1. What do you think it is about your books, set in tiny Ohio towns, that
appeals to a mass audience?
Well, I think kids who read are very open to any sort of setting as long as the story is interesting and the characters are lively.
As a writer, though, I find it enormously fun to write about Ohio, to lavish it with the sort of love and attention that it deserves. The Midwest is so forlorn in children’s literature! The market is bursting at the seams with medieval forests and Scottish moors and the seamy gangsta rap underbelly of LA, not to mention the tsunami that is All Things Southern—yikes! But…Ohio? Barbara Robinson (Portsmouth, Ohio) and Virginia Hamilton (Yellow Springs, Ohio) notwithstanding, small-town Ohio is definitely a here-be-dragons country in children’s literature.
2. What about Ohio, its people and places, inspires you?
Flannery O’Connor wrote that it takes a certain kind of stupidity to be a good fiction writer—the kind of stupidity that requires you to stare at something before you begin to understand it.
When I first began to stare as a writer, I found myself staring at the rivers and hills of southeast Ohio; staring at the people who had lived there. And since I had everything to learn about telling a good story, I tried to stick to a familiar setting and description. Hey, one less thing to juggle, right? But the more I wrote about the familiar and the commonplace, the more I realized something crucial about my writerly process: writing about stuff I know turns pretty quickly into writing about stuff I don’t know.
Take my third book, The Dragons of Spratt, Ohio. Dragons was really born out of my first trip to The Wilds - the wildlife refuge maintained on fourteen square miles of reclaimed coal land smack in the middle of good old Muskingum County, Ohio. One day in 1995, I climbed the hill at the brand-new Visitor’s Center and saw zebras and giraffes wandering the fields below as if they had always lived there. Granted, zebras in Muskingum County were odd, but everything else I saw that day was extremely prosaic. The sky was blue, the robins sang. Across a dirt road were a couple of dairy farms with faded red barns and herds of milk cows. On the horizon sat the Big Muskie where it had always sat—the world’s largest surface mining dragline which had been parked for years in the middle of unreclaimed coal land. There it all was right in front of me. My little world’s most familiar and unremarkable landscape. Who knew that writing about this wee patch of sunny Ohio would turn into an epic adventure featuring flying dragons, pink rhinestone hairclips, and a villainous aunt from Paris, France?
Goodness me. I’ve never worn sparkly pink hairclips. And I’ve not been to Paris, France, either. But hairclips and Paris are emblematic of the funnest part of writing: how a writer can be going along quietly, writing her own business, only to be ambushed and dragged off screaming into parts unknown by stuff she knows nothing about, has trouble envisioning, and couldn’t even begin to describe without a whole bunch of rewriting.
3. What do you find so entrancing in small towns? Could you elaborate on the
juxtaposition of writing about an insular community for a major New York
publishing house?
It’s true I’ve lived most of my life in small towns, but I was born and raised in Chicago—and what is that great city composed of but very small neighborhoods? I grew up on Chicago’s East Side: at that time very much a small town of steel mills and Polish immigrants and the Catholic Church. It was far different in tone and voice than the educated Hyde Park community surrounding the University of Chicago, or the hard-working Dutch Calvinists who congregated around 106th Street; tidy little towns unto themselves.
Now, I’ve never actually tried it, being chicken, but I suspect that if you scratch a random bunch of New York editors, you’ll find that among all those native New Yorkers or San Franciscans there’s somebody who started life out in French Lick, Indiana, or Petoskey, Michigan. Call it the James Thurber syndrome—the everyman from Ohio State who lands a staff job at the New Yorker and pals around with EB White and Harold Ross.
4. Why did you decide to write for children/young adults? Do you ever get the urge to seek a different audience?
When I first started to write seriously (1991), I wrote three “apprentice” novels over the course of five years. They had twelve-year old protagonists, turned out to be about 150 pages long, and all of them had the unmistakable smell of a middle school library. I have since written three novels which have been published—and two and-a-half which have not, worst luck. All of them, every blessed one, has a twelve or thirteen-year-old protagonist. I’m afraid my imagination is in a rut…but oh! What a wonderful rut it is!
On the other hand, I would dearly love to learn how to write for the kids just a little younger—the eight-to-ten year olds. To do something on the order of The Whipping Boy (Fleischmann) or The Magic Skateboard (Richemont); a tale told quickly and very well.
5. How did you break into the industry from a small town?
Like most of my life’s biggest accomplishments, I went out and did everything very enthusiastically and energetically and exactly wrong.
When I finished my fourth novel in 1996, it dawned on me that I really liked to write, that I was probably going to go on writing, and that after practicing for the last five years, I was getting discernibly better at it. Perhaps my work was ready to submit? Up ‘til that time I hadn’t thought much about publication. I knew my first three books weren’t ready. I had found an appropriate use for them (doorstop to the basement laundry room), and I had absolutely no desire to do anything else with them. But Book Number Four was different.
We were living in Zanesville, Ohio, at the time, and I had no idea of the depth and breadth of the wee world of children’s literature. Frankly, I’d never heard of SCWBI, networking at conferences, literary agents, critique groups, or CWIM. My family wasn’t hooked up to the internet, but we were just down the road from the John McIntire Library, one of the crown jewels in Ohio’s world-class public library system. The juvenile stacks are extremely well-maintained and current, and the children’s librarians are very knowledgeable. I spent one rainy spring afternoon flipping through children’s books, picking out the mid-grades with good cover art. (I just adore cover art. Embarrassing, but true—I judge every book by its cover.)
About halfway through the afternoon, Scott Horst, one of the reference librarians, got involved. He handed me a stack of writer’s books which discussed query letters, manuscript formatting, the crucial role of agents, and how the writer must thoroughly and earnestly research in order to find the perfect publishing house for one’s book.
Well, I’m terrible at being earnest. And thoroughness is hard. On the other hand, all that cover-art pondering had been great fun. Simon and Schuster had a nifty art department, so I fired off a letter:
Dear First Reader:
I’ve written a children’s book about submarines and penguins and traveling circuses and shipwrecks in the sub-Antarctic. It’s written with deathless prose and at the end, love conquers all. Would you like to read it?About two weeks later, I got a badly mimeographed we’ll-take-a-look-at-it letter with a hastily scrawled “send it to the attention of Sarah L. Thomson, Editorial Assistant” in blue ink at the bottom.
And the rest is history. Sort of. After working for a year with Sarah on the story, the book was ultimately rejected in Acquisitions (they said love certainly does not conquer all, the very idea). During the next year, though, I wrote another book (wisely sticking closer to my Ohio roots, so nix on the submarines), and Sarah moved to HarperCollins as a full Editor. Our first book, The Truth about Rats, Rules & Seventh Grade, was published in 2001.
So, my first book published was actually the fifth one written, and the second book submitted. There’s a math problem in there, somewhere.
6. Is there a particular children’ s book or book about life in a small
town that inspired you?
Well, there are so many books that have prodded me on. Thousands upon thousands! But if I’ve got to limit myself to children’s books, and children’s books set in small towns, then I will go for broke and plump for The Wheel on the School, by Meindert deJong. Oh, I know, I know. Writers aren’t allowed to write like that anymore. A shame, really.
7. What do you think makes a standout children’s book?
In a word? Action. Wait—there’s a better word: Adventure. The characters need to be having the times of their lives in a page-turner of a story.
By “adventure”, I don’t mean only what we normally think of as the adventure genre: discovering pirate treasure or diffusing nuclear warheads or driving off the edge of the planet, though I dearly love books like that and wish we had more of them. Falling in love is an adventure, don’t you think? So is finding out your best friend cheated all year long on Miss Finch’s spelling tests. Learning how to parallel park? Whoa—now that’s adventure!
Whatever sort the protagonist is, he needs to do something HE HIMSELF considers meaningful or interesting or alarming (as opposed to simply having meaningful or interesting or alarming things happen to him in the first half of the book and then spending the last half thinking meaningful or interesting or alarming thoughts about his fate in life). Adventure is the stuff of interest and intelligence—it’s what the protagonist does next which shows us who he is becoming. And giving the reader the chance to walk around in somebody else’s skin—is that not juvenile literature’s highest and most noble calling? Plus, it’s great fun. What other profession gives a girl the opportunity live the wild and crazy life all day long and still be in bed by ten o’clock?
The reason I bring this up is that it does seem to me we’re in perilous danger of being snookered by the notion that if one’s characters are simply oozing singular voice and personhood, the story can be any old rag of a thing and the book is still wrapped in glory. But voice without story—without the right story, the most adventuresome story for this particular voice in that particular space-time continuum—makes the protagonist a spectator to his own life. Jeez, what’s the point of that? Even if we write him all pale and interesting and draped in dramatical black, 150 pages of spectating is pretty darned boring. And I vote we make boring the new National Kiss of Death for kiddie lit.
8. What elements do you think are crucial to telling a compelling story to
your audience?
The main thing that interests kid writers is the main thing that interests kid readers—a rattling good story populated by amazing and lively characters. That’s our common ground. Certainly, the writer enjoys dressing it up all sorts of ways, and with all sorts of literary devices. And certainly, the story can be happy or sad or fantastical or photo-realistic; the characters anything from deeply profound to profoundly shallow. The sky’s the limit, really. But at some point the writer has to forget everything—considerations of time and technique and literary merit—and serve that particular story featuring those peculiar characters to the best of his ability.
This kind of wonderful storytelling happens most often, I think, when the writer disappears from the page. Characters are meant for their story; the story is meant for its characters. Their sounds, their settings, their descriptions; what they think, what they feel, what they believe. We should write our books so full of life and light and adventure that there’s just not a lot of room left for us to ride our writerly hobbyhorses.
Because really….no self-respecting kid wants to hang around with an author. Why should they? It’s bad enough when an author shows up at school full of perky advice about rewriting book reports—far worse to be hijacked by authorial enthusiasms smack in the middle of Chapter Ten. It’s my goal to let the reader liberate the dog pound with Larch, or bust his brother out of the hospital alongside Matt without me sticking in my writerly oar about the heart-warming glories of Nature, or how a stitch in time saves ninety-nine.
9. How do you balance a job to pay the bills with writing for a major
publishing outfit?
I am definitely one of those poor lost souls who, if a full-time writer, would sit home and moon about her Amazon rankings (or lack thereof), and what am I doing wrong that School Library Journal never calls about a cover story?
I know most writers yearn for the day in which they can do nothing but write, but personally I think that would be very bad for this pilgrim’s progress.
Me, I like to write. I like to think about my story, dream about my story, fiddle and tinker and revise. I work hard at writing. My books are getting better and better, which is exciting. Writing good adventures for my characters is a thrill and a challenge, and I greet each writing day with a song in my heart….but honestly, by noon, I can’t sit still for one minute more. I have to jump up and DO something!
So, I really have this perfect setup. I hoard the creative morning hours to sit around and write. Then, I jump up and go to work for Sears, hauling around table saws and mixing paint and selling ratchets. It’s the best of all possible worlds, in my opinion—the contemplative life of the writer juxtaposed against the rough-and-tumble existence of the sales clerk at a suburban mall in the middliest part of the Midwest…where there be dragons a-plenty.
10. Children ’s Writers and Illustrators Market basically deals with an
audience looking to break into the notoriously insulated world of children’ s
books. What advice can you give to these people?
I wrote for a long time—five years—before I was satisfied that I had written anything worth publishing. After I sold two books and thought I had this publishing biz all figured out, my next two were thumpingly rejected. I’ve gotten some pretty awful reviews. One of my books has had three different editors, and I’m pretty certain Editor Number Three never has found the time to read my poor orphaned book. Of course, I’ve had some incredibly wonderful things happen as well, but my point is: if you take your writing seriously, and yourself not at all seriously, you’ll be fine. Even better—your books will be great as you can possibly make them. The writer serves the story. The writer finishes the book. There’s really not much more to it—-unless, of course, you want to moon about your book’s Amazon rankings. Yikes!
11. What would you have done differently, knowing what you do now?
Even though I wrote for what sounds like a long time before trying for publication, looking back, I wish I had waited one more book before starting to submit. I’d be further ahead with a bit more practice. They’ll be writing that on my tombstone, that one.
12. What are the best and worst aspects of the business?
The best thing is the time! The writer has all the time in the world to Finish. The. Book. “A thousand years are but a day” in the great big world of kiddie lit, and so we can revel in it, dive into it, play with it—all the time in the world to think about writing, to dream about the writing, to do the writing. Time has been give to us to write a good book—no no, a great book, the best one we’ve ever written! So, if it takes us one year or twelve to Finish. The. Book, no matter; the editor will still send you a surprised and delighted email: “Wow! A new story from you already! I can hardly wait to read it!”
But of course, she can—and does. And Time, which had been the writer’s most faithful friend, becomes the writer’s worstest enemy—what the heck can the editor be doing with my manuscript? Using it to prop open her door??? Good Lord! It’s been three. Whole. Weeks! and I haven’t heard a peep. My editor hates me. My story sucks. My life is over.
All that self-doubt and wormtalk after I’ve submitted a manuscript for consideration…it’s hard. Very hard. On the other hand, when mooning about my books’ Amazon rankings becomes the morning’s great creative endeavor, I’m always vaguely comforted. Finally—nowhere to go but up!
13. Are you working on any new projects?
Yes. I am currently mooning about my books’ Amazon rankings as Dutton has my recently finished mid-grade set in the near future, and my editor hasn’t gotten back to me yet.
In the few remaining sane hours allotted to me, I am trying to make amends for starting to submit before I was ready—I’ve gone back to that story I wrote back in 1996; you know—the one full of deathless prose and submarines? I’m completely overhauling it. The working title is Jack and Hendrick , and wow. Just wow. It’s turning out to be my best story yet…..