Life After the ‘Princess Diaries’

How did you come up with the name Allie Finkle?
I try to choose first names that are people I like. I had a great boss named Allie. It started out as Finklestein, but that seems a little too long and a little too much like Frankenstein. My last name was Cabot, so people cruelly called me "Cabbage." I needed something they could call her something mean, like "Stinkle." I was Maggot Cabbage.

How did you become an author?
I always loved to write. My mom won the Seventeen magazine fiction contest when she was 19. She was really encouraging, but she also said you need to get a job. She said study something in college besides writing. When I was 16, I met this college guy at a party, and he was a creative-writing major. He said don't study it. I studied art and said I'd be an illustrator like my mom. I moved to New York to be an illustrator. The weird thing is, I met that guy from the party in New York, and we're married now! He was the one who was super encouraging. He got me a job working in the housing department at New York University because he was getting his Ph.D. in American literature there. I was the assistant manager of a 700-bed freshman dormitory. I actually wrote a series about a girl who works in a dormitory and every book there's a new murder. When the kids were sleeping, I would write. I got rejected brutally for, like, 10 years. I quit when they sent me the check for the ["Princess Diairies"] movie.

The next Allie Finkle book, "The New Girl," will be about encountering a girl bully at a new school. That happened to you, right?
It all did. I have to write about stuff that really happened--except the princess thing!

What's your advice for kid writers? Should they keep journals, like you did?
Absolutely. We're working with the American Library Association to encourage kids to keep journals, and not post quite as much information online.

Did you read a lot as a kid?
I read a lot of comic books. I was obsessed with the idea of narrative and how stories were told.

What do you read for fun now?
Magazines! And mysteries. I love those hard-boiled whodunits by Robert B. Parker. I love those tough-guy mysteries.

What does it feel like to have your books made into movies?
It's really bizarre to see your characters come alive, walking around on the screen. It's great. These are characters that live inside your head, but to see them come alive is amazing, especially when it's Julie Andrews. The best thing is to get letters from kids who are like, "I saw the movie of your book, and I went out and bought the book, and now I can't stop reading. It's so amazing, the power of Hollywood. The second movie they made on "The Princess Diaries" was not actually based on my books, and that was a little weird. But they still paid me!

© 2008