Alan Morrell

Rebecca Gainsburg is past the age for writing those “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” assignments in school.

If she wasn’t, she likely would have been excused. A junior at Pittsford Sutherland High School, Rebecca spent quite enough time already writing last summer. She wrote the first of her trilogy of books, a fantasy novel titled Dragon Chick.

Much of Rebecca’s summer of 2013 was regimented with around-the-clock writing, her mother said.

“She literally locked herself away,” Jeanne Gainsburg said. The family realized they had an author when Rebecca emerged from her self-appointed captivity.

“In August, she came out of her room and said she’d written a book,” Jeanne said. “It’s amazing that she can sit down and do that in three weeks.”

Since then, Rebecca has done it again and then again. She followed up Dragon Chick with X Greene and followed that with Darke. The first book is available in hardcover and paperback on Amazon.com as well as for Kindle. The others should be available soon.

Dragon Chick is about 190 pages and the others are longer. That’s quite a lot of writing for a novice novelist, or anyone else, for that matter. Rebecca said it was no problem, once the creative juices started flowing.

“I was obsessed with it,” the 17-year-old said of Dragon Chick. “I worked on it all day long. It’s told from the perspective of a young girl in her late teens. It starts with her in town. She’s from a broken family, and she ends up stealing a baby dragon. She runs away with the baby dragon, whose owners were abusing it.”

The book is written in first-person style. When she was done, Rebecca gave it to friends to read. They encouraged her to publish it, which she did, with her family’s help.

Rebecca’s mother really took notice after someone reviewed the book on Amazon, three weeks after it came out. The reviewer, whom the family doesn’t know, called Dragon Chick a fast-paced read, and “very clever,” “with a main heroine that I am quickly falling in love with!”

“I hope more readers give this book and this new author a chance,” the reviewer wrote. “I see a lot of potential in Rebecca F. Gainsburg, and I can’t wait to read her next book!”

Not surprisingly, Rebecca said she has always had a voracious appetite for reading and writing. “I re-read things until I have them memorized,” she said. The Harry Potter and Percy Jackson books were especially inspirational, she said.

The motivation to write a novel emerged from a creative-writing class Rebecca took in sophomore year. “I wrote a paper for my teacher, and I learned that I could write a whole book,” she said. “I was just looking for inspiration.”

Inspiration often strikes at the weirdest times. For Rebecca, it was during a trip to Home Depot with her father, Edward Freedman.

“The first line came to me,” Rebecca said. “I thought, all right. Now, I can write my book.”

(That first line — “I’m screwed” — had nothing to do with Home Depot, by the way. Or maybe it did. Home Depot sells screws, after all. The subliminal mind works in mysterious ways.)

Rebecca’s writing style was to develop the characters and their interactions first and the plot secondarily. Once that started to develop, the writing took off.

Rebecca dedicated Dragon Chick to her dad, “who taught me how to read.” Her father, a biologist at the University of Rochester, said he mainly formatted the book for Kindle and didn’t do much editing.

“She fell in love with writing,” Freedman said. “She had written one other book-length composition. With this, she just ran with it. We were not allowed to read it until she was done.”

Once Dragon Chick was written, Rebecca realized she couldn’t say goodbye to the characters. She returned to them and wrote the second and third books, although she had no original plans to pen a trilogy.

Rebecca is especially fond of her protagonist, whose name isn’t revealed until X Greene.

“She’s sarcastic and vivacious,” Rebecca says of her heroine. “The main character is someone I relate to. She’s very similar to myself.”

Lengthy writing can be excruciating, especially when the author labors over ideas and the precise words to describe them. Rebecca said she avoided writer’s block by taking time between the books.

“I wouldn’t start until I had, like, five scenes in my head,” she said. She enjoys running, and that helped her clear her head. When it came time to write, “I put in about 12 hours a day,” she said.

With that kind of dedication and imagination, don’t be surprised to see more books in Rebecca’s future.

Morrell is a Rochester-based freelance writer.

Get to know Rebecca Gainsburg

• Rebecca’s family includes her mother, Jeanne Gainsburg; her father, Edward Freedman; an older brother, Hayden; and two cats, Carlos and Saphira.

• Along with reading and writing, Rebecca’s hobbies include “everything outdoors.” She and her father backpack the Adirondack Mountains every year, and she was in a 100-mile Tour de Cure bike ride to benefit diabetes research.

• Rebecca completed an internship at a veterinary hospital. She played varsity volleyball for three years, but took this year off from the sport.