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(c) Photo P Solfest, 2000
Although John Coy grew up only a few miles from Altoona, he had come a long way before visiting students at the middle school on January 18, 2000. Mr. Coy had not started writing books for children until just ten years ago. In between he had taught school, worked for a variety of companies and held lots of different jobs. But until the day he visited the library with his young daughter, he had never given much thought to the idea of being a writer.
That day at the library, John Coy decided on a whim to check in the library's computer to see if there were any authors with his name. When he found there weren't any, he was disappointed. This was the inspiration he needed to begin a writing career that has lead to two new books and lots of readers.
During his visit, Mr. Coy described how a book is published and some of the inside tips he has used in writing his first book Night Driving, and his newest publication, Strong to the Hoop.
First, he disagreed with the idea that writing is easy or quick work. Writing, he warned, takes less than one percent of his time. It is revising and improving his writing that consumes more than 99% of his time as an author. From first draft to final book, it took nearly six years for Night Driving.
Mr. Coy gave several examples from his own writing. Reading from his first draft of Night Driving, for example, Mr. Coy had at first written the book to include a mom and a sister in the story. As he revised the story, though, Mr. Coy decided that the story would be better if it centered on the relationship between the boy and his father, so the mother and sister were dropped from the next draft.
When asked whether the story was based on his own life, Mr. Coy said that every author has to write what he/she knows best. That didn't mean that everything in his books actually happened to him, he said. But the feelings the boy has and the place he would like to visit are real. "When you write, you get to go into and change things. Some are things that happened and some are things I wished had happened. That's what's fun about being a writer."
Similarly, Mr. Coy said, his new book Strong to the Hoop, is based on his experiences as a boy playing basketball. "Who," he noted, "wouldn't want to be the little guy was makes the winning shot?"
Mr. Coy also described the process of how a book goes from the writing and revising stages, to finding a publisher, and then having an illustrator take his work and draw pictures to accompany it. "I sent Night Driving to five publishers. Usually they say 'no'. They get 6,000 unsolicited stories a year."
Another idea that Mr. Coy told students is not true is that authors make a lot of money from writing books. Asking students to guess how much of a $16 book goes to the writer, students guessed amounts ranging from $1 to $10. Listeners were surprised to learn that the author earns only about $.75 for each book sold, and that money is not sent until months after the book is published. Most of the money goes to the people who publish the book - print it and advertise it as well as distributing the book to the bookstores, which also must make a profit from selling the book, he said.
When asked whether the second book was easier to write, Mr. Coy commented that there were actually a lot of books in between. He said he has probably started twenty stories so far with some completed and others in various stages of completion. "I think you can learn a lot by finishing a story," he noted.
Mr. Coy said he is currently working on a new book and is enjoying his time visiting other schools and talking about his writing. "When I went to school, I never had the opportunity to listen to an author. I wonder how it would have been different if I had."
