People credit Andrea Warren with creating a literary genre. Warren is not sure that is true, but she knows that writing historical non-fiction books for children makes for a challenging and joyful career.
Warren will be in Emporia on April 14 for the Young Writers’ Conference, held annually for selected students in this area.
She previously was here to receive the William Allen White Children’s Book Award for “Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps.”
“After 11 years as a classroom teacher, reaching out and writing for a younger audience suits me perfectly,” Warren said. “I just find such pleasure in not only this age group, in terms of writing about them and for them. When I can get together with them like I’m doing in Emporia, that’s a real joy. ...
“I think more it’s just that I’ve found my niche and I’m comfortable with it. It took me a long time to find it.”
Warren has enjoyed several careers, but writing or history have held a place in all of them. In addition to teaching English and history, Warren has been a magazine editor, a newspaper reporter, and a freelance writer for magazines and corporate entities. She does other types of writing still, though it is the books for children that brings her the most pleasure.
“What writing these books has done, it’s brought together a number of interests for me,” Warren said. “My love of history, my love of writing non-fiction. I enjoy the research.”
She hopes to pass on that passion for studying history as part of her contribution to the Young Writers Conference.
“It’s a little bit like weaving, I believe,” she said. “You just keep pulling in strands from here and there.”
Warren’s current book project centers on children and their experiences inside Vicksburg during the Civil War.
“With all this, 150 years in the past, makes it that much harder,” she said. “You can’t interview anybody. You find conflicting information. There are things you wish you could ask. It’s a real challenge.”
Warren writes about a specific moment in time, though that moment can span several years. She relies on writings from her subjects if available, interviews with their families if possible, and research into archives with related information before she can fully interpret her characters and put them into the specific moment in time.
“Once you have that all pulled together, that’s when the fun begins, when the creativity begins,” Warren said. “You take those facts and you spin a story — and I love spinning stories.”
Warren takes meticulous care to ensure that the facts of her stories are accurate and the writing is as tight and concise as she can make it.
“Students grimace when I tell them — and this really is true — that any sentence or paragraph that I write probably passes under my eyes at least 100 times,” she said.
“I’m constantly editing and revising. It’s literally like working on a piece of sculpture or a painting or drawing a picture, composing music. You want every note perfect. You take ownership of it. It’s in print; it’s there to stay.”
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