BYU alumna wins contest for young adult novel

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    By Laurie Frost

    Olivia Birdsall wasn?t thinking about her soon-to-be award-winning novel when she dropped it in the airport mailbox. She was just trying not to be sick all over her boyfriend?s car.

    As if that beginning wasn?t unceremonious enough, Birdsall, a 2001 BYU graduate, found her novel sitting on her doorstep in New York City two weeks later. She had accidentally sent her book, ?Notes on a Near-Life Experience,? to the wrong address for the Delacorte Young Adult Novel contest.

    But luckily, the Random House offices, where Delacorte hopefuls mail their manuscripts, are in New York, where she is in grad school at New York University.

    ?I took it to the mail room and just prayed it would get there and they would accept it,? Birdsall said.

    It did get there in time.

    ?Notes on a Near-Life Experience,? Birdsall?s book about a lively teenage girl named Mia, won the 2005 Delacorte prize, one of the most prestigious young adult novel contests in the nation.

    ?[The Delacorte] is highly competitive,? said Chris Crowe, professor of English and one of Birdsall?s former professors. ?Some years they don?t even give a prize if they don?t have an entry worthy of it. ?

    Former Delacorte winners include part-time BYU professor Ann Cannon and former BYU professor Louise Plummer, who was one of Birdsall?s mentors and frontrunner ?cheerleaders.?

    ?Olivia?s just a riot,? Plummer said. ?She?s got a really wonderful voice, and her voice comes out in [the book].?

    Birdsall tells the mishaps surrounding the book?s beginning in that same voice: the turn-in disaster, the long four-and-a-half years it took to finish the book, and how she had submitted ?Notes on a Near-Life Experience? the year before to the Delacorte contest ? but without an ending.

    ?I sent it in with a note: ?If you like what you see, I promise I can get you an ending,?? Birdsall said, laughing. ?They didn?t take it.?

    She attributes part of her success to the beginning of the book, because judges will toss out a book if the beginning isn?t interesting, no matter how good the rest of the book may be.

    ?I slapped on a more entertaining beginning ? a cute, fun, compelling beginning. They started reading and kept reading because they liked it,? she said.

    The secret to Birdsall?s captivating beginning was a muse in the shape of a mole.

    ?I started remembering this girl in junior high because she had this big ugly mole in the beginning of her eyebrow,? Birdsall said. ?I started writing about it and how even though she got it removed, she never got her dues because there was still this ghost of a mole.?

    This stream-of-consciousness beginning then jumps straight into the story of Mia, who trips through her teens, learning how to drive and falling in love, while coming to grips with her parents? divorce and family dissipation.

    What separated Birdsall?s story from any other teen novel was the book?s unique structure, she said.

    ?It?s not necessarily chronological,? Birdsall said. ?It goes in and out of her childhood and the present [and] moves all over the place. I think that?s why it was different from other entries they received.?

    What was Birdsall?s secret to this unique framework?

    Beginner?s luck, she said.

    ?I think [it?s] a result of my not knowing how to write a book,? she said jokingly. ?It?s very random.?

    Crowe, however, disagreed.

    ?[Olivia] wasn?t conventional,? Crowe said. ?She stood out from the other students and took some creative approaches. I couldn?t predict that she was bound for glory, but she definitely has the drive.?

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