Three Things I Know From 30 Years of Writing
I only understand what I am ready to hear. My readiness is the contingency, always.
Here’s a list of three things I’ve learned from editors. I rediscovered them in a notebook in which I’d scribbled notes during lectures at the July 2016 residency at VCFA.
I can’t remember who set the assignment and during which lecture, but here’s what I wrote:
1999: "Children are half-wild." Mallory Loehr
2003: "Don’t forget there has to be a big tomato at the heart of every story." Elizabeth Law
2005: "What’s in it for the child reader?" Janine O’Malley
There’s truth in every one of those little nuggets. In various ways, at various times, I know one or the other of those ideas has bailed me out. When, though, and how? Relative to which of my books? Here’s what I recall.
Children are half-wild
Last year, while writing a follow-up to my very first picture book, Monsoon, I had trouble finding the heart of the story. The suggestion for the book had come from the FSG editor of Monsoon. Through the first few drafts I sent her of this new possible companion book, we couldn't find a storyline that worked for us both. The ingredients I had were mangoes (OK, spell that mangos, American style, if you wish), a setting, a couple of kids, a family business, and unseasonal weather. The more I tried to shoehorn the contextual backdrop of climate change into the story, the more I tried to raise the stakes for the child—in fact the more I did to turn what I had into a story—the less it felt worth telling. Somewhere along the way, information and the imposition of structure began to overwhelm interest.
Did I remember that injunction from long ago to be aware of the half-wildness of children? Not consciously, but when I put an old top into my child character’s hands, things changed. As it spun, the story began to take on a rhythm of its own. I set aside my need to write this book and let the child character climb trees, pick fruit, hear thunder, feel fear. The story began ticking. Mango Sun (working title) will be published by Caitlyn Dlouhy Books/Atheneum within a couple of years. Only now do I see just how far back its roots might go.
There has to be a big tomato at the heart of every story
See what I wrote in this post about my timeline for Threads of Peace: How Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Changed the World:
Editorial letters provided obligatory encouragement while urging me to write boldly, to claim my role as the teller of this story.
I remember thinking, what is the big tomato here? Writing a thesis for the book, creating an outline, drawing visual storylines for each of my subjects: all of it had to do with finding that inner meaning.
Years ago, when I told my friend Vicki Holmsten about the big tomato concept, she gave me a plastic tomato as a gift. It sits on my window-sill even now, reminding me to dig deep enough into every book I write. Oddly, when I ran into Elizabeth Law years later at a conference and mentioned this, she didn’t recall it at all. It doesn’t matter. What might just be an idiom used in passing for one person, can turn into something much more for another.
What’s in it for the child reader?
This is probably the most crucial question of them all. If there’s one obstacle to the endeavour of grownups writing for children, it’s our distance in time from the children we used to be. This matters because we have an amazing audience—open to a world in which everything is new and fresh for them. Kids are an honest audience. They will close a book if it loses their interest.
In 2011, when I was speaking at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, I was invited to do an interview for a wonderful program called Colorin Colorado. Here’s a video excerpt related to the writing of my middle grade novel, The Grand Plan to Fix Everything. We don’t need to slot our books into an age-group, necessarily, but we do need to keep in mind that our work in progress is intended for readers in progress, and that’s a real responsibility.
