Author Archives: Zu Vincent

Meaning and Metaphor

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More thoughts on fully realizing your fictional world…  gull

No matter how fantastical or faraway your fictional world, it begins inside you, as the writer. We are all from some place, even if we are displaced. All a product of what we know and don’t know. Of who are, our culture, our parents, the landscape where we were raised.

If you doubt this, the next time you have an opinion about something, ask yourself where the opinion comes from. Your parents? Your culture? The books you read or movies you watch?

When I ask myself where I am from, I get many different answers, but they often begin with the natural world. I’m not only from water, but from mountains, canyons, trees and starry nights, the sprawl of a river town and its highways, as Ray Carver writes about in “Highway 99E from Chico”

 

The mallard ducks are down

For the night. They chuckle

In their sleep and dream of Mexico

And Honduras. Watercress

Nods in the irrigation ditch

And the tules slump forward, heaving

With blackbirds.

 

Rice fields float under the moon.

Even the wet maple leaves cling

To my windshield. I tell you Maryann,

I am happy.

 

I tell you Maryann, I am happy. Carver remembers this highway, this windshield, these birds, this trip, because of the emotion behind it.

If we seek to understand the emotions behind what we write, it can make our fictional world real.

Another California writer, Brenda Nakamoto, who writes about growing up as a third generation Japanese in Peach Farmer’s daughter, talks about creating her book out of a sense of needing to understand her roots, and a yearning for a grandfather she never met.

In missing the rural farm where she grew up, Nakamoto recreates it with sensory details. The peaches heavy on the trees, and her Dad’s old Ford truck bleached to the color of a faded sky.

And while she never knew her grandfather, who killed himself before she was born, she re-imagines him as an immigrant on a ship bound for Seattle. Although he was only 5 feet tall, she sees him as “a big so huge I cannot put my arms around it.”

A big so huge, I cannot get my arms around it. I love that line. And in creating place through specific details, Nakamoto’s world has become universal.

What makes a fictional world believable? How to you find the right words that will paint a place that feels every bit as real as Dad’s old Ford truck bleached to the color of a faded sky?

I believe these exquisite details emerge through the work of mining your own subconscious, to uncover your true reasons your writing. As Alice Hoffman says, don’t write what you know, write what you feel.

And when you are writing what you feel, symbol and metaphor naturally follow.

Listen to this moment in The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo when Rob cries at his mother’s funeral:

“They were both dressed up in suits that day; his father’s suit was too small. And when he slapped Rob to make him stop crying, he ripped a hole underneath the arm of his jacket.

’There ain’t no point in crying,” his father had said afterward. “Crying ain’t going to bring her back.’”

That hole in his jacket underarm is a symbol for the whole in Rob’s life.

_Homecoming

In Cynthia Voights Homecoming, the story of four abandoned children walking to their grandmother’s house, the children are in constant search of food.

“Dicey and James pulled mussels from the rocks and washed them off in the water, while Maybeth and Sammy climbed back up the hill for twigs and larger pieces of wood. Soon they had a large mound of mussels waiting beside a crackling fire…”

Food in this way becomes not just a meal, but stands in for the missing mother, their loss and their yearning… a type of extended metaphor that TS Elliot called an Objective Correlative: or a “Set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for a particular emotion.”

In my own novel The Lucky Place, I returned to my water roots with my character Cassie. In this scene she is realizing that the stepdad she loves may die, as she walks into the ocean and is swept under:

“I’m underwater.

I’m rushing backward and down and hit something hard and sand stuffs my mouth. My cheek burns. When I hit I can’t hold my breath and I suck in water. I can’t find the air. I kick out for the surface, but it’s not there. My chest aches enough to burst. The blue is gone, replaced with black and bits of silver star. I’m sucked out to sea and I’m going to die.”

She doesn’t die, though, and is spit back out.

“My cheek feels scraped where it hit the sand, but nobody realizes. Nobody knows how scared I was. Or that I finally understand. Cancer isn’t a gypsy curse. It’s a huge smashing wave. It catches you and drags you out. And anybody can be spit back up, and anybody can drown.”

Earlier I said that just as in the real world, a fictional is not simply a place, but what is happening to a character in that place. And that what is happening to a character—the tension between her inner and outer landscape, at just that moment, is not static, or generic. It is specific, in motion, has cause and effect, like a crackling fire or a crashing wave, and if it rings true it’s because it’s part and parcel of the story itself.

Take the opening scene in Jennifer Donnelly’s A Northern Light which not only begins in motion, but sets the story world beautifully in time and place:

“When summer comes to the North Woods,” she writes “…time slows down. And some days it stops altogether. They sky, gray and lowering for much of the year, becomes an ocean of blue, so vast and brilliant you can’t help but stop what you’re doing—pinning wet sheets to the line maybe, or shucking a bushel of corn on the back steps—to stare up at it. Locusts whir in the birches, coaxing you out of the sun and under the boughs, and the heat stills the air, heavy and sweet with the scent of balsam. As I stand here on the porch of the Glenmore, the finest hotel on all of Big Moose Lake, I tell myself that today—Thursday, July 12, 1906—is such a day. Time has stopped…”

Time has also stopped for the reader. We want it to, at least the time outside the novel. While in the world of A Northern Light time is already on the move. Soon a girl’s body will be brought to the porch, and that idyl will be shattered.

Donnelly has created a perfect fulcrum between this sweet moment and what will happen next. And it’s worth noting that her character is crossing a threshold –literally and figuratively in this moment. And so are we, as readers.

a_northern_light_jennifer_donnelly

A story world is created from within, they are your themes that manifest in your character’s point of view. This world is already moving as your reader crosses your story threshold. It is dynamic, changes as your character changes, is the world where your character is hot, or cold or moody or in peril. It is the place where a character first makes love or loses a loved one. It is set in time and has a spot on the map. It begins in the white hot center of experience, in all its sensory detail, and is the spark between your character’s inner motives and outer action. And building your world with emotionally powered, specific details allows your individual story to become universal.

Katherine Paterson notes in Spying Heart that the Japanese word for idea is “i, which is made up of two characters—the character for Sound and the character for Heart—so an idea is something that makes a sound in the heart (the heart in Japanese, as in Hebrew, being the seat of intelligence as well as the seat of feeling).

Paterson is talking about the “power of the imagination” that comes from the sound of a writer’s heart. It’s from this imagination that we create the symbols and metaphors that invite young readers in to figure things out for themselves. To be caught up in a story so fully that their own imagination then allows them to, as Paterson says, “listen to the sounds of their own hearts.”

                                                                                     –zu vincent

Worldbuilding, Movement and Metaphor

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Thoughts on the art of creating place…

by zu vincent
by zu vincent

 

 

From the moment I knew I wanted to be a writer, which for me was somewhere around three years old, I was writing about place.

Place for me is California, where in one way or another I grew up on the water. Ocean water, lake water, river water, irrigated farmlands with the Delta Breeze blowing through. And I was forever trying to capture in words, a rain dimpled puddle in a parking lot, the knuckled hills on the way to the Pacific, or the creek’s rush past the warm, fresh smell of river rock. Each of these sensory details were wondrous to me because they reflected the experiences, feelings and  emotions I had while in those places I loved.  

And just as in the real world, a fictional world is not simply a place, but what is happening to a character in that environment. And what is happening to a character—the tension between her inner and outer landscape, at each moment, is not static, or generic. It is specific, in motion, has cause and effect, and if it rings true it’s because it’s part and parcel of the story itself.

Add to that we’re writing for children and young adults, and what is happening may be a first. Your reader may never have been exposed to this landscape, this idea, this raw emotion before.

To understand how place infuses a fictional world for a young audience, think of the place you first fell in love, first experienced joy, or shame. First felt death’s grief. No doubt your experience wrapped that place with emotion, too. And then consider that the essence of world building begins in your own reasons for writing. Which means place cannot be separated from character, plot, or theme, is created out of symbol, metaphor and sensory detail, and relies on your character’s as well as your, emotional state.

Façades…

The story goes that in 1787, after Potempkin had wrested control of the Black and  Caspian Seas for Catherine the Great of Russia, she took a large group of dignitaries on a triumphant journey to the Crimea to view her holdings.

At one point, Potemkin led the party on pleasure boats down a river, to show them that only happy people lived in Russia. From their pleasure boats, the dignitaries viewed the facades of houses Potempkin had built, with smiling Russians waving out front. Yet the villages were fake. Behind the bright facades were ragged beggars, collapsing huts and desperately poor people. These fake villages were later to become known as “Potemkin villages.”

Creating fictional worlds is not like creating a Potemkin Village. We aren’t erecting a façade. Our readers need to climb off the boat, across the muddy river banks, walk up to the door where, even if it’s unpleasant, we want them to step through.

And when they do, they must encounter a world fully realized.

 Next: Some thoughts on fully realizing your fictional world….

                                                                                    –Zu Vincent

Fictional Trance: Clay Carmichael and “A Foot in Two Worlds”

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Author Clay Carmichael

Clay Carmichael

 

“When I’m lucky enough to have a good day of creating, I rise almost as if in a trance from my chair and step out the back door feeling momentarily dazed.”

                             –Clay Carmichael

 

This March I’ll be speaking at the Associated Writers Program’s annual conference in Boston with authors Clay Carmichael, Debby Dahl Edwardson and Kelly Bennett, discussing World Building When Writing for Children and Young Adults. In a recent conversation with Clay, the question came up, what happens when you’re building more than one fictional world at a time—and are moving between worlds yourself?  Clay, who always knows just the right thing to say, wrote the beautiful response that follows. It’s about art, success and the psychic balancing act between two very different fictional worlds.

 

Clay Carmichael: 

I have a new young adult novel, Brother, Brother (Roaring Brook) coming out this August and I’ve been working on final things with that manuscript, but also writing talks, visiting and Skyping with students—American and German—about my 2009 novel, Wild Things (Front Street/Boyds Mills Press), which is happily on three state award lists this year.

Both take place in North Carolina, but one is for younger readers and the other for teens; one has a cat, the other dogs; one an eleven-year-old girl, one twin teen boys. In Wild Things, the girl spitfire goes to live on the red clay of the North Carolina piedmont with her sculptor-uncle, while my other more passive main character in Brother, Brother seeks out his twin on the private island of a powerful, conservative U.S. senator.

cover art Brother Brother

Going from one book’s world to the other is a bit whiplash inducing some days, not so much due to the different characters and places, but more because the emotional landscapes and character’s challenges so differ. It’s a bit of a psychic balancing act and requires a good emotional memory. Zoë, in Wild Things, approaches every situation with an animal fierceness and an open mouth; while Brother, the titular protagonist of my YA, is quieter and pretty much resigned to being flattened by whatever steamroller life sends his way. Most of the characters in Wild Things are trying to help Zoë, while most of the characters in Brother, Brother are trying to snow, use or control Brother any way they can.

There is some common ground. In both books, the animals are wiser than the humans who control their fates, their four-footed love purer than anything the two-leggeds generally manage. In both, the heroes—and I think of them as heroes—wrestle mightily with what could have easily been dire fates, and in both they prevail, each in his or her own large-hearted way.

Even so, it’s challenging going from one world to the other—though really, when I think about it, that’s just what authors do. The ability to be simultaneously and deeply in two or more worlds for extended periods is an author’s job description. When I’m lucky enough to have a good day of creating, I rise almost as if in a trance from my chair and step out the back door feeling momentarily dazed. The sleeping cats and the backyard bird feeder in the pecan tree seem, for a second, foreign. I know where I am, of course, but it takes me a few minutes to make the transition from the emotional, psychological or physical scene I’ve just left on the page to my real back yard. In those moments, I’m in kind of limbo, transported in the Star Trek sense back to the home world of my life.

“At least it’s less dangerous than real travel,” a friend of mine once said.

“Don’t bet on it,” I told him, tapping my head. “Gets pretty crazy up here. Some dicey situations and twisted individuals.”

We laughed, but also exchanged a knowing look. He’s an artist too, knew what I said was true. I mean, in a way, if you’re not risking it all on the page and the places you travel to and the people you meet aren’t new or strange or dangerous or tragic or heartbreaking or revelatory or joyous or scary as hell, what’s the point?

– Clay Carmichael 2.4.13

Clay Carmichael is the author-illustrator of three picture books; the middle grade novel Wild Things and the upcoming young adult novel Brother, Brother. She lives with her sculptor-husband in Carrboro, NC. www.claycarmichael.com

 Clay, Zu Vincent, Debby Dahl Edwardson and Kelly Bennett will discuss World Building When Writing for Children and Young Adults at the AWP conference in Boston, MA on March 8, 2013: https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/schedule_overview

–Zu Vincent

 

Sandy and the Writer’s Place

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How sad it is to hear of the destruction from hurricane Sandy. The loss of life and the enormity of the storm—said to have been twice the size of Texas—is almost too large to contemplate. So too are the effects its aftermath is surely having on those in its path.

            In order to get our minds around the hugeness of calamity, we tend to focus on the single stories. Stories such as the one from Governor Christie, who talks about his sorrow over the destruction of the New Jersey pier, which held for him so many childhood memories.

            Place can hold the heart still in time. But when that place is gone, is part of our heart then stilled forever?

            What place do you write from, long since knocked away by wind and waves. Is it the place itself, or what you take from it, that matters?  

            When I set out to answer that question for myself, I found an answer as to how I can help… 

My place:

            There was a mysterious little library in the beach town where my grandmother lived when I was small. A lone, tiny building from the 1800s, rickety and spent, it stood on sand like the house made of sticks in The Three Little Pigs.

            The library’s presence seemed impossible, hovering beyond the general store and gas pumps, its back against the bay. Sad fronted, dire even, the big bad wolf in the form of sea winds had already taken its huffs and puffs. The place was about to splinter down.

            It took some courage to mount the steps.  

            Inside was dim, with floor to ceiling shelves. Beyond the puny walls the waves on the bay lip-lipped.

            But then the little library became a cave, a den, a lair, where smallness disappeared.

            I’d opened a book.                                         

                                                                               Zu Vincent  

 

Kekla Magoon: What It Takes to Move to YA

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“For me, thinking about my readers doesn’t mean deliberately writing something I think they will like and connect with. It means trying to get inside their heads and writing something that is authentic to where many of them are coming from.”

–Kekla Magoon

 

Part two of our conversation with award winning author Kekla Magoon, on her move from middle grade to young adult fiction, and her new YA  37 Things I Love.

Cover of Magoon's new novel

 

In the past eighteen months, I’ve been simultaneously working toward the publication of two different novels: 37 THINGS I LOVE (a YA) and FIRE IN THE STREETS (a Middle Grade). Here are just a few of the areas I’ve learned to deal with differently in MG projects vs. YA projects:

The Marketplace: MG vs. YA

The readership for both MG and YA novels is broader than the age ranges printed on the book jackets. Adult readers plus younger and older child readers can find connection within both MG and YA pages. At times it seems that designating a book MG or YA is somewhat semantic, a detail that matters only to publishers and booksellers. But there is one critical difference: who has the buying power, and who is taking charge of getting the books in the hands of the readers.

Middle Grade books are more often bought by adults for children (even if the child picks it out), whereas YA books are just as often bought by the actual readers. This is especially true in the school and library market, where MG books reign. YA books seem to be more reliant on the bookstore market and individual book sales, rather than school sales (this may be partly because of the content issues I’ll touch on below).

As an author, this makes me think very differently about who my books need to appeal to. I always keep the child reader first and foremost in my mind when creating a book, but I give special consideration to adult appeal when I market and promote my MG novels.

 

The Readership: MG vs. YA

I’ve just said that readers of varying ages can enjoy MG and YA books, but I also believe these designations exist for a reason. Psychologically, upper elementary students are in a concrete thinking stage. Middle schoolers are beginning to break from that “up is up, down is down” mentality and are capable of thinking sideways. Sideways thinking makes them begin to realize that not everything is so clear-cut and different people view the world in different ways; thus they begin the process of identity formation.

High schoolers not only think sideways, they actively search for ways to push the envelope and assert their independence. Readers reach different stages at different exact ages, but the stages of psychosocial development still evolve for everyone around this time.

I think about these developmental stages when I’m creating characters for MG or YA novels. My youngest MG characters need to relate to the world in concrete ways, even if they harbor many profound questions about the world around them. My YA characters must, on some level, be bursting at the seams of their lives, and craving something bigger, whether they get there in the course of the story or not. It’s just part of adolescence.

For me, thinking about my readers doesn’t mean deliberately writing something I think they will like and connect with. It means trying to get inside their heads and writing something that is authentic to where many of them are coming from. I hope that connection will happen if I succeed at it, but I see a big difference between writing “for” teens of a certain age and writing from within their mindset.

 

The Rules: MG vs. YA

So far, I’ve been able to get away with most anything I’ve tried in writing YA, be it sex, drugs, rock-and-roll or just plain old defiance of authority. But, to succeed in all corners of the MG market, there are definitely some rules to follow. The problem is, they’re not hard and fast rules. They are a collection of guidelines whose stringency varies situationally. “Just don’t take it too far,” seems to be the rule of thumb.

Take what too far, you ask?

Language.  Watch those four-letter words. In writing my upcoming middle grade, I once again faced a critical decision about whether or not to include a couple of swear words. I wasn’t interested in gratuitous cursing by any means, but I could make a reasoned argument for why the characters would use certain language in certain situations. But middle school teachers and librarians tell me language can easily get a book removed from a school reading list, or get it challenged in a local library. The way I see it, why would I want to make trouble for educators who just want the best literature in their students’ hands? I can keep it clean.

Content. I’ve found that I can get away with any sort of violence in MG, but the first hint of anything sexual starts raising red flags. Kissing seems to be okay, but some books reviewers may see fit to “warn” readers if you so much as mention a tongue. Interestingly, I’ve also learned that religious content of any kind (including mention of a character’s lack of religious affiliation) can cause ripples in some local school district ponds.

Romance optional! Romance plays a much smaller role in MG novels than YA. I’d say it’s a rare YA novel that doesn’t mention a romantic interest, be it a crush, a distant attraction, or an actual dating situation. Even if it doesn’t affect the main plot at all, it’s usually there, as a character note. MG novels don’t need it. Kids can just be kids.

 

 

Resolution. MG novels must end with a sense of finality, some fairly concrete form of closure to the main character’s journey. YA readers can handle a bit more ambiguity in their conclusions.

 

I like being both a YA Author and a MG Author. To be quite honest, you will probably never catch me, in actual conversation, describing myself as a “Middle Grade Author.” I invariably say “YA Author.” I don’t really know why. Maybe I think it sounds cooler. Maybe I think more non-writers understand the term “YA” as opposed to “Middle Grade.” Mainstream knowledge does seem to include the YA genre, while the “Middle Grade” designation is more nebulous to people outside the community.

I suppose it doesn’t matter much what I call myself. The fact is, I wear two hats and both are a good fit. So far.

About Kekla Magoon’s new novel: 37 Things I Love: Ellis only has four days of her sophomore year left, and summer is so close that she can almost taste it. But even with vacation just within reach, Ellis isn’t exactly relaxed. Her father has been in a coma for years, the result of a construction accident, and her already-fragile relationship with her mother is strained over whether or not to remove him from life support. Her best friend fails even to notice that anything is wrong and Ellis feels like her world is falling apart. But when all seems bleak, Ellis finds comfort in the most unexpected places. Life goes on, but in those four fleeting days friends are lost and found, promises are made, and Ellis realizes that nothing will ever quite be the same.

–Zu Vincent

Kekla Magoon on Moving from Middle Grade to Young Adult

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“Publishing Middle Grade as opposed to YA means your book will emerge into a different marketplace, cater to a different readership, and follow an entirely different set of rules to make it successful within that market…”

A conversation with Kekla Magoon on the shift between writing (and publishing) for a middle grade and young adult audience.  

Kekla Magoon is author of four fabulous novels for young readers: The Rock and the River, Camo Girl, 37 Things I Love, and Fire in the Streets. Kekla has received numerous awards and honors for her fiction, including ALA’s Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, ALA Notable Books for Children, YALSA Best Books for Young Adults, Bank Street Best Books, and Junior Library Guild selection.

What follows is a two part dialogue where, as always, Magoon’s approach is honest, engaging, and often surprising…

 

I always considered myself a YA writer. So you can imagine my surprise when I learned that my first novel, THE ROCK AND THE RIVER, was going to be published as Middle Grade.

At first, I thought: No big deal. I mean, my book was still being published (hooray!) and, really, how big a difference could there be between being a Young Adult Author and a Middle Grade Author?

It turns out that there is quite a big difference. Publishing Middle Grade (MG) as opposed to YA means your book will emerge into a different marketplace, cater to a different readership, and follow an entirely different set of rules to make it successful within that market, and to make it accessible to that younger readership.

When I published THE ROCK AND THE RIVER back in 2009, it was my first time dealing with any readership and market. I learned everything I know about publishing from the Middle Grade perspective, and the process was both wonderful and challenging in its ways.

But this spring, I made the transition back to YA, when my YA novel 37 THINGS I LOVE was published. I quickly learned that the MG world is completely different, and that my foray into YA writing had only just begun.

                      

                        next…. Readership, Rules and Romance  zu

 

More about Kekla… In addition to her many published novels, Kekla’s non-fiction titles include Today the World is Watching You: The Little Rock Nine and the Fight for School Integration 1957-58 and the forthcoming PANTHERS! The History and Legacy of the Black Panther Party in America. Kekla also conducts school and library visits nationwide, speaks at writing conferences, and serves on the board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Kekla holds a B.A. in History from Northwestern University and an M.F.A. in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Visit her online at www.keklamagoon.com.

Father’s Day: Finding Dad in a Love of Books

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photo of author Eudora WeltyI envy Eudora Welty who wrote, “I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to.”

I love hearing that her childhood included countless hours of being read to in every corner of that house, whether cradled in her mother’s lap in their rocker, “…which ticked in rhythm as we rocked, as though we had a cricket accompanying the story,” or in the kitchen while her mother, “…sat churning (butter), and the churning sobbed along with any story.” Wondrous too, that the Welty home included a “library”—the living room bookcase—encyclopedia tables, and a dictionary stand under one window.

Looking back at my own childhood, I’m not sure where I found my love for reading. No one read to me after a very young age. And we had no library to speak of. But we did have a single bookshelf, whose presence I attribute to my dad.

But that came later. Before my dad was in the picture, my mom read to me when I was very small. She read from a series of books a door to door salesman talked her into called The Child’s World. This large, leather bound set included volumes on other cultures, other countries, and plants and animals of the world. But the one I loved (and this I have in common with Welty and probably a zillion other kids raised with similar-sounding collections) was the volume of stories and poems.

vintage encyclopedia artThese were beautifully illustrated with deep, vividly colored inks and fancy scrolling titles. Pages I poured over for years until passing them down to my younger siblings. Once these siblings came along, Mom no longer had time to read to any of us, but the damage was done. My older brother and I took to the streets, setting up mock stages around the neighborhood and acting out the stories that swirled in our heads.

When I turned six, this same brother and his friends terrified me with stories of the first grade teacher who (how could I doubt it?) fried you in an electric chair hidden in her broom closet, should you fail to learn your lessons. Mrs. T was as tall and square shouldered as the first letter of her name, and wore a perpetual grim face accompanied by long, dark dresses. Just the sort of appearance you’d expect of an executioner!

I decided on my first day of class, that should she try anything with me, I’d be out the door in a nano second, headed home. (Or at least back to kindergarten, where the sweet-faced teacher let you play in the sandbox and delivered cookies at noon. And whose very name—Mrs. Spain—conjured the rolling hills of a far away country.)

But Mrs. T had a surprise in store for me, and I never ran away. She seduced me with the alphabet, and subsequently unlocked the deeper mysteries of language. How I loved drawing the fat bellied a’s and b’s, the loopy g’s and j’s, the dottie i’s, and rambling m’s and w’s. Suddenly I was not only reading without pause, I was conjuring my own words—my own stories!—on the page.

deep sea diving helmetBy this time my dad had left his previous marriage and come to live with us, and he brought a few possessions. Among these were a mysterious looking deep sea diving suit and his carpentry tools, and that single shelf of books. It was the first and only authentic bookshelf our family ever owned. I never saw Dad read these books, but I remember them with a reverence that he somehow passed down.

Enter Scholastic Book Club, whose monthly book sales swallowed my allowance. Money carefully hoarded and divided between the titles. Oh, the agony of choice—the main title—more enticing and expensive—or those older titles bundled together for discount. I devoured countless middle grade mysteries, adventure stories, and mainstream fiction on my way to being broke.

It was Dad who was responsible for the allowance that gave me a chance to hoard and spend on these books. And I suppose I was also inspired to acquire by that shelf of his. I was just like a grown up, owning books. And I soon graduated to libraries and a hopeless infatuation with Zane Grey. Grey was, after all, writing about the western landscapes I knew (however idealized).

Then on to the classics, whose far off lands beckoned me further. Dickens, Brontė, Melville, Tolstoy, Guy de Maupassant. “Books that took the back of my head off,” as Emily Dickinson put it. One day I would travel to the far off lands in these books, in real time.

sea voyage in Kon TikiAs for Dad’s bookshelf, we weren’t allowed to mess with it. The contents were precious. There were books with full color plates, and titles from his childhood such as; Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Pinocchio, and dearest of all Ferdinand the Bull. These old fashioned books enchanted me, sitting as they did beside dark adult reads by Émile Zola and Thor Heyerdahl, and a full set of studiously bound Encyclopedia Britannica.

Later, I was allowed to use the Britannica when writing school reports, which I did for years. But it’s the Twain, Zola, and Stevenson I’ve held on to.

Somewhere between the book shelf arriving in our home and my growing up, I lost my dad. When I lost him, I stopped reading for a while. But books will find you if you let them. And it was first my dad’s books—the shelf no longer untouchable—their stories, their messages and meanings, their wide world of possibilities, that helped save me when I was most lost.

reading braceletI suppose, like a parent you love, books never lose their hold on you once you fall for them. They never lose their connection. Not just the stories but the actual books. The inky perfume, the paper moon smell of pages. The tandem of art and text so locked together that nothing else will do but to anticipate again and again, turning the page to find that next illustration. The back jacket, with its promise. The cover you can dissect, looking for the girl in the book, and perhaps not finding her because you picture her some other way. As some girl you’ve conjured much more clearly, alive from the words on the page.

I indentify with Ray Bradbury who noted in the title to his famous essay, “How Instead of Being Educated in College, I Was Graduated From Libraries.” Because a single book shelf, then libraries and the books within them, graduated me in the difficult times. And later gave me permission, as the saying goes, “To write for the dead I loved.”

I think of my dad’s old books as Father’s Day comes around. I wish I could reminisce with him about them. If I could, I’d ask him why he brought these particular titles when he came to live with us. What they held for him between their pages. What memories they conjured, and dreams they kept. But mostly I’d just soak it in, having my dad to talk books with.

–zu vincent

This quote says so much about the meaning of story. It’s from the write up of Ray Bradbury’s book on childhood, Dandelion Wine: “It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always, which attracts us.”  

 

 

 

 

Ray Bradbury Inspiring Passion

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Author Ray Bradbury, ninety one

 

Passion for writing. How do we get it? Where does it come from, and where, sometimes, does it go? I’ve been thinking about this question for a while, and it seems fitting to talk about it now in light of hearing that one of the most passionate writers of our time died last week. Ray Bradbury.

Early in his career Bradbury set himself the task of writing 1,000 words a day and reportedly banged out the first draft of his famous book, Fahrenheit 451, in nine days on a rented typewriter. His books have sold over eight million copies in 36 languages and he’s thought of as one of the major science fiction writers of our time.

But where he most touched and influenced me as both a reader and writer is through his semi-autobiographical 1957 novel Dandelion Wine. Reading about 12 year old Douglas’ childhood in Dandelion Wine is to be transported. It’s evocative, sensual language stirs you up and lands you smack back in childhood, replete with all its wonders and fears.

And it begs the question for those of us who love to write for the young, is childhood the realm where passion truly lies, and never dies? Is that why we seek to recreate it on the page?

Ray Bradbury as a young man

Fevers

On his 91st birthday, Bradbury was working on a screenplay for Dandelion Wine with Phoenix Picture’s producer Mike Medavoy (of “Black Swan” fame). Knowing this book would be made into a film Bradbury is quoted as saying, “(this) is the best birthday gift I could ask for. Today, I have been reborn! Dandelion Wine is my most deeply personal work and brings back memories of sheer joy as well as terror. This is the story of me as a young boy and the magic of an unforgettable summer which still holds a mystical power over me.”

How could it not? As children everything sparkles, because we’re experiencing our lives for the first time. And as Bradbury himself noted, as a boy his imagination was “hungry. It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another. You rarely have such fevers later in life that fill your entire day with emotion.”

Mystical power, a kindling of the imagination, hysterical fevers, high emotion. Oh for the joy, pain and yes, passion of childhood!

Can we truly ever get it back? Can we, as Bradbury suggests, be reborn?

Awakening

I recently spoke at a writer’s conference in California alongside musician Mark McKinnon, guitarist-vocalist-songwriter and founder of the California Celtic band, Ha’penny Bridge. A few years ago Ha’penny Bridge released its first studio CD album of original songs titled “The Awakening.” And, as its title suggest, “The Awakening” is the result of a journey of rebirth of passion for artist McKinnon.

Listening to McKinnon talk about “The Awakening,” it struck me how many similarities his musician’s journey has to the writer’s journey. Not that he particularly knew he was on a journey until he found himself in the middle of it. But a trip to Ireland in 2001 transformed his music, and his life. Seemingly overnight, he went from years of performing rock, folk, and world style music to becoming a Celtic musician and songwriter.

McKinnon had traveled to Ireland reluctantly, cajoled by his wife.  But as anyone who’s been there knows, there’s a moment when the plane banks and the clouds part and you’re offered the first glimpse of endless, enchanting green. For McKinnon that glimpse told him he’d come home.

He fell in love with Ireland, its traditions and its music, and never looked back. It was a moment that gave him renewed passion for his art. “The first Celtic song I wrote I started to cry,” he admits. “My ancestral ghosts were talking to me.” At this point, all he had to do was show up and listen. And listen he did. He’s since returned to Ireland many times, studied Gaelic, changed his approach to music, and found a new passion for his songwriting.

“I have no idea how I wrote the songs on this CD,” he says of the bands’ new release “At Fiddlers Green,” and the magical inspiration now stirring his soul. “But the journey of my songs are the journey of my life. Never give up hope,” he adds, “never close down doors, or shutter any windows.  I kept walking through doors I didn’t know existed and I didn’t know I was even looking for this.”

Cover art for Ha'penny Bridge new CD At Fiddlers Green

The result is a beautiful, melodic tapestry of songs that have garnered Ha’penny Bridge an enthusiastic following, and showcases McKinnon’s storytelling, and keen instinct for the arc of a song.

Still, we can’t all be Ray Bradbury, and write 1,000 pages a day. As McKinnon says of the muse these days, “I’m no longer a short order cook. I’m a chef. I have to trust it’s okay to let something be on the back burner. That when you return to it, your connection will still be there.”

Passion, it seems, can be both fevered, and simmering. And sometimes, when you think you may have lost it altogether, or are watching it eek away, passion can sneak back up on you.

Falling in Love

Is passion then, the newness of falling in love with a thing, no matter what age you are?  I fell in love with writing my novel The Lucky Place. I fall in love with each novel I write, or else I couldn’t write it. Not well, anyway. But to fall in love you have to pay your dues. You have to show up and sit down and plunk.

That was Ray Bradbury’s advice to writers. Keep plunking. Let your plunking sweep you away, awash in the fevers that fill your day.  Burn with a thousand pages. And look with surprise  from a banking plane, to know you have come home.

–z.v.

Ha’penny Bridge Band plays “The Running Man”

 

 

Creating Story in Non-fiction Narrative

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cover for Tanaka's Earthquake!

 

So far this week, we’ve been talking about how to create empathy in narrative non-fiction through well chosen sensory details. But there’s more to the story. In non-fiction, just as in fiction, you have to find a through line. Through line comes from the frame you set for the character’s story, is augmented by the balance of summary and event, and builds on hope and disappointment toward the character’s goal.  

 

Framing Your Narrative

I was lucky enough this January to be in the audience at Vermont College of Fine Arts, when author Shelley Tanaka unveiled photos from her book A Day that Changed America, Earthquake! With each photo came a heart wrenching tale about the individuals whose lives were turned upside down that April day. And it reminded me that a well crafted non-fiction book can make true story as gripping as any piece of fiction.

Like the sinking of the Titanic, this historical event especially captures our imaginations. And while there might be many reasons, including what was happening historically, socially and culturally at the time, the bottom line is, it’s the humanness of the tragedy that lingers. We all yearn to be safe, to have our dreams fulfilled. And it’s the dashing of these dreams and the struggle to reclaim them, which creates great narrative.

As Robert Owen Butler writes in From Where You Dream, “We are the yearning creatures of this planet.” Find what your character yearns for, even in non-fiction, and you have your story. To bring the idea of empathy back in, yearning ties us empathically to others, as author Jeremy Rifkin finds in The Empathic Civilization, because our human capacity to empathize is not only emotional, but an ability that is hard wired into our neurological pathways. You might say we feel empathy (and thus yearning) in our very bones.

The writer’s task, then, is to tap into this yearning to frame his story. In books such as Tanaka’s, and those mentioned earlier by Levinson and Barton, the author’s stories, and thus the through line, were framed by events, the events offering a beginning, middle and end to the human journey set within its borders. But if you’re writing a book larger in scope, such as a biography, the challenge is to unearth a through line that creates its own frame. And that’s a matter of carefully sluicing through, and summarizing, your research, then balancing your findings with your character’s emotions.  

 

Research Rollercoaster

It’s tempting when you research non-fiction to want to use every bit. You may end up with fabulous first hand interviews, letters, diaries, other biographies, newspaper articles, and historical accounts of the times. But you have to then carve away at your findings to reveal those points that relate to the story happening to your character.

 

Picture of Rising Action

Emotional Though Line

When I was writing the Scholastic biography Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia I had my story when I found this through line. Catherine was born Sophie in a small German principality. She wanted to please her mother, who raised her to marry well. Marrying well, which meant marrying into a ruling class, became her own goal (her yearning) as she grew.

But Sophie’s hopes were dashed early in life when she was disfigured by a long illness. What future husband would want a disfigured woman? Worse, her panicked mother summoned the executioner, the only one who could fashion Sophie a body cast to help straighten her crooked spine. The active girl had to wear this disabling cast for months, if not years. But it was during this time that she studied and read, and built the intellect that would later help her rule Russia.

And so it went. When, at age 15, a now straight-backed Sophie was summoned to Russia as a possible bride for heir to the throne, her cousin Peter, she made sure she pleased Empress Elizabeth and the Russian people. Sophie’s plain looks were a downfall, but her intelligence a plus. Later, after she’d pleased the Empress, been christened Catherine, and married Peter, her two children—born from liaisons with other men—nearly did her in. (Catherine’s internal struggle also played a huge role in her story since, as she struggled to understand herself, she could be her own worst enemy.)

The list of ups and downs grew. Catherine was locked away after childbirth and feared imprisonment. She seized the throne from her husband and perhaps arranged for his murder. Later, as Empress, she gave up a desire to be an enlightened ruler when a peasant uprising threatened her power. So, while her short term goals changed, Sophie, now Catherine the Great, never lost sight of her yearning to rule. And each of these elements was important to the overall thread of her story goal. In writing her biography, what didn’t fit in moving her to this goal, had to be left out.

 

High Tide photo sand and tide

Find what your character yearns for in your non-fiction narrative. Frame you story through events or by using your character’s emotional through line. Imagine your through line as an incoming tide, each wave cresting and falling like your character’s inner waves of hope and disappointment, hope and disappointment. These waves—in ever increasing intensity—will create your story. Until finally, at high tide, your character faces her crisis moment. Crisis leading, as we know, to resolution, and the smooth sand as the tide pulls back.

                                          –zu vincent