Every day this week, we are taking you behind the scenes of I Survived with author Lauren Tarshis and editor Nancy Mercado as they give you the inside scoop on how the latest book in the New York Times bestselling series was created.
PICKING THE TOPICS by Lauren Tarshis
When I first had the idea for the I Survived series, I planned to write about events that most people probably hadn’t heard much about, like the Great Blizzard of 1888 and the Hawaii Tsunami of 1946. Scholastic loved the idea for a historical fiction series about disasters and other events, but they wanted to begin the series with a highly recognizable disaster, the sinking of the Titanic.
I still remember my reaction.
Me: “Titanic? Aren’t there thousands of books about the Titanic?
My editors: “Yes! Because every kid wants to read about the Titanic!”
Turned out they were right about the Titanic – it was the perfect kick off for the series. And when it comes to choosing topics for I Survived, we continue to ask ourselves one simple question: What events do kids want to read about?
Lucky for me, the readers of I Survived are constantly telling me what they want. I get emails every day —many, many emails—from kids brimming with ideas for the series. And often their suggestions surprise me. Sure, they want stories about tornadoes and hurricanes. They want action and suspense and details. But many also express deep curiosity about events that are big and complex and dark.
They are fascinated by historical episodes that shaped our history, like the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Gettysburg. They are willing to travel far and wide in their reading— to Japan to read about the tsunami of 2011, or way back to the year A.D. 79, to learn about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the destruction of the city of Pompeii.
Other topics kids like you suggest? Chernobyl, the Black Death, and Hiroshima. Every day a kid writes to me asking for a book about the Boston Marathon Bombings. Will I write about those events? I doubt it. Then again, I doubted that I would write about 9/11 and the Holocaust, and in the end I was persuaded by the sheer number and intensity of kids’ requests for those topics.
When it came time to choose the topic for I Survived 11, the team at Scholastic decided to leave the decision wholly up to my readers. We selected three of the most commonly requested topics: The Great Chicago Fire, The Hindenburg Disaster, and the Revolutionary War. Scholastic then created an online contest in which kids could vote. Thousands of kids participated, and in the end Chicago won (not by a landslide, by the way—all of the topics generated lots of votes).
As I sheepishly admitted to readers in the author’s letter at the end of I Survived the Great Chicago Fire, I was hoping Revolutionary War or Hindenburg won (I have a crush on George Washington and have always been fascinated by dirigibles). But in the end I loved writing the Chicago book, and the research journey was one of the most interesting that I’ve undertaken.
And of course this shouldn’t have surprised me. One thing I’ve learned as the author of I Survived is that my readers know where they want to go—and that by listening to them, I can’t go wrong.
Want to learn more? Watch this video about how Lauren got the idea for the I Survived series and this one about the differences between writing for a magazing and a book.
For additional classroom resources, visit www.scholastic.com/TeachISurvived.
Author photo © David Dreyfuss.
