Before Jessie Rosen’s published novels, there were her childhood booklets, each hand-bound with ribbon. These pieces would eventually lay the foundations of her career.
“As a really little girl, my mom would help me ‘publish’ stories that I wanted to tell on paper bound with little pieces of cardboard,” Rosen said. “She would use cereal boxes and cut them apart and bind my books with ribbon.”
Rosen, BC ’05, has spent much of her career as a Hollywood screenwriter but recently ventured into a new medium for her writing: the novel.
She published her first novel, The Heirloom, last year, and her second book, All the Signs, is slated to be published in May.
But despite her lifelong interest in storytelling, she hadn’t always considered writing as a career.
“I didn’t know any career writers,” Rosen said. “There were no authors or journalists, television writers or screenplay writers in my family, so I considered it a passion, and didn’t put it in a bucket of career ideas.”
As a result, Rosen decided to major in marketing. But something was missing.
“When I got to Boston College, I missed writing,” Rosen said. “I was looking for opportunities to do so, and one of the very first places I went was The Heights.”
There, she was able to reconnect with her love of writing.
“I remember pitching an article about vintage shopping because I also loved exploring the city,” Rosen said. “They accepted the article, and I became a contributor. In my senior year, I pitched a column on campus fashion, and I wrote that throughout my senior year.”
Despite the work she was putting in, Rosen still didn’t see writing as a viable career. The idea of pursuing it full-time felt intimidating, both professionally and financially. So, after graduating, she worked in marketing until writing found her again.
Writing returned to the forefront of Rosen’s mind when a friend from BC reminded her of her column in The Heights.
“My Boston college friends, very sweetly, had missed engaging around the ideas that I wrote in my column for The Heights about culture and fashion and the way we were living,” said Rosen. “And so one very dear friend, who is still a good friend, said, ‘Let’s start a blog.’”
The blog, launched in 2007 and titled 20-Nothings, centered about pop culture and navigating life as a young adult.
“I always wrote about the trials and tribulations of being in your 20s and trying to live independently,” Rosen said. “There were articles about dating or about surviving on very little money.”
This niche proved to be in high demand, and the blog quickly became a success.
“It started to pick up steam,” Rosen said. “It ended up becoming so popular that I was contacted by more established places—like Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post—to do freelance articles on the 20-something experience.”
Rosen’s talent was recognized through the extensive network she had built. One friend offered her a job as a playwright, an opportunity that would prove to lead her into the next phase of her career.
One night during her time as a playwright, a Los Angeles-based agent attended a show Rosen was putting on in New York City.
“She then learned about my blog, and she enjoyed the play and reached out to see if I had ever considered writing for film and television,” Rosen said. “She challenged me to try writing a screenplay, try writing a television script, to keep in touch with her as I was developing that.”
Rosen continued to pursue this format, unknowingly paving the way for the next phase of her career.
“Over the course of about two years of honing those skills and figuring out that very different format, I ultimately decided to make the move to Los Angeles and to pursue that kind of writing full time,” Rosen said.
Then, COVID-19 hit, and Rosen suddenly had ample time to develop her own writing ideas, including one that had been floating around in her mind for the last 10 years. Inspired by her own engagement, this idea eventually became The Heirloom.
“The book is about an engagement ring,” Rosen said. “My family has a very strong superstition around vintage engagement rings. So when I was getting engaged, this, of course, caused lots of debate among my friends. I believe that engagement rings hold the karma from the relationships in which they’ve been worn, so I would never accept a vintage ring.”
Though Rosen was working on several screenplays, this idea felt better suited to the length of a novel. Yet again, Rosen entered a new format that challenged and expanded her writing abilities.
The story follows Shea Anderson, who is recently engaged and wearing an antique engagement ring—one that, like Rosen, she fears may carry karma. The book traces Anderson’s journey to discover whether the ring holds good or bad karma based on its previous owners.
Drawing on her own superstitions, Rosen found that her character reflected some of her own traits.
“I definitely think the way her brain works very much resembles the way my brain works,” Rosen said. “So when posed with a challenge, I want to hit the road. I want to go on the mission to figure it out. I will not stop until I’ve gone all the way. And that’s very much this character’s energy.”
Tarren Van Slyke, Rosen’s social media consultant and friend, said curiosity is a defining trait of Rosen’s personality.
“She’s very courageous and curious, and puts herself out there, whether it’s establishing a live in-person talk show in the improv scene, writing a novel, or spending her 40th birthday solo in Italy,” Van Slyke said. “She’s a really curious, passionate person, and I think that’s really amazing and rare.”
Rosen hopes her main character’s journey will resonate with readers, both as she physically travels around the world, and as she grapples with her emotions in the face of a big decision.
“Even though it is scary to face our biggest fears, they make us strong enough to face all the unknowns of our future,” Rosen said. “It’s only after [the character] is willing to look those things in the face and feel some of the pain that she’s able to be strong enough to understand what she really wants and to make her decisions moving forward with confidence.”
Since the release of her book, Rosen has even drawn on some of the skills she acquired during her years in marketing. Her manager, Rachel Miller, highlighted how her background makes her a uniquely well-rounded writer.
“She understands the social media side,” Miller said. “I think she has the left brain and the right brain, and not everyone has that. And she works just as hard on the business side as the writing side, and I think that makes her incredibly successful on all sides of being a creator and a writer and an author.”
Rosen’s second book, All the Signs, features a protagonist who is markedly different from Shea Anderson in The Heirloom.
All the Signs follows a doctor with a rare type of vertigo that some characters in the book attribute to astrological misalignment. The character doesn’t believe this explanation, so she sets off on a mission to uncover her exact astrology.
Miller highlighted the versatility of Rosen’s skills as an author.
“I think she’s very good at taking personal, authentic stories and making them very universal,” Miller said. “I think she’s also very good at understanding human emotion, which is what every writer needs to have.”
Van Slyke echoed Miller’s comments, highlighting Rosen’s qualities off the page.
“She’s great to work with and a really wonderful resource for people in her community, especially young women,” Van Slyke said. “She’s a really big believer in the idea that a rising tide raises all ships, and you don’t find that everywhere.”
Despite her growing body of published work, Rosen isn’t ready to leave screenwriting behind. As she continues to explore intriguing projects sent her way, her dream is to leverage her multi-format writing skills to adapt her novels into films.
“The big dream is that my novels would be adapted and I would have the chance to turn them into screenplays, which would just be such a full circle moment—to be able to take this creation in one format and turn it into my other absolute favorite format,” Rosen said.
Rosen’s writing ventures call back to her life experiences and core values, including those shaped during her time at BC.
“Something that I try to bring to my novels is a lot of the philosophy and tenet that we are brought up with as Boston College students,” Rosen said. “So much of that was instilled in me in my time at BC, so I think a lot about that as I’m working on these books.”
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