Francisco’s Journal

Marcelo in the Real World was the recipient of this year’s Schneider Family Book Award. I am so very proud and honored to have received this award. It is a very meaningful award to me. The award is given for “a book that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences.” The award, for me, recognizes the many young men and women who suffer because their perception of the world differs from that of a neuro-typical person. The award is also a recognition that “artistic expression” can take us into the world of the non-neuro-typical person like nothing else. People sometimes ask me how I came upon Marcelo’s voice, a voice that resembles the voice of so many young people with Asperger’s syndrome, and ultimately I have no answer other than to say that the voice was a gift and also that somewhere in me I too must have Marcelo’s voice, I too must see the world the way he sees it, if only in a small way. I am glad there are awards like the Schneider Award.

Last week I was invited to speak at the Simmons College Young Adult Literature conference. The theme of the conference was “Crimes and Misdemeanors” and I talked about the different “crimes” that Marcelo encounters in the real world. There were those personal crimes committed or intended to be committed by unsavory characters in the book. There were “institutional” crimes, for lack of a better word. These are sanctioned actions, all perfectly legal, committed by institutions or systems which cause suffering. An example of this in the book is the encounter by Marcelo of a legal system that protects a manufacturer of faulty windshields. The third kind of crimes are what I call “crimes against the spirit” These are the sometimes very subtle “crimes” that seek to demean Marcelo, to thwart his goodness, to prevent him from growing and developing. Basically, these crimes against the spirit are reflected early in the book when Marcelo’s father tells him that the key rule of the real world is to watch out for “number one.” This ingrained belief that self-centeredness is normal and even necessary to live in the modern world is the source of all “crimes against the spirit” that Marcelo encounters. What follows are some of the remarks on this topic that I made in my presentation.

Literature that is enjoyed by Young Adults has always had that joyful sense of rebelliousness against the crimes of the spirit perpetrated by adults. The crimes of the spirit manifest themselves in many ways. Sometimes, they are depicted in characters that approach caricatures. But sometimes, the crimes of the spirit are subtle and it takes the eyes of the young to detect what the adult eye has become accustomed to.

The beauty of writing young adult literature, and the challenge, is that crimes can be as obvious or as subtle as we want. The young will always delight in the triumph of the good over evil. And I do believe that in young adult literature good should triumph. That is not to say that the young adult book need not be realistic in its portrayal of evil. Rather, I believe that it is a matter of focus. Good and evil are both here in this real world of us. I believe it is my job as young adult writer to affirm the good.

In my one and only adult I have written, crimes are treated differently than in my young adult books. The difference I think is one of attitude in the writing. In the adult book, there is ambiguity as to whether the protagonist is redeemed or chooses to redeem himself. In my young adult books, hope plays an important role. It is hard for me to envision writing a book where the young protagonist doesn’t reach a stage in life where there is growth or the hope for growth.

The presentation of crimes and misdemeanors can be as complicated in a book as it can be in real life. The book can present criminal intent in its various gradations. A young adult book can have monsters that represent evil and it can present subtle attitudes that with time will corrode the spirit. I’m hoping that there will be many diverse young adult books that deal with the complexity and the subtlety of evil while still remaining exciting books to read. Even if these books are not best sellers, if they’re good enough, I guarantee you that they will be read by and appreciated by many young people. To a certain extent we as authors need to put aside considerations as to how many will read our work. We should write as if only one young person will read the book, but the book will change that person’s life. I think that as authors we may sell our young readers short if we don’t write with all our hearts, if we don’t go beyond the entertaining surfaces and present young people with the real world in its totality, the good and bad, to the best of our ability.

March 1, 2009 is the official release date for Marcelo in the Real World. I was looking in my journals the other day and ran into an entry written back in May of 2005 that talked about writing a story from the point of view of the son of Aurora, the protagonist of the novel I was then in the midst of writing. A few weeks later, I started experimenting with a story about Marcelo, the son of Aurora. What happened in the four years that followed can best be described as “false starts that got me closer to where the story wanted to go.” I would say that at least three versions of Marcelo were produced over a three year period before the right one chose to reveal itself. I wonder sometimes whether there was anyway to have gone straight to the final version and skip the pain of not getting it right. I’m inclined to think that with some books you can and with some you can’t. Marcelo was one of those books that required trial and error. I can see now that the character of Marcelo didn’t change that much all along and that is a good sign. It means that throughout, I somehow managed to remain true to the initial vision, the force that impelled me to create a character like Marcelo and to write about him.

You may be a young person who has a book you want to write. But you want it written and published like right now. You have the idea for the book in your head and maybe forty typed pages written already. You want to finish it and publish it before the school year is over if possible. You get the picture. In those forty pages of yours, there is a seed that may follow its course and grow into the book you are writing or maybe it will grow some place else. Please know that it will not be wasted. The probabilities that you have a “false start” in your hands are high. But it may also be a false start that gets you closer to where the story wants to go.

May Marcelo do well in the Real World. I send him out with all the blessings of a proud father. He persevered and kept insisting, even clamoring to be born, and so he did.

A question that is frequently asked is whether good writing can be taught. Another way of asking the question is: what part of good writing is innate talent (the kind of thing that you either have or you don’t) and what part is craft that can be learned through discipline and application. I think that there are two aspects of writing that seem more like a gift than others. One is the ability to join together apparently disparate ideas or images to form a new one. The other is the ability to temporarily be someone else. In the exercise of this second quality, the writer becomes the character he is writing about in order to speak and think and act like her. The process is not unlike that of an actor who “gets into character”. The actor must access the personality of the person he is portraying. This empathy, this chameleon-like ability to change, to transform into another being, is the gift of the good writer and the secret of great art. Here I think of Cervantes and the dialogues between Sancho and Don Quixote and how the narrator disappears and we have two different persons talking to each other. I imagine Cervantes switching back and forth from Sancho to Don Quixote with schizophrenic delight. The reason why I think that this is the secret of the great novelists is that it is this ability that allows them to create such real characters. How do you create a character that will live in the imagination and life of the readers? You need to become that character as you write. Actually, you need to become every single character that you create, even if that person is a post office clerk that takes up one sentence in your novel, that utters one line.

Wendell is a character in Marcelo in the Real World, who is not a good person. In a recent visit with students at Boston University, I was asked if it had been hard for me to create and write about someone like Wendell. It must have been difficult to imagine someone so evil. Unfortunately, evil characters are not that hard to access. Such is the nature of humankind. Much harder I think is to access someone who is good and pure like Marcelo. It is as if goodness and purity are more removed from our every day life. I mean, not a caricature goody-goody goodness, but a real goodness, the kind of goodness that is believable, that is real. I think that in the process of temporarily becoming a Wendell or a Marcelo in order to write about them and hopefully make them real to the reader, in that process I learned a little more about myself. I also learned that there are some aspects of writing you can practice and learn and get better at and others, well, others you pray will be given to you.