WORD: A Brief Look at WriTeen Celebs

IS MILEY A SECRET WRITEEN? Probably not.

Miley Cyrus is arguably the current teen queen right now. She's got number one songs, her own TV show, and every time I walk into Dillards I see her face on a little girl t-shirt. Yet WriTeen celebrities rarely look like models. If you want to be famous, don't be a writer. Writing is not really glamorous, and the highest satisfaction comes from being by yourself, with a computer. But we WriTeens usually attract attention by being so young and so good at what we do. Or not so good.

We don't have a WriTeen People, but here's a little celeb gossip all the same.

Christopher Paolini is The WriTeen. He wrote Eragon and Eldest, both which stayed on the NYT Bestseller List for an unbelievable amount of time and made buzz because he was a) fifteen when he wrote it and b) he was homeschooled. Eragon became a major motion picture, featuring a hot young Brit as the main character and Jeremy Irons as the cheesy mentor. The entire movie was cheesy, but I'm sure it made moola. Last I heard, Eragon was becoming a 4-book series. I hated Eldest, so I don't really care at this point. He looks a little like Dan Radcliffe in this picture.

Kaavya Visnawathan was The WriTeen Girl. She was a Harvard freshman with a two-book deal for How Opal Mehta Got Wild, Got Kissed and Got a Life, and rumors of a movie deal as well. Yet all was not sweet for this overachiever: within weeks of publication, she had at least five counts of plagiarism against her. Her book was removed from shelves and she's kind of lost the love of the limelight. (The popular novels Born Confused and Sloppy Firsts were both plagiarized from, and I heard rumors about Meg Cabot too.) I got to read the book before the whole plagiarism thing, and liked it. Shame it wasn't original.
S.E. Hinton: the old grande dame. She had a publication contract for The Outsiders on her graduation-from-high-school day. She's gone on to write Tex and other cool stuff, and as far as I know, has remained gossip-free and quite successful. I consider her a celeb for the pure fact that Francis Ford Coppola directed the movie and there was a young Tom Cruise involved. It was them, wasn't it?