by Laura Prudom

Her movies have grossed over $100 million in the United States alone, but now screenwriter Jessica Bendinger is turning her talents to novels. Hailed as the next Twilight, her new novel The Seven Rays offers readers all the attitude of Bring it On with a paranormal twist; a gripping tale of female empowerment from the perspective of a kooky teenage girl with a very special gift. In our exclusive Q&A, Bendinger talks Hollywood, psychics, and why readers need to realize that, "you are more than you think you are."

How did you get started in writing?

My dad's a writer; he's a copywriter in Chicago and was very successful, so I knew you could write as a career. And when I was at Columbia University I started writing for Spin Magazine; I got a job as an intern there and they were very understaffed at the time so I got a break. My first interview was a Public Enemies interview and then I interviewed Salt-N-Pepa and they reprinted it on the back of their second album A Salt with a Deadly Pepa and I kinda got a reputation for covering hip-hop. I worked at MTV News briefly, and that was the start of my writing career. I did a lot of technical writing, PR writing, whatever I could do to pay the bills for many years, until I sold Bring It On.

And how did you come up with the story for The Seven Rays?

I had been working on a movie idea after Bring it On, I was researching psychics and healers and I had a really profound personal experience and thought ‘nobody's ever done a really good movie about psychics; they've all been really cheesy.' So I started thinking about, what if this girl could see the truth of your body, what if you had something going on - like you had a cancer growing or a brain injury and she could see it on you and know exactly what it was and have complete diagnostic accuracy? I tried to write that movie but it was really hard to write from someone's point of view that way, so I put it down. But I love this idea of someone who thinks they're seeing things, they get Lasik to correct it and it makes it worse.

What's your writing process like?

I usually say ‘three bad pages or thirty minutes of writing, whichever comes first.' I work in little increments like that so I'll do three bad pages or thirty minutes, so if I finish in twenty minutes I can go have a coffee or call a friend. That makes it fun for me and it helps me overcome writer's block and the paralysis of that really critical part of our brains.

It seems like you're very adept at capturing teenage female characters - what draws you back to these types of characters in so much of your writing?

I think writers, whether they know it or not, are revisiting the place with the most damage and trying to fix it and heal it, and that's certainly the case for me. I was traumatized by the last two years of high school, absolutely terrified. I was pretending I wasn't traumatized, but beneath
it I was a sleepwalker, I had nightmares; I had so much anxiety about leaving home and going to college. It's a really tough time so I guess I have a lot of compassion for that age, I keep trying to go back and make it okay! [laughs] It's such a hard period for girls especially, I just wanna get in their brains and say ‘it's gonna be okay, it's never this bad.'

You use a lot of symbolism in the books - tarot, spiritualism and Catholicism, how do you draw it all together and does your own faith inform that process?

I'm definitely of the "one tree, many branches" vein. I believe whatever works - whatever works in writing, whatever works for you spiritually, but I think that finding peace of mind for me was a really rocky road. And I was determined to keep seeking and seeking until I found something that worked and no one thing fully worked except cobbling together my own version; exploring different kinds of meditation and different kinds of yoga. I use a little bit of Buddhism, a little bit of The Secret, a little bit of Chicken Soup for the Soul, a little bit of just trying to be a better person. I don't have a religion - it's a real patchwork quilt for me.

There is an air of female empowerment in the novel, why was it important to include that aspect - what do you think the message of the book is?

I think we're really dissociated from our power as women, I think there's a lot of really damaging images about women in the world. I think there's a lot of the wrong kind of emphasis, whether it's wearing racy clothes at a young age or having sex at too young an age or engaging in promiscuous behavior to try and feel like you're in your womanhood. I feel like there's a lot of false initiations into womanhood and I wanted to tell a story that was about a really genuine initiation into womanhood even though it's paranormal, I thought it would be a good metaphor for what we all go through, which is trying to figure out who we are and why we're here and what is our destiny? I wanted to write an empowering metaphor about what we all go through to really feel who we are in the world in a genuine way, rather than putting a miniskirt on it.

PHOTOGRAPHED BY FELICITY BURNS