Seventeen and famoux

“I’m named after a Greek prophetess who predicted the fall of Troy, but nobody would listen to her. I think this says a lot about my life in general.”

Oh, the irony — seeing as her weekly-updated, ongoing novel has received over 356 thousand views and been ranked second overall in dystopian fiction within the mere six months of her presence on Wattpad, an online writing community. Junior Kassandra Tidland has become famous for her work in progress, The Famoux.

It all began in June of 2014 when her dad sent her an article on Anna Todd, an author who got a book published off of Wattpad. Kassandra decided to tweet the fellow Wattpad writer the link to her story, not expecting much in return. But not only did Anna take the time to read and comment on it, she also retweeted it to all her followers and added it as the tenth book on her reading list.

“I woke up [the next day] and it went from 300 to 3000 views,” Kassandra said. “It was insane, and it was just — I was like, this doesn’t happen to me.”

Now, her audience waits eagerly for a new chapter every week on #FMXFriday. But all of this fame did not come easily. Kassandra’s journey as an author began at 11 years old when she wrote her first novel.

“I didn’t really know how to write a book so it was like: she went to school, she went home, she talked to her friends, and there was no problem that needed to be solved,” Kassandra said. “I went for a whole book just doing that, and I thought it was so good. I wanted it to be huge. I [thought] people were going to love these characters. I thought it would be super simple.”

She later realized that her writing wasn’t so ideal after all.

“She won’t let me read it because it’s so bad,” said Kalina Tidland, Kassandra’s twin sister. “She’s given me snippets, but it’s not like her writing now.”

By the time she entered middle school, Kassandra had already moved on from the 100-page story she spent a year working on. As she became more and more fascinated by the science fiction genre, she made the decision to pack up all her characters and take them to a new world with a completely different terrain.

“I don’t really know when I started writing [The Famoux] because I’ve always had the idea in my head,” she said. “I’ve always known about these characters since before I could remember anything. The characters that I’m thinking about now are the characters that I used to think about when you would make an imaginary friend.”

Although Kassandra’s characters have remained by her side throughout her previous stories, the style of her writing has changed. She credits her biggest inspiration behind The Famoux to The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, but Kassandra also adds on a post-modernism sensation and a World War II vibe, inspired by The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“[My first book was] very lame and cliché because at that time, I was reading a lot of books like The Princess Diaries that were little love stories, so I just wanted to embody that — it was really nothing deeper,” Kassandra said. “My story now — I’m taking from a lot of classic books. Most of them have a little bit of a dark ending, and my story has a little bit of a dark beginning.”

To be able to portray the way society functioned in the mid and late 20th century, Kassandra does research to maintain historical accuracy and build up the most realistic setting for her characters.

“I’ll look over and she’s looking at Hitler,” Kalina said. “I’m like, ‘what are you doing?’ It’s dark. She’ll be bashful, but yeah, it’s deep. It’s good.”

Other than history, Kassandra also scrutinizes the society she lives in for inspiration. She discusses social issues such as appearance insecurity and media presence through her fictional writings. But the range of her inspiration is unlimited. The first chapter of The Famoux was actually from a nightmare she once had. She believed that if she wrote it down, it wouldn’t come true, and so it became the first chapter.

“I think almost everything inspires my book,” she said. “If I read something that has really good descriptions, I want to be more descriptive. If I read something that’s very minimalistic and kind of poetic, I want to also start writing like that. When we read Beloved [by Toni Morrison], all I wanted to do was fragments, everywhere.”

A good writer is a good reader. Kassandra reads from all genres and chooses both books that are popular and books that she randomly comes across. She connects The Famoux to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, as the protagonist also faces a dark beginning. Other favorites of hers include Whirligig by Paul Fleischman, A Separate Peace by John Knowles and Looking for Alaska by John Green.

“I want to write like John Green writes because I just like the way that he tells stories,” she said. “I like how it can be funny and sad at the same time and one page can make you cry and the other makes you happy.”

Her admiration for Green has also sparked her to create her own rendition of An Imperial Infliction, a made-up novel in The Fault in Our Stars by Green. At the 2014 VidCon Convention, Kassandra got the chance to meet Green and share with him her passion for writing. Other connections she’s developed through The Famoux include New York Times Bestsellers Pierce Brown, Meg Cabot and Michael Grant.

“Before I ever posted on Wattpad, I would look at [Anna’s] page and I would look at all of the others and think, ‘Man, it must be really good to have that community of people, if only I could just get into that it would be all good’,” Kassandra said.

Although Kalina had always encouraged her to start posting The Famoux onto Wattpad, Kassandra wasn’t as confident. It wasn’t until her seventeenth birthday that Kassandra decided to take her sister’s advice and give Wattpad a shot.

“I was very apprehensive because I thought, well, there was no chance,” Kassandra said. “It’s not going to get a lot of views and it’ll probably be something I forget about. And then I’m going to look back on it and be like why did I even try that.”

The obligations of high school make it even harder for Kassandra to pursue her dream. As a scholar and a cheerleader, Kassandra needs to balance her honors classes and three-hour cheer practices with writing and editing a chapter each week.

“A lot of times during high school I [thought], maybe I just should stop writing because it’s not that clear of a career choice and I can’t just major in creative writing because what am I going to do with that,” she said. “I just needed to find a way to actually start writing because I told a lot of people that I was a writer and I was just sitting there with five chapters of this story pretending like I had a whole lot going on.”

Now, with 32 chapters posted, Kassandra has every right to call herself an author. Her fan base that grows larger by each chapter has created over 200 photo edits of her characters, choosing who they think The Famoux characters would look like in real life. Fans have even gone so far as to make book and movie trailers as well as Instagram and Twitter accounts for the characters.

“It’s very unbelievable to me that it’s happened,” she said. “It’s unbelievable if I get an email that says ‘Much love from Spain!’ or a group of people from Botswana, Africa that love my book. Ten percent of my readers are from the Philippines and it’s just even insane to me that it can [reach] other places around the U.S.”

Currently, there are completed translations of The Famoux in Spanish, Czech and German and a Romanian translation in the works. Kassandra also recently revealed news of collaborating with a team to create a screenplay of her novel.

“I love that Wattpad’s really working for her because I feel like it’s about time,” Kalina said. “I know what’s going to happen in the story and it’s a story that a lot of people need to hear, especially if you read into it and find all the little hidden meanings. We used to play this game where we go to Barnes & Noble and I’ll look for all the Wattpad authors and their published books and I [would] show them to her and say like ‘See, it’s going to be you’.”

With an international fan base and a screenplay in the making, Kassandra no longer identifies with the Greek prophetess whom nobody ever listened to. Kassandra Tidland is on her way to creating a legend of her own — one that does not end with the fall of Troy.