Last spring, when my editor at Holiday House asked me how I
came to write The Misadventures of the
Magician’s Dog, I thought I knew how to answer. The seed of the novel dates back more than a
decade, to when a dear friend’s daughter adopted a dog named Anatole. He in no way lived up to his dignified
name: he was a scruffy mutt who liked to
jump the fence and frequently peed on the furniture. Still, he adored my friend’s daughter—which
became very important when she was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at the age
of five. At a moment when her life was
falling apart, he was a best friend who never left her side. Perhaps for that reason, when she asked me
where Anatole lived before he came to her, I explained that he used to belong
to a magician and that he could talk and do magic. After all, isn’t there something magic about
a dog who can make a child feel that loved?
For years after that, I thought about writing a novel about
a dog who used to belong to a magician. But I couldn’t quite figure out
the rest of the novel—who would adopt the dog and what would happen
next. And then our country went to war, and I couldn’t stop thinking
about the kids of deployed service people: it seemed to me that these
children were carrying an enormous burden, one that they hadn’t chosen and that
my own children and their friends knew nothing about. So I wrote the
story of Peter Lubinsky, the son of a deployed air force pilot who adopts a dog
that used to belong to a magician. The
dog offers to teach Peter magic so that he can bring his father home—but only
if Peter first helps the dog rescue his former master, who has accidentally
turned himself into a rock.
This is what I told my editor when she asked about the
origins of my book. However, in
reflecting back, I think my answer only skims the surface of why I wrote this
particular story—just like most answers to the question of where stories come
from only skim the surface. We write the
books we write because of who we are in our deepest cores, because of the
questions that drive us, the desires we haven’t resolved. These are hard issues to talk about—at least
for me!—but I think there’s value in understanding a story’s unconscious
undercurrents. So I thought I’d use this blog post to try to examine some of
the deeper reasons I wrote the novel I wrote.
In my case, one of my obsessions is the complex nature of
love, with all of the push and pull of emotion that accompanies it. Love isn’t black and white: it’s full of ambivalence, one moment a source
of happiness and well-being; the next, of frustration, anger, hurt. This is true, I think, regardless of age—but
for children in particular, this sort of ambivalence can be very difficult to deal
with. Children whose parents are deployed
have more reasons than most to struggle with conflicting emotions. On one hand, they may adore and even idolize
their parents. On the other, they may
also feel fear, betrayal, and anger too at their parents for being gone. That’s a lot for any child to carry. Peter’s father is in a wonderful and loving
man, and yet he’s also left his children and put himself at risk. All Peter wants is for his father to come
home—but his father would have to be a different person in order to return.
I’m also obsessed with how anger affects people. When the dog in my book teaches Peter how to
do magic, he tells Peter that power is channeled through strong negative
emotions, like anger—and the more magic Peter does, the more angry (and evil!) he’ll
become. When a friend read the first
few chapters of an early draft, he wondered if magic done through anger might
be too dark for a middle grade novel.
But every instinct in me recoiled from changing this particular aspect
of the story. As every parent can
attest, anger is a powerful—and often scary—emotion for kids. I wanted to write about how anger that isn’t acknowledged
can fester, changing everything about how one sees the world. Yet I didn’t want
to say anger is “bad.” In the course of
my story, Peter struggles to acknowledge and make peace the anger he feels, to
understand that he can be angry with his father and still love him deeply. This, to me, is the emotional heart of my
story, the part of it that matters.
Of course, in writing about Peter’s attempts to reconcile
his conflicting emotions about his father, I was really writing about my own
struggles to understand love, anger, and the places where those two meet. I didn’t know this when I wrote my initial
draft, but I came to understand it as I revised. And I think that this understanding helped me
to make the choices I needed to make as a writer.
So here’s my advice for writers who are beginning the process of trying to tell their stories. Write something that excites you: whatever sort of story it is, just make sure it will keep you glued to your laptop, pouring the pages out. Have fun, and let your imagination run wild. But when you revise, go back and find the
emotions that are driving your story—the undercurrents that caused you to write
this book and no other. Once you
understand your story’s heart, polish it.
Refine it. Make it true.
Your story’s emotional core may not take up much space in terms of the
words in your book, which could be about dinosaurs and talking mice and crazy
carnivals (mine is). But make sure that
the words, no matter how few, are right.
And then send your story out into the world, knowing that it
carries with it a little bit of your soul.
