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Quantity AND quality

Sisters author, who has written hundreds of books, hopes to inspire potential writers at local readings

By David Jasper / The Bulletin

Published: October 13. 2009 4:00AM PST

It's been said that Sisters author Melody Carlson has written more than 90 books. Elsewhere, she's been credited with writing more than 100 books.

So which is it?

Actually, Carlson has published more than 200 books, many by Random House imprint Waterbrook.

That's when it hits you: the number keeps going up, like an odometer or score counter.

The 53-year-old author writes across genres: adult novels, Christian romance, teen books, chick lit, advice. According to Trivia-Library .com, which has compiled a list of the 20 most prolific authors in history, Carlson still has a little ways to go if she wants to catch up to L.T. Meade (1854-1914), in 20th on the list with 258 books.

Yet Carlson, who will read later this week in Sisters and Redmond (see “If you go”), is humble and supportive when she hears from aspiring writers who say they might have a book in them.

“You hear that all the time, but ... I encourage people,” she said last week in her bunkhouse office, where there's a bookshelf crammed with her books, including a bottom row with foreign translations.

What might be hardest to fathom is that she only began writing seriously about 20 years ago, when she was in her early 30s. A mother of two sons, Carlson ran a day care out of her home.

“It was just like, one day, I thought, ‘Oh, I've got to write a book. I've got to write a book.' I didn't even know what it would be, but I loved fiction, so I thought it was going to be fiction. While the kids were napping, I had a yellow legal pad. ... I would just sit there and write, and I wrote a whole book on a legal pad.”

It was a juvenile novel, she recalls. After that, her supportive husband, Chris, bought her an electric typewriter with a primitive word-processing display.

Today, her sons are 28 and 30 and, about 10 computers later, she uses their former bunkhouse room as her cozy writing space, where she aims to keep a reasonable 9 to 5, Monday-through-Friday workweek. Her office is on the second floor of one of the four structures on the couple's just-shy-of-an-acre property in Sisters, where there's a teepee in the backyard.

‘Not typical'

Born in San Francisco, Carlson proudly proclaims herself a fifth-generation Oregonian. Her ancestry stretches back to the Oregon Trail on her mother's side; her parents divorced when she was quite young, and her mother raised her and her older sister in Springfield.

“It was not a regular childhood at all,” she says. “It looked like, from where I was, everyone had normal homes with two parents. We didn't, but it was a small community and we went to school where she taught, so that helped us along.”

She says she was something of a hippie child, and her mother exposed Carlson and her sister to the arts, taking them to see dance performances and art exhibits.

“That was not typical Springfield,” she says.

Carlson says she was also an avid reader. “In sixth grade, they had a reading contest, and I won it. I was so embarrassed because I'd read the most books,” Carlson recalls. “I was probably reading extremely quickly — like I do everything, pretty quick.”

That same year, she edited the school newspaper and struggled to get kids to participate.

“I ended up writing almost the whole paper; I would just make up pseudonyms. I didn't even know what a pseudonym was at the time, but I would just make up goofy names and write the articles myself. And (I) illustrated it and made copies on the mimeograph machine, too. I was probably working too hard.”

Writing came easily to Carlson, whose teachers would tell her, “‘You are a writer,' ‘you could be a writer,' but I heard it so much,” she says. “I think it's like, any time you're good at something, you have a gift for something, you take it for granted because it doesn't seem like it's very hard. It seems like it should be harder.”

She graduated early from high school, and by 18 had earned her associate degree in early childhood education at Lane Community College in Eugene. “I just didn't really know what I wanted to do,” she explains. She got on a boat in San Francisco and headed to Papua, New Guinea, where she taught preschool as a volunteer for a Christian organization.

At the end of her year in New Guinea, she traveled through Thailand and Europe, then returned to live in Springfield. She taught preschool and became active in Young Life, a Christian organization for young people, through which she met and married a fellow counselor, Chris, at age 22.

“We got married, still pretty young — even though I'd done all those things, I was still pretty young,” she says. “Had kids right away. Nothing was real planned about our lives.”

At the start of the 1980s, Chris learned the building trade. After a few more years of teaching preschool, Melody Carlson began operating a day care center out of the home.

“I never, until I hit my mid-30s, even considered writing,” she says. It began with letters to the editor of the Springfield News.

“They printed my letters to the editor, and they go, ‘If you want to write more words, you can,'” she says. Before long, the paper was running her photo, “like I had my own column, but I didn't. People assumed that I did, but I was like, ‘No, this is just volunteer work.'”

Before long, she'd begun writing that first book on the legal pad. She joined a critique group and began attending writers' conferences. Within the first year, she sold four or five short stories, “which I should have been thrilled about, but I was writing books” that weren't getting published.

Nevertheless, she took herself seriously as a writer early in her writing career. “Once that light went on, then it was kind of like, ‘OK, I'm going to do this.'” Her husband was — is — her “biggest fan,” she says.

“He'd read my stuff and say, ‘You're good, you're good.'” They'd walk through the field by their house in Springfield and she'd dream of publishing two books a year: “That would be enough income that I wouldn't have to work at any other job.”

She quit running the day care, and in about three years' time, wrote four books while caring for her sick grandmother. “That was conducive to writing, because I could write and still tend to her. It was easier than having a bunch of kids.”

Still unpublished, she got a call one day from an admiring editor who wanted to know if Carlson could write nonfiction.

They say you should write what you know, and Carlson's first book, published in 1995, ended up being a handbook about running a day care center. It's unwieldy title was “How to Start a Quality Childcare Business: Everything You Need to Know,” and it sold about 10,000 copies.

Going to Sisters

Carlson's debut book came out shortly after she and her family moved to Sisters, where she accepted a job as an executive assistant at Multnomah Publishers, then called Questar. A Christian press, it later sold to Random House.

“We'd always wanted to live in Sisters, and the younger son was just 14 and he was starting to make some questionable decisions and questionable friends in school,” she says. A counselor at his school recommended he change schools. “I thought, ‘OK, here's a great opportunity,'” Carlson says.

Meanwhile, her other books had started selling.

“Bethany (House Publishers) bought six books in one year. And they were written, so it was really cool,” she says, referring to her “stockpile” of unpublished books.

Multnomah restructured and “six months into it, I became an editor,” she says. “Almost exactly a year later, they restructured the company, and I ended up having to run the entire editorial department.”

She stayed another year and a half, learning the ins and outs of publishing. During her time at the company, Carlson submitted a children's book to her employer using a pseudonym. When it was selected for publication by a committee, she fessed up. The company published it, and other Carlson books, “which made the company a bunch of money,” she says.

After she decided to quit Multnomah, the pressure to write was really on: “After I left, I felt like I didn't have a fresh idea, I didn't have any more books. Suddenly, it's late fall, my husband's not been working, because he's been trying to manage life for us with two teenage sons.

“I didn't see anything in the future,” she says. “It was like jumping off into the black abyss.”

Carlson signed with an agent and committed to writing one book a year. “But I think God had another plan,” says Carlson.

Workman Publishing approached her to write “My First Bible Brain Quest,” and when it came out, she went on a 10-city promotional tour. With Workman picking up the tab, “it was kind of a boost,” she says.

Fiction was her first love, but she was also known for her children's books, which “were kind of easy money,” she says. Ten years ago, she started writing for the teen market, with which she's proven very popular with series like “Diary of a Teenage Girl,” which bowed in 2000.

“It was like, ‘This is only a test,' and it worked. We were kind of all astounded,” she says. She ended up writing 16 books around the four characters in that line.

The books in her “TrueColors” series are issue-oriented stories written around divorce, suicide, materialism, homosexuality, body image, mean girls and depression, just to name a few. “For me, the easiest way to deal with a hard subject is to tell a story,” Carlson says.

She describes her “Carter House Girls” series, for which she's written eight books, with two still awaiting publication, as being “kind of like ‘Gossip Girl,' only cleaned up,” she says.

She thinks “Gossip Girl is really well-done and I know why girls love it,” she says. “But there seems to be a lack of consequences. The girls are making some pretty stupid decisions. I mean, I like to make really stupid crazy decisions in here, but then there's consequences. The girls do end up in rehab, and a girl does get pregnant.”

Carlson estimates she has 10 complete books waiting to be published. She's still hoping to see some of her work adapted for TV or film. Despite having taken a class in adaptation, she hasn't tried it herself. “What it did teach me to do is write my books in a way that they can be adapted,” she says.

‘Idea a minute'

Sara Fortenberry, of the Sara A. Fortenberry Literary Agency in Nashville, has been Carlson's agent for 15 years. She says Carlson “has an idea a minute.”

“There aren't many who are as prolific as Melody is,” Fortenberry says. “She is just incredibly gifted.”

Fortenberry believes Carlson pays close attention to the world around her, and with her teen novels, addresses issues that girls are thinking and talking about.

“And I think she has a really good memory of what it's like to be a teenager,” Fortenberry says. “There's some distance between where she is now and when she was a teenager, but I think she remembers all of that period really well ... it comes across on the page, and girls respond to it.”

The “Diary of a Teenage Girl” series alone has sold about 700,000 books. “That's not small change,” says Fortenberry. “The Christian market can really deliver those numbers.”

“Christian market” is a term often used to describe evangelicals, but, Fortenberry adds, “I think her books reach a broader audience than that. I would be willing to say that there are a lot of girls who don't maybe consider themselves evangelical, who are reading her fiction.”

Though being a Christian informs her work, Carlson believes her faith comes through subtly.

“I've had letters from people saying, ‘It's not there' in a book, but to me it is. It's part of my life, so it's going to show up. But I'm probably one of the more subtle Christian writers.”

That's especially true with her adult novels: “Maybe I'll have just one incident that will make somebody look towards God,” she says.

Carlson says she and husband could likely live off of the royalties from her books, “but it's not like I want to quit writing.”

There are challenges when you're as prolific a writer as Carlson, who says she has to be careful not to recycle character names from earlier books.

As for stories, the supply never runs out. “To me, stories are as limited as people and personalities,” Carlson says.

“Every person, if you listen to them for very long, has a story. I think people are interesting, and my books tend to be character-driven. To me, that's the only kind of book that I enjoy. If the character's not pulling me along, what's the point?”

David Jasper can be reached at 541-383-0349 or djasper@bendbulletin.com.

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