"What a Man Do": Coe Booth and the Genesis of Tyrell

ALAN Review, Winter 2007 by Blasingame, James Jr

I have been writing my whole life. I sometimes judge my happiness at a given time by my writing output, so no matter what I'm doing, if I'm writing, I'm OK, but if I'm doing something and I'm not able to write, I'm not happy. Period! When I was working for ECS I was not writing, I had no time to write, I was miserable. I wanted to start writing again. My friends pointed out to me that I wasn't writing and that this wasn't right for me. They believed I was destined to be a writer.

After Coe left ECS, she would eventually move from part-time to full-time at Bronx Community College, teaching English. Even after leaving ECS, her writing wasn't what she knew it could and should be. She was not finding the rhythm, the routine, or the discipline. Even though she was writing more, she didn't believe her writing was improving as much as it could. She was certain that if she went back to college for an MFA in creative writing, it would be the incentive she needed to return the act of writing to center stage in her life.

Coe was determined to find the right college with the right degree program, one that specialized in writing for young people. She felt she would be out of place in an adult fiction writing MFA program if she wanted to write for teens. She was thrilled to discover that her alma mater, The New School, well-known for its strenuous but innovative programs, offered an MFA in creative writing with a concentration in children's writing. It was there that she fell under the tutelage of David Levithan, award winning author and founding editor of Scholastic's cutting edge PUSH imprint. The stars were moving into alignment.

David Levithan and The New School proved to be exactly what Coe needed:

It really made me write. Every few weeks we had to hand in twenty pages of what we were working on to be critiqued. I needed that. I started to feel that I was getting better.

I didn't think I was going to be writing about the social work kind of thing, at all. I had other stories that I wanted to write. When iyrell came along, I was writing a different story called The Thmwaways, a book I had been writing for a long time, trying to get it out on paper, putting it away in a shoebox, trying again, and putting it away again. I just couldn't get past the sixty-five page hump, which is my personal barrier. I can write anything at all for sixty-five pages, at which point, 1 question where the story is going and if it's not going anywhere, the manuscript goes in a shoebox for another year.

I had dug out The Throwaways again as I started at The New School, but it just wasn't working. When it was my next turn to hand in twenty pages for critiquing, I wasn't satisfied with what I had, and I had the beginning of an idea for Tyrell, a story about a middle-school-age boy, so I started writing. I wrote the very first sentence, Tyrell cursed, and I knew immediately, he wasn't going to be a middle school age student.

Tyrell, the protagonist, just sort of channeled through me. I didn't know where the story was going, but I wanted the twenty pages to hand in, so I just let it come pouring out. People in the class were excited about this new story, much more so than they had been about what I had been working on before. So, I said, 'Let's see where it goes.' I really didn't have a plan. I had no outline or ending. I had nothing more than the first sentence when I began, and anytime I tried to force the direction of the story, it would suffer. So I just followed this teenaged boy wherever he wanted to go. He seemed to have a story to tell. I had heard authors in the past say they just followed their characters as they wrote a novel, and I thought it was ridiculous, that it couldn't possibly work. But it turned out to be true. I had no plan for the book, but just let it come out.