Ally Carter stopped at GPS on her new book tour.
Writer Ally Carter told the GPS student body her daydreaming of her own versions of her school’s required reading contributed to her current career as a writer, especially of young adult fiction for girls.
A native of Oklahoma, Ms. Carter majored in the field of agricultural economics, with a master’s from Cornell. Ever since she read the book The Outsiders (written by a teenage girl from Tulsa, Ok.), she says she wanted to be a writer, but she pursued a more “practical major.” The practice of writing, and filling up 50-page notebooks from the Dollar Store, finally resulted in her first book.
Learning from the process and the obstacles she encountered, her advice to the students was to “follow an agent’s directions exactly,” “realize that you’re going to get a lot of rejections,” and “never compare your first draft to someone else’s finished draft; good advice for everything.”
Her six Gallagher Girls novels (Cross my Heart and Hope to Spy and Only the Good Spy Young are two) were the start of her popularity as an author. Although her first book, one geared toward adults, was accepted for publication, in 2005 she and her publisher saw the potential for teen fiction.
“Everything changed with the publication of my first book about a boarding school for spies,” she said. Another book, Heist Society, was about a girl, a response to her observing that “heist movies are always about guys.”
Clearly, all of her books have strong female protagonists. GPS was the first school on Ms. Carter’s tour “Girl Power,” an introduction of her new series, Embassy Row, in which the main character in the first of three books, lives in an embassy with her grandfather. All Fall Down is the title of the first novel launched through Scholastic publishing.
In a quick Q&A with the audience, Ms. Carter said she learned the most about herself from writing, her favorite genres are young adult fiction and historical romance, and she’s sold two million books in 20 countries. “I am one of the luckiest people in the world,” she says, “and today I’m able to do the job I wanted to do when I was a kid.”