Two Stanford students — Brittany Newell ’16 and Kiley Roache ’18 — have each recently acquired deals with publishing houses to publish novels written during their time as students at Stanford.

Henry Holt will publish Newell’s novel, “Oola,” in 2017, and Harlequin Teen will publish Roache’s novel, “The F Word,” in the summer of 2017.

Newell said her book is about a writer who wants to create a “100-percent accurate” character based on his girlfriend.

“What starts out as an allegedly romantic gesture gradually turns into this weird, twisted power play as he tries to know every single thing there is about her,” Newell said.

The young writer found inspiration for her book from Genisis P-Orridge, lead singer for the band Psychic TV. (Genisis’s preferred pronoun is “they.”)

“They have this concept of pandrogyny,” Newell said. “It’s basically the idea that when we fall in love with someone — when Genisis fell in love with their late wife — it was as if they were the same being.”

Newell became fascinated by the idea of pandrogyny and wondered about the various ways that the goal of pandrogyny could go wrong if one took the concept too far or simply did not understand what that concept meant. Pandrogyny is when both partners in a relationship transition into one being. For example, Genisis underwent multiple surgeries and dressed as their partner to reach their goal of a pandrogyne.

Newell is appreciative that she was still in school while writing her book, because deadlines sent by her London-based agent would have been harder to meet with a full-time job or other more time-intensive commitments. Newell said she thought of writing her novel as another class in order to make sure she gave her creative work the same importance as her academic work.

“I always mentally, just for my own peace of mind, have to block out time for writing,” Newell said.

Roache’s novel, which she wrote last summer, is about a young feminist writer who joins and observes a fraternity, hoping to expose what she sees.

“But the longer she stays, things become more complicated,” Roache said. According to Roache, she was inspired by the second-wave feminist slogan that the personal is political.

“There are all these huge societal, sociological processes at play that you can see in your everyday interactions but then at the same time those are still personal interactions,” she explained.

Roache was interested in the idea that friends who are different from each other and have different backgrounds can change each other’s views and opinions.

Since Roache wrote her novel’s first draft over the summer, she arrived at school with a manuscript that needed revisions and edits — and “revising is where most of the work happens,” she said.

She makes a point of setting aside a couple hours per week solely for writing. During high school, she would often stay up extra late to work on creative writing projects.

“It’s kind of like a stress relief working on it,” Roache said. “I enjoy doing it. It really doesn’t feel like work.”

Roache’s writing experience goes back to before college; she first signed with her agent before she graduated high school. She has worked on various projects since middle school but did not complete a project until her high school senior year. That project was the first work she sent to her agent — but she was not comfortable publishing it at the time.

“Although I learned so much from that experience, it wasn’t ready … to go into the world as a book,” Roache said.

Contact Elaine Pappas at epappas18 ‘at’ stevensonschool.org.