Anybody's daughter, winner of the 2014 naacp image award for literary fiction.
Mysteries that Matter
As a kid, Pamela Samuels Young was an avid reader, but she never dreamed of being a novelist.
“I majored in journalism in college,” Pamela says. “I became burned out after several years as a television news writer and decided to go to law school. Writing fiction never crossed my mind.”
But it was Pamela’s love of reading—legal thrillers in particular—that ultimately led to her third career as a novelist.
“I owe my writing career to John Grisham,” she says. “During my early days as a lawyer, reading legal thrillers was the way I relieved stress. I’m a big John Grisham fan, but it always bothered me that I never saw any characters in his books who looked like me.”
That prompted Pamela to take a stab at writing a legal thriller herself, one with a more diverse cast of characters. At the time, she was working as an associate at O’Melveny & Myers, a large corporate law firm in downtown Los Angeles, which meant she had very little free time. After thinking about it for months, one day Pamela jumped out of bed at 4 a.m. to take a shot a crafting a legal thriller based loosely on a case she had won at trial.
“From the moment I started writing, I knew I’d discovered my passion,” she says.
From that moment forward, Pamela wrote whenever and wherever she could find the time—early in the morning, late at night, on weekends, in airports, on airplanes, and in hotels.
When she couldn’t find an agent or a publisher for the book, Pamela started writing a second novel.
“I read that John Grisham got 45 rejection letters and people told him no one wanted to read about lawyers. If he could keep going after all that rejection, so could I.”
Pamela began taking novel writing courses and studying her craft. It took her another year to finish her second novel, which ultimately garnered her an agent and a two-book publishing deal. But the path was still rocky.
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Attorney. Wildly Successful Author. Motivational Speaker.
pamela samuels young