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Thoughts About Craft
A founding faculty member of the nation's first graduate program for children's writers at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Louise Hawes has worked with students at dozens of colleges and conferences nationwide. As part of her commitment to helping new and emerging writers, she is glad to reprint the lectures below. Click on the title you want to read:
On Overwriting: The pitfalls of "lyrical" prose *
Writing from the Core: Does it have to hurt? *
September 11: The Day the Writing Stopped *
Thou Shalt Not Tell....Or Shalt Thou? *
Ten-Something: How Old is a Young Adult, Anyway? *
* Want to quote Louise? No problem: permission is granted to individuals and other web sites to reproduce up to four paragraphs of each lecture above, provided a hyperlink or reference to the full text at www.louisehawes.com is included. To use more than this without securing permission via the email link on the left is not only a violation of copyright, but means you're not thinking for yourself J
On Overwriting: The pitfalls of "lyrical" prose
First, the disclaimer: The following opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the management. Nor are they hard and fast rules. Or profound truths. They are simply one writer’s thoughts on overwriting, an affliction I knew intimately for years, and one with which I continue to wrestle.
My apologies, then, to those of you who write pithy, terse sentences. Most of this session will be about writing too much, not too little. I will have something to say later about erring on the skimpy side, but you should understand that I’ve always treated these talks as a sort of lab, where I can examine my own process, address my personal writing foibles. And hopefully, by sharing them, save you some time and energy as you face the same problems.
So let me start where the seeds were sown, where my overwriting began: First grade. Don’t panic. I won't spend this entire lecture on my autobiography, but Mrs. Dougherty is crucial to my thesis. Mrs. Dougherty was my first grade teacher, a pretty woman with dark hair and eyes, and a sharp nose from which I should have taken warning. It was she who discovered that I was a Mirror Writer. Which is a lovely term, rife with poetic implications, but which simply means that I formed many of my letters in reverse. My B’s, C’s, and D’s, my S’s, E’s R’s, and P’s all faced backwards and to the left, instead of forward and to the right.
For this minor quirk I was consigned to the "Basement Reading Group." There, exiled from the four-color, spritely lives of Dick and Jane, I joined a small contingent of wayward souls who followed the adventures of Sam and the Rat. Sam chased the Rat, who Ran around the Rug in tiny mimeographed booklets, illustrated with black and white stick figures.
Now even though this Basement metaphor was NOT lost on us exiles, I loved our snug, warm tunnel of a classroom, and I ADORED Sam and the Rat. I credit them to this day with making me a slow reader. And writer. One who savors every word. Of course, this savoring business can be carried to extremes. And I did, indeed, carry it there. In fact, I acquired such a fondness for the sound and shape of words and developed such proficiency in their skillful arrangement, that soon I wasn't paying attention to content at all. I began to "coast" through school on the strength of my writing alone. All through middle and high school, I wrote book reports without ever reading the books I described in florid, heartrending prose; I answered test questions with lengthy, ponderous essays on subjects I hadn’t bothered to study.
I was definitely OUT of the basement -- with a vengeance. I was skimming along on the surface of things, with no regard for what I said, so long as I said it artfully. And all indications were, this was the way to go. Because every one of my teachers praised my writing. They didn’t make note of my feel for a book, or my mastery of an idea. But they always extolled my "lyrical language."
"Lyrical language?" What is that, anyway? The word lyrical comes from the Greek word for lyre, because lyric poems were meant to be accompanied by music. But these poems were more than just musical. They were up close and personal. Sappho was among the earliest lyric poets. She was a writer who focused on moments of intense personal feeling, on individual subjective experience instead of epic events and stories. You have only to compare the opening of the Iliad, Homer’s mega narrative, with one of Sappho’s haiku-like fragments to see what a stunning departure this was:
"Sing, Goddess," Homer begins, "the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians." (Iliad, book I)
Now, in contrast, listen to this:
"Tonight," Sappho confides, "I’ve watched/the moon and then/the Pleiades/go down./The night is now/half-gone; youth/slips away; I am/in bed alone." (Sappho, frag. 64, Mary Barnard trans.)
Hear the difference in scale here? In specificity? Both these poems are, well, "poetic." Their language is musical and rhythmic. But one poem takes the "high road," making even private moments larger than life, mythic in stature. While the other is written, not to justify the ways of the gods to man, so much as to gossip, complain, sigh, share. You can almost hear Sappho saying she’s feeling a bit "verklempt," can’t you?
Now I have a suspicion that when my teachers credited me with "lyrical" prose, they were confusing bombast with heart. The dictionary defines lyric literature as writing that "suggests music in its sound patterns and expresses FEELING, especially a deep personal emotion in a direct and affecting manner." Hmm. Let me run that by you one more time. "In a direct and affecting manner." Well, only if you substitute "obtuse" for "direct", "affected" for "affecting" and "mannered" for "manner," would this definition describe the lyricism that served me most of my academic career, especially in college, where I seldom attended classes or read assignments. (I should add, lest you think I totally frittered away those four years, that I averaged a good eight hours a day playing cards. And that I discovered, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise, that I had a real talent for bluffing. Let’s just say, that I was seldom short of spending money.)
Okay. So I graduated writing obtuse, affected prose. I disdained "spare" writers like Hemingway and Carver. I loved the lushness of Welty and Woolf, the meandering denseness of Faulkner, Genet, Joyce. And yes, that glorious echo chamber, Melville. And after college and grad school, despite a series of jobs that called for terse ad copy and pithy press releases, I still nursed dreams of writing something as sonorous, as rolling and grand as Moby Dick.
These dreams were postponed but not forgotten during the years I churned out first, formulaic Sweet Valley Twins adventures under the name of Jamie Suzanne and then, a dismal stylistic and financial flop, my own pseudonymous series, Mercy Hospital. (If you can find one of these Avon classics by "Caroline Carlisle," hold onto it. It’s probably as collectible as an Edsel hood ornament!) All through these patently unlyrical detours, I persisted in believing I was meant for larger, more mellifluous stuff, that I would someday once again earn ringing praise for my "lyricism."
So what happened when I finally DID publish something under my own name? Nelson Malone Meets the Man from Mush-Nut, that’s what. Does this title sound trippingly on the tongue? Is this book replete with music and pathos? Not unless your tender passions are aroused by alien camp counselors and talking snakes. Not unless pink sneakers and a doll that does your homework strike a universal, epic chord.
How to explain my fall from lofty lyricism? Why, when I finally had a chance to step into Melville’s shoes, did I instead write nothing but deliberate, frivolous fun? Because, quite simply, I had children. And when I did, I discovered a different kind of reader, one who wasn’t looking for the things my teachers had required. My writing suddenly became, not a product designed to advance my own cause, but a process, an interaction between me and a reader I cared about. Like Sappho gabbing to her friends or complaining to her lover, I wrote for someone real, someone I knew - my children and then other people’s. And no children wanted to watch while I flexed my metaphorical muscles. They didn’t want to stand around while I showed off my lyrical voice, skating along, doing fancy figure eights on the surface of everything I described. Children wanted me to get off my lyrical high horse; they wanted a story.
Which didn’t mean I had to give up lovely language. It just meant I had to say something with it. I consider myself blessed beyond all merit that children saved me this way. If they hadn’t, I might very well, given the current state of American letters, still be writing on empty, still be blowing verbal smoke.
I’m not alone, by the way, in thinking that much of adult lit in this country is hot air. In the 2001 double summer issue of The Atlantic, there is one of the most delightful, wise, and downright hilarious articles on contemporary literature I’ve read. It’s called "A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness of American Literary Prose." (Did any of you see it?) It was written by one B.R. Myers, whose gender and previous publications are not mentioned by the magazine, but who is clearly a discerning and dangerously candid reader. In essence, this manifesto suggests that language-driven writing (or "pretty" writing, as Marion Dane Bauer called it in her talk yesterday) has taken over adult lit in this country. Why? Because too many readers, like the emperor’s courtiers who praise his invisible new clothes, are ashamed to admit that they, like children, want more story and fewer linguistic pyrotechnics.
Myers decimates authors like Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, David Guterson, and other celebs. The crime of which they are all guilty, according to this manifesto, is a failure to let their characters and their stories speak for themselves. The voice we hear, Myers claims, in all their critically acclaimed work, is the author’s. And it is a self-conscious, self-aggrandizing voice that booms, "You’re in professional hands, for only a Serious Writer would express himself so sonorously. Now read on, and remember, the mood’s the thing."
As children’s writers, we are fortunate that our readers (and therefore most of our editors) have little patience for this sort of ego dance. And so, thanks to children, do I. Now that I know I’m writing for a teenager numb with loss, or a young girl torn between what the rules say and what her heart tells her, I’m not inclined to waste their time with irrelevant riffs, with strings of self-indulgent adjectives. With language, in short, that doesn’t grow from my story.
So what distinguishes language that’s story driven from a riff that’s been imposed on it? How do you tell what words belong to your character and which ones you’re forcing on her? One way is to watch WHO says ouch when you edit your prose. If you drop a particularly "lyrical" passage, one that strokes your writerly ego, it generally feels like the unkindest cut of all. I find in my case, my reaction makes up in outrage what it lacks in confidence. Sort of a whiney, "How could you?" On the other hand, if an editor or my writers’ group wants to delete something that’s integral to my character, my response is usually very different. It's simply a firm, calm "NO. This has to stay."
I have to confess, though, that sometimes the whine wins the day. In response, perhaps, to what’s happening in the world of adult lit (I have 30 adult titles piled in teetering pyramids around my bed as we speak.), or maybe in an effort to prove to that world that I can write with the big boys, I occasionally find myself yielding to the urge to mark my literary territory. This impulse, though it may take the shape of magnificently honed sentences, is really not coming from any higher place than the instinct that makes a dog lift its leg at every new turn in the road. And it’s a lot more dangerous. Because it almost always means I’m calling attention to myself at the expense of the story’s voice. It means my language stands out instead of my character or my setting or my scene. The Reader’s Manifesto I just mentioned takes a NY Time critic to task for opening an online discussion of one of Proulx’s books by asking readers to pick their favorite sentence. If you can do that, Myers suggests, the story, characters, and dialogue haven’t swept you away the way they should. If individual sentences are what stands out, then the author’s real message is, "Look at me. I’m a writer with a capital W."
For me, the temptation to lapse into these authorial intrusions is worse in a first draft than in revision. I am, by nature, what Annie Dillard calls a lapidarian. Thanks to my old friends Sam and the Rat, I write slowly, word by polished word, and I'm reluctant to let anything go that doesn’t "sound right." I read all my work out loud, but in early draft mode, what is it I pay attention to? Most often, I’m listening for music and flow; I don’t play any instrument and I can’t carry a tune, so all my frustrated musicality gets poured into my writing. During that first reading, then, I’m listening to my favorite instrument, the sound of my own voice. And so long as I’m doing that, I’m staying on the SURFACE, the skin of my story. I’m not going deep.
By the time I’m in revision, though, I know my characters and their voices. I know what my book is about. It’s easier then to kill my linguistic darlings, to cut away what isn’t right, what doesn’t come from the heart of my story, from its characters and their experience. Time and time again, I've found in my own work and in my students’, that when we know what we want to say, we can say it clearly. And when we don’t, we’re much more likely to take refuge in those fancy flourishes and curlicues. They soothe our writerly souls, they let us forget that we still haven’t answered those simple, unavoidable questions: What does my character want? Why does she want it? What’s keeping her from having it?
Once you’ve answered those questions, though, the flourishes become downright embarrassing. By way of illustration, and as an exercise in abject humiliation, I thought I’d share with you an example of one of the "Look at Me, Mom, I’m Writing" moments that I dropped in a recent revision. Take a look at this handout:
He hadn’t napped all day, and it was well past his dinner time. But Feena was beyond patience and excuses. She grabbed his shoulders again, turned his chin up so he’d have to see her, have to understand. "Didn’t you hear what I just said?" His bones were like a kitten’s or a bird’s between her fingers. "What did I say, Chris?"
Behind the moth’s rushing wings and Christy’s whimpers, underneath the beating of her own heart, Feena felt a still place, a dark center that sucked up every noise, every touch. Something was alive in there, something fearsome and beautiful. Its rage wasn’t hot, but icy, pure. It didn’t think or worry or care. And it couldn’t be stopped.
Christy’s face, his angel’s face, darkened then. Still crying, he shut his eyes and turned away from her. He put his arms around his head, crouched the way she’d seen him do at the amusement park. He was protecting himself – from her! And why did the anger get worse then? Crawling into her throat like a meal she couldn’t keep down? Why did Feena want to shake him, make him know she would never hurt him? Make him stop. For god’s sake, just make him stop.
This passage is from the first draft of Waiting for Christopher, due out in spring 2002 with Candlewick. It’s an early pass at a critical moment in the book, the moment when Feena, who has rescued an abused toddler, becomes increasingly irritated with little Christopher until she nearly turns into the same sort of angry caretaker she’s just saved him from. Just before these three paragraphs, little Christy begs Feena to read from a picture book. But then he graduates from begging to nagging, repeatedly shoving his book onto her lap, covering the homework she’s doing. Over and over, she pushes the book away and tells him No, not now! Then comes this moment of violent possibility.
Okay. Let’s talk about that lurid paragraph in the middle, the one that's framed in red. First of all, this paragraph stands out like a sore, or at any rate, a runny thumb, doesn’t it? I mean, it certainly calls attention to itself. But what does it really add, to the story or to the character? Not much. It yammers away, making only a little music and even less sense. Check out the logic here: Do you see that the first two images in the paragraph are aural – the beating wings of the moth that we’ve learned in an earlier paragraph is hurling itself against a lamp? And then the beating of Feena’s own heart? Next, behind and under these sensory images, Feena doesn’t HEAR something else, which would be logical, but FEELS it instead. Can you feel something under a sound? Particularly silence? And what about that supremely non-descriptive generality that lives in the silence: "something fearsome and beautiful." Yikers! If one of the writers working with me came up with that I’d call them on it right away. That sort of language is as informative and real as ads that tell you a detergent is bigger, better, improved. I for one, just don’t buy it.
And then the paragraph goes on and on about how powerful this vague, fierce something is, how it can’t be stopped. Well, I like Feena being powerless in the grip of anger, but I don’t think someone losing their temper has quite so much time to dwell on the intricacies of their tantrum or to personify it, for that matter! Feena’s a romantic, true; and she reads a great deal. But I think all that romance, that literary flair, would go right out the window when she’s on the verge of hitting the little boy she’s trying to save. In fact, it NEEDS to go out the window before Feena can learn that we’re all human and that we all have some pretty unromantic moments.
The solution? Harsh but necessary. OFF IT. It only hurts for a minute. And look how much better the passage holds together minus my exhibitionism.
So granted: A good book speaks through it’s story, not its author's voice or language. Yet it can’t become so transparent that it falls into the other extreme, a sort of voyeurism like the existentialist author, Robbe-Grillet’s, where the writer is no longer an artist at all, but a passive witness to objects and events. A camera that sees without emotion or feeling.
How do you strike the balance, then? How can you become lost in a story’s moment or character and still steer the craft? My way of equalizing things, is to free write with pencil and paper before I sit down to draft a chapter at the computer. By warming up this way, by tapping into a character away from my desk, I literally separate her from "the book," give her permission to say whatever she wants without regard to how she says it. Then, when I return to the computer, I continue to hear her voice in my head as I write. I’ve found this is an effective means of reigning in my editorial, intellectual, and yes, lyrical impulses, of putting them in their proper place – as assistants or handmaidens to the view point character.
As handmaidens, these critical and aesthetic faculties can still be given plenty of constructive work to do. After a week or so, when I’ve got a lot of free writes in my character’s voice, I like to sit down and use a magic marker on all of them. I highlight pieces of language that stand out, "hot spots" where the character talks vividly, but without seeming forced or strained. I pick the places, in other words, where my response is, "Oh, yes, that’s just like Rosey. That sounds precisely like Feena. Or Franklin. Or Vini." Such passages, particularly if I have to stop work on a project for a while, keep me connected to the character and the voice of the book. If I type these free writes all together on a few pages, they become a sort of "bible" and enable me to saturate myself with a character, to get right back "into" her as soon as I return to my desk.
I've talked, so far, pretty interchangeably, about your story's voice and your character's voice. Are they the same? The answer is, usually. But as you already know about the writing game, rules are made to be broken. Naturally, an omniscient narrator in a folk tale or a sprawling, Dickensian novel is a voice distinct from any of the character's voices. And what about an unreliable or limited protagonist? How do you convey the whole story from the point of view of an uneducated character? Or a retarded one? With great skill and difficulty. And usually, if the truth be told, with some sort of narrative bridge between the character and narrator. Allow me to tear you away from the uneven, if fascinating ;) Hawes "oeuvre," and let's take a look at some other authors who've managed to write skillful variations on the one-voice, limited perspective novel:
Gypsy Davy by Chris Lynch centers around a retarded or "slow" 12-year old boy. By interspersing Davy's disingenuous first-person narration with third-person limited passages focused on other characters, Chris manages to show us events that Davy misinterprets or misses. But holding the book together, running through it like a choked, sweet blade of grass, is Davy's voice - loving, innocent, and determined:
Sometimes my sister goes out right away when I come over and comes back hours later when me and the baby Dennis are asleep. She says that Dennis is crazy because he's loud and he's active and he doesn't listen but then he stops still and stares for almost ever and he makes a lot of sounds that are nothing at all like words and he moves funny sometimes more like a praying mantis than like a baby boy and that all this is why little Dennis and me get along so good is what she says because we're both screwed she says. And that's why she has to leave sometimes.
If you go back over this passage, you may be astounded to find that Davy has used only three sentences in this whole passage. Naturally, such run-on, elongated sentences would be hard to sustain for a whole novel. Chris doesn't. He alternates Davy's chapters with ones written from his older sister's view point. It's in these passages that we learn things Davy couldn't possibly know. Like the fact that she and the baby are eventually taken away by Social Services. In effect, then, the voice of Chris's story is two voices, with very different cadences and very different perspectives. Both are crucial to the book.
Zora Neale Hurston, whose book Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the truest AND most lyrical books I know, has an even tougher row to hoe than Chris. Because she wants to pour rich wine into a small, humble vessel. Her protagonist Janie Crawford is bright, but uneducated; limited in experience but a traveler in her soul. Hurston, moreover, wants us to see Janie as a heroic figure, epic in nature if not circumstance. She achieves this by using Janie's own voice as well as a narrative voice that speaks for her. This narrative voice stays true to Janie's spirit, though it uses far loftier language than Janie could possibly know. Here's a description of Janie's second marriage, gone sour:
The years took all the fight out of Janie's face. For a while she thought it was gone from her soul. No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels...
Now and again she thought of a country road at sun-up and considered flight. To where? To what? Then too she considered, thirty-five is twice seventeen and nothing was the same at all.
"Maybe he ain't nothin'," she cautioned herself, "but he is something in my mouth. He's got tuh be else Ah ain't got nothin' tuh live for. Ah'll lie and say he is. If Ah don't, life won't be nothin' but uh store and uh house."
She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop¼
Here again, then, is an amalgam. The book's voice is a combination of the character and the author who speaks for her, of Janie herself and Hurston's admiration for her.
I mentioned near the outset that most children's authors can't afford to write metaphor or language-driven fiction because most young readers won't endure it. I'd like to spend the rest of this session on some exceptions. Allow me, then, to present my own "Reader's Manifesto," wherein I skewer a few writers who have managed to beat the odds and publish self-conscious, ponderous books for kids. I do this for two reasons: First, to show you that I'm not all self-effacement and apology, that I can be just as hard on others as I am on myself. Second, it's just plain fun!
Let's start with one of my favorite targets, Francesca Lia Block. Okay, this time I won't pick on her name, because after all, maybe she was born with it or married into it and it isn't really her fault. But I will pick on Ecstasia, one of the most self-indulgent fictions I've ever read, for children or adults. Here, in passages from the book, are three first-person narrators in love. One of these lovestruck characters is gay, the other two are heterosexual; one is a woman, two are men. All three are central characters, members of the pseudonymous band, Ecstasia. But I defy you to tell them apart. I defy you, in fact, to hear anything in all three selections but Block's infatuation with the sound of her own music. Here's Rafe, the band's drummer, in love:
I take off my jacket and put it around you as you kneel facing me. As I wrap you in it, I feel the ripples and pulses and swells and hollows of your body. my groin aches¼
We fall together into the cold sand, suddenly warm and fine as if it were the dust of sun-baked pearls and we, plunging into each other's forbidden, impossibly lost, impossibly found, bodies, bring each other back and back and back.
Now here's Paul, the lead guitar, in love:
... A tenderness fills you. You kneel down in front of me, tilting your face up. I take your glowing blue face in my palms. I wonder if my tears are as blue as yours. You place your open hands on my chest. Your lips taste of harsh, marvelous salt.
We slide down together. Our bodies are the waves. We roll and swell and crash blue salt foam. Your moist flesh pressed against mine, makes me whole.
And last, but not least self-indulgent, is Calliope, the group's vocalist, in love:
"Open me up," you say. "Help me to open." But it is you who open me, who have guided me into the mysteries -- wild gardens spilling, spouting fountains, cool violet light beneath the wisteria-draped arches, veiled women dancing, lynx cats striding, reclining men lifting flasks of nectar to their lips. All this is within the dream you give me when our bodies join together."Whew! I think Block has managed to top the vacuous lyricism of my fearsome, beautiful something in the silence! Although Ecstasia is a mercifully short novel, you should know that every page is like this. There are no highs or lows, no rests between the endless stretches of horizon-less, hysterical prose. Which reminds me of another gibe from Meyers, the author of the Atlantic piece I mentioned earlier. The article notes that Cormac McCarthy tends to invest everything he writes about with an almost biblical intensity. "To record with the same somber majesty," Meyers says, "every aspect of a cowboy's life, from a knife fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch." Amen.
Lest we leave the story-driven or "action" camp unscathed, let me mention Gary Paulsen. Here's the part of the program where all of you who have been saying, Louise isn't talking about me. I don't have a poetic bone in my body," can sit up and take notice. Paulsen is your man. He is never "writerly" in the verbose, ponderous sense. He clearly cut his teeth on Hemingway, and his much-touted "sparseness" owes a great deal to Papa. Still, he apparently missed the seamless precision, the faithful observations with which Hemingway crafted every unique moment in his fiction. Paulsen's got the emotional distance right, the spare language, but after a while, even within a single book, there's a rigid quality, a sameness to his descriptions and his rhythms. Here, from Hatchet, is the castaway Brian being surprised, first by a bear, then by an airplane. This is the way the bear happens:
Sweet juice, he thought. Oh, [the berries] were sweet with just a tiny tang and he picked and ate and picked and ate and thought that he had never tasted anything this good. Soon, as before, his stomach was full, but now he had some sense and he did not gorge or ram more down. Instead he picked more and put them in his windbreaker, feeling the morning sun on his back and thinking he was rich, rich with food now, just rich, and he heard a noise to his rear, a slight noise, and he turned and saw the bear.
He could do nothing, think nothing. His tongue stained with berry juice, stuck to the roof of his mouth and he stared at the bear.
And here's how the plane that saves Brian arrives:
[The orange drink] was sweet and tangy -- almost too sweet -- but so good that he didn't drink it fast, held it in his mouth and let the taste go over his tongue. Tickling on the sides, sloshing it back and forth and then down, swallow, then another.
That, he thought, that is just fine. Just fine. He got more lake water and mixed another one and drank it fast, than a third one, and he sat with that near the fire but looking out across the lake, thinking how rich the smell was from the cooking beef dinner. And at that precise instant, with the smell from the food filling him, the plane appeared.
Brian was standing now, but still silent, still holding the drink. His tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of his mouth and his throat didn't work.
Too little language, then, like too much, makes for self-conscious, ho-hum art. For me, the limited use of imagery, the even more limited vocabulary, and the reliance on staccato rhythm in Paulsen's writing is neither "rich," nor "tangy." It suggests, rather, that the author's tongue, as well as Brian's, is stuck to the roof of his mouth; that his "clarity" has distilled itself into a formula.
Now for my final victim I've chosen an adult author turned picture book writer, Louise Erdrich. Each time I open Grandmother's Pigeon, I wonder whether it would ever have been published if not for its byline. Here is a book where the child narrator has no dialogue, her older brother has three lines, while their parents and other adults talk non-stop throughout. Here is a book centered around an absent, totem-like figure, Grandmother. A book where the plot involves no problem or conflict owned by the child narrator, where the gifted illustrator has had to work manfully to add visual details that lend individuality to the undifferentiated, cardboard characters.
Take a look at the beginning of Grandmother's Pigeon, in which the nameless first-person narrator, who is pictured as being about eight years old, describes the only character in the book who counts:
As it turned out, Grandmother was a far more mysterious woman than any of us knew. It was common knowledge that she trained kicking mules. We'd often heard how she had skied the Continental Divide. I was with her myself once when she turned back a vicious dog by planting herself firm in its path and staring into its eyes.
There was a softer side of Grandmother as well. In her hands there was soothing medicine. She could numb a bruise, touch away a charley horse. When on school test days we felt slightly ill, she brewed a magic tea so bitter that we usually got well just as she brought it into our rooms. Yes, we all thought we knew Grandmother.
This paean to Grandmother, this telling-instead-of-showing litany, makes it clear that the book's narrator is not now, if she ever was, a child. From the complicated sentence structure to the arch tall-tale takeoffs to the condescending wink at children who don't want to go to school, this voice can't possibly belong to the delightful, sensitive little girl in Jim La Marche's compelling illustrations. Whose voice is it, then? I'm afraid that's pretty obvious. It's the voice I mentioned earlier, the one that calls attention to itself, the one that announces over and over, "I am in control. I am an artist. Read on and be amazed, amused, and awed." Who was this book written for? Is it truly directed to children? Or is it a self-aggrandizing dip into a profitable market by an author who's really writing for other adults?
In happy contrast, let's look at one of my favorite picture books, The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf. First published in 1936, this classic still has "all the right stuff." As you probably recall, the protagonist, one Ferdinand, is a young bull who refuses to play the establishment's game:
Ferdinand ran to the middle of the ring and everyone shouted and clapped because they thought he was going to fight fiercely and butt and snort and stick his horns around.
But not Ferdinand. When he got to the middle of the ring he saw the flowers in all the lovely ladies' hair and he just sat down quietly and smelled.
He wouldn't fight and be fierce no matter what they did. He just sat and smelled. And the Banderillos were mad and the Picadores were madder and the Matador was so mad he cried because he couldn't show off with his cape and sword.
So they had to take Ferdinand home.
And for all I know, he is sitting there still, under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly.
He is very happy.
The voice of this book isn't clever or grandiloquent or awe inspiring. It makes the trick of juggling a main character and a narrative voice ("And for all I know... "), the feat of using flashback in a pre-reader's book, seem effortless and natural. It respects children and lampoons adults. It is not simple, but it is simply moving. Simply delicious. Clear. Bell like. A novelist and short story writer named David Long (The Falling Boy, Scribner) has said that readers meet a work in its final form. "They can't know," he writes, "how you composed -- the routes tried and abandoned, the doubts set aside, the energy consumed -- for the best art, as Renaissance painters believed, has sprezzatura, a grace and ease that hide the sweat it took." The Story of Ferdinand has sprezzatura.
I like to think that sometimes so do I. I like to think that years and years later, Mrs. Dougherty may be right, after all, and that I AM, on my good days, a mirror writer. That whenever I look closely at a fictional moment, whenever I feel deeply what my characters’ feel, I hold a mirror up to my young readers; a mirror in which they see their own moments and feelings reflected. And if I’ve done the job I want to, if my language doesn't get in the way, they’ll say, "Ah, I never thought of my life in just that way. But yes, that’s how it is. And you know what, it’s pretty special."
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Writing from the Core: Does it have to hurt?
Almost thirteen years ago, I made a "career move" that changed my life and marked my writing. After I had two fairly well received middle-grade novels under my belt, my agent asked me if I would like to write for a new series. I clambered immediately onto my artistic high horse and told her from that considerable height, "Over my dead but un-prostituted body."
Cut to three months, three mortgage payments and three utility bills later: I began to experience a conversion of sorts, a change of heart. Or of mind, anyway. What would be so horrible, I asked myself, about a bit of entrepreneurial spunk? After all, I could call in my cards anytime I wanted, as soon as I'd earned enough filthy lucre to buy time to write pure.
SWEET VALLEY HIGH, and its endless spin-offs: SWEET VALLEY TWINS, SWEET VALLEY PRE-SCHOOL, SWEET VALLEY TOTS, SWEET VALLEY EMBRYOS (I'm joking about that last!!), were a huge commercial success, the first of the mega middle-grade series. I put my two children through college with the money I earned writing about Jessica and Elizabeth, blonde-haired identical twins who live in Sweet Valley, CA, where the sky is always as blue as the twins' eyes. I got letters from girls all over the country; I was a major draw at school book fairs. And even today, if, in a moment of weakness, I confess to women in their twenties that I had a hand in some of those books, I get asked to sign autographs and even to pose for pictures.
But I lost something in the trade-off. I lost seven years. During that time, I stopped writing in my own voice, and I stopped closing my own wounds. I no longer wrote about things I needed to know and feel; I no longer created characters who were, or could have been, me. Jessica and Elizabeth stole seven good writing years from me. And I let them.
Some writers could have come back sooner than that. Some writers would have been strong enough to fend off the corrosive, dangerous effects of golden hair and laughing eyes. But my voice wasn't developed enough, my language wasn't resilient enough, and clearly, I didn't know enough to come in out of that blazing California sun before I got burnt. By the time it was over and the money was spent, I not only wasn't, but I couldn't, write for real.
So, I am the perfect person to address you on the question of whether writing needs to hurt. I spent a great deal of time and energy, you see, writing things that didn't hurt at all. And now, after the fact, that makes me extremely sad. Because I have this panicky feeling I'll never catch up, never come close to writing everything I want. Now that I've finally reclaimed my voice, sidled back into the corrida and made a few exploratory passes with my new cape, there's only one thing I'm daunted by, one thing that frightens me silly. I'm not worried about getting gored or wounded, I'm not afraid of the next fight. What does scare me is the battle not fought, the book not written.
In a variation of the "so many men, so little time" conundrum, I find myself flooded with ideas, teased by countless characters, by books and poems and short stories that pop into my mind, that flirt with me, that reveal just enough of their uncreated shapes to tantalize, to leave me breathless. If I could finish each of these projects I dream of in a week, I'd still need two lifetimes to tackle them all! (which is why I always laugh (and envy a little) writers who complain they have no ideas.) (It occurs to me this might be a generational issue, somehow; it's invariably young writers who wonder where the next book's coming from, and us crone-types who pray for the time to write them all.)
So, for me at least, choosing is crucial. I can't go off with every saucy story that insinuates itself into my consciousness. And the older I get, the more sacred I hold this business of writing, the more my choices count. Writing a book, after all, is a long-term commitment. It's a journey, and it better take me somewhere I've never been, somewhere that matters. It better take me to the lip of joy or the edge of despair, where I can use that cape I let hang, limp and ineffectual at my side, for too many years, while I picked my way across the surface of things, feet high, toes pointed to avoid the mess, the blood on the ground.
I won't take on a story now, or a character or a poem, unless I smell a little blood and feel some risk. Unless my Duende gives it the nod. Who or what is the Duende? Nobody, anywhere, has given a more brazen, luscious description of the creative force that animates real art than Garcia Lorca. In his essay, "Play and Theory of the Duende" (which is currently out of print and which I suggest you sleep with from now on), Lorca defines duende as a spirit, brooding and passionate as Spain herself, that appears only when death is possible So, of course, the duende loves a bull fight:
You can have muse with the muleta and angel with the banderillas and pass for a good bullfighter, Lorca says, but in the capework, when the bull is still clean of wounds, and at the moment of the kill, you need the duende's help to achieve artistic truth.
The bull fighter who scares the audience with his bravery is not bullfighting, but has ridiculously lowered himself to doing what anyone can do: gambling his life. But the torero who is bitten by duende makes us forget he is always tossing his heart over the bull's horns.
The artists of southern Spain, Lorca insists, whether they are Gypsy or flamenco, poet or painter, know that no emotion is possible without the duende:
The Andalusian singer Pastora Pavon, La Nina de los Peines, dark Hispanic genius whose powers of fantasy are equal to those of Goya or Rafael el Gallo, was once singing in a little tavern in Cadiz. For a while she played with her voice of shadow, of beaten tin, her moss-covered voice, braiding it into her hair or soaking it in wine or letting it wander away to the farthest, darkest bramble patches. No use. Nothing. The audience remained silent...
As though crazy, torn like a medieval weeper, La Nina de los Peines got to her feet, tossed off a big glass of firewater and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, without breath or color, but with duende. She was able to kill all the scaffolding of the song and leave way for a furious, enslaving duende, friend of the sand winds, who made the listeners rip their clothes...
La Nina de los Peines had to tear her voice because she knew she had an exquisite audience, one which demanded not forms but the marrow of forms, pure music with a body so lean it could stay in the air. She had to rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her duende might come and deign to fight her hand to hand. And how she sang! Her voice was no longer playing, it was a jet of blood worthy of her pain and her sincerity, and it opened like a ten-fingered hand around the nailed but stormy feet of Christ.
Whew! Sure beats Rilke's letter to a young poet, doesn't it? But, despite the beauty of this passionate treatise, how seriously are we to take it? Do we really need to buy into this tradition of the suffering artist? Must everything be broken glass and open veins? As a sort of antidote, let me quote from the surprisingly funny, warm autobiography of Jean Paul Sartre. If you haven't read THE WORDS, I recommend it. What's most relevant for us is a passage in which the aspiring young writer, Jean Paul, who was all of ten years old at the time, imagines himself chosen by the Holy Ghost (which is, I suppose the French Catholic equivalent of the Duende) to be a Suffering Writer:
The Holy Ghost was observing me. It so happened that he had just reached a decision to return to Heaven and abandon human beings; I had just about time enough to offer myself; I showed him the wounds of my soul, the tears that drenched my paper; he looked over my shoulder and read, and his anger subsided. Was he appeased by the depth of my suffering or by the magnificence of the work? I said to myself, by the work, but secretly thought, by the suffering. ... The word genius had always seemed suspect to me: I went so far as to conceive a loathing for it. Where would the anguish be, where the ordeal, where the foiled temptation, where, in short, the merit, if I possessed the gift? ... I accepted my appointment on condition that it be based on nothing, that it shine gratuitously in the absolute void. The Holy Ghost and I held secret meetings:" You'll write," he said to me. I wrung my hands: "What is there about me, Lord, that has made you choose me?" ¾ "Nothing in particular." ¾ "Then why me?" ¾ "For no reason." ¾ "Do I at least have an aptitude for writing?" ¾ "Not at all. Do you think that the great works are born of flowing pens?" ¾ "Lord, since I'm such a non-entity, how could I write a book?" ¾ "By buckling down to it." ¾ "Does that mean anyone can write?" ¾ "Anyone. But you're the one I've chosen." ... I was elected, branded, but without talent; everything would come from my sorrows and long patience... I was faithful to nothing but the royal commitment that was leading me to glory by way of torment.
Between Lorca's dark insistence on pain and Sartre's ironic approach, let me suggest there may be a slightly more salubrious alternative. First of all, writing in the eye of the storm, in mid-agony, is not only excruciating, it's probably counter-productive. It takes time and distance to reach the point where you can write about frightening or painful experiences. It takes seasoning before you can observe such experiences the same way you would your heartbeat or your meandering mind during meditation ¾ without judgment, without control, with acceptance and, if you don't mind my using a word much bandied about, with love. When you come back to experience in writing, you do what you couldn't do at the time you lived it ¾ you submit to it, you give yourself up without struggling. And inevitably you learn something astonishing.
SO, now, instead of Lorca's acrid, torturous duende or Sartre's sublimely indifferent Holy Ghost, let me propose a duende with a difference. My duende doesn't need to rake its sharp claws down my chest to get my attention. It often waits until a storm is long past or a person has dropped out of my life, before it taps me on the shoulder. It is a silent but insistent visitor, and (hallmark of this duende) it is patient; it keeps coming back. I can try like mad to avoid it, flirting with other more seductive writing projects, doing volunteer work, picking fights with people I love. But it won't go away. Rather than diminishing, it grows in importance over time, acquiring like a dirty snowball, layers of associations and memories that stick to it. It usually makes me uncomfortable to look at it, because it is part me, part other. It doesn't tease or wheedle or command; it opens in front of me a path whose end I can't see, but which angles and curves and gets narrower and darker. And then she does this. (Beckon with finger.)
Besides being more patient and slightly less bloodthirsty, my duende can laugh. It finds comedy and delight, so long as they are rooted in human particularity and passion, just as creative and "artistic" as tragedy. It knows you don't have to beat your breast to write from the heart. Or with intensity.
You can prove this to yourself by reading Chris Lynch's wonderful books, Slot Machine and Extreme Elvin, or you can do this classic meditation exercise: The idea is to concentrate on the happiest moment you can remember (I usually focus on my daughter's wedding), and when you feel its energy filling you completely, switch to focusing on the saddest moment you can recall (unfortunately, I have several deaths of loved ones to choose from here). If we had time, I would love to have you try this now, but you can experiment with it later and if you do, I promise, you will find yourself crying at both the sad and the happy memories. In fact, the two experiences will feel very similar in effect, as if the tears had come from the same irrepressible force, the same energy that spills over in infinite variations, countless moments and lives, yours and mine.
So no, I don't think you need to write only about "big" issues (death, incest, abuse, drugs); I think you can write big about little things and have the same impact. If you focus deeply enough to find the core of any experience, you will end up taking the same journey, a journey that moves toward resolution of the temporal and the timeless, the individual and the cosmic. Everyone of us, after all, is dying every minute that we live, and that fact alone invests each of our moments, great and small, with poignancy. It makes, as William Carlos Williams says, "so much depend upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water/beside the white chickens."
Okay. It's all very fine and romantic to talk about the duende or the Holy Ghost or even my patient prodder. But we're technicians as well as writers. So let's get down and dirty. How do we recognize our own duende's handiwork? How do we know we're writing from our core? I once had the tough task of handing a manuscript back to a dear friend and saying, "There's no blood on these pages." My friend, who had already published several short stories and reams of criticism, was appalled. "What do you mean?" he asked me. "I worked harder on this than anything I've written." And then he added the clincher. "I cried when I wrote it!"
If sweat and tears aren't enough, how do we recognize the bloody footprints of the duende? I'm going to give you my checklist. It may not be the same as yours, and like everything said from a lecturn, it's subject to the quirks and frailties of the speaker. But for what they're worth, here are five traits which help me spot duende in my own and other's work:
1. Duende is specific, so individualized and particular it hurts.
2. Duende transcends the particular, because its one special case is generous enough, real enough to include you and me.
3. Duende is intense, with an intensity born, not of control, but of surrender.
4. Duende resonates, effecting a change that stays with both the writer and the reader.
5. Duende is imperfect and knows it. Behind all work marked by duende is humility in the face of the inexpressible.
As soon as I'd put this list together, I noticed something very interesting about it. It comes close to mirroring the qualities of what Abraham Maslow, in his famous book, calls "peak experiences," moments of religious or spiritual enlightenment. It also parallels the oneness experienced in the state of samadhi or yoga. As we go down this list in a bit more detail, be on the lookout, then, for the ways in which the spiritual and the aesthetic overlap time and time again:
1. When you write from the core, you are specific. You deal with the particular, and that particular is, in one way or another, you. Your characters, your settings, your plots are all drawn, of necessity, from the rich mine of what you yourself have seen, done, thought, learned, imagined, overheard, hated, loved or run from. You can write about a barn, but unless it smells of wet wood the way your sister's cabin in Maine does, unless its stalls have all been kicked away at the bottom the way the stables were when you took riding, unless bats hang from its rafters, with all their little claws folded as if they were a congregation praying upside down, unless, in short, the barn comes from you, it won't have duende.
Remember the description of the barn at the beginning of the second chapter in Charlotte's web? It's a long, catalog-like list of specifics, down to and including every piece of equipment that's stored there. This passage has been criticized as meandering and unnecessary, but I think it does just what White meant it to do. Like all fine writing, it seems to me, inevitable. I can't think of a better way to get at the feel of a working barn, at the hugeness, the all encompassing, life sustaining nature of the place.
How close this passage, this litany of details is, to the process described by the ancient yogic sage, patanjali. Patanjali says that by focusing repeatedly and intensely on the outer material layer of things, we can reach what he calls "the subtle essence within." He also suggests that by concentrating on the mind's perception of the object, we will eventually become aware of the simple otherness of the ego and the object.
This seems to me to be just what happens in haiku. These poems, steeped in Zen tradition and replete with duende and with specifics, are characterized by a loving (in the sense of accepting) but detached seesawing between the observed and the observer, between an objective and subjective view of the world -- all achieved by focusing on a few, carefully chosen particulars: From Ryota: "No one spoke, /the host, the guest,/the white chrysanthemums." From Issa: "If my grumbling wife/were still alive/I just might/enjoy tonight's moon.
Is your specificity the work of duende? Here's a test: Ask yourself: Do I already know what this place looks like? Do I already know who my character is? Or am I writing to find out? (If you're taking a trip to somewhere you haven't been, if you're learning about yourself from the world you create, then you're probably writing with duende.)
2. Duende transcends the particular. Its specifics are capacious, real enough to include you and me. Hal Zia Bennet, in his book WRITE FROM THE HEART, notes:
It is the greatest of life's contradictions, perhaps, that when we are most focused on our physical being, we see beyond it into the nonphysical, timeless, the universal. Just as deep meditation takes us to the place where the observer self dissolves, so the boundaries between reader and writer are dissolved when the latter is able to help the former focus on the present, on the senses, and on what we are holding in our hearts and minds at the moment.
What Bennet says about writing and meditation, Maslow says about peak experiences:
In peak experiences, there is a tendency to move more closely to a perfect identify, or uniqueness, or to the idiosyncrasy of the person or to his real self.
But it has also been discovered that precisely those persons who have the clearest and strongest identity are exactly the ones who are most able to transcend the ego or the self and to achieve a unitive consciousness, a sense of the sacred glimpsed in and through the momentary, the secular and the worldly.
When the duende writes of the particular, then, it leads, as inevitably as water tumbling down a falls, to the universal, to a state where observer and observed are one. Hear how this happens to e.e. cummings as he watches an organ grinder's monkey:
(if you toss him a coin he will pick it cleverly from, the air and stuff it seriously in, his minute pocket) Sometimes he does not catch a piece of money and then his master will yell at him over the music and jerk the little string and the monkey will sit, up, and look at, you with his solemn eyes blinky eyeswhichneversmile and after he has caught a, penny or three, pennies he will be thrown a peanut (which he will open skillfully with his, mouth carefully holding, it, in his little toylike hand) and then he will stiffly throw the shell away with a small bored gesture that make the children laugh.
But i don't, the crank goes round desperate elves and hopeless gnomes and frantic fairies gush clumsily from the battered box fatish and mysterious the flowerstricken sunlight is thickening dizzily is reeling gently the street and the children and the monkeyandthe organ and the man are dancing slowly are tottering up and down in a trembly mist of atrocious melody... tiniest dead tunes crawl upon my face my hair is lousy with mutilated singing microscopic things in my ears scramble faintly tickling putrescent atomies, and
i feel the jerk of the little string! the tiny smiling shabby man is yelling over the music i understand him i shove my round red hat back on my head i sit up and blink at you with my solemn eyeswhichneversmile...
Does what you've written cherish the particular and transcend it at the same time? Here's my litmus test: Can you summarize what you've written in 25 words or less? Is cummings' poem about feeling sorry for a monkey? Being a monkey? Animal liberation? Dependency? Oppression? If you can successfully capture your work in a few words, my advice is, do it. But if you can't, if you're trying to express what can't be expressed, to merge the temporal with the timeless, to find connections, meaning, truth in the chaos of existence, you're writing with duende.
3. The duende is intense, with a passion born, not of control but of surrender. You'll hear this faculty forever talking about character-driven fiction. We hammer away at this point because if you give your characters their head, if you trust them by falling into them, you turn your story over to the parts of you that need to speak, to act, to close old wounds. Maslow tells us that cognition in the peak experience is "much more passive and receptive, much more humble, than normal perception. It is much more ready to listen and much more able to hear. In the peak experience, such emotions as wonder, awe, reverence, humility, surrender, and even worship before the greatness of the experience are often reported."
WAITING FOR CHRISTOPHER, the book I've just finished, involves a young woman who kidnaps an abused baby. A wise friend and fine writer told me long before the book was even half finished, that there was a danger, in this plot, of theme overwhelming character, of motivation being subordinated to agenda. In other words, I would need to let duende in and control out.
Because Norma Fox Mazer is who she is and because I trust her, I let my character take me where I did NOT want to go. Together, we went to the edge, to a time when Feena, is forced to abandon the simplistic view that she is the baby's rescuer and his mother is an abuser with a capital A. It took a lot of free writes to overcome my resistance, but Feena and I finally wrote a scene in which she herself, feels helpless before her own anger and irritation at the child she's saved.
Once I looked at the character, not the situation, once I turned in, not out, I replaced agenda with duende. Each time you write, if you don't give yourself to the moment, if you don't experience it in your own inner present, you lose and your reader loses. You give less and get less. It's that simple, that terrible.
So the test here is easy: Were you in control when you wrote? Did what you planned happen? If your answer is yes, you might possibly have written something beautiful, something graceful, but you didn't follow your duende over the cliff.
4. The Duende is resonant; it effects a change in you and your readers. "To have a clear perception," says Maslow, "rather than an abstract or philosophical conviction, that the universe is all of a piece and that one has his place in it ¾ one is a part of it, one belongs in it ¾ can be so profound and shaking an experience that it can change a person's character... forever."
I think writers may have a more intense fear of death (or love of life) than other folks. I think we write (and read) to find out what's noblest and strongest and most resilient about life, what survives. Each time we write a life and see it through trials and tribulations like our own, we find something sacred, something enduring in our natures. Each time we finish reading a book and catch ourselves coming back to the same scene over and over, it is usually to a moment when what we feel and think about life is, like light shining through a leaf, changed and transformed by the particulars of what we've read. (We can all think of scenes like this, moments when a writer's duende has invested life with risk and beauty and meaning. For one of my favorites, I refer you to the funeral scene in Oliver La Farge's Laughing Boy, a Pulitzer prize winner in 1965.)
The test for this aspect of duende, then, is simple and unfailing. "Am I the same person I was before I wrote this? Do I believe the same things, feel and think the same way? (Or if you're appraising someone else's writing, in workshop, say, the question becomes, "Am I the same person I was before I read this?")
5. Duende is imperfect; it deplores the distance between savage, untamable experience and what's on the page. Like T.S. Eliot and Prufrock, it mourns the gap between the dream and the deed:
Would it have been worth it, after all? Would it have been worthwhile, after the sunsets and the door yards and the sprinkled streets? After the novels and the teacups and the skirts that trail along the floor? After this, and so much more, it is impossible to say just what I mean? But as if a magic lantern had thrown the nerves in patterns on a screen. Would it have been worth it, if one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl and turning toward the window, should say, "That is not it at all. That is not what I meant at all.
The test question here: Have I done it? Have I actually written what I meant, captured what I intended, spoken my truth? If your answer is yes, you may have written something inspired by a muse or an angel. But if you wrote with your duende peering over your shoulder, goading you, tickling you with its feathery wings, your answer will invariably be, "Not even close. But wait, listen, I think I know another way... "
I framed the title of this "lecture" as a question, "Does it have to hurt?" Let me close with my answer, one you may or may not feel works for you. It doesn't have to hurt, but it does have to matter. It has to matter so much that it scares you. Denial and blocking, as I proved when I wrote SWEET VALLEY, are never scary. But they dam up everything ¾ the good and the beautiful as well as the unpleasant and frightening. Once you write your hurt or your fear, you find out who's feeling it, what your voice really sounds like. That doesn't mean you're stuck in the mire. It means you write THROUGH it, come out the other side, and live to tell the tale. Or write the book. And it can be a funny story, a wondrous, optimistic book. All because you redeemed life, by facing it, feeling it, loving it. Every bit.
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September 11: The Day the Writing Stopped
When this program started, I used to make terrible fun of the breast-beating, confessional approach most of us take up here in lectures. But in a field like writing, that defies prescriptions and formulas, our individual experience is A) all we have to give you, and B) probably the best kind of teaching there is. Because it demands participation. Today, after I finish speaking, you will have to find out if what worked for me can work for you. And you will need to decide whether what I have to say about one rather spectacular instance of Writer's Block, applies to all the rest as well. I hope that it does.
An important disclaimer before we begin: It is not my intention to discuss here the staggering psychological, social, or political impacts of 9-11. And I certainly can't give you an inspiring first-hand survivor's account of the tragedy. Like most of us in this room, I was lucky. My life, my family, my job -- none of these was directly affected. We lucky ones all have our own second-hand stories of the disaster. This is just one more:
September 11, 2001. My sister in Sweden called and woke me up early that morning. "Are you all right?" she asked. It was a question my sister in New Zealand would repeat a few hours later, then my father in D.C., and another sister in Cambridge. It was the same question I phoned to ask two of my oldest friends, who live in Chelsea and teach ESL to Turkish immigrants in New York City. It is, in fact, the same question we've all been asking each other, ever since. "Are you all right?" Are you still there? Are you still writing?
When the optimism and the good fortune that have characterized our nation for nearly 60 years came tumbling down last fall, the loss felt incomprehensible. When just one person, old or young, loved or despised, dies, the universe misses a particular pattern of chromosomes, of tics and needs, that will never come again. When 5000 people die at once, the dark presses in on all of us.
And that includes those of us who, by profession and inclination, are engaged in the business of celebrating life, of finding meaning in existence and telegraphing it to our readers. The Twin Towers tragedy resulted, among other more horrific losses, in the most massive case of writer's block I've ever seen. Every writer I know stopped ¾ stopped imagining scenes, stopped telling stories, stopped believing in words.
Here's what my students wrote me. This is from Cathleen:
Dear Lou, It seems like a lifetime since I sent my last packet. I have to be honest. Writing does not come easily lately... my best friend said something that triggered the truth of what I've been feeling. "Why can't I write?" I asked her. "What's wrong with me? I always write, that's what helps me to understand the world."
"Maybe it's because you don't think writing can help you understand this," she said. Which is, of course, why she's my best friend."
Here's Joshua's letter:
Lou, today is September 12 and yesterday is a day I can't wrap my mind around. What happened is so difficult to understand -- I'm still trying to soak in the details, but so far nothing makes any sense. I am at a saturation point and can't talk of this easily.
And Emily:
I can't even begin to describe how I have felt as the events of the past week unfolded, except to say I have felt paralyzed. Even small daily functions like showering and eating have been neglected, as I can't seem to get a handle on my thoughts..
And Richie:
That week every ounce of free time I had I spent in front of the television. I have never held my attention on one thing for so long. I honestly couldn't think about anything else. I find it hard even now.
And Lyn:
I admit to being ...dazed by the recent disaster¼ It is a great sense of loss not to have ideas pouring out as they used to...
Yes. How hard it is to write when life, our raw material, seems to have lost its heart, its meaning. And it wasn't only new writers who found themselves bereft, unsteady, wordless. Mary Pope Osborne, author of the Magic Treehouse series, writes in a recent issue of the Author's Guild Bulletin:
Many New York writers I talked to in the days following September 11 found it impossible to write; the only true expression of their horror seemed to be a stunned silence. I myself was caught in a web of anxiety and news gathering, ignoring deadlines, e-mails, business calls.
Paula Fox, in the same issue, says:
We have little context for what happened on September 11th, only an uneasy, flickering awareness that other countries and other cities and peoples have experienced such horrors, a dim awareness next to the events themselves. Perhaps chaos can only be imagined after it has struck.
Now to the confessional part of the program. What about Yours Truly? Was I immune to my students' paralysis? Did I resist Osborne's web of anxiety or Fox's more cerebral self doubts? No, of course not. But I also had my own bizarre response to the trauma. It began with nearly normal symptoms. In the initial grip of panic, I thought of people I had loved and lost years before. For a fragile, uncountable second, I was jealous of their having missed all this. Next, I was relieved, glad I wouldn't have to add their pain and confusion to mine. Last and, to my shame, more enduringly, I was angry at them for not being here with me, not being beside me or within phone's reach, so I could turn to them, or call and ask, "Are you all right?"
Then, in the fearful aftermath, the body counts and the talk of retribution, the rumblings of a national war engine, I was seized with my own peculiar version of writer's block. I call it, in retrospect, Writer's Palsy. I had just seen, after all, that actions speak loudest, most thunderingly of all. And now I doubted words so much that I became a whirlwind of activity. I took to the streets to prove, perhaps, that I was still alive, that I could have an impact on the world. I carried signs, I protested, I marched to Washington, I organized teach-ins and demonstrations. I became a mad, political dervish. And it was only slowly, after weeks, that I came to the sobering realization that the days of Vietnam-style protest were over, that my romantic theatrics, while rooted in pacifism and the doctrine of Ahimsa, to which I was and am still very much committed, were not actually changing anything.
And I wanted desperately to change things. I knew that my first grandchild, born a few weeks before September 11, would not grow up with the images of those skyscrapers, sliced like bread, burnt into her retinas. And I didn't want her to pay for the fear, division, and anger those images had generated in the rest of us.
So I switched my attentions to the internet. Finding a way to put words to work at last, I churned out dozens, scores, hundreds of e-mails; some of which even found their way into print. I think a few of you received this when I sent it out, but for the rest, here's a sample:
In the wake of President Bush's promise to "bring them back, dead or alive," and after hearing countless TV commentators applaud this motive, I am glad I severed myself from the media long enough to attend a vigil last night at a non-denominational sanctuary in my neighborhood. People cried and sang and prayed and talked about what had happened in New York City and outside Washington, D.C. Sitting with them, I watched the candles we'd lit and I found myself thinking of stars and of people, how even though the scale is different, there are some good things, some true things you can say about both. Their variety is infinite, their magnitude can be small or large, their impact on others measurable or not. But when a single human life is lost, just as when one star is snuffed out, the shape of things, the constellation is changed forever.
Among those at the meeting, was a couple whose son died in the collapse of one of the twin towers. Another man lit a candle for his daughter, who walked away whole. Two families had friends whose fate was still in doubt. Three couples were the parents of young children who had watched the destruction "live" on television at their schools, and who kept asking what it all meant.
Every person in that room felt overwhelmed, helpless. But each of us felt something else, too. We were united in our hope that this nation's response will be one of love and support for the victims, not wide-scale, bloody retaliation meant somehow to balance the scales. For the life of us, and for the lives of all those who died so terribly, we could not understand the point of snuffing out other stars across the globe in the name of people we loved.
I was writing again, and being published, after a fashion. But I was not telling stories. My novel, the opening of which I read you last semester, remained untouched. Vini, my young protagonist, whose historical counterpart, Lavinia Fontana, grew up to be among the most famous painters of the Italian Renaissance, is an image maker. But Vini's work as a painter now seemed to me as irrelevant and frivolous in the face our country's choice between moderation and vengeance, war and peace, as did each and every one of my books, which were useless words, fables, stories.
But even as I disparaged stories, they continued to work for all of us. Early on, stories helped us spot humanity in the welter of statistics, the staggering numbers. Yes, nearly 5000 people had died, but that figure was somehow less impactful than the story of two individuals, a man and a woman who chose to die holding hands, as they jumped from the 91st floor of the tallest building of the largest city in the most powerful nation in the world. The dizzying clatter of numbers gave way to a silence in which we could feel, could hear stories like that of the wife of one of the heroes on the plane that crashed in western Pennsylvania, how she sat for four hours with her cell phone in her lap, how she waited past all reason and the last hope, to hear his voice just one more time.
Stories didn't only help us feel the pain, the loss; later, they helped us heal too. 50,000 people might have been in the Towers that day, the statisticians tell us, but only 20,000 showed up for work, and of those, less than 5000 died. That is numerical salvation. But the story of the man who dragged a handicapped office mate and her wheel chair down and down the narrow, smoke-filled stairs, that is acute, vibrant, real. And the woman who always walked past the tantalizing smells of a bakery on her way to work, but who on the morning of September 11, decided for the first time to treat herself, and whose life was therefore saved by a sticky bun, that is salvation we can taste. It is a story we can savor, a story that brings us back to our job, living.
There have always been stories, especially stories of suffering and redemption. Like signal flares from one heart, one village, one generation to the next, stories are the way we get outside our own skins and into someone else's. Just as we've all found in workshop that we can often understand the writing process more clearly by analyzing someone else's writing, so we can often be clearer about the value and beauty of life , about the cost of the unfathomable journey to death, when we experience them through someone else. "Alas, poor Yorick," we say, holding in our hands, not a skinless skull, but a book, a story that brings to life a whole, breathing, fallible, funny, passionate, lazy human being. A human being to whom we are connected by our common frailties and potentials, and by our common end. This commonality and our tender response to it is the stuff of art -- of music, painting, and stories.
John Tarrant has studied English Literature, Australian aboriginals, the music of the Latin mass, Jungian psychology, and Zen Buddhism. He writes more lushly, and lyrically than any non-fiction author has a right to. His book, The Light Inside the Dark, has been by my bedside ever since the towers fell:
"The consoling and alarming discovery," Tarrant tells us, "is that we are not bounded by our skin. What we witness, we become; we are not separate any more than we are lonely. We are the snow making a silence as it falls, the girl picking up her bicycle, the blossom adrift on the bough. This is the insight of Buddhism -- an image of the jeweled net that holds the world and all of us in a seamless continuity. It is also the insight of the creative process, the alchemy by which the harshest touch, the bitterest grief, is altered through our careful openness -- an attention so persevering it becomes a kind of love -- into something astonishing: a pain filled with immortal brightness. Refusing nothing of life, our sorrows, like pails of water, carry their gleam... "
The finest art, then, like the finest moments, reveals our vulnerability, our ignorance, and the bravery of our persistence in honoring this brief, protoplasmic dance of ours by getting out of bed each morning. By putting one foot in front of the other. And by going about our human business all day long until it is time to go back to bed. But this is hard work. And sometimes we lose will. The will to persevere, the will to do what we've always done. The will to write. Such dark, faithless periods don't mean, of course, that the well is dry. They simply mean that we've forgotten how much stories matter, how powerful the smell of sticky buns can be. Why one girl, sitting at her easel more than four hundred years ago, has something to say to us here and now.
How do we remind ourselves of these things? I guess it's no coincidence that it was two writers, one famous and one unknown, who taught me again this fall what countless stories had already tried to show me -- that loss paves the way for renewal, that pain is part of growth.
Let's start with the writer whose work many of you have read. Ed Young, a wise and gentle man, who is a gifted painter and the author of picture books that bless both their child and their adult readers, happened to be the keynote speaker at a conference this fall where Norma, myself, and ten other children's writers were on the docket. Held barely a month after the towers collapsed, this literary festival seemed poorly timed to celebrate children or stories or anything else.
But Ed gave us a special and hopeful gift. He built his brief remarks around his study of Chinese calligraphy. Chinese ideograms, like Sanskrit and Japanese writing, are made up of several characters, each with its own history and meaning. (For a luscious illustration of this, I refer you to Ed's Voices of the Heart, a book I use in meditation almost every day now.) At the Festival, Ed showed us the ideogram for CRISIS, pointing out that it is made up of two seemingly conflicting characters, one signifying DANGER, the other OPPORTUNITY. He told us that he'd thought about this ideogram a great deal since September 11, because that day of crisis had, indeed, brought with it not only unspeakable danger and wholesale destruction, but a tremulous opening as well, a compassionate wound, through which all our hearts poured out, so that our love and caring found a vaster, broader reach than ever before. We became not only sadder and wiser for what we had endured, but more tender, sweeter if you will.
The second, slightly less well known writer who showed me how growth and change are almost always part of calamity, was our own Joshua Keels. I was groping for ways to show myself and you in this lecture how to regroup, recharge after the shock we've all absorbed, when Joshua's packet arrived in the mail. He had mentioned in an earlier letter to me that, as a student, he used to do Tarot readings. I loved the way he talked about the deck, and I encouraged him to incorporate this in his book. He did, and in the process, gave me a gift I pass on here to each of you.
In the chapter enclosed in his next packet, one of Joshua's characters does a Tarot reading for a friend. He turns over a card, the 16th card in the major arcana, The Tower. The illustration on this card, you should know, is just that -- a huge castle tower. A tower that is burning. Although at least six centuries old, this image speaks eerily to what we've just experienced. In some decks, the cap of the tower is a crown, a crown that has broken off and is hurtling through the air. In all decks, this card shows human figures (sometimes two, sometimes more) leaping from the crumbling tower and falling to earth. It is a shocking card, perhaps the most dreaded in the whole deck, for it foretells nothing less than catastrophic, irreversible, and traumatic change.
When Joshua's character, Jim, turns over the Tower, he is fully aware of this card's meaning. He is also aware that nearly always, the trauma of the Tower, like the Chinese ideogram for crisis, includes opportunity for change and growth. Here's a snippet from Joshua's book:
"Your house is in conflict," he said, "old ways are being overthrown. Old order is being destroyed. But liberation comes at a price." Jim always spoke like this when he read a card -- vague and cryptic -- but somehow, dead on."
I should add that the Tower is followed in the major arcana by the seventeenth card, The Star. And if the Tower is the most frightening card in the deck, The Star is the most hopeful. It is rich with purpose and guidance, wisdom and calm. It is not a card of action, but of quiet assurance and peace. (This card features a young woman kneeling by water. From two jars -- in some decks, from her own breasts, she pours two streams of life-giving liquid.) So if I could read our group Tarot, as writers, as a nation, and as a planet, I would hope that, in the same way night follows day, the Star is in our cards.
So, bit by bit, with a little help from friends, students, and from the weedy resilience that seems to be hard-wired into our biology, I, like the country around me, resumed the business of living. For a writer, at least for this writer, where there's life, there's reading. Once I surfaced from the nightmare to deal with my students, to keep engagements like the reading festival, I was back to normal in at least one respect. I was reading again.
So here, half way through my talk, I'm going to give you the first tangible step in my Writer's Recovery Program. I've typed up the program and handed it out to you, partly to lend the false impression that this talk has a structure, and partly because it does actually mirror the process I went through. (You'll also find on the handout the titles of each of the books I'm going to mention today.) Back to Step One: If you can't write, read. Heal yourself with others' stories. Read your way out.
One of my ways out is always through poetry, which generally gets right to the heart of things. Pablo Neruda is a favorite, and even his essays, like those of Garcia Lorca, speak with a poet's fire. A fire that, like the lightening which strikes the Tower, combines annihilation and redemption. This is from an essay called "Themes" from his collection, Passions and Impressions:
While the timeless firefly dissolves its phosphorescent tail into glowing dust, the students of the earth, secure geographers, impresarios, decide to sleep. Lawyers, receivers.
Lonely, alone, a hunter overtaken by night in the deep forest, overwhelmed by the aluminum sky, startled by raging stars, solemnly raises his gloved hand and strikes the site of his heart.
The site of the heart is ours. Lonely, alone, only from the heart, with the aid of black night and deserted autumn, emerge our songs...
Like lava or shadow, like bestial trembling, like bells tolling without purpose, poetry dips its hand into fear, into anguish, into the ills of the heart. The imperious ornaments imposed by solitude and oblivion -- the stars, trees --are eternally external. The poet in mourning black writes with trembling hand, very much alone.
This piece reminds me of Jacob and his lonely all-night wrestling match with the angel. Jacob, you'll remember, survives this unequal struggle, but at a cost. Art, Neruda suggests, is born at night when we refuse to sleep through despair. When we visit the places it's hardest to go. After, we are left with the wounds of grief and loneliness. But our reward is a poem, a way of looking at pain and sadness through angel's eyes, with the long view that transforms them into something necessary, integral, and somehow sacred.
Nazim Hikmet, Turkey's most famous poet, winner of the Nobel prize, and not surprisingly, a friend of his fellow Laureate, Pablo Neruda, wrote a poem called "On Living." Here's the last stanza:
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space --
You must grieve for this right now
you have to feel this sorrow now --
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say, "I lived."
Or, I would add, if you're going to say, "I wrote." So far, I've talked about reading poetry, but I haven't mentioned fiction. It's obvious, though, that most contemporary readers on the prowl for succor, for comfort in strife, will eventually find their way to the novel. The stuff of novels, after all, is life, in all its confusions, frustration, and nobility. The books I was led to when I needed them most were largely about survivors, like the young protagonist of True Believer (Virginia Euwer Wolff), who says,
At night, I put my things together in my backpack
and tell myself I can make it through another day...
I believe in possibility. In the possibility of possibility. Of the world making sense someday.
That lump in my throat that keeps coming back to remind me of my messes: It only stays for a little while. I'm a true believer. And that's a fact.
Survivors like the missionary mother in Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, who tells her dead daughter: "My little beast, my favorite stolen egg. Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. "
But I also took notice of someone who did not survive, someone who got ground under. Susan Vreeland's little book, Girl in Hyacinth Blue. is a collection of stories about a Vermeer painting, and of course, about the role of art, the meaning of beauty in our lives. Perhaps because I needed to get back to Vini at her easel, I found the few brief scenes devoted to Vermeer's daughter, among the most touching in the book. This young girl has an artist's soul, wants very much to paint. But unlike Vini who, a century and a half earlier, was blessed with a father who taught her to paint, Magdelena Vermeer is not so lucky. Johannes has no time or inclination for anything but his own work. He never notices how his daughter yearns to create:
If only she could have colors of her own, and brushes. She wouldn't just paint pictures of women inside cramped little rooms. She'd paint them out in marketplaces, bending in the potato fields, talking in doorways in the sunlight, in boats on the Schie, or praying in the Oude Kerk. Or she'd paint people skating, fathers teaching their children on the frozen Schie.
Fathers teaching their children. The thought stopped her.
Looking from the sentry tower at a cloud darkening the river, she knew, just as she knew she'd always have washing and mending to do, that it would not be so. She'd worn herself out with wishing, and turned to go. She had to be home to help with supper.
On a spring day that began in no special way, except that she had climbed the town wall, and all over Delft lime trees lining the canals had burst into chartreuse leaves, and light shone through them and made them yellower ... on that spring-certain day, out of some unknown, unborn place came that scream. "I hate to mend," she shouted to the walls, to Mother, to anyone. "It's not making anything."
Somewhere in the recesses of my distracted brain, then, I knew who I was, what I needed to do. And if I didn't know it, every book I picked up was telling me: No pain, no calamity is any bigger, or any less staggering, than the loss of a single life. And writing, my kind of writing, was about preserving life, bringing it back, throwing it a party. (Remember that beautiful birthday party that ends True Believer? Remember the best present La Vaughn gets? It's a book. About Michaelangelo, and it gives her permission to paint on her ceiling.)
But if at some level, I knew who I needed to be, I was still being driven by guilt at not doing more. In my desperation to forge a role for myself, a place in all this, I had begun to turn the whole world into one self-centered, self-righteous and ultimately tiresome story about -- guess who?
Mary Pope Osborne, again from the Authors' Guild Bulletin:
After about a week, I realized that in my mind this story was turning into a story about me, my pain, my fear. Appalled at myself, I decided I had to sit down and try to write again..."
I, too, eventually made the same decision, but I was a little bit slower on the uptake than Mary. Waylaid by peace activism, my story took on mythic proportions. Each time someone grabbed a placard from my hand and threw it in the street, each time an angry passerby gave me the finger, yelled, "Nuke the Ragheads," or spat in my general direction, I became a heroine, brave, determined, driven to lonely defiance by the fury and anger of those around me.
It took weeks, as I've said, before I realized that anger wasn't the response I wanted to elicit. That I was bringing out the worst, not the best, in people. And that Louise, Our Lady of Patience and Peace, was pretty full of herself -- and pretty boring. Even to me. "I don't want to protest anymore," I eventually found myself saying, in the manner of Angelica Vermeer. "It isn't making anything."
That was when, as I mentioned, I started disseminating material over the internet. I had at last taken Step Number Two: Get Over Yourself. This is a step related to recovery from almost all cases of writer's block, not just the one following 9-11. I know writers who use their fallow periods to define themselves. It's called Writer's Block, isn't it? But we need to be careful not to romanticize this business. Everyone, lord knows, has days when they don't want to do what they do. Yet you don't see guys hauling sixteen wheelers pulling over by the side of the road, putting their hands to their brows, and wailing, "I've got Truck Driver's Block!" Why should we be so privileged? Poor, poor, pitiful me is a fine song, after all, but it makes a lousy story.
But wait a minute, I wasn't writing stories. I was still on the internet, publishing letters, tracts, calls to action. I had put words to work, all right. In a sweat shop. No breaks, no laughing, no daydreaming, no standing up from your desk to watch the sun set. None of the things that feed art. Because, in truth, I still wasn't making anything, so much as I was trying to make something happen. I had an agenda. Which only goes to prove I had skipped right over Step Number Three in the Recovery Program: Stay Open, Reconnect.
I suppose the worst thing we could have done, and the one thing we all did after September 11, was to stay in front of the television, watching those buildings fall, not once, not twice, but dozens and dozens of times. Meanwhile, life went on; it continued to happen, but without us. Which means we nursed our shock and our horror at the same time that we lost touch with the resilience, the incorruptibility of the world around us.
I, who haven't watched television in years, spent September and October in front of my TV and my computer, soaking up grief and radiation. Where do I wish I had gone after the first set of film clips? And before I sat down at my computer? Where did I eventually find enough hope and curiosity to restart my story engine? In my own backyard, Dorothy. That's where, shortly after Christmas, I watched a squirrel carrying a huge, parachute shaped bundle of leaves in her teeth. She dragged it up nearly a hundred feet to the top of one of our spindly NC loblolly pines. From there, I heard industrious, scuffling noises as she tamped the leaves down into what I could see was already a sizeable nest. Then, down she came again, refilled, and made the long trip back up.
I couldn't help thinking, as I watched her, of the people in those high-flying office buildings, people who bought stocks, made plans, had families. Were all their hopes, their busy days a cipher now? Had they signified nothing? I studied the squirrel with an angel's eye, knowing that tomorrow, or next week, or next month, the wind or rain could destroy everything she had built in a single instant. But that outcome seemed totally unrelated, irrelevant to her determined journeys up and down the trunk. Those journeys were not defined, for me, by their futility, anymore than the dazzle of a mayfly's wing is cancelled by its imminent doom. Long or short, stunted or soaring, life has its own meaning, and speaks eloquently in whatever time it has.
Living in the country, as I do now, I've been privileged to witness this eloquence, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, again and again -- I've seen a frog carry a large branch under its arm, to a spot on a sunny rock, just so it could sit in the shade; I've seen a squirrel pelt a cat with acorns from its high perch in a tree. I've watched a lizard, its skin torn half off in a fight, struggling to live till it reached its mate; a cat, bitten by a snake, puffed to twice its size, still looking for a stroke, a word; a fish leaping from its safe pond to nose another fish off a sand bar and back into life-giving water, while it remained stranded on the sand. The lesson is simple: Life is everywhere; so is pain, so is grace.
Non-fiction, it seems to me, is about all of us, and therefore applicable to one of us. But fiction is about one of us, and therefore applicable to all of us. And once I took Step 3, once I got outside again, once I stayed open and paid attention, I realized that that's what I want to write about: One fish. One squirrel. One human, scrambling to make the best of things.
Hundreds of firemen rushed up the stairways of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. Hundreds never came down. But only one had an argument with his wife the night before about their son's low math score. Only one phoned her that morning to tell her that he guessed she was right, that maybe he had been too hard on Jess. Maybe there were more important things than math. As if he knew, she would say later, that he wasn't coming home.
Thousands of people were spared on September 11 because they didn't show up for their jobs in the Twin Towers. Only one was late because he sat on his glasses as he sank gratefully into the last free seat in the whole subway car. His optician, whose office was in the basement of the Trade Center, and this early morning customer rushed out of the building together, then stood and watched it collapse. Only one woman woke that morning to find her child burning with fever, and so stayed home, reading the same picture book eleven times, cursing the cold germs that had cost her a temp job and saved her life. Sorry, Tolstoy. We humans are not only unhappy each in our own way, but we are uniquely, individually saved as well. It's just that, without losses and tragedies, without dark nights of the soul, our bright, sun-filled days tend to run together. Without pain, we take joy for granted.
Almost five months after the Towers fell, I am finally taking the last step in the Recovery Program. I am writing again. Each morning now, I wake up with Vini. She chatters away at me, not angry over my long absence, holding back nothing. And now, thanks to the Tower and the Star, the lost and the saved, I have found a way to tell her story. It will involve suffering and redemption, and it will transform her. She will lose her sight, and though she recovers it, she will never, never forget what a world without colors is like.
I've shared with you, in this talk, my personal journey from voicelessness to remembering who I am, what I do as a writer. This journey is universal in its trajectory, in its rising action, its struggle, its resolution. But it's unique, too. It's a story no one else can tell you. It's a story everyone else can tell you. I'd like to close with the story the way Louise Glück tells it. Her poem, "The Wild Iris" is from her collection of the same name. The title of the poem tells you that it is spoken by a flower, a single sticking point of beauty that has just made its way out of the dark. Listen and take heart:
The Wild Iris
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.
Thank you.
(The handout that accompanied this lecture appears below.)
One Writer's
4-Step Recovery Program
: If you can't write, READ.Step One
Step Two: Stop whining; the world isn't about you.
Step Three: Stay open, pay attention, RECONNECT.
Step Four: Write! Write! Write!
NB. You can combine Steps 3 and 4 by assigning an arbitrary geographic limit -- ten paces or ten miles. Walk, bike, or get in your car and "go the limit." Then stop, look, care, write.
Books that Helped
Glück, Louise. The Wild Iris. The Ecco Press, NY, NY, 1992.
Hikmet, Nazim. Beyond the Walls: Selected Poetry. Anvil Press, 2001.
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. Harper Collins, NY, NY, 1998.
Neruda, Pablo. Passions and Impressions. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, NY, NY, 1980.
Fully Empowered
Tarrant, John. The Light Inside the Dark. Harper Collins, NY, NY, 1998.
Vreeland, Susan. Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Penguin Books, NY, NY, 1999.
Wolff, Virginia Euwer. True Believer. Atheneum, NY, NY, 2001.
Young, Ed. Voices of the Heart. Scholastic, NY, NY, 1992.
End of Lecture. You can click here to return Home or read the next lecture below.
Thou Shalt Not Tell... Or Shalt Thou?
A Reconsideration of the First Commandment for Writers
"Most of what calls itself contemporary is built, whether it knows it or not, out of a desire to be liked. It is created in imitation of what already exists and is already admired. There is, in other words nothing new about it. To be [truly] contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain. Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a new idea into the air."
- Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook
Despite the fact that we know better, that we’ve been cautioned again and again not to write with an eye to the market, most of us can’t help peeking from time to time. It’s fun, after all, to see what everyone else is up to and to spot trends. I, for one, always get a little thrill of self-congratulation when I can say I saw it coming. So I’m going to try my hand here at predicting the "next new thing;" and it may surprise you that I’m betting it’s an old one. If you want to catch the wave of the future, I’d suggest you look to the past.
Here, by way of example, is an excerpt from an author whose work has caught fire with young readers in the last several years:
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful and had pleasant facial features, but they were very unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery and despair. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.
As many of you know, this passage comes from The Bad Beginning, the first novel in the wildly popular Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, whose real name is Daniel Handler.
Interesting, isn’t it, how this modern riff of Handler’s recalls Dickensian plots? How the shadows of Little Nell, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield fall large across this passage? Note, too that the protagonists here are named after one of the nineteenth century’s dark darlings, Charles Baudelaire, the author of Les Fleurs de Mal, the Flowers of Evil.
And here’s a tempting tidbit from an even newer book, one that won the 2004 Newbery Medal:
"Once upon a time," he read aloud, relishing the sound. And then, tracing each word with his paw, he read the story of a beautiful princess and the brave knight who serves and honors her.
Despereaux did not know it, but he would need, very soon, to be brave himself.
Have I mentioned that beneath the castle there was a dungeon? In the dungeon, there were rats. Large rats. Mean rats.
Despereaux was destined to meet those rats.
Reader, you must know that an interesting fate (sometimes involving rats, sometimes not) awaits almost everyone, mouse or man, who does not conform.
I know you all recognize this moment from The Tale of Despereaux by our own Visiting Writer and Commencement Speaker, Kate DiCamillo. This excerpt, too, recalls nineteenth-century literature. Remember the way Charlotte Bronte, who wrote about another dreamy, book-loving rebel, addresses us as "Gentle Reader?" Remember how George Eliot constantly interrupts her narratives to comment on her characters and her job as their creator? All of which means I wasn't at all surprised two days ago, when Kate and I were talking, to hear her, in the middle of our conversation, quote Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville's bizarre, immoveable protagonist!
Okay. I'm going to stop here to ask you all a question, and I want an honest show of hands, despite the abject humiliation that is almost sure to follow! How many people here have used the device of having a character look into a mirror in order to avoid TELLING your readers what she looks like? (I raise my hand with the rest.) Guilty as charged. To the dungeon with all of us! Notice, in contrast, the bravado with which Handler simply describes his long-suffering protagonists. And observe, too, please, that his description comes off as a great deal fresher than our contorted and by now clichéd attempt to circumvent the forthright delivery of necessary information.
Here’s another question: How many of you have avoided exactly the sort of moralizing Kate delivers with such panache at the end of the passage I quoted from her book? (I raise my hand again.) Yep. We’ve been taught, well taught, you and I, to show our themes through our characters’ actions and words, to painstakingly suppress any impulse to tell our readers what to think.
And then along comes an author like this, an author (mark me, now) who knows the rules perfectly well and is adept at applying them, but who suddenly decides, rules be damned. An author who has a long enough view to recognize that nothing is new under the sun. Nothing except the story she needs need to tell right now, at this very minute, and who also recognizes that contemporary wisdom may not help her find the best way to tell it. She knows that, yes, good books, the great books, are character-driven, but she also knows that there’s someone else in that driver’s seat. Someone equally indispensable to the process of story.
I’ve suggested that DiCamillo and Handler share a debt, a debt to the 19th century writers they both clearly know and love. This is a pair of authors whose work is testimony to the fact that good reading is crucial to good writing. Because what’s happened in their books is not something unprecedented, but something missed, something yearned for, something sensible and honest that once characterized the majority of novels written in the western world. That something is the story teller.
Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Baudelaire, while worldly, sophisticated and, in the case of the late Dickens and Baudelaire, increasingly dark and despairing, were still story tellers. They did not attempt, like the Wizard of Oz, to foster the awkward illusion that no one is behind the curtain; they made no bones about the fact that their stories were art and that they were artists.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. Somewhere between existentialism and deconstruction, we lost the author. Contemporary Realism now insists that the world of the book is real and that characters act and speak on their own. Modern writers and literary critics, especially those writing in the field of children's literature, have worked themselves into a fetishistic stupor that can’t see beyond first person, present tense. To reveal the storyteller, to comment on events, or - perish the thought - to be swept away by them, is considered egotistical, passé, and a violation of the First Commandment for Writers: (audience says with me) Show, Don’t Tell.
Even as we say these words, I see the initials S.D.T. in blazing red ink, scribbled derisively across thousands of pages, yours and mine, by hundreds of editors, college comp teachers, and MFA instructors. Yes. I confess! I’ve succumbed at times myself to the lure of "The Rule." It is soothing, after all, to have at least one pure inviolable dictum I can pass on to my students. It helps persuade me that I am teaching a craft, not an impossible mystery; that I have something tangible to offer.
So, sadly, I can imagine a new writer being admitted to this program, an older, seasoned author as some of our community are. And I blush to imagine further that one day, in the grip of S.D.T., I might scold him in my illegible scrawl on the side of his manuscript: "T. S., you’ve already shown us your narrator is aging; you’ve established this through very effective concrete detail in the rolled trousers, the hair parted over the bald spot, and the dentures that can be dislodged by a peach pit. Do you really need this rhetorical outburst, "I grow old! I grow old?"
Well, of course you do! T.S. Eliot’s man Prufrock is, by nature, all plaints, all woe is me, all what’s the use. He is excess; he is heightened sensibilities and endless talk without action. So the telling here is in character and on target. It is excruciatingly right. Does this one poetic exception, though, give the rest of us license to dispense with showing, to abandon sensory detail and concrete imagery in favor of sweeping generalities and impassioned pronouncements? Does the brave, born-again narrative of Handler or DiCamillo give us permission to preach, to teach, to expound?
Not always. But sometimes. What I hope this talk does, you see, is not create a stampede toward unbridled rhetoric, but restore a delightful tool to your writer’s tool belt, one that has been all but denied you, one that can, if used with discrimination and skill, add a great deal to your artist’s world and vision and to the world of your readers. I want to promote among us today an openness to coming full circle, to returning to a relationship between author and reader and between the teller of tales and his story. For too long, it seems to me, contemporary criticism and pedagogy have refused to acknowledge how much lyricism and authorial voice can add to fiction. It has been far simpler, less complicated to reject them out of hand. But look what has happened as a result: The blanket acceptance of Show, Don’t Tell has effectively bound modern authors, and turned narrative into the idiot relative we hide in the basement and bring out only for transitions and minimal expositions.
It’s gotten so that, anxious to turn transparent, to disappear, we writers have confined ourselves to first person and present tense. The result is that we have a hard time telling, even when it’s called for. Where our predecessors would have blithely announced, "Three days later," or "He’d been in jail for ten years, and never learned to appreciate four-course meals," many of us today perforate our stories with ellipses or rely on vignettes, prologues, and multiple view points to make connections clear. We force our characters to peer into mirrors, we find unlikely occasions for someone to call out their names rather than risk simply telling them to our readers. We tend toward the most improbable expository moments, where teachers announce the grade level of the class they’re talking to, or suddenly sensitive protagonists intuit the emotional responses of those around them. Like the Wizard, we keep pushing Dorothy away from that curtain, when what she might really need is to see how hard, how industriously we’re working back there for her approval.
Yes, you’re right. This diatribe is being brought to you by the same faculty member who usually warns against getting in the way of your characters and their story. Who chastises you for flexing your stylistic and metaphoric muscles at the expense of immediacy and authenticity. And yes, again, the times they are a-changing, and readers today no longer have the patience that characterized book lovers before the advent of television and film.
But there is, nonetheless, room for sometimes ending the pretense that stories are real life. For going back to the fire, where we sit together and listen spellbound. Where we know that what we are hearing is not reality, but something different, something better. Where we acknowledge the magic of make believe and the relationship between teller and listener, or author and reader.
There is not only room for such acknowledgement; there is, I contend, a positive hunger for it. A hunger so implacable that it will reward more and more experiments like DiCamillo’s and Handler’s. I know, you see, that I am not the only one who adores Thomas Hardy, whose moors stretch for pages; and Rudyard Kipling, who addresses me as, Best Beloved; and George Eliot, whose triumph, Middlemarch, is as much about the author and her times as about the characters in her story. There are many of us who steal away to the nineteenth century when the 21st overwhelms us. Why? Because telling, the way these folks did it, IS showing. It shows us (For those of you who love to take notes, grab those pencils, a list follows! They’ll be six items, so leave enough space):
1. WHO THE AUTHOR IS -- not by way of puffery, but to make us secure, comfy, patient, involved; to let us know we’re in the care of a story teller whom we can trust. Here’s Eliot opening Chapter 15 of Middlemarch and complaining, ironically enough, that she doesn’t have the leisure to carry on about this and that, after the fashion of earlier authors:
...Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example, and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot house. I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
At present (then) I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had seen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch. For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown.
Hmmmm! Delicious! Who wouldn’t want to keep reading? Who wouldn’t be lulled by the storytelling voice here, by the companionable way in which our responses and opinions are solicited? By the way the author admits her limitations at the same time she bowls us over with her canniness about human nature. Robertson Davies in the lecture series at Yale I recommended you read in preparation for this talk, makes a point of stressing the author apart from her story. "When we read," he says, "we must always be aware of the mind that lies behind the book. Not that we may be wholly persuaded by it, or that we should have no minds of our own, but that we may share it and be shown new meanings by it."
Of course, to be open in this way calls for certain qualities on the part of a reader, which leads to the second thing the great, windy novels of the nineteenth century show us:
2. RESPECT FOR THE READER’S ROLE -- this sense of inclusion is, for me, an important part of my delight in "old fashioned" writing, and I can think of no better example of an author who continually reaches out to his young audience than Rudyard Kipling. In How the Whale Got His Throat, from the Just So Stories, as in all of Kipling, the read-aloud rhythms are stunning. Here, this is due, in no small measure, to his asides to the reader:
So the whale swam and swam to latitude Fifty North, longitude Forty West, as fast as he could swim, and on a raft, in the middle of the sea, with nothing to wear except a pair of blue canvas breeches, a pair of suspenders
(you must particularly remember the suspenders, Best Beloved), and a jack-knife, he found one single, solitary shipwrecked Mariner, trailing his toes in the water. (He had his Mummy’s leave to paddle, or else he would never have done it, because he was a man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity.)Then the whale opened his mouth back and back and back till it nearly touched his tail, and he swallowed the shipwrecked Mariner, and the raft he was sitting on, and his blue canvas breeches, and the suspenders
(which you must not forget), and the jack-knife -- He swallowed them all down into his warm, dark, inside cupboards, and then he smacked his lips -- so, and turned round three times on his tail.Throughout this story, Kipling continues to check on us, to make sure we remember the suspenders, and when at last the Mariner who is, as you’ll recall, a man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity, uses them to tie open the whale’s mouth, our story teller chortles triumphantly, "now you know why you were not to forget the suspenders!)
And just in case you think first-person narration precludes "breaking the third wall," (I've borrowed this term from the theatre, where occasionally, an actor may speak through the invisible barrier that separates him from the audience and address them directly), let Bronte’s Jane Eyre show you otherwise. The opening of Chapter XI is a virtuoso combination of a first-person narrator combined with the transparent acknowledgement of story as art:
A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote, with such large figured papering on the walls as inn rooms have; such a carpet, such furniture, such ornaments on the mantelpiece, such prints, including a portrait of George the Third, and another of the Prince of Wales, and a representation of the death of Wolfe. All this is visible to you by the light of an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, and by that of an excellent fire, near which I sit in my cloak and bonnet; my muff and umbrella lie on the table, and I am warming away the numbness and chill contracted by sixteen hours’ exposure to the rawness of an October day. ...Reader, though I look comfortably accommodated, I am not very tranquil in my mind....
Doesn't this sound daring? Modern? As bold as meta-fiction? How I wish more contemporary authors would bring us, faces warmed by the fire, back into the intimate story circle this way: When Kipling urges us to find the place he’s talking about in our atlas or encourages us to color his illustrations because his publishers won’t let him; when Kate and Lemony Snicket send us to our dictionaries, (You do know, don’t you, Listeners Dear, that the two of them do this with some regularity?) they are all acknowledging our crucial role in the process of reading. They are agreeing with Robertson Davies (again from the Yale series) that writing is meant for performance, that "great works of the imagination -- the masterworks of poetry, drama, and fiction -- are simply indications for performance, which you hold in your hand, and like musical scores they call for skilled performance by you, the artist and the reader. Literature is an art, and reading is also an art..."
Which brings us to the third thing nineteenth century writers show us with their telling. Because like all art, fiction can be used to paint
3. THE BIG PICTURE -- to tell us what God or grace is like; or how an entire town thinks or a place feels. How often, especially when dealing with an unreliable narrator, who sees only one small part of the world, contemporary authors must yearn to do what writers a hundred years ago didn’t hesitate to do -- escape from their protagonist’s view point and put on large, impartial spectacles that see for miles and miles. Remember the super-size opening of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, a sprawling catalog of two continents that begins,
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...
Dickens’ Big Picture ends a full chapter later, like a telescope closing, with a single sentence that finally brings us down to the "small creatures" about whom he plans to tell his story. This sort of God’s eye view, a view larger, more knowing than any one character’s, a view too huge and generous to be conveyed by mere showing, earned E.B. White several scathing reviews when he described Wilbur’s world at the beginning of Chapter Three in Charlotte’s Web:
The barn was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell -- as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world.
White's lengthy description goes on for two pages, through a catalog of rakes and grain and hoes, until we return to the story with the sentence, "And the whole thing was owned by Fern’s uncle, Mr. Homer L. Zuckerman." The human mind, like the human eye, is a flexible piece of equipment, suitable for both narrow and expanded focus. What fun, then, what good practice, and what healthy mutual respect is involved when authors give young readers a chance to make such adjustments in perspective.
It’s fun, too, to roll words around on your tongue or in your head. To be shown, as so many of the nineteenth century novelists showed us,
4. THE BEAUTY AND DELIGHT OF LANGUAGE, language chosen with relish, artfully employed, and perfectly suited to the character and occasion at hand. Davies, as you read in the lectures I recommended, believes the magic of the storyteller resides, primarily, in his language. "It is extraordinary," he says, "how few people have any real feeling for language, or any sense that it is one of the greatest and most inexhaustible playthings with which our human state has presented us." For a sense of this playfulness, we only have to turn to Kipling, who read all his work out loud and therefore tempts us with such exotic treats as the "great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees." (That's from "The Elephant's Child.")
But for sheer beauty of language, is there anyone who can compare with Herman Melville on one of his Shakespearean rampages? No real person, mind you, is likely to expend the words or time Ahab does at every plot turn of his desperate life, but who cares? This isn’t life, it’s magic. Listen to the tired captain, then, standing watch with his first mate the night before his last three fateful encounters with the white whale. Here’s just a bit of his beautiful, mad two-page soliloquy:
"Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day- very much such a sweetness as this- I struck my first whale- a boy-harpooner of eighteen! Forty- forty- forty years ago!- ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without- oh, weariness! heaviness! ...I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!- crack my heart!- stave my brain!- ... Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!- lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!"
Moby Dick is not an easy novel to read. It is dense and varied and studded with gems that must be held up to the light, gone over and over to fully appreciate. In her book, Living By Fiction, a collection of essays almost as dense and rich, Annie Dillard suggests that contemporary prose styles can be divided into two schools, the plain and the fancy, which last she also calls "fine writing." She might as well be describing Melville in particular, as fine writing in general, when she claims it "is not a window, not a document, not a surgical tool. It is an artifact and an achievement; it is at once an exploratory craft and the planet it attains; it is a testimony to the possibility of the beauty and penetration of written language."
Okay. Now it’s time to put away those mirrors we confessed to using earlier, and to consider the fifth thing nineteenth century telling shows us:
5. WHAT SOMEONE (or something) LOOKS LIKE, REALLY LOOKS LIKE:
In a wonderful New Yorker article on what he calls hard-to-read writers, Jonathan Franzen describes one modern novelist’s insistence on constructing a character entirely from dialogue. (No transitions, no narrative, no description!) This is not so far, is it, from the challenge we set ourselves in most of our first-person fiction? Franzen, having spent some dizzying hours with this experiment, suggests that eschewing description is "like boxing with one arm tied behind your back." He is not persuaded by the argument that imagination can make a character more real to us than description imposed by an author. "In fact," he says, "the work of reading [a description-less book] makes me wonder if our brains might not be hard-wired for conventional storytelling, structurally eager to form pictures from [narrative] sentences, [even ones] as featureless as ‘She stood up.’"
It could be argued, and has been, that it is more democratic and inclusive to present a character in whose mind and heart we can make ourselves at home, but whose externals are up for grabs; who, like the protagonist of Virginia Euwer Wolff’s True Believer, can be considered black or white, Hispanic or Indian, depending on a reader’s sympathies. But does this, in fact, add or detract from a book’s credibility as a "slice of life?" Don’t we see the people around us (and ourselves) with more clarity than that? And isn’t there a certain undeniable verisimilitude in the way we meet characters in the older novels, approaching them from a distance first, then moving closer and closer, rather than being plunged immediately into their consciousness on the first page? Here’s one of Thomas Hardy’s most famous heroines, reintroduced to the reader in the novel’s second part, after she has been seduced by an arrogant wastrel and has run home, a wiser, sadder woman. Note, by the way, the switch to present tense once this passage is underway, a change that insists on the reader as observer, even though the action of the novel unfolds in the past tense. Notice, too, how in a time before film, Hardy moves from a long-distance shot to a close-up:
The women--or rather girls, for they were mostly young--wore drawn cotton bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and gloves to prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble. There was one wearing a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured tight-sleeved gown, another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the reaping-machine... This morning the eye returns involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket...
Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony. From the sheaf last finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her left palm to bring them even. Then stooping low she moves forward, gathering the corn with both hands against her knees...holding [it] in an embrace like that of a lover. ....At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her disarranged apron, or to pull her bonnet straight. Then one can see the oval face of a handsome young woman with deep dark eyes and long heavy clinging tresses, which seem to clasp in a beseeching way anything they fall against. The cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular, the red lips thinner than is usual in a country-bred girl.
It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise d’Urberville, somewhat changed -- the same, but not the same.
This emphasis on the surface, it should be added, only serves to heighten what Hardy turns to next -- the changes that have happened inside his character.
To finish our list, let’s look at the last thing that artful and unapologetic telling can show us,
6. WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS -- The most heinous crime of all, according to modernism, is to tell your reader how to feel. Preaching seldom works, it’s true, nor sentimental manipulation, but the great ones can break even this rule. Here’s George Eliot, like a Greek chorus, commenting on the way one of her characters, after being rejected by a first woman decides to pay court to a second:
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, ‘Oh, nothing!’ Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts -- not to hurt others.
And here’s Melville again, or rather Ishmael, his mouthpiece, after Ahab has promised to chase the White Whale around the world:
Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.
Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
Today’s young readers don’t have much experience with 19th century literature. And if the impetus driving current "No child left behind" programs continues, there will soon be nothing but test-based reading in the schools. Will that, do you suppose, end the need for story telling in the old fashioned sense of the word? I doubt it.
In 1952, a book called Ginger Pye won the Newbery medal. Eleanor Estes, a master at conveying individual points of view through third person, undoubtedly shared her protagonists’ prejudice, but I, too, remember, as a new reader, feeling just the way Rachel and Jerry do in the following passage:
They both always opened a book eagerly and suspiciously looking first to see whether or not it was an 'I' book. If it were they would put it aside, not reading it until there was absolutely nothing else. Then, at last, they would read it. But, being an 'I' book, it had to be awfully good for them to like it. Only a few, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and Swiss Family Robinson, for example, survived the hard 'I' book test. These were among their best beloved in spite of the obvious handicap.
So even if you’ve never heard of George Eliot or Thomas Hardy, you can still crave the security of being cradled by a brilliant story teller, who holds you in the arms of their book and murmurs comforts as the scenes unfold. Even if you’ve never experienced Melville, you can still thrill to the majestic cadences of a storytelling voice that thunders and booms, that hurls fireworks and rockets skyward on every page.
Am I suggesting here that modern writers turn back the clock? No. Of course not. While I can’t claim to have seen the "hundreds" of moors he has, I agree with Robertson Davies that Hardy’s chapter-long description of Egdon Heath, at the opening of Return of the Native, strains the patience of anyone born in the television age. We admire Gothic Cathedrals, after all, but few contemporary architects devote themselves to duplicating their grandeur. What many try to do, however, is incorporate the best qualities of the old style with the new, and this is what I am, respectfully, recommending to you.
In bringing this talk to a close, then, I’d like to give kudos to a few more contemporary authors who have managed a combination of showing and telling and who may, therefore, be riding the wave of the future. Let me say first that I think it’s a bit easier when we write picture books, rather than novels, to embrace the inclusive nature of old-fashioned stories, to invite the participation of young readers the way Kipling did, the way Munro Leaf does in Ferdinand the Bull. (Remember when Ferdinand inadvertently shares a clover with a bumble bee? Remember how the narrator stops, before telling us what happens next, and asks: "If you were a bee and a bull sat on you, what would you do?") It’s easier, too, for picture book authors to have open, riotous fun with language. Remember Phyllis’ Rattle Trap Car? And Laura’s See You Later, Alligator? Or Tim’s On Tumbledown Hill?
Chafing under the yoke of Show, Don’t Tell, several authors of longer books, too, have managed to tell things, big things beyond the scope of a single character or point of view. Lovely Bones is an example of an adult novel that achieves The Big Picture by letting its protagonist speak from beyond the grave. With much less fanfare, our program’s friend and a former teacher here, Jacqui Woodson, has done the same thing in Behind You, her sequel to If You Come Softly. Here, soaring way beyond the confines of contemporary realism and, not unusually for a Woodson character, employing beautiful language in the process, is Jeremiah, the boy who was killed at the end of If You Come Softly. As you listen to him, hear how Woodson has dropped the narrow, showing "I" in favor of a telling, universal "you":
You do not die. Your soul steps out of your body, shakes itself hard because it’s been carrying the weight of your heavy skin for fifteen years. Then your soul lifts up and looks down on your body lying there -- looks down on the blood running onto concrete, your eyes snapped open like the pages in some kid’s forgotten picture book, your chest not moving. Your soul sees this and feels something beyond sadness -- feels its whole self whispering further away. Shhh. Shhhh. Shhhh - past the trees in Central Park, past the statues and runners and children playing on swings. Shhh. Shhh. Shhh. Over yellow taxicabs and late-afternoon flickering streetlights. Shhh away from the dusting of snow, the white tips of trees, the darkening sky... But you do not die. Each breath your soul takes is cool and reminds you of a taste you loved a long time ago. Licorice. Peppermint. Rain.
Okay, so we’ve got Kate and Lemony Snicket breaking the third wall, even moralizing now and then. We’ve got Jacqui painting a big picture with a broad and rapturous brush. Any more adventurous souls tipping the sacred Show, Don’t Tell cow?
(Whisper) Well, if you promise to keep it just among us, I’ll share with you the fact that we are harboring one such pioneer in our very midst. Marion Dane Bauer, Newbery Honor winner, past Department Chair, beloved mentor -- who would have thought that she is, even now, contemplating a series of retrospective short stories. These shorts, like Jacob Have I Loved, the novel that earned Katherine Paterson considerable critical disapproval when it was first published, look back on youth. Instead of a child a few years older than her readers, the narrator of Marion’s book is Marion, a grown woman whose perspective on her past combines the now passions of childhood with the then second thoughts of adulthood. This backward glance often results in wonderful, wise, and unashamed telling. Here’s a snippet about the narrator’s Episcopalian background:
Instead of a Pope we had the Archbishop of Canterbury, but nobody had to listen to him unless they wanted to. That’s what it was like being an Episcopalian. You picked and chose, like at a potluck. You took what you wanted and let the rest stay on the table. If you wanted to listen to the Archbishop of Canterbury, you did. If you didn’t... well, who was there to tell you you had to? Nobody ever said, "If you do this or don’t do that, you’ll go to hell." Nobody ever talked about hell... or even sin.
Which is not to say that we didn’t know about it. I don’t think it was possible to grow up in the middle of the twentieth century without knowing about sin, even if you weren’t Catholic. For us Episcopalians there was, after all, that moment, just before we went up for Holy Communion, when the priest knelt before the altar and said, "Lord, we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table." And we knew ...we knew.
John Rechy, the author whose website I mentioned in my lecture description, claims that the greatest art always involves telling. "They don’t call it story showing," he rants in his fun and bitter diatribe about what he calls the "major nonsense" of trying to Show, not Tell. He insists that showing needs telling and vice versa. And he makes the (forgive me; here at the end, I can’t resist) "telling" point that when artfully handled, telling throws showing into relief, makes it all the more compelling and universal.
My darling Annie (Dillard) says what amounts to the same thing at the end of the delicious essay I steered you toward, "Fine Writing, Cranks, and the New Morality." She makes the neat distinction there that "fine writing" is writing that points to the world with a hand, that is with a storytelling presence and voice the reader can clearly identify. She says that plain writing, on the other hand, has a sort of humility about it which calls the reader’s attention to the world, not to the hand that paints it. "I think," she concludes, "the very finest works of art do both things at once and well." She notes how Cezanne both distorts and attempts to recreate three-dimensional space. "Just so," she adds, "do artifice and sincerity meet and balance in a great work of art. We teeter at the edge of the artists’ representations, affected by their depths and at the same time admiring their effects."
I couldn’t agree more. To pretend that the hand isn’t there makes no sense at all; besides pyrotechnics are fun and generalities are sometimes unavoidable and powerful. Similarly, we need moments when nothing, no authorial stance or style or voice, stands between us and the world. Immediacy and lavishness; empathy and magic; we need it all, Kind Listeners. And in the best fiction, especially in the brave new work that shows as well as tells, we get it.
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N.B. Because I've quoted from so many "classics" in this lecture, I had to take the liberty of rather severely editing some of the selections I read. If you enjoy the snippets above, please turn to the titles under section 2 below and read the unexpurgated originals!
1. CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davies, Robertson. "Reading and Writing," the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Yale University, 1991. (online at www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/davies92.pdf)
Dillard, Annie. Living by Fiction. (See in particular, "Chapter 7, "Fine Writing, Cranks, and the New Morality: Prose Styles.")
Franzen, Jonathan. "Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Writers," The New Yorker, September 30,2002.
James, Henry. "The Art of Fiction," Longman’s Magazine, Sept 1881, Number 4; reprinted in Partial Portraits, Macmillan, 1888 or viewable at guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/engl/462/artfiction.html
Rechy, John. "The Three Terrible Rules." (www.johnrechy.com/onwriting_3rules.htm)
2. QUOTES EXCERPTED FROM THE FOLLOWING FICTIONBauer, Marion Dane. "Sin," from an unpublished collection.
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre.
DiCamillo, Kate. The Tale of Despereaux.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch.
Estes, Eleanor. Ginger Pye.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Kipling, Rudyard. "How the Whale Got His Throat; "The Elephant’s Child,"from Just So Stories. (Be sure to get an edition with Kipling’s illustrations!)
Leaf, Munro. Ferdinand the Bull.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick.(Charles Feidelson, Jr. did an excellent job of annotating the novel in a 1964 edition by MacMillan.)
Snicket, Lemony (Daniel Handler). The Bad Beginning.
White, E.B. Charlotte’s Web.
Woodson, Jacqueline. Behind You. (sequel to If You Come Softly)
End of Lecture. You can click here to return Home.
Ten-Something: How Old is a Young Adult, Anyway?
Those of us who grew up before the Y.A. category even existed, can certainly be excused for wondering about its parameters. The rest of us, given the current resurgence of YA literature and the dual marketing of some titles to both adult and YA audiences, may well have questions, too: is Y.A. an artificial publishing construct, a created need that serves only to segregate already alienated adolescents? Or is this "genre" a genuine literary refuge, a place where lonely teens can find, finally, acceptance and understanding?
Okay. If it was good enough for Julius Caesar, it’s good enough for me: this lecture is divided into 3 parts: Part 1)What is a Young Adult? Part 2) Why and How did the Young Adult publishing category evolve? Part 3) Where is YA literature now? Where is it going?
1) What IS a Young Adult?
I’d like to start my discussion of adolescence with a poem by Lucille Clifton:
Note Passed to Superman
sweet jesus, superman
if i had seen you
dressed in your blue suit
i would have known you.
maybe that choirboy clark
can stand around
listening to stories
but not you, not with
metropolis to save
and every crook in town
filthy with kryptonite.
lord, man of steel,
i understand the cape,
the leggings, the whole
ball of wax.
you can trust me,
there is no planet stranger
than the one i'm from.
-from THE BOOK OF LIGHT
We are all of us in this room, experts on young adulthood. Many of us have fathered (or mothered) offspring who one day, much too soon, stop believing we are perfect and start regarding us as riddled with flaws and crumbling into senescence. And even if we’ve never been parents, each of us has ourselves traveled through that heady, idealistic, frightening and confusing stage of perpetual hormonal and emotional alert known as adolescence. Each one of us can identify, if only in memory, with the strange and alien condition described in Clifton’s poem. Conveniently, this life stage corresponds, for the most part, with ages that are preceded by the number 1. So let’s provisionally, at the beginning of this talk, suggest that we’ll be discussing folks between the ages of 10 and 19. (You'll see a little later why I'm starting this range a bit lower than you may have expected.)
Now if I knew, definitively, what motivates people in this age range; that is, if I could tell you what makes teenagers tick, this room would not be a modest lecture hall, but an auditorium, nay a temple. And you all would be joined by thousands of fellow seekers, who had journeyed across miles, states, continents to hear my words of wisdom. Sorry! As appealing as that picture is, I have to put an end to it right now. I, like the rest of us, know next to nothing about why adolescents do what they do.
In proof whereof, I need to confess that my children's adolescent years were among the unhappiest of my life. I remember going into the NYC office where I worked at the time and complaining about the goings-on at home. The C.E.O. of my company overheard me -- well, of course, he did; I was wailing. He came over and tapped me on the shoulder. "I don't know if it will help," he told me. "But you might like to know that my daughter is 24 years old now, and she's my best friend. When she was your children's age, though, I remember feeling utterly powerless and afraid. All I could do was look in her eyes and tell myself: "I know you're in there somewhere. And I know that, someday, you'll come back to me." Believe it or not, that helped a lot. It was a relief to know I wasn't the only one in that leaky boat.
This, by way of letting you know that the following description of adolescence is based, not on my own singular and perilous odyssey as a parent, but on a good deal of research and on years of experience as a writer in the schools and a visiting author in classrooms ranging from pre-schools to high school honors programs. I think it’s fair to sum up what I gleaned from all this experience by reporting to you that pre-schoolers and teenagers are two groups whom I regard as, in the very nicest sense of the word, psychotic.
What I mean by this is that both these life stages are relatively free of the social, emotional, and logical constraints under which most of the rest of us operate. How may of you have watched a toddler let loose and start crying in a supermarket or bank or post office? (I raise my hand.) How many of you have been the parent of such a toddler? (My hand goes up, too.) Do you think that an adult witnessing such a scene could use logic to make the little one stop crying? "Now Katy, you know Mommy can't afford that toy. We can come back again next week when Mommy gets paid." Not too effective, huh? Or how about employing a little social shaming? "Timmy, timmy, look! Everyone is watching you cry! What must they think?" That won't work, either. And finally, what about an emotional appeal? "Rebecca, you've made Mommy so upset. See how unhappy she is?" Scratch that approach, too. Yet, suddenly, without our intervention, that same screaming toddler can turn on a dime, can be transported to sheer bliss by something s/he finds fascinating in the next NOW, when everything else is forgotten.
Teenagers, like toddlers, ride an emotional roller coaster,
experiencing higher highs and lower low’s than the rest of us. I call this
period the theater of adolescence, and you've all lived it. It's a time that can
make high tragedy of wearing the wrong style jeans: "They’re going to think I’m
a total loser; I’ll never be invited to a party again; my social life is over;
can I transfer to another school?" Equally, an adolescent can create
awesome, gut wrenching joy from the smallest crumb -- say, when the right person
looks at you, or, unthinkable rapture, speaks to you: "He said, 'Hi.' Just like
that. 'Hi.' I heard him; everyone heard him. I’m going to die of happiness,
totally expire right here where it happened, on the very same spot!"
By the way, I don’t mean to treat this emotional roller-coaster lightly. It’s real, it’s hard and fast, and it makes life more thrilling, more throbbing, more raw than it will probably ever be again. Which is why, of course, so many of us writers go back to this time over and over. When I sit down to write a book, naturally, I don’t tell myself, "Hmmm. I think I’ll write a young adult novel today." But I do go where I’m compelled, where I need to travel – for my own personal healing, for my growth as an artist, because that’s the itch I need to scratch. What a treasure adolescence is in this respect! What a wondrous, intense store from which we mine wounds and fury, hope and bliss! Anyone who can reclaim their seat on that teenage roller coaster, is sure to step down from the ride more vulnerable, more hopeful, and more fully alive.
Now just in case there are some of you who crave proof, who want factoids to write down, let me give the final word of this first section on adolescence to science. It turns out, you see, that several recent studies support what mothers, teachers, -- and writers who do school visits -- have known all along: the brains of pre-schoolers and teenagers are "under construction." There are, according to studies in California and Boston, two times in our lives when our brains are losing gray matter as we trim away neural connections and branchings – yep, you guessed it: the ages between 1 and 3; and between 12 and 20. The frontal lobes, responsible for decision-making, emotional control and organization undergo the greatest change between puberty and early adult-hood. In an experiment at a Boston hospital, teen’s brains failed to register shades of emotion in photos of other’s faces. "No wonder," says a Newsweek reporter, "looking daggers at a teen hardly gets a rise out of him." And no wonder, I’d add on a more positive note, teenage crushes and ideals persist in the face of obstacles the rest of us would find daunting.
2) Why and How did the Young Adult publishing category evolve?
All right. Let’s move from this thumbnail picture of teens to the reason we’re here – a consideration of the books they choose to read. I should say, rather, the books we choose to publish for them, since like the rest of us, teens have no immediate, individual control over the business of what gets sent to the bookstore shelves. So what follows is more a survey of demographic and publishing trends then an accurate expression of teenage reading druthers, though I feel my school visits have taught me something about these and I’m going to share that with you, if there’s time, toward the end of this talk.
First, though, the history lesson: if I had been conceived at the end of World War II, instead of born then, I would be a card-carrying baby boomer, instead of an experimental prototype. And I would probably be a lot less confused about Young Adult literature. Full-fledged boomers grew up with YA titles; I did not.
Which means that, once I had read Wind in the Willows and the Jungle Books; once I’d finished L. Frank Baum’s Oz series (I drew the line at Ruth Plumly Thompson’s sugary follow-ups); once I’d read all of Albert Payson Terhune’s dog novels, polished off the Wyath-illustrated versions of Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, and devoured every last one of the Narnia books....well, then I had to make a choice: it was Nancy Drew or leap into the abyss, that alluring, naughty, very, very long-winded world of adult books. I, wisely I think, chose the abyss. The result was that I read The Caine Mutiny at age ten, most of it sailing (metaphorically) right over my head; I was titillated but puzzled by the same author’s Marjorie Morningstar at age eleven; captivated by the rolling, overblown language of I, Claudius at 12; and swept tremblingly away by Look Homeward Angel at 13.
Was I precocious? Reading-gifted? A poseur? None of the above. I simply had no choice. I waded into the sea of adult literature and started paddling. No one came out to meet me half way; no one steered me toward stories about me, about my world, and my fears and hopes.
But librarians began doing just that for teenagers when teenagers began to overwhelm the school system and the population. As the "real" baby boomers reached puberty, their demographics literally shook the rafters, and schools, libraries and institutions of all kinds had to make room for them. That’s when YA literature officially began.
The 60’s, then, saw the first separate YA library sections. These early YA shelves included adult books chosen by librarians for their brash, exotic lure, books like Hesse’s Siddhartha, Castenada’s The Teachings of Don Juan, Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Such calls to rebellion were mixed with tamer fare, adult titles that had long been read by children – fantasy like Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkein), and science fiction like Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov (I, Robot; Tomorrow’s Children (Sadly, not his fine Shakespeare studies!) and Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451; Something Wicked This Way Comes.)
But it wasn’t just librarians who needed to make space for the children of Woodstock. It was publishers too. And just what sort of book did adult publishers think flower children wanted? The problem novel! – which, to give those pushy grownups credit, sold like hotcakes: alcohol, drug addiction, incest, abuse, – you name it. For a while, it looked as if American youth were not individuals with separate personalities and needs, but a conglomeration of every worst case scenario from the self-help books that had become such a fad among adult readers at this time. Shocking, scary and easy to read; easier still to forget, most of these books no longer hold up today, though a few like the "anonymous" Go Ask Alice (Beatrice Sparks and others wrote this preachy book – see http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/askalice.asp ) remain famous, if not for their literary quality, then for their place in the history of YA lit.
If the sixties was the era of the YA problem novel, the seventies featured its paperback revolution. One of my former agents (yes, I’ve had a few before settling happily into un-agented obscurity), George Nicholson was, during this time, an editor at Dell. Long before I dreamed of agents (or publishing) he got the idea of a lifetime. Why not, he thought, give young readers on the go small, inexpensive, mass marketed books? The YA paperback was born. And so were specialized YA authors, who happily, put the formula problem-book writers to shame. Welcome Judy Blume (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret), Paul Zindel (The Pigman; My Darling, My Hamburger (( a problem novel with a difference)), Bruce Brooks (The Moves Make the Man – third wall), Robert Cormier (I Am the Cheese, The Bumblebee Flies Anyway....((Tenderness)), Susan Cooper (Dark is Rising trilogy ((The Gray King))), and Katherine Paterson (Of Nightingales that Weep; Jacob Have I Loved, Bridge to Tarabithia, The Great Gilly Hopkins, and so many others). This decade saw the birth of real, honest-to-goodness YA writers, authors who brought great gifts, authority and love to literature for teens and pre-teens.
But once the 80’s dawned, the times they were a’changing again. The funding that had been readily available for Young Adult library sections and community youth programs dried up as the baby boomers grew up and out of the YA age range. As they matured, though, they had children of their own and created what former editor and author Marc Aronson calls a second-wave "boomlet," a huge increase in the youngest segment of the population. What happened next is the prelude to bookselling as we know it now: YA librarians, last hired, were first fired, and the chains came to town. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders offered more for less, more than any booksellers before them, at prices that the independents couldn’t hope to match. Those giants with actual storefronts, not only cut prices, but also courted parents and their young children with huge play and reading areas, special events, book tie-ins, and shelf after shelf of the picture book and easy reader titles with which publishers rushed to feed the frenzy. Children’s publishing was, suddenly, the healthiest, hottest segment in the industry!
And teenagers? Without the specialized knowledge of teen librarians and without sufficient numbers to merit publishers investing in a whole host of new YA authors, adolescents got second-best; they got series books. The 80’s saw the advent of formula series, the first and most famous of which was Sweet Valley High. And now for the confessional part of the program. You may have noticed that most writer's lectures feature at least one moment of breast-beating. This is mine: (Assuming an AA tone) My name is Louise Hawes and I.....wrote for Sweet Valley. The full account of this dark period in my writing life is chronicled on my website (click the shoptalk link, then the lecture entitled, "Does it have to hurt?"), so I won't go into the dreadful details here. Suffice it to say that I traded seven years of my writing life for my children's college tuition. I learned important lessons, too: learned about structure (writing a novel every month does that!) and I learned, first-hand, the difference between literary and commercial fiction, and to which form I would be personally committed for the rest of my life.)
Publishers learned things from Sweet Valley, too: They learned that 1) you could treat readers like other consumers and trust them to look for "brand names." You got the same reading experience each time you picked up a book in the series; that's what you wanted, and that's what you got. And they learned that 2) the only people who enjoyed being singled out as young adults or teens, were pre-teens. The cards and letters in response to Sweet Valley High came, not from students in high school, but from children in junior high. Quick to spot a market, the publishers of SVH created a spin-off, Sweet Valley Twins, featuring the SVH crowd in junior high. But lo and behold, the response this triggered, came not from middle schoolers, but from elementary school students. Ever ready to reap new profits, the publisher created Sweet Valley kids. At this rate, I was fully convinced were were going to produce Sweet Valley Kindergarten and then Sweet Valley Embryos, but mercifully, the fad died. But not before a hit TV show, and not before young readers had become consumers in the eyes of publishers. And not before the YA label crept lower and lower. The lesson had been learned: young readers like to read "up."
Which is why the 90’s saw such confusion over reader categories like YA and middle grade; why terms like "high-YA" to designate teens over 15, and low YA, referring to kids as young as 10, came into use. It’s why awards like the Printz, for high-YA titles, was established even though the Newbery was already frequently being awarded to books for the 11-14 year old crowd. And it’s why librarians began to bifurcate their Young Adult sections, steering older readers to a mix of books reminiscent of the 60’s – that is, an assortment of titles that included both books written and published for teen readers, as well as adult titles that seemed appropriate for young readers anxious to "read up."
3) Where is YA literature now? Where is it going?
Flash forward to today and to the last part of this lecture: Where is YA lit now? And where is it going? This year, in School Library Journal, Karen Cruze, a dedicated, savvy librarian at the NY Public Library, reported her losing battle with a seventh-grader who resisted the suggestion that she might enjoy reading Joan Bauer’s Rules of the Road. This book was a Best Book for Young Adults and a Notable Children’s Book in the same year. Which means that, when a library can afford it, it will be housed in both the children’s and the YA sections. "Because [our] Young Adult copy was out," Cruze writes, "I steered [this reader] toward the Juvenile shelves. "I don’t read books from here anymore," she said. When I explained we had books by Bauer in both spots, she looked at me skeptically. I actually got the book in her hand, though, before she spied a new YA book with a glitzy pink, black, and silver cover, and that was it for Bauer."
That glitzy book cover, as many of you know, is just the tip of a marketing ice berg. Some of the larger houses are making expensive, greedy grabs for herdable pre-teens: Harper Collins has promoted several of its recent titles with text-messaging campaigns; others are handing out free books at rock concerts. And of course, many publishers have developed elaborate websites, especially for books like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants that are linked to movies; these sites, and many individual author sites feature screensavers, ringtones, blogs and the more and more popular option, pod-casts. The internet has only begun to be tapped by publishers who, don’t forget, are the same people that insist, even in the age of computers, on holding back royalties for six-months and making edits by hand on hard-copy manuscripts!
It seems clear to me that as publishers push the YA label lower (most YA titles are now labeled 10 and up), they’ve abandoned the readership for whom the designation was originally created. (And pushed readers who may not be ready for them toward books like Rainbow Party, or series like Making Out, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all of which are currently marketed and shelved as YA titles.) If fifth, sixth and seventh graders, like the girl I just mentioned, think of themselves as YA readers, where do older teens go to find books that speak to them? It’s my experience that most 15-19 year olds, who have truly earned the YA sobriquet by dint of driving, voting, or even fighting for their country in far-flung, inhospitable corners of the world, are now doing what readers their age did before the YA label was invented —they’re looking for their stories in the Adult sections of libraries and stores.
The older teens I know don’t want to be seen within shouting distance of their library’s YA section. Most, too, are tired of the way schools treat YA fiction. (During a recent visit with teen bookclub members, I asked the kids why they were reading the some of the same books they'd been assigned in school. They explained that they'd hated the books in school, because they'd been forced to write book reports on them, and to answer "cognitive skills" questions about each one, when all they wanted to do was read them for fun!) These older teens don’t want to mix business with pleasure, school with stories. Which is why, when left to their own devices, many of them seek out adult escapist fantasy that’s certain not to be "assigned" reading in school. (Yes, that means titles by Phillip Pullman and Christopher Paolini, but it also means they’re reading Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; So Long and Thanks for All The Fish), Piers Anthony (A Spell for Chameleon, the rest of the Xanth series, Incarnations of Immortality), and Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons); other hi-YA’s are drawn to adult books with protagonists whose problems and lives more closely resemble their own. Which explains the success with YA readers of adult fiction that features young characters, books like The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, My Losing Season by Pat Conroy). Doesn’t All this cross-over reading certainly explains why Harper Collins and a few other far-sighted houses have begun dual-marketing their YA titles, issuing two separate editions, one with a cover for teens to be shelved in the YA section, and another for adults.?
Yes, to answer my own question. Of course, teens reading up have helped trigger double marketing. But there’s another reason -- another untapped market. YA authors and librarians have known for a long time about the secret, undercover adult readers of YA lit. I can't tell you how many adults confess to me, sheepishly, that instead of giving my books to their children and grandchildren, they read them themselves, by flashlight, I assume, under blankets, I gather J Some of these people grew up with YA authors and don’t want to let them go. Others simply know a good, daring, concise read when they see one. I’ve listed only a few of the high-YA titles (even some middle grade books) that can and should be appreciated by many more adult readers than have ever heard of them. Double marketing is one way this can happen.
But double marketing is expensive. Far too costly to enable publishers to treat every book that deserves it this way. So what’s the solution? How can we get these fine books to as many readers as possible? Let me give you two ideas, one that’s as likely to happen as pigs soaring into clouds; a second that’s relatively inexpensive and eminently do-able: Number one -- In a galaxy far, far away, in my dream library, there would be NO age sections at all. Divisions, if any, would be by genre or content, not readership. Picture, if you will, an Abraham Lincoln reading tower in the biography room. It is arranged vertically and conveniently, with picture book biographies of Lincoln (the first place I start any research) on the bottom shelves where little kids can reach them; with middle grade biographies next; then longer books, for both teens and adults on the higher shelves. Yes, there would be carrels and chairs scattered around, but the readers sitting in them would be old and young, forced to mix and mingle and share their enthusiasms for the topic.
In my dream library, adults, very few of whom currently read picture books -- unless they’re parents or teachers or writers (or students in MFA programs :-) -- these readers would discover the fun, lyricism and sophistication of contemporary picture books. Young children who want to know more than a picture book tells them, could read "up," maybe finding a chapter book or an easy reader about Lincoln. Middle graders would be able to read "up" and "down" without shame, and all of our reading worlds would be broader, richer. By extrapolation, picture a poetry tower, a mystery tower, a self-help tower, a tower of faith, a holiday tower, and on and on, as the season and whims of readers and librarians dictate.
Make sense? I think so. Is it going to happen? Probably not before those avian swine I mentioned take to the sky. So what else can we do? How can we bring fine, sensitive titles to the attention of both hi-YA readers and adults? Simple; we can move hi-YA titles off separate shelves and put them in the adult sections of libraries and bookstores. Most hi-YA’s aren’t labeled on their jackets, anyway, so all we need to do is physically pick them up and put them down again, alphabetically by title with adult fiction. Once we do this, hi-YA becomes a genre, not a ghetto. and this designation, like mystery or romance or self-help, indicates the content, not the age-appropriateness, of a book.
In this way, we could achieve a snippet of the lovely "tower dream" I just described. By virtue of the alphabet, you see, an "adult" title like The Diagnosis by Alan Lightman, might end up next to a "Hi- YA" book like Chris Lynch’s Freewill. (Parenthetically, guess which of these two stories about a breakdown is more experimental in form? --The YA novel is written in the second person! And guess which book readers of any age are likely to find packs the biggest emotional wallop? Lynch's gripping novel is about one, fully realized individual, rather than a symbolic surrogate for every modern man.); Under S, Lisa See’s adult title, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan might become the neighbor of Sandy Salisbury’s young adult collection, Blue Skin of the Sea. (Guess which of these books, both based in an exotic cultural context, this reader found most lyrical and character-driven?) How about the D’s? E.L. Doctorow’s The March could be shelved with Jennifer Donnelly’s A Northern Light. (Guess which historical novel this reader feels penetrates character most deeply? Guess which puts you in the period most convincingly?)
I’ll spare you the whole alphabet, but you get the idea. The result of which would surely be that new reading vistas would be opened, both for adults and older teens. Teens would now find Booker prize winners next to Printz winners; they’d discover books like Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, his pitch-perfect channeling of a ten-year old boy; or Andrea Fuller’s stunning, mind-and-heart broadening picture of growing up in Africa, Let’s Not Go to the Dogs Tonight; or Mark Haddon’s tour de force, a moving book about an un-moveable child, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time -- a novel which was, by the way, dual-marketed in England before it was published as an adult title here.
Equally important, adults would now come face to face (or face to spine) with irresistible YA books each time they visited the bookstore or library. Because if you think it’s only pre-teens like the seventh grader I mentioned earlier who are brand-conscious readers, think again. Most adults are just as reluctant to read "down." Remember the Printz? Everyone had high hopes that this award, established in 1999 and first awarded in 2000, would win new adult readers for the innovative, wondrous literature that’s being written by Hi-YA authors. But while adult books, if they feature young protagonists, will be ferreted out by teens anxious to read "up," the reverse is not true. When a book is marketed and labeled as YA (and nothing says YA like that silver Printz medal!), it simply drops off the radar of most adult readers. If, though, these books were shelved in the adult section, authors like M.T. Anderson, Carolyn Coman, and Brock Cole would finally find the adult readers their brilliant books deserve.
I am not, let me be clear, recommending that low-YA, 10 to 14-year olds be deprived of the intelligent, informed and loving attention of YA librarians. I wish that I had had such wise literary advisors when I was that age. But for readers over 15 or 16, I truly believe we can serve them best through inclusion, through shelving their stories beside ours, and through recognizing that the time for jumping the gate, for making their own way has come.
Which means it’s time for us to step back, to stop hovering and nurturing and recommending. It’s probably even time to allow them to read whatever they want, to scandalize us with their reading choices, to become passionate about books we loathe. In Anna Quindlen’s delightful book, How Reading Changed My Life, she describes an episode that she claims taught her about "insurrection and the assertion of personal taste." Her mother, a normally gentle and genteel woman, suddenly threw a book she was reading to the floor. "This is a dirty book!" she yelled and left the room. The book was Portnoy’s Complaint and of course, when Quindlen took a look, she found it "as funny and intelligent a novel as I'd ever read." Now, she says, "I have to wonder...what my mother was thinking that day. Didn't she know that the book felt deeply true at some level....and above all, didn't she know that I would pick it up and read it the moment she was gone?"
In other words, like their younger pre-teen counterparts, older adolescents want, in fact need, to "read up." And whether she knew it or not, Quindlen’s mom did her a favor. Because if we're perfectly honest, we librarians with our list of recommended Teen Titles, we teachers with our Reading Across the Curriculum programs, we parents with our well-intended efforts to book-chat our children, if all of us can put ourselves back into those blue tights and that flowing red cape, if we can recapture the teenager we once were, doesn't it seem clear that adolescent readers need the sort of gentle friction that makes reading "up" an act of rebellion, an "assertion of personal taste?" And isn’t this rebellion actually a very effective way of nurturing these lonely, romantic aliens, these passionate strangers among us who just may-- someday soon -- have to save the world.
SUGGESTED READING
1) About Adolescents and Their Literature
Aaronson, Marc. Exploding the Myths, the Truth about Teenagers and Reading, 2001.
Abrahamson, Marla, "Why Boys Don't Read," Book. Jan./Feb., 2001.
Begley, Sharon. "Getting Inside a Teen Brain," Newsweek. April 28, 2000.
Cart, Michael. From Romance to Realism: Fifty Years of Growth and Change in Young Adult Literature, 1996.
Cruze, Karen. "The Criss-Cross Conundrum: A Look at the Implications of a "high" Newbery or a "low" Printz," School Library Journal. May 1, 2006.
Feinberg, Barbara. "Reflections on the Problem Novel: Do These Calamity-Filled Books Serve. Up Too Much, Too Often, Too Early?" American Educator. Winter, 2004-2005.
Males, Mike A. The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents, 1996.
Jackson, Anthony, et al. Turning Points 2000: Educating Adolescents in the 21st Century, 2000.
Pipher, Mary. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, 1995.
Pollack, William S. Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, 1999.
Powell, K. "Neurodevelopment: how does the teenage brain work?" Nature. August 24, 2006.
Quindlen, Anna. How Reading Changed My Life.
2) Young Adults Titles that Merit Dual-Marketing
Anderson, M.T. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing (NBA Finalist).
Cole, Brock. The Facts Speak for Themselves.
Coman, Carolyn. What Jamie Saw (Newbery Honor); Many Stones (NBA Finalist).
Cormier, Robert. Tenderness, The Bumblebee Flies Anyway.
Donnelly, Jennifer. A Northern Light (PRINTZ Honor).
Kujer, Guus. The Book of Everything.
Lynch, Chris. Freewill (PRINTZ Honor), Gypsy Davey, Inexcusable (NBA Finalist).
Mazer, Norma Fox. When She Was Good.
Portman, Frank. King Dork (QUILL Nominee).
Rapp, Adam. The Buffalo Tree.
Rosoff, Meg. How I Live Now (PRINTZ Winner).
Salisbury, Graham. Blue Skin of the Sea.
Zevin, Gabrielle. Elsewhere (QUILL Nominee).
Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief (QUILL Nominee).
3) Selected Adult Cross-Overs
Chappell, Fred. I Am One of You Forever.
Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street.
Conroy, Pat. My Losing Season.
Doyle, Roddy. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
Fuller, Alexandra. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go.
Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees.
Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy.
Niffenagger, Audrey. The Time Traveler’s Wife.
See, Lisa. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.
End of Lecture.
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