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Hey, Campers!
Can you believe we're wrapping up our FIFTH week?! Me neither.
I hope many of you are starting to feel writerly, and some of you are wrapped up in that exciting phase of seeing that you can actually make a story come alive before your very eyes. I hope there are hooky beginnings and vomit drafts appearing, and for some of you, maybe you are in the thick of revision.
I hope it is fun to share here, and that you take something from it -- at a minimum, the sense that writing can be a community sport where you can get input and advice from others who want you to succeed.
Speaking of which, I have another Algonquin Young Readers ** co-hort with me this week, the fabulous Amy Herrick whose first middle grade novel, The Time Fetch (SLJ starred review, ages 10+) comes out from AYR on August 27th.
Amy says of Time Fetch: "The original notion for this story came from my suspicion that there isn't as much time as there used to be. I wondered if it was possible that something had gotten into our world and was stealing the stuff. Out of this arose a winter solstice fantasy/science fiction story about four young people who accidentally let loose just such a dangerous and insatiable power."
Please look for Time Fetch in August and add it to your classroom shelves and library!
Amy is also an educator, a mom, and the author of two novels for adults: At the Sign of the Naked Waiter and The Happiness Code.
So, without further ado (except a reminder to read the FRIDAY FEEDBACK RULES if you haven't been here before), I give you Amy and a chance to give and get feedback!
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| Amy, taking a writing break with her pal. |
Dear Writers! What kind of madness is this? To invent characters. To make up stories for them. To get them down on paper in such a way that
they tempt a reader to come in and sit down.
And then to keep the reader sitting by the fire, listening until the
very last word. What hubris! What chutzpah!
Yet here we
are, oh brave and intrepid ones. It is
Friday. We will stick out our
necks. We will dare to try our hands at
this heroic and necessary thing, for where would the world be without the story
tellers?
I notice
that the Friday conversation often turns to the brain freezing problem of how,
exactly, to find your way from the beginning to the end of your story. Best to start out with a map, a plan? Best to just close your eyes and plunge ahead
without turning around till you’ve got a draft?
Best to go moseying along, erasing and adventuring and discovering as
you go? Do not imagine that I know the
answer. But I do love Geoff Herbach’s
advice to try writing into your tale a ways, and then begin a more serious
outlining attempt. Sensible and workable advice, I think. I’m going to try to remember it, but here’s a
description of how it usually goes for me:
I begin with
the intent to stay moving and not to stop.
An idea or a character has come to me.
I believe I sense the shape of the whole story stretching away into the
distance. I leap up on my high
horse. I urge us forward, a nudge with
the knees, a little flick of the whip.
Go my trusty steed. Do you see
it? There’s something glimmering up
ahead between the trees. Hurry, hurry
before we lose it. And off we gallop for
a few paragraphs or so, and then abruptly we slow down to a trot and shortly
thereafter, we stop, not simply because there’s the usual: the unmarked fork in the road and then the
mist that descends and causes us to lose our way and then the strange old woman
who appears suddenly from out of the mist and wants to sell us a hatful of
dried beans, but also because there’s a whole
maddening swarm of questions buzzing around our heads:
What tense shall the story be told in? From
whose point of view? Shall the
narrator’s voice stand close or distant?
In any case,
I end up slow as rust, as mud, as a snail on crutches. And much of it is misery. Some of it is rapture.
But I see I
am veering off the track, as always, and the rapture is another question, a
discussion for another day. Let me present
the “problem” I am struggling with at the moment.
I recently
finished The
Time Fetch, which is about four middle graders (Feenix, Danton, Brigit and Dweebo) who
discover that a power has accidentally gotten loose in our world and is feeding
upon our time. They must attempt to stop the time foragers before the entire
space-time continuum unravels. The
story, told mostly in “close” third person, switches around, chapter by
chapter, from one character to another. (When
I started it, I had only one main character, but the book took things into its
own hands, as it tends to do!) I found
it a fearful challenge—trying to make each of the characters truly themselves,
to make each voice distinct and someone the reader is eager to hear from again.
Now I have
begun what appears to be a sequel to this tale (a summer solstice story—working
title The Cemetery Dog)) and find myself fixated on questions of point of view and
the position of the authorial voice in relation to the character’s voice. I feel something nudging me to play a bit with
what I did in The Time Fetch and have
begun Danton’s first chapter (which is the second chapter of this new book) in
such a way that he becomes a type of “unreliable” narrator. He is telling a
story to his younger brother, a third grader, who is sick in bed. Danton claims his story is fiction, and
certainly, it is pretty implausible. But
I am trying “suggest,” as he tells the
story, that we are all on shifting ground, that some part of what he is telling
his brother is not invention. Or that
something else is going on that he is not revealing. Some of my motive is to create an interesting
tension, an ambiguity that the reader will want to understand. Some of my motive is more mechanical. I also want to set up a device that I can use
to throw light on what is happening to the other characters in the “outer”
story.
So here it
goes. Let me know any thoughts you have,
if you think this is working or not. Too
subtle? Too preposterous? And, are you curious to find out what is really going
on?
And then, of
course, I am eager to see what you will share of your own work!
His
little brother looked up at him curiously.
“What kind of story? You mean like a made-up story?”
Danton
hesitated. “Yes. A made-up story. A dog
story.”
Jay
loved dogs. “Go ahead, then.”
“Well,
a long time ago there were four friends and they lived near here and, before
this story begins, something impossible had happened to them.” Here, a gust of wind spattered the rain
angrily against the window. Danton
unfolded himself from the bed and went over looked out into the darkness.
“What?
What’s out there?”
“Nothing,” Danton said. He came back and sat down on the bed.
Jay
coughed and shook his head. “Well, okay
then. What kind of impossible thing
happened to these people?”
“I
can’t say. I’m not allowed to talk about
that. But the thing was that after this impossible thing happened they
discovered they were under a…well, a curse, I guess. The curse was that they
were being driven crazy by an itch they couldn’t scratch.”
“Oh,
I hate that,” Jay said. “Where was the itch?”
“No,
no, no. It wasn’t that kind of itch. Maybe
it was more like a thirst. A craving. Like when you really, really want a
chocolate milkshake. Only it wasn’t a
milkshake they wanted.”
“OK. What was it that they really, really a
wanted?”
“They
wanted to go back to the place where the impossible thing had happened to
them. They wanted to go into Prospect
Park.”
“Prospect Park?! Our Prospect Park?!”
“Yes.
Ours.”
“I don’t understand. Why didn’t they just walk into the park, if
that’s what they wanted to do so bad?”
“Well,
they tried, of course. But that was the
thing. Every time they got near one of
the park entrances something always seemed to stop them. Once it started to
hail—these big killer chunks of ice, shaped like macaroons.
Once a tree just uprooted itself and fell down right across the sidewalk
in front of them and almost made them into paninis. Then, last week they were just going in the
Ninth Street entrance---“
Danton
looked startled. “Oh, well…that was just a figure of speech.”
In
the dim illumination of his Star Wars nightlight, Jay examined his older
brother suspiciously. “Well, OK. So what happened at the Ninth Street entrance
and where’s the dog come into it?”
- Amy (& gae!)
