Francisco’s Journal

I’ve been thinking about what it means for a young adult novel to have integrity. I approach the subject from the point of view of the author. How can I write a novel for young people with integrity and why is it important that I do so? I don’t know why it is so hard to write about integrity. It is almost as if integrity and silence go together. The minute you start speaking about integrity you are in danger of losing it. But maybe the risk is worth taking.

The reason why it is so difficult to write about integrity is because integrity has a lot to do with intent and motive. Why am I writing this? The young adult novel will have integrity if it is written in response to an inner calling, a spiritual necessity. When the impulse to create is pure, when what it seeks is the expression of beauty and goodness, the result is a work that has integrity.

So integrity is something that happens in the mind and heart of the author. But the motive of the author cannot help but manifest itself in the work. There it waits to be recognized by the reader. Integrity is an invisible presence recognized by an invisible awareness. Integrity gives rise to trust between writer and reader. “Yes, I give you my heart. I now know you have my wellbeing in mind,” says the reader wordlessly when integrity is apprehended.

To write with integrity is difficult. To do so the writer must invoke a sort of amnesia for all those external considerations that detract from the work itself. How hard these days to forget about sales and awards and praise or its opposite. But I don’t think integrity means that the writer must forget about the reader – the person for whom she is writing. Rather, to write with integrity means to respect the intelligence, the feelings, the autonomy of the reader. It means that I as an author will remain true to an artistic vision that I intend to share. That the artistic vision is to be shared imposes certain limits to the creation. And it is here in the imposition of limits that I as an author will respect my reader. It is here that I will keep her wellbeing in mind. This dance, this tension, between responsibility to the work and responsibility to the reader is where integrity may be found, where it lives like a spark of life.

Writing a book can teach you about life, how to live your days, if you let it. Take this thing we call faith, this mystery that is as real in its presence as it is in its absence. You need it. The book cannot get written without it. But what is it? The kind of faith you need, the one you’re looking for, the kind you wait for open-eyed and thirsty is more than a belief. I believe in myself. I believe I can do it. My experience is that this kind of mental faith (for belief is a thing of the head) doesn’t get you too far. The faith that works is the kind that triggers surrender and that follows it. This vision of a book that I have, there’s no way that I can make it real. The work is beyond my powers and yet it must be done. I put my foot in the water, testing, and I wade in slowly. Or I dive in careless of depths or petrels. Faith is this two-chambered heart of giving up and going on. And as the book gets written sentence by sentence yet another kind of faith is needed. Let’s call it faith in the reality of your creation. The world that you are creating is made real and kept alive by your faith. You must not doubt your creation’s power or its purpose or its goodness. The world you have created has been made real by your faith and now you begin to love. You love your characters, the things that happen to them, the world they live in. Faith has become love. And that’s what it always wanted to be.

Periodically I get inquiries from young people (and older ones too) who want to write or publish their first novel. By way of response, I would like to share with you some thoughts about the writing of my first novel, The Way of the Jaguar.

I started writing Jaguar about seven years before it was published. Of course I was not writing continuously. In terms of time frames, the process of creation went like this. I wrote pretty much every day for about eight months and came out with what I thought was a best seller and which I proceeded to send out to agents and publishing houses and in the process picked up dozens of rejections. Besides sending it out to publishers and agents I gave the book to a few friends and one or two gave me helpful comments. I think that at this time I put the book away for about three years. When I picked the manuscript again, I started to re-write the whole book. I would begin each writing session by reading a scene of what I had written before and then I would start writing from scratch. Many of the same scenes were kept, but they were embodied in different language. But more significantly, many more scenes were added. This re-writing took about a year. Again I sent it out and again amidst the many rejections I received a letter from a publisher who told me that the book was an “unpolished gem” and she was specific about what did not work for her. This is when the third version of the book came into being. In this third version I did not re-write totally from scratch I re-structured. I connected. I changed where the story started, organized chapters into more logical common themes and time frames. By this time I knew that the book was not the type that would be picked up by a commercial publisher so I sent it to the type of small non-profit literary presses that specialized in Hispanic-American literature. That’s when Bilingual Review Press out of Arizona State University decided to publish it. A few months later, the book won one of the Chicano/Latino Literary Awards.

This is sort of the external history of the book. The internal history is more complicated. I have always wanted to be a writer. When I was nine years old my father bought me a typewriter, which I still have. But wanting to be a writer and writing are two different things. I majored in English in Philosophy in college. I studied Latin American literature at Harvard because I thought graduate school would help me write. I have kept a journal since I was in high school and I think that that’s how the book was born. The book is the daily journal of a person on death row. One day when I was writing in my journal I decided to imagine that I was a prisoner who was about to die. So then I just started inventing. The book is a grafting, a mixing of reality and fantasy. For example, the law firm that I used to work at had these yearly outings at a country club and I took that and created a scene where the main character was at a similar outing in the pool with the person he loved.

In thinking back, I see that I wrote this book at a particularly difficult period of my life. Writing is good therapy. But, of course, good therapy does not always result in good writing. The book was published because I was able to transform the writing that was helpful to me into good writing. The Way of the Jaguar was published in 2000. My attitudes toward writing have changed somewhat since then. Now I write books whose main characters are young people. But the experience of writing that first book showed me how to discover and accept the purpose of writing in my life.

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.

Craftsmanship is the how of writing. It is the part of writing that can be practiced and learned. The writer is artist, true. He or she possesses the artistic impulse. But the writer must also be a craftsman. She must know how to measure the wood and how to cut it and where it can be nailed and how to make a house or a cabinet by following rules that will provide for the cabinet to open and the house to stay up. I like talking about craftsmanship because it tends to deflate our highfalutin notions of what writing is all about. The less highfalutin your notions about writing and about yourself the more and the better you will write. Think of yourself, if you must think of yourself at all, as a person learning a trade. If you are starting out, you are an apprentice. If you have been doing it for a while, you are an experienced craftsman who must challenge herself with every task and still learning. But here is the key point I want to make. In the eyes of God, I don’t think that being a writer is any more special, any better than being a carpenter. In the eyes of God, writing a book and building a table are equally good. What counts is the care and the love and patience that went into the making. What counts is the talents that are expressed in the creation. It’s good now and then to try to see the way God would see.

I am not a good carpenter. When I was in first grade in Mexico, I was so bad when it came to doing crafts, that the teacher would let me tell the class stories whenever the class worked on a project I would sit on a stool in the front of the class and make up a story on-the-go as the class made wooden clowns that you could roll on the ground with a long wooden stick. I’m not sure any of my classmates were envious of me up there, but I was envious of them. Now I think that my classmates and I were just using a different medium. Be a carpenter of words.

I want to write about these mental illnesses here because I am aware that many young people suffer from these and I don’t want them to feel ashamed or embarrassed about them. I would also urge adults to respect the power of the illness in young people. By “respect the power of the illnesses”, I mean, take them seriously. Don’t try to joke them away or ignore them. With depression and bipolar disorder you need the right balance of compassion and encouragement. You need to accept the illness and you need to fight it. You need to learn to live with it and you need to do what you can to get out of it. I have bipolar disorder now and have had it or depression since I was fourteen. I write this now because more young people are reading this journal and some of them have depression or bipolar disorder and I want to tell them that with treatment you can survive these illnesses and be happy. And its okay to be happy. I don’t ever want a young person to think that being depressed or bipolar comes with the territory of being a writer. You must not romanticize these illnesses anymore than you would romanticize, say, diabetes. Having these illnesses will not make you a better writer or a more sensitive human being. The fact that many writers have depression or bipolar disorder and the fact that many kill themselves does not make them special in any way. It is harder to live with depression or bipolar disorder than it is to kill yourself. Trust me on that one. If you are depressed or manic, know that this is not a good state to be. Hold on. Seek help. If you know someone who is sick, be there in the way he or she wants you to be there at this particular time even if its not the way you would prefer to be there. But you may have to insert yourself into his or her life in unwanted ways if need be. There are many, many places where you can go to get advice about symptoms etcetera. This is not one of them. All I want to do is say, if you somehow ended up here because you like to write and you also suffer from depression or bipolar disorder, then please seek help and get help as I have done and am doing. You can still write and write well when your illness is controlled by proper treatment.

John Updike, one of my favorite writers died last week. The New Yorker published this week (February 2, 2009) excerpts from John Updike’s writings. I am glad they were excerpts because I could hardly breathe as I read them. So much of John Updike’s writing takes my breath away every time I read it or re-read it. I’ll be reading one of his novels and then GASP all of the sudden there’s not enough air in the room or in the universe. Beauty does that. The beautiful has an affect on the body . . . like love. I write this because, while it is correct to say, as I did a few days ago on another journal entry, that the more truthful your writing, the more beautiful it is, still, I don’t want you to think that “truth” is all there is to good writing. There are writers (like John Updike) whose writings are both truthful AND take your breath away. In writers like Updike, the “How” and the “What” are especially connected if not united, so that, for example, his brilliant metaphors actually reveal a side of reality you had not seen or considered before. People like me need to forego any attempts to dazzle. “Stay on the safe side, and concentrate on truthful writing rather than on trying to take anyone’s breath away”, is what I tell myself. And if you are starting to write, I would strongly recommend you tell yourself something similar. However, sometimes there is no other way of saying it other than by saying it beautifully. If you find that there is ABSOLUTELY no other way of conveying the truth than by taking the reader’s breath away, well then, in that case, please proceed. With Caution.

Mahayana Buddhism posits six “paramitas” or “perfections” for enlightenment. These paramitas are “perfections” in the sense of guides or principles one should attempt to perfect as much as possible in this life. These are: giving (or generosity), patience, ethical discipline, enthusiastic (or joyful) effort, concentration and wisdom. It occurred to me that these six perfections, with a little twisting and turning, could be applied to writing (just as writing with a little twisting and turning can be seen as a spiritual path). There are as many motivations for writing and explanations as to why people write as there are writers. These six work well for me.

Giving or Generosity. What can you say about this one? Why write if not to give and to give your best? The thing about writing from a spirit of generosity that is not so obvious is that if the spirit of giving is not in your writing, your writing will not be as good as it could be. It will be superficial and you will not give the reader what he or she most desires. And the reader will not give the work his or her full devotion. There is a connection between “why” you write and “how” you write. If giving is the reason why you write you will reach a depth in your writing that will not be reached if you are motivated by anything else other than the desire to give. Writing that is born out of a desire to give is the writing that lasts.

Patience. Patience is typically associated with not getting angry or frustrated or giving up when things are not going your way. So it is with writing. When the words are not coming, wait. When the plot has reached an unsolvable spot, wait. If after a while there is no resolution, you may need to start again. Patience is knowing the day you start a novel that the first draft is a year away and the finished product maybe two years. It means being okay and kind to yourself when after four hours of work you have maybe one more or less salvageable paragraph.

Ethical Discipline. Everyone knows the connection between plain old discipline and writing, but ethical discipline? It’s clear to me that an alcoholic or a drug addict is not going to produce his best work. These addictions take too much time, for one thing. But maybe it is not so clear that honesty or kindness on the part of the author is necessary for good writing. I think that the writer’s integrity is something that is conveyed to the reader in subtle ways. When we read, we ask ourselves explicitly or implicitly, is this author someone I can trust? Is he or she for life or against life? Integrity, which results when our actions reflect our thoughts, seeps into our writing, it informs our work.

Enthusiastic Effort. We don’t get this type of enthusiasm when we write all the time. Some times we need to start writing with just a plain old sense of duty. But sooner or later, enthusiasm comes and when it comes, you better put up your sail. Enthusiastic effort is not a feeling necessarily, it is a conviction that the expression of your talent is something that you need to do for your sake and others. When the wind is not there, we row. Nevertheless, you need to do what you can to row where the wind currents are most likely to be. For me, enthusiasm and joy in writing always come when I stop being so serious and I look at what I am doing as play, when I become child-like again.

Concentration. Concentration happens when you start having fun with your writing the way it happens when a child plays. You realize you have been concentrating not during but later when you look back and realize three hours have just gone by without you realizing it. This absorption is the most enjoyable aspect of writing. Flannery O’Connor says that the writer loses himself or herself for the sake of the work. She means that the writer puts his or her ego aside and puts the characters and the story first so that, for example, brilliant writing that doesn’t add anything to character or story will need to be tossed. When we truly concentrate, our attention is fully directed at the work, we put the work first, we become the characters we are writing about and there is no room for me.

Wisdom. I see wisdom closely associated with the function of the editor. The editor can be an inner editor or another person, a real editor, if we’re lucky enough to have one we trust. Wisdom has to do with decisions about the work, both logical and intuitive. There are places in the work where we can choose to go in different ways. How do we choose? We can use reason, experience, knowledge and good-taste to make our decisions. Sometimes, however, all we have is an intuitive sense that one way is better than another. This is the part of writing that, paradoxically, is both solitary and communal. You need to dig deep initially to see what your heart tells you and then listen carefully to that person who understands your work and whose judgment you respect and trust.

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.

One of the questions that I am asked by people who have read the “advanced review copies” of Marcelo in the Real World is what inspired me to write about a young man like Marcelo. I am not sure that we are ever able to accurately pinpoint the origins of an idea. We carry a seed within us. It came to us when we were a child perhaps. Then one day something happens and the seed presents itself to our consciousness and we water it with attention and we make it grow. When I was a boy growing up in Mexico, I would buy every Sunday a comic book called “Vidas Ilustres” or “Illustrious Lives”. The comic book presented each week the life of a different saint. I collected hundreds of these and the lives of saints filled me with visions of heroism and sacrifice. Was this the seed that forty-five years later turned into the story of a pure, saint-like young man who spends his time reading the holy books? During my senior year at Spring Hill College I lived in a L’Arche community, a Christian community where people with developmental disabilities and “normal” staff lived together with as few barriers between them as possible. Was this the seed that thirty-eight years later turned into the story of a young man diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome? I can try to answer as best I can what inspired me to write Marcelo in the Real World - but my answer in the end will be a guess. The wind blows where it wills. We carry within us seeds placed there by the life we lead. And then one day the seeds present themselves to us gently or forcefully and will us to make them grow with life.