mail attachment, very far from when we wrote on notepaper and mailed it by post.

Fortunately for us, Renée became one of the most respected copy editors at the enormous Harper Junior Books and is my saviour. Not only do misspellings and bad commas fall before her, but with her marvellous sense of logic, she makes astute comments on my plot and characters. Every time we travel together, she comments on gas station signs, hotel room notices, menu misspellings, and grammatical mistakes in parking lot instructions. Christine and I have an upcoming library talk about our long friendship and how it influenced our writing. Renee will notice any mistakes in the printed program.

The earliest things that formed who I am are the New York City apartment with the river wind rattling the windows and the country house with our whispered secrets shared under the rustling of huge old trees. The apartment was sold to someone when Renée’s parents died, and she moved to her own place, the white wood country house under the trees burned down many years ago. Still, they live in my mind with the young girls telling secrets, eating chocolates, and sharing our first stories.

Author Bio: Stephanie Cowell has been an opera singer, balladeer, and founder of Strawberry Opera and other arts venues, including a Renaissance festival and an outdoor art series in NYC. She is the author of Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Marrying Mozart, and Claude & Camille: a novel by Monet.  Her work has been translated into nine languages and adapted into an opera. Stephanie is the recipient of an American Book Award.