Megan: Back to School

As I write this, we have just completed opening day at the school where I work. The first day was just for freshmen, and I watched them wander the halls wide-eyed – or with a swagger that belies self-doubt.

I've been back at school for weeks now getting the library ready for students and staff. Like most people involved in education, I like the beginning of the school year. I like to see the sports teams in their pre-season workouts, reminding me of my own sweltering days on the field hockey field (minus, thankfully, the sweating and shin splints). The marching band rehearsed in the parking lot just outside my library. Students filtered through to pick up their schedules and compare teachers. As the smell of cut grass wafted into the building, I had the feeling that the world was filled with so much promise.

Working at a high school while writing YA Fiction is a terrific opportunity. I am often shot back to my own teenage years. At the high school where I used to work, faculty ate in the cafeteria with students and I was always pained on the first day of school watching freshman paralyzed as they try to figure out where to sit. Having those emotions right at the surface makes it easy for me to draw on them when I write.

As the groups of new ninth graders came through the library for their orientation tour, one of the teacher advisors asked me, “Can you imagine being a ninth grader today?” I replied that no, I wouldn't go back for the world. And it's true that I would not choose to relive my high school years. But imagine it? Yes. I do that every day.

Troy: Me, Tom

That’s me, the kid on the left. Troy Howell.
Or rather, Tom.
Thomas.
Thomas Sawyer…sir.

It was a dress-up party for my birthday and I was ten, a very impressionable ten. An age, some psychologist’s claim, that is pivotal to one’s outlook or direction in life. Looking at myself now as an adult, I suppose I’ve supported that theory. I love fresh air and dappled sunlight, water, independence. I like adventure; I like cats. I don’t like pain-killer. I prefer a balance between sociability and reticence (I‘m involved, while on the edge). I appreciate wit, parody, satire. And one loyal friend is enough.

Just like Tom.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer wasn’t the only element that shaped me back then, but it was significant. I wasn’t Tom Sawyer just on my birthday, but all summer long, which lasted a year. Every summer lasted a year, when I was young. As Tom Sawyer, I purposely jabbed my toe so I could wrap it in bloodied cloth; used some of the blood to sign the Dark Oath I’d copied down; navigated the wide Mississippi (the street on which I lived) from a steamboat (my front porch); longed for a love like Becky Thatcher; and tried to smoke grass—the mowed kind—from a homemade corncob pipe without vomiting. But if I vomited, that was all right: Tom Sawyer did. Then when school began, I “played hooky” along with my loyal friend—the same friend under whose window I meowed at dawn, with whom I spent the rest of the morning reading comics. We were promptly caught and hauled to the principal’s office.

Reality had put an end to Tom Sawyer.
Or maybe not.

The more time you spend in a character’s shoes—or feet, with one toe wrapped—whether you’re a reader or writer (or an illustrator, for that matter), the deeper the experience, the more natural the representation. You can hear his voice, smell her hands. You can place your fingers on the character’s pulse and feel what makes it race or skip or freeze.

For the writer, it’s like taking memories that are yours and making them someone else's.
For the reader, it’s like taking those memories and making them your own.

I had been living Mark Twain’s delights.
When I met this boy covered in fine dust from the past, restless and straw-hatted, I met myself. I discovered desires that had been waiting to surface.

Character as mirror.

I fell in love with the great Mississippi, just like Tom. When I heard there was an actual river near where I lived, there in suburban southern California, I could hardly wait to see it. I did at last, after a long bike trek through the hills and hollows of an asphalt-and-stucco wilderness. There it lay, lagged really: a few-feet wide, few-inches deep, median strip of water with banks of concrete. The Los Angeles River.

Fiction was better than that. So were my dreams. (I now live in the country, close to nature, right where I’d yearned to be. I’m a mile or so from the Potomac; we have a pond….)

I pulled Tom Sawyer off the shelf the other day. It had been years since I’d opened it, and contrary to the impression I may be giving, it would not be one of my desert island picks. Twain is not even among my favorite authors. It was a book that touched me, not as a writer, but as a person. As a child, and hence, as an adult.

Since I’m writing middle grade material (my debut novel is middle grade), I thought I’d check to see how something that influenced me at age ten compares to what I’m doing for the same age group. I was relieved, if not surprised. The storytelling is direct, but much of the writing is mature:

“Then at once they reached and hovered upon the imminent verge of sleep—but an intruder came, now, that would not “down.” It was conscience. …. but conscience was not to be appeased by such thin plausibilities…. Then conscience granted a truce, and these curiously inconsistent pirates fell peacefully to sleep.”

Of course in context, in the setting and flow of action, this becomes less obscure for the young reader. Besides big words, there will always be overtones and meanings that drift beyond the understanding of a child. But just as a child can be affected by what is not said by a parent, what whispers in the parent’s heart or mind, so a child reader can be affected by these unseen currents. The child feels them. As the child grows, what is shifting below the surface gradually rises.

Back to my age-ten self: Oddly, when I picked up The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s masterpiece, after having lived and breathed Tom Sawyer, I had difficulty relating to the first-person narration. I had difficulty separating the “I” of Huck from the I of me. Though personal in the telling, it was less personal than the third-person narrative of Huck’s counterpart. (I think today’s young reader is more sophisticated, but that’s another focus.) The writing in Huck Finn seemed more mature than that in Tom Sawyer, but it was its theme, its sweeping truth, that created this notion. This is also confirmation that what places a book is not so much “reading level” as it is point of view and scope of relevance across both time and culture. In Tom Sawyer, the narrative voice is obviously adult, in Huck Finn, it is simply that of its narrator. Compare the previous Tom Sawyer quote with this, the point of Huck’s moral crossroads between society’s (and, based on his clouded conception, God’s) view of slavery and his core nature:

“I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing … but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.”

That’s as complex as the narrative voice gets.

As a matter of course, once I was able to grasp Huckleberry as a character, I was able to grasp some of what he represented. I sensed that what he represented spread beyond the world of boyhood adventure and into the streets and spires of a large, looming, initial-capped, Society.

Character as window.
Character can also be concept.

When I turned twelve I found Lord of the Flies, and not long afterward several neighborhood boys and I conducted a three-day war. Our neighborhood was chaotic with ditches at the time—the city was replacing water lines—that became symbols in my unconsciousness. I felt the upheaval, and the fever spread to my companions and rivals. During those delirious days, faces were painted, dirt clods flew, wooden clubs were carved and brandished, bruises appeared. One boy fell from a hastily constructed fort and landed in cacti. A boy I thought of as Piggy got struck in the forehead with a bamboo pole, which someone had thrown like a spear. The pole stayed suspended in that moment, an extension of our horror, and the boy collapsed. We washed his wound in the dog’s water bowl until his mother came, fearful, tearful, and angry, to take him to the nearest emergency room.

Again, reality ended the affair.
Again, maybe not.
Whatever William Golding’s intent, the climaxes of each—story and truth—collided within me. Until the blood ran, I‘d had no thought beyond merely playing out the parable. Though now not a pacifist—it depends on the cause—I loathe contention, strife, argument, fighting, war. Recognizing parental example as primary—my parents were peacemakers—I nevertheless see this adolescent episode as a threshold.

The heat waves of fiction always quivered along the surface of reality for me. Never mind whether the characters were flat or round or some other dimension: they were people; they were real. Though I was largely unaware of the process, they helped to reveal, define, introduce, change.

Besides giving me a ripping good time.

I recently loaned my Norman Rockwell edition of Tom Sawyer to my ten-year-old nephew. Before long, his parents were wondering why he and his little brother kept sneaking off into the woods; it was so unlike them.
They were pursing old adventures, and making them new.

The confluence of fiction and reality. Of an author’s dreams into those of the reader.

Memory as character …
Character as memory.

“Tom!”
No answer.
“Tom!”
No answer.
“What’s gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!”

The old lady with the spectacles didn’t know it, but she was calling for me.

Michael: The Books That Made This Writer (slow-track edition)

I am dyslexic. This is the #3 ranked fun fact about me. (The first two involve Jonathan Swift and bees, in that order.) I repeated second grade in honor of my, you know, brain problem, but I am "highly functional" now. Or so I claim. I still read letter by letter, rather than gobbling up words in bunches—I'm still amazed people can do that—but what I lose in speed, I make up in accuracy and recall. 

It may not be an issue now, but it definitely affected my reading habits when I was a kid. Which is to say, I didn't have any reading habits when I was a kid. I began reading for myself late, haltingly, and only because my brother seemed to be having so much fun with it. But while Matt would blast through a thick Stephen King novel in a few days, I labored. I mostly chose short books, and they had to be worth it. 

The first book I remember reading as something other than a homework assignment was The Book of Three, the first in a five-book series by Lloyd Alexander. This was completely because of my brother, who read all five and liked them so much that he named his main Dungeons & Dragons character after one of Alexander's creations. That was an almost unfathomable compliment in our world, and I just had to see why he'd done it. 

I loved The Book of Three—featuring Taran, the heroic assistant pig-keeper!—and even made it through the second book, the very awesome  The Black Cauldron. Loved that too, more even, but that was as far as I got. It was a lot of work, this reading for fun, and I already knew how the series ended from my brother.

So even after that postive start, books weren't a big part of my life. When it got too dark for climbing trees and riding bikes, there was TV and Atari. The next book that had a major impact on me was Watership Down. Technically, that was a homework assignment, but I devoured it in a way that was above and beyond the call of academic duty. That book floored me. Floored me. Still does.

That was fifth grade, fifth or sixth, and again, I didn't run out and start reading everything I could get my hands on. It was more of a growing suspicion that this reading thing could be kind of amazing sometimes. At about the same time, I started writing some poetry because, basically, it was short and I liked rhyming. Still, that was when I started writing for myself.

My dyslexia was thoroughly beaten down by then. It is, essentially, a problem of processing the symbols that make up language in a non-standard way, and years of assigned reading and individual attention in my no nonsense, small town elementary school had effectively retrained me to process those symbols properly. In the space of a few years, I'd gone from Special Ed to the gifted program, and that was really more about my teachers than me.

So now I had the mental tools for advanced reading and knew it could be fun, but I still wasn't an avid reader. That wouldn't happen until Robert Cormier. And then S.E. Hinton. I guess that was seventh grade. The Chocolate War, I Am the Cheese, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish... Kids were passing these books around: You have to check this out.

The books were darker than anything we'd read before. I'm not sure if anyone would have actually disapproved, but we acted that way, passing the little paperbacks around like contraband. And what seventh grader can resist something both portable and forbidden? 

The books were fantastic and now they were cool, too. That was that. I read pretty consistently from that point on. And then, in 10th grade English, we read the poem "Hawk Roosting" by Ted Hughes. Floored again, gobsmacked, whatever. I'd never heard anything like it:

There is no sophistry in my body;

My manners are tearing off heads...

It was the same thrill I'd felt reading Cormier for the first time. How could something be so dark, resonant, and cool and made only of words? And it was my old friend poetry again: still short, though no longer rhyming.

I was an English nerd 4eva after that. I plowed my way through all of Faulkner and then through NYU and into a job in publishing. Eventually, I started writing fiction, and when I made my way to YA, there was no doubt what sort of books I wanted to write. Something dark, something for kids who aren't necessarily avid readers, something they could pass around under their desks.

Will they? I guess we'll find out in April, when Gentlemen comes out. In the mean time, if you'll excuse me, I have some reading to do. 

Holly: Five Books That Made This Writer

FROM THE MIXED UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER by E.L. Konigsburg
When I first read this book I was the same age as the main character, 12-year-old Claudia, and I had a brother the same age as her 9-year-old brother Jamie. One of my favorite daydreams at the time concerned secretly living inside the mall, so it was tremendous fun to live vicariously through Claudia and Jamie as they ran away and slept inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When I decided that I wanted to write for teens and pre-teens, Konigsburg's novel is one of the first I went back and re-read. It was everything a great MG novel needs--a strong, smart main character, adventure, and heart.

THE STAND by Stephen King
Stephen King is tremendously underrated. He's not just a horror writer; he's a master of characterization. At over 800 pages, THE STAND was by far the largest novel I'd ever read (and now that I think back, there were some terribly inappropriate passages for an 11-year-old!). I dragged the enormous hardcover book with me everywhere for three months and read a few pages whenever I could. I remember breaking down in tears one day, over my pancakes in Denny's, when my favorite character suddenly died. By then I'd already known for several years that I would be a writer, and it excited me to think that one day I might be able to affect strangers the way Stephen King had affected me.

WRITING DOWN THE BONES by Natalie Goldberg
Writing Down the Bones is my creative writing Bible. I first read it in ninth grade, while attending an arts school and majoring in creative writing. I rolled my eyes at the sonnets and terza rimas the teacher expected us to write, but I loved the 20 or 30 minutes for journal writing we were given every morning, and I loved the emphasis on Natalie Goldberg's approach to writing. The book is filled with advice that is simple and practical, but easily forgotten ("Show, Don't Tell;" "Writing is Not a McDonald's Hamburger"). I go back to the book often, when I'm feeling bored or uninspired or even lonely, because the chapters feel like old friends. Natalie Goldberg is a poet, and it comes through even in her non-fiction. I know all writers are different, but I can't imagine anyone reading Writing Down the Bones and not taking something away from it.

WHY GIRLS ARE WEIRD by Pamela Ribon
In my heart I always knew I would be a writer, but sometimes my rational mind wondered if that would really work out the way I wanted it to. I knew "regular" people and I knew of writers, but I didn't know any regular people who had become writers...until 2003 when Pamela Ribon's first novel was published. Okay, so I didn't personally know Pamie, but I'd followed her online journal for several years and she was very much a real person to me. Pamie's success renewed my faith in my own writing. Reading the book also gave me insight into the process of writing a novel. Like Pamie, her main character kept an online journal. The majority of the plot was clearly fiction, but some of Pamie's actual journal entries made their way into the novel, and it fascinated me to see firsthand how an author used her own experiences in her fiction.

THE KEY TO THE GOLDEN FIREBIRD by Maureen Johnson
Maureen Johnson's first novel was my gateway drug into the world of YA literature. I'd called my first novel "literary fiction" because I had no idea what it really was, but I knew it wasn't working, until I woke up one day with the brilliant idea to completely rewrite it (again!) from the perspective of a 16-year-old character, and call it Young Adult. Since I didn't know anything about young adult literature, I headed to the library and found Johnson's book. Right away, it felt like home. I related so strongly to the characters and the situation. I thought about all the novels and short stories I'd written, or started, or thought about over the last few years, and I realized they'd all work as YA. I think it was fortuitous that I blindly selected something as excellent as The Key to the Golden Firebird as my first YA read in years. If I'd picked something less stellar, I may have dismissed the entire genre, and then where would I be today?

Saundra: Five Books That Made This Writer

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE - Maurice Sendak

Not only is this book willfully transgressive and stubbornly unsentimental, it's the first book that taught me that the words left off the page are just as important are the words left on.

Let the wild rumpus begin- and then it did in the most incredible way. Those strobe-captured moments left so much room for Max's celebration to become anything- as wild, as rumpusful, as infinite as our own imaginations allowed.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE is the very essence of show, don't tell- the very foundation of writing.

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA - Katherine Paterson

A book of startling honesty, BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA is the first book that I remember reflecting the real caprice and chaos of the world. Sometimes people are strange and selfish; sometimes terrible things happen for no reason at all.

And for me at that age, I was comforted knowing that other people Went Away- to Terabithia, to their fantasies, and that these otherplaces could live with, not in spite of, the ungentled intrusion of reality.

THE OUTSIDERS - S. E. Hinton

There's a certain shell of despair to poverty, and this book gets that. In three brothers and a handful of greasers, S.E. Hinton revealed the distraction of hunger. The restless acceptance of a menial fate. The ordinariness of violence and death. The inescapable truth that your friends and your pride- these are all you will ever be able to call your own when you're poor.

But Hinton also let the sunrise and sunset bring hope- not a promise that things will be better, but a whisper that things could be better. That you could be more. That it's possible to be hungry, but still full- of thoughts, ideas, even beauty.

HOMICIDE: A YEAR ON THE KILLING STREETS - David Simon

This book is quite simply the absolute distillation of everything I took from WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA and THE OUTSIDERS. It's non-fiction, beautifully written, revealing how directed, and how arbitrary, our short time here on earth really is.

Simon's exhaustive, exhausted look at the men and women who investigate murders in Baltimore, Maryland is not about true crime. It's about living, and finding the perversity, the tragedy, the beauty, and the sacred in all of it.

I can only try to capture the thinnest margin of his success there, but every time I sit down to write, I try.

ON WRITING - Stephen King & STARTING FROM SCRATCH - Rita Mae Brown

I love both of these books for the things they say about the art, the heart and the meaning of writing. King's description of the telepathic art and Brown's insistence that a book is only half done when it leaves your hands (and your cat's paws) were deeply meaningful for me.

But I also love them for reminding me that nobody- not even a best seller- knows anything about the act of writing.

The only way to write a book is to sit down and write it. And everything else- from Stephen King's absurd dismissal of word counts under 5000 words a day, and Brown's brow-lifting dictate that every writer should learn Latin, Greek and own all 13 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary- that's all personal eccentricity.

Having these books as reminders of both- art and act- has defined me, and I'm so glad to have them both in my collection.

Lisa: Books That Have Made This Writer

What a fascinating exercise, to come up with the five books that helped me become the writer I am today. I think what’s difficult for me is I feel like every book helps me become a better writer. I don’t think I’m one of those born with the necessary talent to do this writing thing. I really have to work at it. And I honestly feel like every single book I read is a lesson in writing, in one way or another. But here is the list of five I came up with!

DREAMLAND by Sarah Dessen – This was the first Sarah Dessen book I read, and actually one of the first young adult books I read after I started writing for kids. I started out writing picture books and middle grade novels, and since there were many mid-grade novels to keep me reading, I didn’t venture much beyond those. But when I read this book, I was hooked. Her characters were real. Her descriptions swept me up and away into the story. It’s no wonder her books are so hugely popular with both teens and adults.

OUT OF THE DUST by Karen Hesse – As someone who writes in verse, how could I not mention this amazing book? It was actually the first verse novel I read. The poems were so vivid, I could taste the heat and dust as I read. It stuck with me for a very long time, and even now, when I’m writing in verse, I think of Billie Jo and the pictures Karen Hesse painted in such few words.

BECAUSE OF WINN DIXIE by Kate DiCamillo – I don’t often reread books because I have so little time to read as it is, and my to-be-read pile is always about to topple over. But this book is the exception. When I need to remember why voice is so important to a story, I read this book. When I need to remember how important it is to create unique and vivid characters, I read this book. When I need to remember why books are so important for kids, I read this book. I loved books when I was at the middle grade age. Life was kind-of chaotic for me then, and most of my memories of books as a child come from that period of life. They comforted me in a way nothing else could. Those memories, along with this book, are what keep me going back to mid-grade fiction.

WHAT MY MOTHER DOESN’T KNOW by Sonya Sones – Another novel in verse I have to mention, because this book is hugely popular with the teen girls and when I finished I HEART YOU, YOU HAUNT ME, I immediately sent an e-mail to Sonya and asked if she ever took on books to critique. By its very nature of being different, verse can turn some teens off. I really wanted to make sure I was being poetic while also being accessible. It’s a fine line! Fortunately for me, Sonya said yes and my book became stronger thanks to her feedback.

CAT IN THE HAT by Dr. Suess – I know, what an odd one to end with. Why? Because one of the top rules in children’s literature is don’t try to be Dr. Suess. Which is another way of saying, there is only one Dr. Suess. So when I find myself wishing I could write books like John Green or Laurie Halse Anderson or E. Lockhart or Suzanne Collins or a thousand other authors, I tell myself, don't try to be them. Just be yourself, and do the best you can with what you've got. After all, it worked for Dr. Suess, didn't it?