Alone
Alone
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Megan E. Freeman on Alone
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
A question that wouldn’t stay in the roomThe premise of ‘Alone’ was born at a mother-daughter book club meeting around 2009 or 2010, when Freeman was discussing Scott O’Dell’s ‘Island of the Blue Dolphins’ with her daughter’s fifth-grade friends. The girls kept marveling at how the protagonist Karana survived on her own. Freeman redirected them: the island was Karana’s home, which meant the real hardship was psychological, not practical. Then she flipped the thought toward the kids’ own suburban Colorado neighborhood.
I asked them to imagine what it would be like for them to come home after school to find everyone in the entire town gone. What if they couldn’t reach anyone for help? What if no one came back? What would they do? How would they survive? I couldn’t get the idea out of my head and it became the seed of the story.
The question did not stay theoretical. For months after that book club meeting, Freeman found herself running the scenario against ordinary streets, testing what a 12-year-old would actually see and feel.
I drove around for months afterward, like I’d drive down the street and I’d look at the street and I’d think, okay, if I were 12 and I were alone and I was the only person here, what would it look like? And what would it feel like? And what would I do? [paraphrased from audio]
By the time the book reached readers in January 2021, the evacuation scenario that early agents had called implausible had become something else entirely. The pandemic had arrived between those first query letters and publication, and the distance between fiction and reality had collapsed.
I could never in my wildest nightmares have imagined this. It’s interesting, because some of the early feedback I got when querying the book in its first iteration was that it was too far-fetched. Now it almost feels too close for comfort.
livswonderfulescape.wordpress.com, “INTERVIEW WITH MEGAN E. FREEMAN – Liv’s Wonderful Escape”How she wrote it
A prose draft, a workshop, and a complete rewriteFreeman’s first complete draft was prose, written in third person and past tense. It attracted agent interest over several years of querying but no offers. The turn came at a workshop by verse novelist Melanie Crowder, who demonstrated her own drafting process for ‘Audacity.’ What Freeman heard there identified the problem she had not been able to name.
In a singular moment of operatic clarity, I knew what was wrong with my manuscript. I knew I needed to rewrite the entire thing in verse. I went home and began, and the moment I started writing, I could feel the difference the verse made.
poetryforchildren.blogspot.com, “Poetry for Children: ALONE by Megan E. Freeman”The rewrite felt immediately right because Freeman had been writing poetry for decades before she attempted prose fiction. When she moved back to the form she knew best, fluency returned.
I was a poet for years before I was a novelist, and I was much more fluent in poetry than I was in prose. And as soon as I started rewriting it, I could feel the difference that that made and I could feel the flow. [paraphrased from audio]
Once inside the verse draft, Freeman discovered that the form solved narrative problems that prose had made awkward: communicating the passage of seasons, hinting at danger, anchoring a scene in time and place, all without slowing the story to insert explanation.
Writing ALONE in verse was so satisfying because the poetry could do so much for me and for the reader, and the more I wrote the more I discovered. Something as simple as a poem title could place a scene in a specific location (‘Millerville Public Library’) or a season (‘Short Days, Long Nights’), establish time passing (‘Days. Weeks. Months.’), or foreshadow something the main character is going to encounter (‘Equus’ and ‘Ashes, Ashes’ and ‘Deluge’).
Setting a survival story in the 21st century posed one structural problem that verse alone could not solve. A contemporary 12-year-old can simply dial for help, which meant the story required a technical isolation as complete as the geographical one. Freeman also consulted a water conservancy expert to understand the downstream consequences of a total power grid failure, including what would happen to running water.
I knew that I had to figure out a way to not only isolate Maddie geographically, but also isolate her technologically, so that she could have no connection to the outside world and the outside world could have no connection to her.
Revision brought its own reckonings. Freeman’s editor identified a flood scene in which Maddie, the 12-year-old protagonist left behind when her town inexplicably empties, watched rising creek water from the bank, a spectator to the threat. The note sent Freeman back to the scene with a clear fix.
Oh, she needs to fall in. [paraphrased from audio]
That single editorial push transformed a passive scene into one where Maddie’s survival is genuinely at risk. It also illustrates the larger principle behind the revision process: every danger in the book had to reach the character, not merely surround her.
The personal thread
Eleven years between a question and a bookFrom that book club meeting to publication day in January 2021, Freeman was writing the book alongside the demands of a full-time teaching job and single parenthood, drafting in evenings and on weekends when her daughter was with her father. The number she gives for that span is exact.
Eleven years, actually, between conception and publication.
Freeman had been a classroom teacher for three decades, and she first understood what verse novels could do for students when she taught Karen Hesse’s ‘Out of the Dust’ early in her career. That experience, watching students who found dense prose difficult gain access to a story through the white space and compression of verse, shaped every structural choice she made in ‘Alone.’ She described that double inheritance, the poet’s practice and the teacher’s knowledge of her audience, as inseparable from the book’s form.
The secret magic about novels in verse is that they invite that engagement with the reader...part of the trick of trying to write a really good novel in verse is giving the readers just enough so that they can fill in all the details.
On craft choices
What a single borrowed poem does for the storyMary Oliver’s poem ‘The Summer Day’ appears inside the novel as a text Maddie encounters and reads closely. Freeman did not choose it for atmosphere. She built it into the story as the specific mechanism by which Maddie’s psychological shift becomes possible.
In ALONE, Mary Oliver’s poem becomes the catalyst that helps Maddie think differently about her situation. Her close reading of each line leads her to become fully present to the truth of her life and to stop living in the future of hope or the past of regret. It allows her to let go of the longing that causes her so much suffering, and only then she is able to come to terms with her present reality.
The white space that defines the verse novel’s page was not only a poet’s preference. Freeman watched it function differently for different student readers during school visits, and her description of its effect is framed as a structural argument about what novels in verse ask of the reader that prose does not.
The secret magic about novels in verse is that they invite that engagement with the reader...part of the trick of trying to write a really good novel in verse is giving the readers just enough so that they can fill in all the details.
Freeman describes ‘Alone’ as a survival story in the practical sense, but she places Maddie’s psychological endurance on equal footing with every physical threat the book presents. The book’s internal argument is that the two kinds of survival are inseparable.
ALONE is a book about physical survival, but it’s also about psychological and spiritual resilience. The existential angst that Maddie endures is no less a challenge than the life-threatening situations she finds herself in. To triumph in the story, she needs to overcome existential hurdles as well as physical ones.
What she wants us to sit with
Questions that outlast the last pageFreeman is deliberate about what she does and does not want from readers. She resists the impulse to encode a lesson in the story, and she names that resistance as its own kind of intention.
I don’t intend any kind of message or lesson, or any one kind of reaction to the story. I hope it will inspire the children who read it to engage their imaginations in creative ways. I hope it will make them hungry to read more.
livswonderfulescape.wordpress.com, “INTERVIEW WITH MEGAN E. FREEMAN – Liv’s Wonderful Escape”What she does intend is the specific imaginative work that survival fiction demands of its readers. She describes the experience of writing the book and the experience of reading it as the same act: inhabiting the question of what you would actually do.
I think survival stories invite readers to imagine themselves in the same situation as the main character and to ask, ‘What if that happened to me? What would I do?’ That’s what I was doing throughout most of the writing, and those are the questions that invite the reader’s imagination to come out and play.