Francisco Stork’s Blog

I was invited last week to talk to the 7th and 8th graders of Indian Ridge Middle School in El Paso, Texas. I work hard during the year trying to get invited to at least one El Paso school. First and foremost is the food. Mexican food restaurants on every corner. All of them with a grandmother or two cooking in the back. I grew up in El Paso and the setting for Behind the Eyes (at least the first part of the story) is in El Paso. A large part of my first novel, The Way of the Jaguar also takes place in El Paso. So it makes perfect sense to have someone like me spend a couple of days with El Paso kids. Now I have to tell you right away that these speaking engagements are hard work. At Indian Ridge, met with seven group of kids each day (each group for an hour). There was half an hour off for lunch where, you guessed it, I had tacos. What I try to do during these little talks is talk a little about my life and my books and how the two play off each other, how something actual gets transformed by the imagination into fiction. My favorite part, however, is when I get the kids to write for a few minutes. We pretend that we are writing in a journal that no one will read. I’ll read what they write but I don’t know them so it’s like writing for themselves. The question that elicits the deepest responses is this one: “What is the worst thing that has ever happened to you.” I tell them to write for five minutes without lifting their pencils from the paper, without thinking. Just write. Sometimes, one or two will volunteer to read out loud what they wrote. I bring the hundred of sheets of paper home and I read them. I read about death and divorces. I read about abuse and addiction. I read about rejection and failure. Their writings are a reminder of to me of what a young person of fourteen and fifteen is capable of thinking, feeling, enduring. Their writings are a reminder to me of why I write.

For the past month or so I have been working on the final edits to my third novel, Marcelo in the Real World. Today we finished the copyediting process. It is a funny feeling to see my work “corrected” that way. It is a humbling experience to see all that I missed despite the reading and re-reading and revising that I did before sending the manuscript off to publishers. It made me realize how much I need others with different skills to bring a book to completion. Even though the book is different now than the first submission, it is still very much my own. It is as if the initial vision of the work lay hidden and the editing cleared the way for it to emerge. This, I think, is what a good editor does - she opens the way so that the beauty and the light of the work can shine forth. Marcelo was very fortunate to have found an editor like Cheryl Klein at Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. It is truly beautiful when a book and an editor are made for each other - when the characters and ideas in a book resonate with the sensitivities of the editor and when the editor has such kinship with the book’s meaning that she can articulate for the author what the author dimly feels. Publishing a book is such hard work. And in the midst of the hard work there is the element of “luck” or “fate” or “grace” - some mystery that cannot be accounted for in rational terms. Dozens of people read a manuscript and one likes it. Why that person? It is a mystery - like love.

Not that I’m jealous or anything, but the authors that I list below are not only good writers (you’ll enjoy reading their books as much as I did - I guarantee it!) but they also have really good websites. As opposed to, you know, this one, which is kind of on the serious side. (Serious sounds so much better than boring, don’t you think?). But, seriously, these author’s websites are full of information that you will find interesting. They are “generous” websites. Their websites don’t just talk about the authors or their books but they provide lots of helpful information to young adults and adults and they are lots of fun. Check them out (and read their wonderful books).

K.L. Going Klgoing.com
Lauren Grodstein www.laurengrodstein.com
Mary Hogan www.maryhogan.com
Blake Nelson www.blakenelsonbooks.com
Allison Van Diepen www.allisonvandiepen.com

By this I mean blogging. I mean, I am probably bad at many other things but for the sake of my self-image, let’s just take one at a time. When Behind the Eyes came out, I was told by my publisher that I needed to have a site where I could communicate with readers. Ideally, she said, you should be writing a blog at least once a week. Once a week? I don’t have enough to write once a year. Look at the last time I wrote something here and you’ll see what I’m talking about. If I were to write once a week, I would have to resort to telling my imaginary readers (And I’m a one hundred percent certain that there are no real, live and kicking, actual persons who ever read this webpage) about the snow on my driveway and how hard it is to shovel it. Nevertheless, I’ve decided that in 2008 I’m going to be more relaxed about blogging. No longer will I wait to write something useful or inspiring. From now on, I’ll write about the books I read, the movies I see, the music I hear, the people I meet, the candidates I like, TV shows, video games, the weather, celebrities, my dreams, restaurants, food. I am in so in awe of those good writers who can blog almost every day about the most common things which they somehow turn into subjects that are not just personal but communal. How wonderful it would be to have such freedom, such humility and lack of inhibition. Okay, in 2008 I will be more open and try as hard as I can to make universal bread from the dough of the particular.

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?

I have been working on the revisions to Marcelo in the Real World with Cheryl Klein, my editor at Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. Now that I have finished a first round of revisions (there will be a few more, I am sure) and have sent the manuscript to Cheryl for comments, I want to tell you a little about the process of editing. My hope is that the young people visiting this website who want to write, will get a better understanding of the writing process. Today’s lesson is on editing. Editing is a process that can begin at various stages. (Uggh! I sounded like a teacher just then!) It can begin once you have finished a first draft of the work, be it essay or poem or short story or novel. It can also begin when the work has been accepted for publication. The word “editing” is somewhat misleading. It makes one think of making sure that you have spelled all the words correctly and you have fixed all the typos. And it is that. But editing also involves re-writing. It involves tossing out a sentence or a paragraph or a passage or a chapter or two hundred pages and starting over. The big difference between this type of re-writing and just writing is that when you re-write you are doing it pursuant to a plan, a direction, a vision of who your characters are and what they are going to do. The act of writing for the first time, that is, the process of creating that you do as you work through your very first draft is done in a kind of intellectual darkness – you move along not knowing exactly where you are going. Creating requires intuition, editing requires reason. Creating is a movement forward that relies on trusting your gut. Editing requires reaching the end and then traveling backwards to make sure that all the pieces fit together and get you to the desired end. But even within the process of editing there is another type of movement – a kind of narrowing of focus that goes from the large to the small. Editing begins with tossing away what is no longer necessary, filling in new gaps by writing new scenes, and proceeds a narrowing path towards the characters, what they say and what they do, so that they remain true to who they are. Editing ends up with the author focusing laser-like on each sentence and each word so that every part, no matter how small, is part of the whole.