Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I have a fondness for Big Questions, and indeed, several of my posts are tagged with that label. Occasionally, in a writer's workshop, I'll lead an exercise called 100 questions. Being able to ask crazy questions is one of the reasons I'm glad I'm an author. And if I were a punctuation mark, I'd be .... you guessed it, a question mark.
So you'll know why I loved this bit from David Almond, who recently received the 2010 Hans Christian Andersen Author Award.
(from the interview in Shelf Awareness by Jennifer Brown)
Brown: It does seem as though we lose track of the big questions when we enter adulthood, doesn't it?
Almond: Because we realize that the questions are unanswerable. There's a tendency to turn away from them, to say they're boring or beyond solution. One of the things about writing for children is you look at the world through their eyes, and the world remains astonishing. I haven't got a clue what it is, and it seems to me more and more beautiful, but more and more unanswerable.
My yoga practice this morning was centered around the idea of releasing fear in order that there be more room for love. We hold both in our chests, in our hearts and lungs, which tighten when we're afraid. The Big Questions (along with a few Cow or Fish poses) are those that untangle that fear of the unanswerable and open our hearts and minds to the astonishing. It seems to me that if we uncurl, our question marks become exclamations.
Me: ?
World: !
Maybe David Almond hasn't "got a clue," but I don't think it's an accident his books explore "The Art of Transformation."
"Whoever said "ignorance is bliss" was, perhaps, correct, but he or she was not a photographer." ---Jacquelynn Buck, blogging at The Journey
Jackie is asking the Big Question here: when is it okay to document the world's misery? Read her post and comment if you have a mind to.
This brings to mind the photographs from Sept. 11th that I saw as part of an exhibit at the Newseum. One was of a person jumping from the World Trade Center. I can't ever forget it.
In happier news, my book club has decided to read both the adult and one or more of the kid/YA versions of Three Cups of Tea. Which is a good thing in itself, but then my friend Quinn Byrnes wrote to say that her school read one of those kid editions, "Listen to the Wind," and planned a 100 Pennies for Peace project for the 100th day of school.
As Quinn said, "The best part is that the kids got it. They knew why we were doing it. It was for other kids to learn. They were really moved by the thought that there are kids somewhere doing their math problems in the dirt with sticks."
Here's to combatting ignorance, one penny, word, or photograph at a time.
Yesterday, my son volunteered in a second-grade classroom. As soon as he entered, a hand shot up.
"Can we ask him questions?"
"Huh? Can we?"
"Please?"
The teacher knew enough not to say no. So my eighteen-year-old son was bombarded with these inquisitive missiles:
"What's your favorite color?" Blue.
"What's your favorite food?" Pizza.
"When was your first kiss?" Whaa...t? I don't know how he answered that. He didn't tell me.
One girl proudly told him that EVERYTHING he liked, she liked too. And then they all proceeded to quiz him on whether or not he knew their older brothers or sisters.
It was very amusing to hear my son tell the story of his introduction, and I responded with something like: welcome to the world of school visits. Except as an author, kids don't want to know if I know their siblings. They want to know if I know R.L. Stine or Judy Blume. Truly, if that line of questioning opens up, I can't stop it. The litany of "Do you know?" goes on and on and on while I desperately try to divert the conversation back on course.
I wonder if kids think all authors live on the same street. Or work in the same large, comfy building. Or meet each other in the park for a game of freeze tag. That would be fun.
How many YA novels have you read with a voice that comforts you?
I just finished reading
Marcelo in the Real World, by Francisco X. Stork, and frankly, I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to dissect it or review it or analyze it. I just want to tell you to read it.
But I'll try to say a tiny bit more than that, because some of you might need convincing.
In the opening chapter, Marcelo talks to his doctor about hearing "internal music" and like the doctor with his carefully worded questions, I struggled to understand what Marcelo meant, to imagine such music, because...well, because I liked Marcelo. And I wanted to believe in such a beautiful thing as music that can be "remembered" and dwelt in and that is always with us. But I didn't really get it.
Meanwhile, I fully enjoyed the story as it unfolded, not in doctor's visits or dissertations on music, but in Marcelo's matter-of-fact telling of his summer in the "real world" of his father's law firm. Nothing there happened exactly as I thought it would, and I often laughed. Best of all, the characters were built layer by layer through Marcelo's considered observations of them and their behavior. When he says that he doesn't know how to "read" people's reactions, and that he has to train himself to make the right responses, I knew it was his self-described Asperger's-like syndrome manifesting, but it never felt like a literary artifice. More like I was abiding with him, in the sense of "dwelling or sojourning."
Then, in almost the last chapter, Marcelo talks about the internal music again, and I suddenly realized that not only did I know what he was talking about, but I had experienced it! Not by reading this book; I don't mean that. I mean that I recognized the state of being he was describing even though our language for it was different.
Spirituality is an extraordinarily difficult thing to write about. But if a story can help you access what you already know...can help you remember...well, you should read it.
Told you.
Over Thanksgiving, I had a conversation with my sister and my mother-in-law about writing. Both of them said that questions about the past, and specifically, questions that sparked memories, inspired them to put words on the page.
No. Not me. I despise writing exercises like: Describe the ceiling of the first room you remember sleeping in. Tell about a time when you should have stopped talking, but didn't. List all your favorite toys, in the order you received them.
I would rather write about
what could be, not
what
was. I know my sister and my mother-in-law are in very good
writerly company. Generations of writers have drawn upon memories to spark new stories. But I still rebel. What inspires me (no surprise to those who read this blog regularly) are the
Big Questions.
I think I'm in the minority, though. To investigate this, I'm running my first poll. It's in the sidebar there. Vote for Juicy Memories or Big Questions.
I'm fully prepared to be labeled odd.
I took an Authors Guild survey, mostly about health care and financial issues that affect writers. But one question stopped me cold:
What is the worst problem writers face today?
I had trouble answering this.
Writers have been imprisoned.
Executed.
Mocked.
Shunned.
Ill-paid.
Deceived.
Dumped.
Pressured.
Dissected.
Over-glamorized.
Under-glamorized.
Milked.
Bilked.
Brushed-off.
Used.
Banned.
and yes,
Celebrated, Read and Adored.
What's your answer to this impossible question?
P.S. Consider this my plug for the
Authors Guild. Whatever the worst problem turns out to be, they are probably already battling it. They reviewed my first contract before I had an agent and they helped me set up my website in about two days. They just
won a huge settlement with Google to share online profits with writers. They help writers in financial or legal trouble. They run free seminars. Their quarterly bulletin is juicy reading. And
Judy Blume is the VP of the board!
Should you be able to take a random page out of your book (or any book) and have it make sense? If you can, does that mean that you're telling too much, and not showing? How much of your story should rely on what has gone before? All of it, right?
Then how do those authors do it: read a scene from the middle of their books? I know, I know...they do a little setup, and then they read. But I've tried to do it, and the setup gets longer than the actual reading! So I give up and read the very first chapter, every time.
I look at the manuscript I'm working on now, and I think: if someone read page 93, would they have any idea what's going on? I want to say that most experienced readers would. But I also hope that any reader, no matter how clueless, would get something out of it, too.
It's like a really good comic strip, like ZITS. You could never read it, then see it one day, and totally get it. But it's even better if you've been reading it all along, like I do.
Which is a very long way of getting round to saying: Hey! Did you read ZITS today?
Jeremy and his dad are playing catch.
Frame: Dad?
Frame: Yeah?
Frame: This is great. Yeah.
Frame: (Mom) You had a meaningful conversation with Jeremy?? How???
(Dad) First you have to get over the idea of using words.
That's what I mean right there! By page 93, you shouldn't have to be using so many words. The more your readers understand, the less you have to say. One small action carries with it the weight of all the pages before it.
At least, I think so. What do you think?
I just finished reading "Atonement" by Ian McEwan. Wow. It's been a while since I read an actual adult novel as most of my reading usually is from the middle grade/young adult genre. I
enjoyed the beauty of this book, the stringing together of the characters lives--their conflicts and desires. The scenes capturing England's battle against the Germans transported me instantly. The sensory details, as you can imagine when writing about war, were raw, powerful and in many cases, just plain sad. It's been a while since I shed a few tears over a novel. The ending of this book, had me sitting in silence, weeping, for about five minutes. Read it.
So, Atonement begins my 2008 reading list. Luxe by Anna Godbersen is next. If that captures my attention, and I finish it, then it's onto Storky by Debra Garfinkle (She was a guest author at the 2007 Big Sur Writing Conference, and lucky for me, my one-on-one consultant. She was quite nice and helpful BTW).
I have a whole shelf of novels waiting to be read. Some I've already started and can't quite get into. I remember Lisa Yee at the 2007 Los Angeles Writer's Day saying that she gives herself permission to put down a book she's not interested in. I silently cheered, because I do it all the time. But I don't want to. I want to give the author the time and respect they deserve and read the whole dang thing. I also try to remember that the books I read are meant for a much younger audience. So by keeping this in mind, I vow to read every book I commit to cover-to-cover. We'll see if that works.
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I think most adults who work with kids do so at least partly because neither party can let the big questions go. I had a 10 year old in the library yesterday who has been studying the 9/11 attacks quite stridently. I was helping him find a few things in the adult collection, and he was talking to me about what he remembered from the coverage when he was so small, what he had thought since, what he had learned, how confusing it all was. He's just really wrestling with the whole thing, asking himself those big WHYs. It was something to see.
I love love love David Almond, and you can see he thinks about these questions through kids' eyes in every one of his books.
Excellently inspiring quote.
Love this. Off to think about the big questions before I faceplant in my pillow.
david almond is wonderful. thank you so much for posting this!
-from a fellow question mark who knows you will tear that tent down with goodness on saturday!:)