Publishing a book is something many people want to do, yet very few people actually go through with it. All the hours spent conceptualizing, drafting, and editing seem daunting to many adults, so the idea that a highschooler would find the time and energy to complete such work seems impossible. Yet one student at Atherton managed to do the seemingly impossible.
During the 2022-2023 school year, Reese McCarty, then a freshman, published her first novel titled Eden Of Exiles. Now a junior, Reese has since ventured into many creative enterprises. As well as working on future novels, she has started a musical project with her friend and fellow Atherton student Lorelai Bowman as the songwriter of Pluviophile, a folk style duo. She balances all of these creative projects with the studying and work that is necessary to go full IB. I sat down with Reese to discuss what her future plans are when it comes to publishing books.
When did you realize you wanted to be a writer and what caused this?
My dad told me when I was younger that Mary Shelley published a book at 13, and I hated her for that, cause I wanted to beat her in life. My goal became to be better than her in general. I later found out that my dad was lying… but it gave me the motivation to write. I also took mandarin in elementary school, and the teacher told us to write a short story, and she said mine was really good. So I took that to heart and made it my whole personality.
Around what time did you decide on writing a book?
Probably like 4th grade. I’ve had lots of book ideas, most of which will never see the light of day. I started plotting for Eden of Exiles around, like, the end of 6th grade, and the majority of it was written in quarantine, with two years spent editing, which wasn’t super fun, since I ended up reading it around 1,400 times and I’m still not happy with it. So you just gotta learn to call it quits and be like “that’s good enough for me!”.
When was the first rough draft completed?
It was probably around halfway through my eighth grade year and the rest was all editing.
Who was the publisher of Eden of Exiles?
I guess you could say me, because the book was self-published through Amazon and Barnes and Noble. From the start I was set on self publishing, because I knew it would be quicker and I wanted to have it done by the time I turned 15. The plan for any future books in the Eden of Exiles series is to self publish, but other projects will be sent to official publishing people.
Could you summarize the plot of Eden of Exiles?
Oh my! *nervous laughter* I would say-well, it’s very much like if you combined The Hunger Games with the TV show The 100 (I know there’s a book…I haven’t read it…it’s probably not a good image for me). But it’s sort of the whole dystopian society with a very controlling government. But the world is inhabitable, post nuclear war, you know: bombs went off, everybodies sheltered within a society that’s trapped within a concrete wall. And every year they send out eight people to see if the world is inhabitable but they never come back, presumed to be dead.
Were any of the characters in Eden of Exiles based on real people?
Oh, Yeah! I would hope the main character’s personality isn’t much like mine, but appearance wise definitely (imagine a very malnourished version of me). For most of the side characters, the thing was when I would tell people I was writing a book, they’d say “can you write me a character?”. And I’d always say “sure!” So for almost all the female characters, their middle names reflect the real names of people that I know. It’s like a cool little easter egg (which they’re not too grateful for…very fake of them). I did base characters off of people, but only the good characters. I do have one villain in the story that was made for someone that I know, but it doesn’t actually reflect them as a person.
What would your advice be to other young people who wanna write a book after having done it yourself?
My advice would be to get your book to where you are satisfied with it because you’re never gonna be fully happy with your work. There’s TONS of things in this book: word choice, plot, things that I wish I could change but I’m not going to because it was the choice I made at the time. And I think that eventually, you just have to realize that nobody else is going to despise it as much as you will (or at least hopefully not) because you are your own biggest critic. So at the end of the day, I would advise any young writers to just put their work out there, because you can always go back and change something. I personally don’t because I don’t have the energy to, but anything that you make is your own, and at any time if you wanna go back and change it, you can. So just go ahead and put it out there.
