When author Meredith Adamo first stepped into Green Hope on May 24 for an author seminar, she instantly felt connected and compelled to share her story with Green Hope students. While Adamo original intended to solely discuss her debut novel, “Not Like Other Girls,” she ended up sharing both the triumphs and trials that paved the way for her first book’s publication in an engaging and informative book talk.
Adamo always had a passion for writing – growing up as the only child to a single mother, Adamo found literature to be a good vice to stay occupied. Even as early as elementary school, Adamo remembers herself immersed in writing. “In third grade, I wrote this horror story, and I remember my grandma reading it and making all of her friends read it and being like, this is really good… and it definitely wasn’t.” Adamo marked this moment as a calling, a moment where she realized that not only was reading and writing vastly enjoyable but also the aspect of sharing her work.
Furthering her love for writing, Adamo attended a performing arts school from middle school through high school to study creative writing, an era profoundly impactful to her writing. “What I really appreciated about it [school] was that they made us write different things. So we had to write screenplays, we had to write plays, we had to write poetry. And we were given a lot of room to explore. We weren’t just sort of writing our own thing, we were kind of looking at everything else.” Elaborating on her multifaceted education, Adamo explained, “In a lot of ways I think I take from those other genres that I was writing. For example, thinking about screenplays that’s so heavy on dialogue, I think that that helped the dialogue in my fiction ultimately.”
After high school, Adamo continued her craft, majoring in English in college. However, full-time writing seemed out of reach to her. “I didn’t study creative writing in college at all. I just knew I liked books but didn’t really know what I wanted to do with it because I think being an author felt like such a big dream, something that a lot of people want. The odds are rough in a lot of ways and there’s so much rejection that I was like, ‘I can’t just tell myself I’m going to be an author.’” To support herself, Adamo worked in other fields but continued her interest in literature. “I need to do something to have a more stable career and a stable day job, so I ended up trying to look at different things. I worked in marketing for a little bit, I worked in libraries for a little bit. I have my library degree, so everything always was close to writing and reading, but not to the type of writing that I loved.”
Adamo isn’t afraid to share the stumbles and struggles she encountered throughout her journey: she previously wrote many novels, even though many were published. “I have so many failed novels, which I think failed sounds kind of negative, but it really isn’t. I got something out of writing everything I’ve ever written; maybe it was me getting to experiment with a new voice or something. I had this one book that I was writing in college that I thought was going to be the book to get me an agent and get published, and it was not good because it was this kind of nonlinear timeline and I don’t think I would’ve played with that without that book,” she said.
During a streak of rejections, Adamo persisted in completing a book. “When I first started writing this book, I was like, ‘This is the book I would’ve loved when I was a high school senior,’ so that was a big part of why I wanted to write this book so much.” Her drive was compounded when a strong vision for what the story came: she knew the exact plot, characters and storyline.
“I first got the idea of this story when I had this vision of these two girls who were talking and I knew that they were not friends and I didn’t really know why yet, but one of them said she was in trouble and the other one could help her and then disappeared,” she said. “I was kind of running with that and as I was delving into this core image, I was like, well, this main character is an outcast for some reason and she has this kind of not other girls mentality and just sort of spiraling out from that one image ended up with the final book.”
Although her initial vision for the story came suddenly and passionately, it was incomplete. While writing, Adamo came across unexpected obstacles: she discovered how hard writing a mystery novel was. “A lot of it [the revision process] was making the book feel more like a mystery. Adding in clues, making that sort of sense of dread come out when reading was really important to me while writing because that’s what I like when I read books… when I have that feeling of investment that I just need to know what happens in the mystery,” she said. “I was really trying to make every character connected to the bigger mystery in some way, and then also trying to make every character and relationship make sense.”
For aspiring writers and passionate readers alike, Adamo’s visit at Green Hope offered an informative discussion of a single author’s career path. Although every writer’s journey is unique, Adamo hopes that by sharing hers, she can inspire future novelists to pursue their ideas, not matter how crazy they may seem.
