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Author Ally Condie visits library
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.New York Times bestselling author Ally Condie spoke to two groups of area students at the Austintown library about her Matched book trilogy.
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Author Ally Condie gave two presentations to students at the Austintown library. The morning session was to students from Austintown Middle School, South Range High School and Canfield Village Middle School; while the afternoon session was to students from Austintown Fitch High School and Austintown Middle School.
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.A large crowd of students from Austintown Fitch High School and Austintown Middle School gathered at the Austintown library for the afternoon presentation by bestselling author Ally Condie.
By TIM CLEVELAND
Local libraries have hosted several bestselling authors over the past few months. The most recent was Ally Condie at the Austintown library on Oct. 16.
Condie gave two presentations, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon, to students from Austintown Fitch High School, Austintown Middle School, South Range High School and Canfield Village Middle School. She spoke for about an hour each time and there was a question and answer session at the end.
Later that night, she was also at another event at the Poland library, which consisted of her speaking for a few minutes at the beginning of the event, followed by games and crafts associated with her “Matched” trilogy books.
Condie’s presentations dealt with her “Matched,” “Crossed” and “Reached” books, all of which made the New York Times bestseller list, with “Matched” hitting number 1 and the others getting as high as number 2. She also spoke of her newest books, “Atlantis,” which comes out Oct. 28, as well as about reading and writing.
Barnes and Noble was on hand during the daytime sessions to sell copies of her “Matched” trilogy. The Austintown library provided free juice boxes and chips to the students.
“I’ve always just loved it,” Condie said of writing. “I love reading and I’ve been writing stories since I was a little kid. I taught [high school] English for a few years and it’s fun to teach other people to write, too. Eventually, I ended up going back to writing.”
Condie still lives in her native Salt Lake City, Utah, with her husband and four children. She wrote “Matched” in 2010. The “Matched” trilogy has been published in 30 different countries.
Condie said as a mother of four, she has to find time to write whenever she can.
“It’s whenever I can get the kids in bed, I write,” she said. “I’m not much of an outliner. I’ve done it before and I can do it, but I will always end up deviating, not intentionally. I tend to have a lot of a discovery process as I’m writing. I write a lot by the seat of my pants. It’s messy to have to edit all that.”
She said she and her husband unintentionally came up with the idea for “Matched.”
“For ‘Matched,’ I had the idea from a conversation with my husband,” she said. “He’s an economist and he and I were talking about dating and how his sister was dating someone and he said, ‘wouldn’t it be great if I could write an algorithm for pairing people up and it actually worked.’ There’s a lot of websites that sort of purport to do that, like Matched.com. The way he said it made me think what if the government had that algorithm and they paired us off with who we married. That was when I got the idea.”
Condie said her newest book, “Atlantia,” has more of a science fiction and magical element to it than the “Matched” trilogy.
“It’s about two sisters and it’s another dystopian novel, so it’s set in the future,” she said. “We’ve polluted the world so badly that they’ve built an underwater city to survive but that’s starting to break. That’s the premise of the book.”
When asked what advice she had for aspiring writers, Condie stressed patience.
“Give yourself time to get good,” she said. “A lot of the writers I meet really want to write but it’s hard for them to set aside the time to do it because they’ve got jobs and lives and other things. For most of us it takes a long time to get good, so it’s OK if you have to take a while.”