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.

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 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.