Contagious Curiosity: A Guest Post by Megan E. Freeman

After a large-scale evacuation and a mysterious threat, a group of curious kids begins asking questions that reveal a huge conspiracy that only they can stop. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Megan E. Freeman on writing Away.

The funny thing is, I never expected to write a follow-up book to my first novel, ALONE. I thought ALONE was a stand-alone story about a girl who was left behind when her entire town was threatened and evacuated. But after ALONE came out, I began visiting schools and meeting readers, and so many of them were curious to learn more about the threat and the evacuation, I became curious myself. Their excellent questions inspired me to revisit the world and write the book that ultimately became AWAY.

In crafting the story, I knew it wouldn’t be a prequel or a sequel. Readers had made it clear that they wanted to know what happened to the people who were evacuated and about the threat that caused it all. So I decided to write AWAY as a stand-alone companion novel, making the action simultaneous with the action in ALONE. But I wanted the book to feel distinct and different, so instead of writing the entire story in verse from one character’s point of view, I created four characters and told the story from their multiple perspectives, using multiple formats.

In AWAY, we meet four kids who are all evacuated to the same shelter where they become friends. Over time, they begin to suspect they are not being told the truth about the causes of the evacuation, and they pool their considerable skills and knowledge to solve the mystery of the so-called “imminent threat.” Two of the characters are written in different forms of free verse. One character is written in screenplay, diary entries, and storyboards. And one character is written in newspaper articles and letters to her aunt. The varying formats all reflect the personalities, interests, and experiences of the kids, and then the larger story is rounded out using other formats like press releases, radio reports, text messages, and more. Varying these formats helped me find the unique voices of each of the four characters, while also giving the reader opportunities to engage with a wide variety of texts.

Since ALONE’s release, I’ve heard from many educators who love novels in verse because they appeal to a wide variety of readers: reluctant, emerging, and enthusiastic. The amount of white space on a page of verse is less daunting that a dense page of prose, and the distilled nature of poetry invites readers to collaborate with the author by contributing details from their own imaginations. In this way, reading a verse novel is a uniquely engaged kind of reading, requiring an active partnership between reader and writer.

With AWAY, I wanted to continue to scaffold opportunities for readers across the spectrum of reading mastery. By using multiple formats, I hoped readers would continue to collaborate in the story creation while also being challenged to grow in their reading comprehension as they encountered various and perhaps unfamiliar forms of text.

I owe a debt of gratitude to all the readers and educators who encouraged me to return to the world of ALONE. Their contagious curiosity was the fuel I needed to create AWAY. And that’s why I dedicated the book to them:

For the readers who kept insisting there was more to the story.