How a high school teacher turned her ideas into successful novels

Before publishing four teen fiction novels, Lea Beddia spent years filling notebooks with ideas inspired by the students she taught at her Joliette high school.

But with a young family and a full-time career, writing remained a hobby.

“Writing was always something I’d tell myself I’d like to do someday," Beddia says. 

Despite years of reading and storytelling, she doubted she could push her ideas further.

“I didn’t feel like I could actually write a novel or complete a short story until I learned a little bit more about structure,” she explains. 

Taking the leap

Ready for a new challenge in 2017, Beddia decided to invest in herself. She enroled in Concordia Continuing Education’s Certificate in Creative Writing program.

“I looked at it as taking time for myself," she says. “To do something I genuinely enjoyed, be a student, and do the work.”

In the classroom, Beddia began to rethink how stories are formed. 

A course on short fiction gave her the opportunity to workshop ideas and approach structure as something flexible — a tool she could adapt to the needs of her characters and stories. 

She also realized that long-form writing was her calling. 

“Short stories were always a struggle for me,” Beddia says. “I still find them difficult. But when you actually have time for characters to develop, where you can weave in people you’ve encountered and their stories, that’s what I started to feel was doable.”

A fresh view of writing

One exercise in particular transformed her perspective.

She and another student were asked to reach into a box without looking and write about what they felt. Beddia felt something soft and wrote a piece about her daughter climbing into bed beside her to cuddle. Her peer, meanwhile, wrote about the holiday season. 

The secret object, Beddia reveals, laughing, was a string of tinsel Christmas tree garland.

The exercise revealed how much perspective influences a story.

“That opened up a whole other realm of writing for me,” Beddia notes. “It made me realize that I really need to know a character. Because when I write, it’s not about how I experience something, but how that character experiences it.”

The toughest audience

Classroom feedback was another key part of her growth.

While peer editing exercises felt nerve-wracking at first, Beddia says having it delivered in a supportive environment eased the tension. When instructors weighed in, most of the same comments surfaced. 

“If you don’t see critique as criticism or as someone putting you down, but instead as people actually wanting you to succeed, then it becomes a really important part of the learning process,” Beddia explains. “If an editor says something won’t work, I may not always agree with how they want to fix it. But the fact that they’re picking up on it tells me something needs to be done.”

From classrooms to bookshelves

Beyond craft, the program also introduced her to the publishing process.

“I didn’t know the process. I didn’t know how you got something from your computer to the point where a publisher was going to look at it.”

She credits instructor Suzanne Litwin, one of the published authors in the program, with helping her research publishers, recognize which ones would accept unsolicited manuscripts and which would require an agent, and meet submission requirements when pitching her work.

“It felt like half the research had already been done. Once I was ready to publish, I knew what I was looking for.”

When Beddia submitted her work, responses started to come in. One publisher passed on her first manuscript but invited her to send something else. While she pursued that opportunity, a different publisher accepted the manuscript the first had declined.

In 2023, Beddia published her debut novel, Take Off! Her fourth book, No Brainer, hit shelves in February.

As Beddia continues to write and publish while teaching at the same school where she began her career 22 years ago, she is particularly proud to share her experience as an educator outside her classrooms, connecting striving readers to stories that she hopes will inspire them to see reading as a hobby rather than homework.

“The writing process is amazing, and publishing is a great feeling,” Beddia says. “But my favourite thing about it is that I get to see kids all over the province and talk to them about writing. My heart is really in that. So it has opened all these other doors.”