Not unlike unrequited crushes squashed in high school, published authors are familiar with rejection.
Perhaps it was this commonality, or Christian McKay Heidicker’s comfortable frankness, that captured the attention of over one hundred East Henderson High students when the writer visited the school.
Before reading aloud the first chapter of his debut Young Adult fiction novel, Cure for the Common Universe, Heidicker engaged with a student he’d met at his Barnes & Noble book signing over the weekend.
“How’s the poetry coming?” he asked, picking up a conversation where they’d left off on Saturday.
Heidicker is down-to-earth. He gets on young adults’ level. He wrote about a kid addicted to video games, for goodness sake.
And on Tuesday, he was honest about the writing process – which is lengthy and at times, unforgiving. But definitely worth the delayed gratification.
“When I was your age I never thought I would write a book,” Heidicker admitted. “I hated writing a three page paper,” much less a 300-page novel, he said.
But Heidicker said he just had to have the right inspiration: an idea that seemed interesting enough to create a whole new world, and another world within that world – a complex video game to which the main character, Jaxon, is addicted.
Heidicker said his friend had been urging him to write for years and pitched the idea of writing a book about video games. Nope. What about a rehab center? It’s been done. A rehab center for people addicted to video games?
And that’s when Heidicker embarked on the two-and-a-half year journey of writing, rewriting and pitching Cure for the Common Universe to publishers.
One student asked how many times Heidicker had been rejected by publishers before the book was accepted.
“It was a lot,” Heidicker said. “I wrote five books before this one sold. And they were all turned down.” He said, “I went through at least two dozen agents and 36 editors.”
So what kept him going, putting pen to paper when he became flustered? When the writer’s block hit? Students peppered Heidicker with questions about his process.
“I tell myself I can totally screw it up,” and just write anything down to push past the block, Heidicker said. “Nobody’s going to read it.”
He then explained the Marshmallow Principle of Success, a delayed gratification principle named after a 1960’s experiment that promised young children they would receive a second marshmallow if they could only resist eating the first one in their hands for 15 minutes.
The kids who could wait patiently for 15 minutes received a reward, and later in life they were found to be more successful in their endeavors.
“They could put off satisfaction until they accomplished something,” Heidicker said.
He encouraged students who struggled with writing prose or poetry to wait to reward themselves – be it by surfing Facebook, sending Snapchats or launching into a video game – until they had created something.
“Do something tiny every single day,” Heidicker said. “If you were to write 300 words a day, you would have (the length of) a Stephen King novel in a year.”
(Written by Molly McGowan Gorsuch, HCPS Public Information Officer.)