Francisco Stork’s Blog

Here is something written by a fourteen-year-old girl:

“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.”

The girl’s name was Anne Frank and she wrote that the 23rd of February 1944. Are young people different now than they were in Anne’s time? Do fourteen-year-olds think and feel like her? My experience is that many do. Perhaps not as eloquently or with the incredible sensitivity of Anne Frank . . . but yes, they do. It is my experience that a fourteen-year-old is capable of the same depth of vision, the same questioning, the same emotional life as an adult. This is specially the case where the young person has experienced hardship in his or her life. (For great examples of this, read: The Freedom Writers Diary)

I write this now because there are so many books for young adults that underestimate the young person’s ability to understand, to feel, to wonder and perceive - abilities which, if anything, probably diminish as the young person grows into adulthood and is numbed into conformity. Annie Dillard, one of my favorite authors, wrote that you should write as if you were terminally ill and did not have that much more to live. And you should write for readers who are similarly terminally ill. What would you say if you had a year to live? What would you read? One of the reasons that Anne Frank’s diary is so beautiful and poignant is because Anne is aware that at any moment the Gestapo could be forcing open the bookcase that hid the entrance to the “secret annex.”

All of this is not to say that young adult literature should not be humorous and suspenseful and, well, fun. Nor is this to say that young adult literature should always have a “message”. Literature that the author would like young adults to read (I like that description much better than “Young Adult Literature” which is full of marketing connotations) ought to be truthful. Truthful in the sense that the author has pushed his questioning to the limits beyond which there is only mystery. Truthful in that the author has done all he or she can to be honest with himself and his readers in what he says and how he says it.

A couple of weeks ago I visited my college: Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. I had not been there in thirty-two years and it was a powerful experience to see the old and the new so close together. There was that immense, ancient and embracing oak tree with its curved branches as low as the top of my head. There was the new library with a terminal at every desk. It was good to see certain things endure and it was good to see new things.

In a creative writing class that I visited while I was there, I was asked a very good question by one of the students: What do you do when you are writing and you feel like what you’ve said has been said before - like maybe you read it someplace but you’re not quite sure.” The student then went on to add: “This happens particularly with metaphors.” The problem with people asking me questions at conferences is that the articulate answer that I should give comes to me on the plane ride home or even later. But maybe, as inarticulate as it was, what came out spontaneously and “from the gut” in my answer to that student is probably still the best answer I can give. I told him that he had to push through and keep on writing. He shouldn’t worry about whether it has been said before because it most certainly has. The plots, the type of characters, the style of your writing, it has all been done before. The fact that you are repeating should not stop you because 1) hopefully what you are writing about is something that is worth repeating, a story or an image or a character that brings a little more light into this world; and 2) if you are writing from a deep center in yourself, if you are writing about things that really concern you or move you or have affected you, you are going to be saying something new. The fact that you are different and special from everyone else in this world is where originality comes from. I’m not saying that your writing needs to be autobiographical somehow. What I’m saying is that even if you are, say, writing a teenage vampire story, there should be something in that story that comes from deep inside of you. If you never reach that deep place. If all that worries you as you write the story is getting it published or being read by lots of young people, then I’m afraid that you are not being original. You indeed are repeating what you have read before.

So to the student who asked me the about the feeling of not being original, I say push through with your writing but also dig deep. Find a inside of you a question you can’t answer or a mystery that baffles you, or a place of pain or joy and take it from there. If the metaphor that you wrote is not something that touches you, find another way of saying it. Above all, believe with all your heart that you are special and original, because you are.

I’ve been working lately on a book about Journaling- a book for young people to encourage them to keep a journal. The book is a combination of thoughts about journaling and relevant entries that reflect or exemplify those thoughts from my own journals (which I have kept since I was fifteen). Here’s an excerpt I wrote recently.

There is something about journal writing that goes hand in hand with a crisis – an event that is emotionally painful. I don’t know that it is terribly important to figure out why that is. There is a whole body of science that deals with the benefits of getting to the bottom of a person’s feelings and of sharing them with another person. When we are having problems in our lives, we see a school counselor or a doctor, someone who listens to us. And the very act of communicating what we feel to another is therapeutic. Healing comes from sharing what we feel with someone else. Maybe writing in a journal heals us that way too – we get what is bothering us off our chest.
I don’t like to look at journal writing as a place where I can dump whatever I want, although I do. I don’t like to look at it as a source of healing, although I am sure it is and has been in ways that I do not know.My journal is a blank page where expression of any kind can take place.
I think of those caves in France and Spain where our ancestors crawled in thousands of years ago and painted pictures of bison and antelope with paints made out from ground colored rocks. No one seems to know exactly the purpose of those pictures. Some say they were religious symbols. Others say they represent their view of the world. Other say they were just representing what they saw. Some of the walls on those caves are very difficult to get to. And some of the pictures are high on the walls, which means they had to carry materials to make steeples to reach those places. Why all the work? What is it about expression that is so important? There is a part of me that understands the graffiti artist who sprays his signature on a building as if to say, “I exist.” But what about the caveman who painted in the depths of a cave that was clearly inaccessible even twelve thousand years ago. Or what about a person who writes in a journal that he knows will never be read by anyone? What is the point of this kind of expression? Is something worth doing if there is no point to it?