Posted: Sat, 13 Mar 2010 07:36 AM - 10,143 Readers
By: Jody Seaborn
Carolyn Cohagan didn't write a children's book on purpose. Her debut, "The Lost Children," published last month by Aladdin, came about because of a failed screenplay.
"The Lost Children" is an adventure fantasy about a 12-year-old girl who falls into another world where orphans mysteriously vanish, a couple of bizarre monsters prowl and an evil ruler reigns. Readers will recognize darkly comedic touches straight out of Roald Dahl here and there, and well-crafted surprises heighten the story of loss and reunion.
Cohagan, 37, grew up on Lake Travis. She graduated in 1990 from St. Stephen's Episcopal School and then from Barnard College in New York, where she lived on and off for a decade. She took a few detours on her way to writing "The Lost Children."
"I've had a crazy career path," she said before a recent reading and signing at BookPeople.
Cohagan performed as a stand-up comic telling "fish-out-of-water" jokes about her life as a Texan living in Manhattan before she moved into theater, where she found the audiences a little more patient and where she could take her time developing a story. Following a year studying theater in Paris, she wrote a couple of one-woman shows and toured international fringe theater festivals with a small company she co-founded.
Then came the desire to try her hand at film and, with it, a move to Los Angeles. There she began writing the screenplay that would lead eventually to "The Lost Children."
Dissatisfied with her screenplay's visual weakness and dependence on dialogue, Cohagan put it aside and started over by writing a film treatment instead. A treatment is a sort of prose outline detailing characters, action and scenes in a proposed screenplay. "The Lost Children" evolved over the next half-dozen years from this treatment.
For decades, writers, parents and librarians have been debating what's appropriate reading for particular ages — what's too scary, what reads too old. Though it's sensitively handled, there are a couple of moments of fleeting violence in "The Lost Children" and an atmosphere of grief and loneliness throughout most of the book. So Cohagan knew that some parents might find her book too dark for its intended audience — ages 8-12.
But she said she's confident most children can handle her book's darker moments, and thinking about the books of two of her favorite authors from childhood, Dahl and C.S. Lewis, helped guide her writing:
"In ‘James and the Giant Peach,' " James is "orphaned because his parents were eaten by a rhinoceros. ... That doesn't traumatize kids."
Cohagan is working on a sequel to "The Lost Children" and using her performance skills to create interactive writing workshops for kids. An upcoming reading of "The Lost Children" will be augmented with music and painting, and for next month's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Cohagan has designed a children's program that will bring scenes from her book to life.
At children's book signings, it's not unusual for readers to ask how they, too, can become an author. For Cohagan, the important lessons from her roundabout experience are perseverance and the willingness to rewrite.
In fact, Cohagan said she was once told that writers who don't want to rewrite are writers who don't last.
But the main advice Cohagan said she would give a young, would-be writer is "to start writing as soon as possible."
And a good way to start is to keep a journal.
Cohagan said that when she revisits the journals she kept as a stand-up comic, she can see her writing improving and getting more interesting as she slowly learned to write less about herself and write more about life around her.
She learned, she said, that "the thing you're going to want to read in 10 years or 20 years is going to be, what did your house look and smell like? What did your mother wear every day? What was the color of her lipstick? And the stuff that's going to be interesting to you in 20 years will also be interesting to a reader."
