Two words

This is the front of a card that one of my dearest friends and critique partners gave me. I’m sharing the words ‘begin anyhow’ because I’ve been struggling to start a new project that’s been on my mind for a while. Lots of writers wrestle with hesitation and self-doubt but that doesn’t make it any easier to overcome. I keep tip-toeing around the idea, convincing myself it’s not worth the effort or the time, that it will surely come to nothing and perhaps I ought to be doing something more worthwhile, altruistic or at least useful with my time.

There is a lot happening in the world that needs time, attention and effort. I’m always wondering if writing is the best way to contribute something constructive or even necessary. The needs of the world are so great, especially now. But the more I think about it, the more I keep coming back to the idea that the world needs stories. People need stories to connect, to empathise, to understand, to question, to find a way though, to make change. Young readers, all readers, need stories that are authentic, that speak of human truth, of the things that help us make sense of it all and ultimately, act.

And so this month I will do my best to ‘begin anyhow’. To pay attention to what is happening in the news without being consumed by it. To do the work. To write a story that will speak to the power of hope, come what may.

The Art of Slow Writing by Louise DeSalvo

This book is something of a gift for writers of all kinds. Do not be deceived by the simplicity of the title. ‘Slow Writing’ is not an excuse for avoiding the work, or for only doing little bits once in a while thereby justifying the weeks, months (years, yes, years!) it takes to complete a project. It is a thoughtful and considered look at process, and how the pacing of that varies for different writers at different times in their lives. By examining what has helped others produce their best, most engaging and authentic work, Louise DeSalvo offers the reader a keen insight into the sort of creative wisdom that can change a writer’s life.

New York Times obituary on Louise De Salvo

Writing A Life - Postings from Louise De Salvo’s blog

Dear, Dreamer

If you haven’t seen this short film about the writer Jason Reynolds, it’s well worth taking the ten minutes or so to watch it. His books tend to be grouped in the Young Adult (13 +) section of libraries, but some are also considered Middle Grade (8 - 12). It’s a beautiful portrait of a talented writer doing essential work. By filmmaker Kristian Melom.

Jason Reynolds’ website

Filmaker Kristian Melom’s website

Making sense of the world through story

I have recently been on the look out for picture books about loss. There are not many, and even fewer that tackle the subject with the complexity and emotional depth that a child’s grief both deserves and demands. I’d like to share the two that resonated most, for us at least.

Art from Ocean Meets Sky by The Fan Brothers, published by Simon & Schuster

The first is Ocean Meets Sky by The Fan Brothers. It works on many spectacular levels, whether you are trying to make sense of an emotional journey or not. The artwork is breathtaking, be sure to notice the hidden details early on. But what I loved most about the book was the portrayal of the young boy and the memory of his grandfather. I don’t want to give away the story, but suffice to say there is magic in the child’s imagination, there is a cherishing of something lost and yes, there is sadness, but there is also joy.

The second is this one, When Sadness is at Your Door by Eva Eland. The two books are very different, not least in styles of illustration. In this story the child acknowledges an overwhelming sadness but goes on to find a way to be present with it and ultimately to embrace it. There is a sense of growth throughout the story, of expansion. It doesn’t come easily, but it comes. And there is also kindness, that the child directs inward towards themselves.

Both books do what stories do best: they help us make sense of what it means to be human, to be a part of a world that is beautiful but hard, heartbreaking but hopeful.

Letters to a young reader

A Velocity of Being is one of my favourite books to have come out recently. It’s a collection of letters addressed ‘to a young reader’ by all sorts of different people, from scientists and writers to entrepeneurs and musicians. It is edited by the extraordinary Maria Popova & Claudia Zoe Bedrick. Each letter is uniquely illustrated and speaks to the power of reading in one way or another. Late one night, after sharing a few with my children, I wrote a letter of my own. To them in some ways, the child who loves to read and the other who’s not so sure, but to all kids really. Anyway, it’s definitely not as good as the letters in the book (!) so please do buy or borrow the book, but for what it’s worth this is what I wrote:

Dear young reader,

Why do you read? Do you read because you can’t wait to know what happens next? Because you get lost in another world and forget to come back? Or because you’re searching for something but you’re not sure what? Or maybe you read because it makes you laugh, cry and all the things in between that friends can make you feel. Or maybe you don’t like reading at all and you do it because others say you absolutely must, because it’s ‘good for you’, in the way that vegetables are but you’d never choose to eat them.

Whether you love reading or whether you have yet to find the right book (that’s out there waiting for you, I promise) here’s what I’d like to share with you:

Stories are a form of real magic.

The words of a story are like the ingredients in a spell. Once they’re woven together in just the right way, they are capable of making the ‘unreal’ real. Real to you in that moment. I do not say this lightly. All sorts of people believe in things they cannot see or touch, but are nonetheless real to them. How? Because those things, those people and places come wrapped in story paper. Because stories are powerful and they can change the way you think, not just about the world but about yourself too.

Stories are a form of real magic.

I don’t mean the straight forward make-believe kind of magic but something far more powerful and sophisticated. Characters and places may not be ‘real’ in terms of blood cells or bone marrow, mileage per minute or geographical location but they are capable of a different kind life inside your imagination. One that is no less potent. Think of it as a kind of parallel reality that exists alongside the one you can see, touch, smell and taste.

Think about the feelings you feel while you’re reading, the way your heart quickens, the fear in your stomach, the laughter that bubbles up inside, the lump in your throat, the pain or the joy in your heart, the things you learn that change pieces of you on the inside, sometimes forever - all of these feelings and shifts are real things that can happen when you read.

Close your eyes for a second and recognise the power of your imagination and the magic that it’s capable of conjuring. Then try to hold these two contradictory things inside your head at the same time: what is imagined can also be real and what is real can always be imagined.

So if you read, read to believe. Read to carry and nurture that spark of something magical, at once real and imaginary, that lives inside you and always will, because you are human. Read to make sense of this beautiful but complicated world, to wonder, to learn, to empathise, to question. Read to connect, with yourself and with others, when you’re young and when you’re old too. And if you haven’t found the right book yet, read in search of it. Because when you do, it’ll change everything.

Read because stories are a form of real magic.

A Velocity of Being on indiebound.org

A Velocity of Being on amazon.com

Enchanted Lion Books

A Velocity of Being - link to Maria Popova’s fantastic blog

Something bigger

I moved house recently and was unpacking a box of desk-ish things when I found this card. My son’s writing isn’t too clear, but this is what he had copied out:

“Always let the world inspire and influence you but never let it discourage you. In fact the more it discourages you, the more it needs you.” Conner Bailey

It’s a line from one of his favourite series, The Land of Stories by Chris Colfer. I can remember exactly where we were when he stopped reading at looked up at me. “Mum,” he said, “I’ve just read an amazing thing. Listen to this…” And he read it out to me.

In that moment he realised that books give us something bigger than plot lines. And because I’m a lover of quotes I suggested he write it out, that he might like to remember it one day. He did.

Truth is, he loved that line and it resonated with him, but it resonated with me too. And when I see it written out like this, in his wobbly child-like hand writing, it resonates even more. There is a need for courage and compassion, for empathy and understanding, for a child’s eye view of the world - both as it is but also as it may be, at its best. There is a need and a place for those things, perhaps now more than ever.

Garth Greenwell on Being a Writer in America Today

My friend Wendy is working on a masters in creative writing at Bennington College, in fact she’s there right now and loving it. She recently sent me the 2019 commencement speech by Garth Greenwell. It’s about 20 minutes long and if you are any kind of writer, children’s or otherwise, I would urge you to watch it in full (see link below). Otherwise, here are extracts of the main 7 points he makes, except for the last one which I’m quoting in full because each word of it matters. So, if you don’t watch the speech, at least read point no. 7. (I will be writing all seven points on the wall in my office and probably around the edge of my laptop screen, in tiny permanent letters. Perhaps you will find them useful too. Anchors even. For the wobbly days.)

From Garth Greenwell’s address, Being a Writer in America Today:

1. Hold your friends close

   “A great workshop, I tell my own students, is one in which you find one or two useful readers, and one or two writers whose work excites you. Hold these people close; don’t lose touch; do the work of maintaining those friendships.”

2. Comparison is the devil

   “The ruling god of the writing world is chance, and it rains (or doesn’t rain) its blessings down with perfect injustice. You will publish books before your friends do, your friends will win prizes before you do, someone none of you knows will be crowned the season’s great writer of her generation. None of this has to do with literature, none of it matters, nothing good can come from trying to gauge your career against the careers of your friends.”

3. Envy doesn’t matter

   “But you will compare, of course, and most of all you will measure yourself against your friends, and for the 99-point-bar-9 percent of us who are not saints, this means that we will find ourselves from time to time envying our friends. You should acknowledge this, and refuse it any importance, and remember that envy doesn’t cancel the joy and pride you also feel for your friends. So long as this is true, envy doesn’t matter.”

4. The content changes but the anxiety remains the same

   “For Philip Roth, who published some thirty-plus books and won every possible literary award—or every award but one—writing was “frustration, daily frustration, not to mention humiliation.” If writing felt like humiliation to Philip Roth, what hope do any of the rest of us have? The idea that some sign of outward success, some award or sales figure, could satisfy us is a mistake, I think. The soul one pours into a novel or a collection of poems, the years of effort a book represents—what possible response from the world could be adequate recompense for that? … The only time the anxiety lessens is when I’m bent over my notebook doing the only work that matters: trying to write a decent sentence, then another decent sentence, then one good page and another.”

5. Not writing is the only failure that matters

   “For twenty years before I published my first book, I wrote in absolute obscurity, in something that could only look from the outside like failure. Certainly it looked like failure to my family, to many of my friends, often enough to myself. For some of that time I was a student, for much of it I taught high school English. But in all those years, without any visible success, there was only one year that I experienced real failure, the only kind of failure that counts: my first year teaching high school, when I was so overwhelmed that for the nine months of the academic year I didn’t write a word… There’s no magic to this. Sit at your desk and write.”

6. Read everything

   “It’s important to read new books: to know what your contemporaries are writing, to keep your finger on the pulse of a literary culture. But I worry, with many of the MFA students I meet, that writing being done in America right now is almost all they read. I think current American writing is vibrant and exciting; but any time you draw most of your reading from a single country, a single language, a single decade, you’re drawing from a very shallow well. Read everything; seek the deepest and most varied wells. The writer Yiyun Li has a rule: for every book she reads by a living writer, she reads at least one book by a dead writer. This is an excellent rule. Read in other languages. Every significant period of innovation in English-language literature has happened because of the collision of languages and traditions… If you can’t read in other languages, read translations. (But do study other languages—study them even if you never get good enough to speak fluently or read without a dictionary; it’s the single most powerful thing you can do to improve your style.) Literature is larger than anything we can say about it, than any craft we can devise. Read everything.”

7. Remember the real life of literature

   “Anyone who cares about the world of books knows this: each year, great books go unnoticed, mediocre books win awards, terrible books sell millions of copies. Very seldom do merit and recognition coincide. (When they do—when Frank Bidart wins the Pulitzer Prize, or Sigrid Nunez wins the National Book Award—it’s important to rejoice.) The truth is that every visible mark of success is irrelevant to the real value of literature. 

   “The saddest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say was a remark made by an editor at a major house, considering the conveyor belt of new books, each granted the month or so of attention an editor and publicist can spare them. “I might as well be selling shoes,” he said. I said before that comparison was the devil, and it is; but really the commodification of art is the devil. 

   “The literary world is set up in such a way that it seems as though if a book isn’t noticed in the first few months after publication it has failed, or if it gets viciously reviewed it has failed, or if it doesn’t win prizes it has failed. All of us know this isn’t true: all of my favorite books sold thirty copies and went immediately out of print. The danger of publication—of leaving the privacy of writing or the purity of an MFA program for the publicity of putting a book into the world, a book about which anyone can say absolutely anything at all they want—the danger of publication is that it can warp one’s values so wildly that these things can seem to be true. 

   “Once, doing a bit of research, I stumbled upon the initial reviews for James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Many of them are absolutely savage, stunningly cruel, stupid and bigoted; when I read them I had difficulty imagining what it must have been like to have such vitriol greet one’s second book. How could he go on, I wondered, how could he bear to write another word? It’s courageous to continue writing in the face of that kind of response. 

   “But reviews have nothing to do with the real life of literature, which happens in an unpredictable elsewhere, a place beyond commodity that no publicity campaign can chart a path to: it happens when a 14-year-old kid in Kentucky, say, pulls Giovanni’s Roomdown from a library shelf, as I did, having no idea that it would speak to me more intimately than anything had ever spoken to me before, that it would radically change my sense of myself and of my relationship to dignity, that in some quite genuine way it would save my life. That intimate communication between writer and reader, that miracle of affective translation across distance and time, is the real life of literature; that’s what matters; that’s why we endure Roth’s failure and humiliation to perform the extraordinary act of faith that is fixing our voices on the page. What a trial it is, what an intermittent joy, what an extraordinary privilege.

   Thank you and congratulations.”

Links:

Video: Bennington College: Garth Greenwell’s full address

For more about Garth Greenwell: www.garthgreenwell.com

All there is to know

A friend recently recommended an online course called Masterclass. I’ve only just got around to looking it up. I was a bit suspicious to be honest, the idea of a pre-recorded, virtual teacher was not exactly appealing. I tend to like real-life teachers, very much. I am lucky in that most of mine were inspiring, selfless, passionate and made a significant impact on my life.

Image courtesy of Masterclass

But I’m loving the class. It’s called ‘Storytelling’ and it’s given by Neil Gaiman. Yes, I would like it if I was sitting across from him, inside the picturesque writer’s cabin breathing in the bookish, woodland air, able to ask questions and interacting in real time, but I’m not. I’m on my daughter’s beanbag covered in dog hair with the lap top balanced on a pile of books. The thing is, it doesn’t matter as much as I thought it would. There’s real value in this for what it is. I’m still listening to him talk about the craft of writing and I’m still learning.

One of the many things I love about writing is that I’ll never know all there is to know, howsoever I try.

Masterclass link (I should add that it’s not free although for $185 you are allowed access to as many of the classes as you want for up to a year. I’m hoping to do Margaret Atwood’s on creative writing next. And then David Mamet and then Judy Blume… and then if I’m not square-eyed by the end of those, I’ll try something totally random, like French Pastry Fundamentals.)

Neil Gaiman interview in Vanity Fair: On His New Storytelling MasterClass, Good Omens, and the Upside of Twitter

An in depth review of Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass by the Write Practice

Podcast: Neil Gaiman interview with Tim Ferris 2019

An unexpected invitation

I was in LA recently and walked past a big board on the sidewalk. It looked like the kind of graffiti you might see in any city, any state in America. I didn’t even notice it. But then I walked past it again and something caught my eye. I looked more closely. The board had been divided into two panels. They were, in fact, invitations to respond to the following two prompts:

1. THINGS THAT SCARE ME.

2. WHAT I’M GOING TO DO ABOUT IT.

I was surprised by some of the entries, some of the things that people had shared. Some of it’s funny, some of it’s weird and rude but a lot of it was personal, moving and raw. If you look closely you’ll find thoughts like: not doing my best to change the world, missing my opportunity to do and be something I’m passionate about, being vulnerable, disappointing my family, speaking out, forgetting how to play piano. But the thing that really caught my eye, the thing that made me smile most is on the second panel, below.

Panel 1: Things that scare me

It’s written in red. And it speaks to the power of storytelling. Maybe the person who wrote it is a writer, maybe they’re a musician, maybe a playwright or an actor. Or maybe none of those things. Maybe it was just a person, expressing their way of trying to make sense of things, of trying to engage with fear. Because that’s what storytelling can do. That’s how powerful it is.

Panel 2 : What I’m going to do about it

World Book Day

There are lots of days in honour of different purposes, causes, reasons and needs. In fact there are so many now (there’s ‘a day’ for toasted marshmallows apparently) that it’s impossible to keep track of them all, even the significant ones.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I’m not a big Halloween person. Halloween is not ‘a day in honour of’ so much as a cultural tradition, especially in the States. If I’m being honest - I’m that person who is genuinely freaked out by the murdered corpse fake vomiting blood into my child’s trick or treat basket. Honestly, it gives me nightmares. Yes, I know it’s fake. It still gives me nightmares. Plus the amount of sweets and candies they collect is indefensible. And my kids have food allergies. The whole thing is a nightmare EXCEPT for the dressing-up part. The children love thinking of costumes, of becoming somebody else for the day, making props, digging around the house and getting some glue and paints out. And because we are lucky to have a lot of books in our house, it’s become a family tradition for the kids to choose characters from some of their favourite stories.

The B.F.G, Sophie and Robin Hood

Imagine my excitement when friends in England started telling me about World Book Day. World Book Day has become a thing in the UK. It is basically Halloween without dead bodies and candies. But if you dig a little deeper, it’s more than that. If you’re a reader of children’s literature or a writer of children’s literature and you’ve never heard of World Book Day (most of my American friends have not) then have a look at their website, link below. It’s brilliant.

There are interviews with writers like Malorie Blackman and Patrice Lawrence on connecting with your character, masterclasses on inspiration, poetry and world building, Jeff Kinney talking about writing funny, there are new releases for all ages on sale for $1 (actually it’s a pound, but I can’t find the pound symbol on my American laptop) quizzes, story ideas, writing prompts, book lists and resources for librarians and teachers.

Children all over the country go to school for the day in costume, read books and talk about books. It prompts important conversations about the immeasurable value of libraries, inclusivity, diversity and equity in children’s literature, books, writing and the importance of sharing stories, for fun. For fun.

World Book Day official website

World Book Day: Author and Illustrator Masterclasses

The Guardian: article on World Book Day Costumes

The Guardian: article by Julia Donaldson on call for diversity in children’s literature