My first book

BY LILY QUAN

Up on my computer screen is the cover of my first book. It comes out in February 2022. I can’t stop looking at it. The title is in big bright letters. The main character strikes an attitudinal pose. The drawings and sketches will surely catch people’s attention. But to me, the most important feature is right at the bottom. In small letters are the words By Lily Quan.

I actually wrote my first book when I was in the first grade. I was both author and illustrator. The plot featured three sisters who had a Big Mac Attack. Each sister had long hair in a different colour. I was so proud of my story. I stapled the pages together in book form and showed it to my mother, who told me she liked it.

Then one afternoon I was home with a bad cold and needed to blow my nose. There weren’t any tissues nearby, so I reached for my book because it was handy. Scads of clear snot dripped down the sisters’ bodies. It didn’t bother me to use my book this way. This meant my book was special; it was multifunctional.

The journey to publication as an adult has taken a lot longer with plenty of snot-worthy moments. It’s tough to get published.

Over the years, I wondered if it was worth it to pursue writing. For several years, I worked on an ambitious historical fiction manuscript. The book was my passion. I got an arts grant for it and did a research trip to Chicago. Despite hundreds of queries, it was never published. Meanwhile Twitter and Facebook became the media of choice and readers lost interest in writing with more than 140 characters. The thought occurred to me that by the time I wrote a second novel, people might not be interested in books at all.

Then one evening, the voice of a snarky, precocious thirteen-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl came to me. She lived in Toronto. She talked about her life, her friends, and above all, her family. I immediately wrote everything down and began my second novel, set in her world. This meant I had to leave behind my beloved first novel and historical Chicago. It was tough to let go but necessary.

What I didn’t know then was that Disney and Pixar were working on Turning Red, a feature-length animated film about a thirteen-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl, directed by Oscar-winner Domee Shi. When they found out I had written something in a similar vein, they thought I might be a good fit to write an adaptation of the movie in book form. That’s the book I am looking at now.

It took a lot of luck and perseverance to reach this point, and I needed both to get here. I can’t say that I would recommend a writing career. It’s an uncertain field where you make a lot of sacrifices for your work. An old friend congratulated me on the book and said I had obviously chosen the right career. I thought about it and replied, “Actually it chooses you, and then you make it work.” Afterward, I realized just how true that is.

Lily Quan lives in Nanaimo. She wrote the middle grade book adaptation of the upcoming Pixar movie, Turning Red, directed by Domee Shi. The movie comes out March 2022.