Tag Archives: Poppy

The chatter about “voice”

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There’s a lot of chatter about “voice” in fiction, which I take to mean the presentation of the narrative, its mixture of tone, character, syntax, and vocabulary. Complex and important, writers can and do spend years perfecting voice though some come to it quickly and naturally. It can be very distinctive, as per Hemingway and Dickens. Perhaps the most influential voice in the English language was the sixteenth century King James translation of the Bible. And we sometimes forget that Shakespeare was a great inventor of words, such as gloomy, critic, bump—and many more. I wonder how Elizabethan audiences responded to such an inventive vocabulary.

Books with distinct voice

I’ve never developed a specific voice for my work. I want the voice of my fiction to be part of the story. The voice of Crispin: The Cross of Lead is utterly different than the voice of City of Orphans or Poppy. In Sophia’s War I worked hard to create an eighteenth century voice, using lots of words used then, but no longer.

When I tell a story, I want the reader to hear, each time, a different voice. And not mine.

The Illustrated Novel

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Denslow Oz

I’ve always loved the illustrated novel. While the heyday of the illustrated novel was the nineteenth century, it exists today, if it exists at all, almost exclusively in novels for young people. I think it adds enormously to the reader’s pleasure. Consider the original Tenniel illustrations of Alice in Wonderland, Denslow’s Wizard of Oz, Shepard’s Wind in the Willows, or Wyeth’s Treasure Island. I read these books as a kid and cannot think of the texts without thinking of those illustrations. Good text and good art, together, make great books.

City of Light, City of DarkI often ask that my novels be illustrated, but only rarely get my wish. The great exceptions are the Poppy novels, so splendidly illustrated by Brian Floca. I may have written those books, but when I imagine the characters I think of his art. Floca  has become a major illustrator in his own right (and write) but I’m proud that his first work was in our graphic novel City of Light City of Dark.

Paul O. Zelinsky’s first illustrated novel was my Emily Upham’s Revenge.

Traitors’ Gate was illustrated like a Victorian novel, with more than sixty illustrations by Karina Raude.

The most beautiful edition of Crispin is a South Korean edition.

Publishers will tell you the illustrated novel is expensive to create and difficult to produce. No doubt. They also say young readers don’t want them, a claim I do doubt very much. I so wish the illustrated novel would come back into favor—and into the hands of young readers. What’s your favorite illustrated novel?

Where did the idea for Poppy come from?

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PoppyThomas, from West Newbury, Massachusetts, wrote to me and asked, “How did you come up with the idea for Poppy?”

Well, Thomas, I was living in Oregon, in the town of Corvallis. Wandering into a bookstore, something I like to do, I went to the bargain section, something I like to do even more.There I found a book—shame on me for not remembering title or author—which was written by a naturalist. It seems that in a forest he found a lost baby owl in poor health. He took the owl home, nursed it back to health, and taught it to live on its own in the wilderness. The owl did well in the forest, but every now and again he (I think it was a he) came back to say hello to the man who saved him. I loved that book. The book also taught me a great deal about owls. The more I read, the more convinced I was that I should write a book about owls. Enter Mr. Ocax! But—as I wrote about the owl, I needed to detail what owls ate. They ate—among other things—mice. Enter Poppy! The book therefore begins with Mr. Ocax, but as always with me, the more I wrote, the more the story changed. I had become interested in the mouse—Poppy—the creature the owl wished to eat. It became Poppy’s story. In short, I invented as I went along. As I have said before, quoting the poet Robert Frost, “If there are no surprises for the writer, there are no surprises for the reader.”

As for the rest of the Poppy books, that’s another  story.

Names

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phonebookI was recently doing a Skype visit with a library group when one of the young people asked, “How do you go about choosing names for your characters?”

There are all kinds of considerations. First, boy/girl. Then, the time period in which the story takes place because names become more or less popular. I was writing a novel set in the 1950’s. What was the most popular name for a boy then? JIM. That’s the name I gave my main character. Sophia was a popular name in the 18th Century. King George III  (or last king) had a daughter named Sophia. And so, Sophia’s War.

If one character is named, say, Emily, I won’t use Evelina for another character. If someone is called Pip, I won’t use Rip.

In the Poppy books all the forest mice have names of flowers. Hence, Poppy, and her father, Lungwort, a mouse given to pompous speeches. My editor, Elise Howard, suggested the city mice in the book, Ragweed, have something city in their names. I decided on car parts, hence, Clutch. Sometime I name characters by way of suggesting what the person is like, both their nature and the way they act. Bear in Crispin is big, and bear-like.

In my own reference library I have books of names, modern, historical, and by nationality. And of course nothing is better for name choosing than a phone book.

What is your favorite fictional character name?

Is it real? Is it fiction?

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Megan of Pompano Beach wrote me and asked, “Do you incorporate real events into your writing?”

Sophia's WarThe 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.

Book Culture

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PoppyOne 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.