Where and when do I get my best ideas? Solve plot problems? Decide what direction a current project should take? It’s when I am out walking or jogging by myself. I have no cell phone. No food. No music. No dog. No lap counter. No deadlines. No time constraints. No particular noise. Nothing that I must do at that moment but think. Solitary in my head. Alone. Thinking. It works.
Author Archives: Avi
A complex and mysterious relationship
Just as “No man is an island, Entire of itself,” no writer writes a book alone.
Beyond the author, the editor is the other major factor in the creation of a book. At his or her best, the editor has the talent for guiding, goading, and grilling so that the author’s vision and text is fully realized. The best editor for you is not necessarily the best editor for me. The best editor for this book is not necessarily the best editor for that book. The best working relationships are predicated on trust, articulation, and insight. The worst working relationships are shaped by discourtesy and unstated feelings of “I know what’s best,” by writer or editor.
I have known writers who bully their editors. I have known editors who bully their writers. There are writers who, in the course of a career, work only with one editor. There are writers who work with many editors. I have known editors who will tell you they are the talent in the author’s creation. I have known writers who claim editors have had no impact on their work. Some editors have exquisite tact. Others, well, don’t.
When I work with a good editor I sense the possibilities of my work and am energized. When I work with a poor editor I feel I am writing to someone else’s vision and become dispirited. I have worked with editors who have offered almost nothing to my text and I have worked with editors who essentially wish to rewrite my book. That said, a writer can be wrong about what is best for a book, while the editor can be right.
Sometimes the working (and personal) relationship is full of tension. Sometimes it becomes a real friendship. I have worked with a truly great editor, Richard Jackson, who has guided a unique list of fine writers to an astonishing number of successes. Not a coincidence. And I have worked with other truly great editors whose names you will never know.
Does all this seem complex and a little mysterious? It is!
Can writing change the world?
Dayanara, of Quincy, Illinois, wrote: “. . . my dream is to become an author someday. My dad would never approve of it though. He wants me to become someone who can change the world, but he doesn’t understand writing can change the world.”
Go Dayanara!
But . . . can writing change the world? Having just been emerged in the world of the American Revolution so as to write Sophia’s War, the evidence is clear that such writing as Tom Paine’s Common Sense, and “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . “ changed the world. But since Dayanara wrote to me, perhaps, it’s fair to ask if fiction can change the world? More specifically, can writing for young people change the world?
I am struck by how many adults vividly recall books they read as young people and with an enthusiastic memory for detail that is striking considering the years which have passed. I’ve noticed, too, how many people recall, in particular, a teacher who read a lot to a class. I’ve often been told by older women that, when younger, they read The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle many times. Only rarely however, did they tell me what they did because of that reading.
Speaking for myself, I do believe And To Think that I saw it on Mulberry Street, opened my imagination. The Wind in the Willows gave me a new awareness of the natural world. Treasure Island, informed me what a boy (Jim Hawkins) could do.
Beyond all else, however, I believe reading taught me how to think. And what I read was, of course, writing.
What happened after the book ends?
Jaxon, of Acme, Washington, wrote to ask, “What happened to Crispin and Owen after they got on the ship to Iceland?” Questions like that, what happened after the book ends? are not uncommon. You can consider them in a number of ways: that I have not completely satisfied my reader; that the story (and characters) are so real that the reader feels the characters must have a further life; that the reader has enjoyed being with the characters so much they want to spend more time with them. I suspect that these same thoughts work on the writer, too. I had not planned to write the six Poppy books, but I so enjoyed the characters, I wanted to write more about them. After writing Night Journeys I worried so about the fate of the characters, I had a dream about what happened next, and indeed, followed that dream to write Encounter at Easton (the only time that ever happened). In the case of the Crispin books, my first musings on the story were such that I contemplated four volumes, which would ultimately lead to, among other things, “What happened to Crispin and Owen after they got on the ship to Iceland?” A publisher’s decision, in which I partly concurred, meant that I did not write that fourth volume. But in fact, I do know (in my head) what happened to Crispin. And I will, someday, write that saga.
A singular connection
Last week, when at a conference at Shenandoah University, I was asked to sign a copy of The Secret School. First, however, I was told a story. The book belonged to a girl, and her father, a US soldier in Afghanistan, had taken a copy with him. Via Skype, he read the book to his daughter, chapter by chapter from afar. I was touched by this account, not least by the notion that this man chose to take a book along to read to his child, when surely he is limited by what he can carry. There are all kinds of honors given to authors, and I have had my share of them, but this was a singular one. Sometimes, in the world of children’s’ books, we forget that one of the most vital things we writers do is facilitate connections, not merely between author and reader, but between parent and child, teacher and child, grandparent and child . . . And so forth. What is worth celebrating is not the author. Truly, it’s about those connections. We should never forget that.
Starting a new book
What’s it like to start a new book? Sometimes I think it’s like a maze, one that has many entrances, many passages, and many outcomes, none known (though you think you know the entrance). The maze also has many dead ends. It certainly doesn’t have a known exit. I, the writer, poke along through this maze, now this passage, and now that, feeling my way (and I mean that feeling literarily). If it feels good, I press on to the next choice of turns. If it doesn’t feel right, I retreat and go another way. I may even have to go back and start again. From a different place. The more I go forward, however, the clearer the way forward—unless, of course, I reach another dead end and have to yet start again. Curiously enough for all the hesitations, false moves, guesses, dead ends, the goal is to make the story appear inevitable, as if it had no hesitations, false moves, guesses, or dead ends. Do you think writers always know what they are doing? Think again.
Is it real? Is it fiction?
Megan of Pompano Beach wrote me and asked, “Do you incorporate real events into your writing?”
The answer is, yes and no. The about to be published Sophia’s War is full of things that really happened during the American Revolution, but the main character, Sophia Calderwood, is fictional. Yet, I tell the story as if she had a great deal to do with what happened. Hard Gold and Iron Thunder were written much the same way. True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is a complete fiction, but I sure tried to get my facts about ships and sailing right. The Poppy books are tales about animals, but they are full of things that happened in my own family life—not that you would know it. Seer of Shadows, a ghost story, uses what I knew from my days as an amateur photographer. But the emotions and relationships I depict in my books are most often based on things out of my own experience, lived or observed. The facts—particularly for the historical fiction—comes from research. I suspect all fiction is created this way. No matter how fantastic the tale, there is some real connection to the writer.
Resetting My Narrative Grooves
I very much enjoy reading short stories, and marvel at their power, and their ability to create a comprehensive experience, however brief. I even edited a collection (with Carolyn Shute) that has no theme, other than quality. It’s called Best Shorts. Over the years I have written numbers of them. There are two collections of my stories, Strange Happenings, and What do Fish Have to Do with Anything? Some nine others are in thematic anthologies and I think there’s an unpublished one somewhere in my files. There is even a one-act play in a collection called Acting Out.
My regular mode of thought is novels, so I usually don’t write short stories unless I’m asked to write one. Finding them a real challenge to write, I begin by reading many, so as to reset my narrative grooves. Curiously enough, my short stories are very much more auto-biographical than my novels—or at least they are most often based on something that really happened to me. Consider “Scout’s Honor,” which appears in the anthology, When I Was Your Age. Readers find it very funny, even absurd. Yet, much of it really happened to me, including the incident in which a can of beans is opened with a hatchet. I have no plans to write more, unless I’m asked. But then again . . .
Why write for children?
Every once in a while, an adult, upon learning what I do, asks, “Why do you write for children? Wouldn’t you have more satisfaction writing for adults?”
A couple of recent letters from kids answer that better than I can. A third-grader named Iva, wrote, “Because my class reads your books a lot we imagine Poppy as one of our classmates.” Mary Rose, upon reading Iron Thunder, wrote, “I think this book should be taught in schools and on the summer reading list. Mainly, with this amazing [sic] written book I believe everyone can be involve [sic] changing America and the world in a way that will last forever.”
The way young people connect with and become part of what I write, means that I have an audience who will take my stories and make them part of their own life stories. Perhaps the change will not be, as Mary Rose suggests “forever,” but to change one child’s life for the better, even for an hour, is a rare privilege.
Book Culture
One of the crucial things that drive writers, I think, is the desire to be part of what I refer to as Book Culture. This is the universe of the book; writing, reading, making, publishing, book-selling, libraries, editing, design, marketing—and you can add much more to the list, I’m sure. If you were a very young reader, as I was, you grew up amidst various aspects of this world. I suppose I could start with the picture books my mother read to us nightly when kids, to the gift of a book (always) on birthday and Christmas, the local library. I decided to become a writer when I was a teen-ager. In a diary I kept when a high school senior (1955) there are long lists of the books I was reading. But there is also the title of a play I wrote which I listed between Ibsen’s Enemy of the People and Dylan Thomas‘ Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, with the parenthetical note (“That’s nice to put down.”) In other words, I was placing myself among great writers. Yes, a seventeen-year-old’s fantasy, but that was the world of which I wished to be a part. So when a friend sent me The National Endowment for the Humanities “Summer Booklist for Young Readers,” updated for the first time since 1988, it was fun to see, wedged between Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales and Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, my book Poppy (illustrated by Brian Floca). Just as in 1955, it’s nice to be a part of that world.