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Assuming the Role: Writing the New Nancy Drews Carolyn Keene '1f"he summer I was ten I read nothing but Nancy Drew. The first ~ one I read was a castoff, my cousin's copy of The Ghost ofBlackwood Hall (1948). I read it because, at that point, ghost stories were my favorite kind of book. I'm not sure I realized that I was getting something very different in a detective story. All I knew was that I was hooked, mostly by the suspense and the atmosphere. As Carolyn Heilbrun pointed out, what I recall now about those early Nancy Drews is a very generalized experience of pleasure-I remember blond-haired, adventurous Nancy, her good chums (as they were called then), Bess and George, her "distinguished" father, Carson Drew, the faithful Hannah Gruen, and, of course, the blue roadster. I know I thought Bess very silly (l was a very serious child, and even at ten I basically had no patience for that sort of female); I thought George was sensible, Ned was boring, and Nancy was perfect. Actually, the only thing I couldn't really fathom about Nancy was her attraction to Ned. I still have trouble with that one. I remember somewhat gothic settings-old spooky houses, eccentric elderly women in distress, and stories that were scary and exciting. I also had a very clear picture of what Carolyn Keene looked like. She was middle-aged, with short, blond permed hair, blue eyes, and had a penchant for wearing white buttoned blouses with scalloped lace collars. She was also quite buxom and always wore a string of pearls. It never, in my wildest dreams, occurred to me that 73 74 CREATING AND PUBLISHING NANCY DREW I would grow up to be, among other things, Carolyn Keene. When I really think about this part of my identity, I get a mild feeling of disbelief . It increases when I realize that quite a number of my good friends, many of them male, are also Carolyn Keene. We are quite a diverse company, and it's a tribute to the publishers and their editors , but mostly to the power of Nancy herself, that Nancy Drew has passed through so many hands and voices and imaginations and yet remains distinct and consistent through the years. She's a very specific vision and as such can be difficult to write. I came to the series through publishing. I'd been working in children 's books for years as an editor and a writer. Like many editors, I'd started as an editorial assistant, which means doing everything from typing to answering the phone, to weeding through the slush (unsolicited manuscripts), writing copy, and spending many, many hours cursing at the uncooperative copy machines. I graduated from being an assistant to being a manuscript reader, which is where I first met Anne Greenberg (I was doing freelance reading for Bantam , and she was managing editor there). Later I did proofreading, copy editing, and editing, which included developing and managing other middle-grade and young adult series. I'd even written two young adult mysteries for Random House's My Name Is Paris series, which is set in Paris at the turn of the century and follows a sixteenyear -old American girl who takes up sleuthing ala Sherlock Holmes. And so by the time I came to Nancy Drew, I knew many ofthe basics of what makes a good story. I had a decent handle, I thought, on plot and character development, language, background, pacing, and what it takes to keep young readers interested. I've now written seven Nancy Drew books, five in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series and two Nancy Drew & Hardy Boys SuperMysteries . I've also written for nine other series and rewritten other people's books in countless other series (though I rarely edit now, I still do a great deal of rewriting and salvage work). I can honestly say that writing Nancy Drew is for me the most difficult work of all. I have a few theories as to why this is true. Part of the problem is specific to me. I am not ideally suited to write mysteries. As a reader, writer, and editor, I'm very characteroriented . At heart I basically agree with Henry James's theory that character is plot. This is not a useful definition of plot when approaching Nancy Drew. Nancy needs action, one suspenseful event [18.217.182.45] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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