Francisco’s Journal

That’s the question that I was asked by a young person recently. What would you say if you were asked this question by someone whose life depended on the honesty of your answer? All answers to this question are so . . . poor (it’s the best word I can come up with). Here’s what I struggled to say. I share this with you not without fear.

I don’t know where to start. The question is like a Zen Koan, so very complicated and so very simple. And like a Zen Koan the mistake we make is to look for an intellectual answer, something we can put in words and impress people with our brightness. Actually, the answer is more like an experience, a new way of seeing and it is one of those things that if you can name it, you probably don’t have it. Nevertheless, I believe it is important to try to communicate as best as possible this experience. Being a seeker (like you are) has consequences. One of the consequences is that if you don’t share what you find in some form or another you’re going to be unhappy.

What I have found is that there are times in my life when I experience something that is unique but also part of a greater whole shared with everyone and everything else in this universe (Maybe our question should be why are we in this universe?”). The best way I can describe this experience is that it is something like what I have experienced in other realms of life and which we call love. The experience is one of being loved and of loving. It is an inward and outward movement, like breathing or like the heart’s pull and push motion.

Why I was put in this planet is to realize completely and always that my true self is this ever flowing fountain of love. For some reason, realizing this full time is not easy. There’s another part of me that doesn’t want to live and operate out of this loving region. I’m not sure why this struggle was built into the system and why this other part exists at all. I have some clues, but that may have to be another e-mail if you’re still e-mailing me and I haven’t scared you off, which, trust me, is a real possibility. I don’t know you and I don’t know at what part of your journey you’re at, but the very fact that you are asking why tells me that you’ve started. The one thing I do know about the struggle to live in love is that for that to happen that other part of me has to surrender it’s claim to be number one and accept it’s role as a servant of the source, the true self, that I am.

So that realization of who I truly am is one side of the coin of why I’m on this planet. The other side of the coin is the expression of that realization in the particular circumstances of my life. This part is related to the “uniqueness” piece contained in the experience of love. This part has to do with discovering and using that uniqueness. How are you going to express the love that you truly are in a way that only you can express. Until not very long ago, I used to think that writing novels was my uniqueness, my gift, and it is only lately that I’ve discovered that my gift is teaching. Teaching includes writing young adult novels but it is broader than that. Teaching sounds pedantic, and preachy and even a little arrogant. You know, the teacher is “better” than the student, the teacher is supposed to know more than the student. But the kind of teaching I’m talking about requires a skill and a mastery that I am still working on, and most of all it requires humility. The good teacher is not just interested in filling the student’s head with information but in drawing out what is unique and universal in that student. Writing for me is the best tool for that and so I write for young people, about young people to walk with them as a fellow seeker, to humbly walk beside them toward the discovery of our true self and and the unique gift each one of us has received.

1. Imagine that an angel appears to you and asks you to rake for an hour. “I’m just a messenger,” he says.
2. No need to be perfect. He knows you can’t get every single leaf. He just wants you to rake for an hour.
3. Don’t let the cold stop you. The movement of your arms will warm you up.
4. There’s no one place to start. Where you start is the beginning.
5. How you feel while you are raking is not important.
6. Don’t worry what others think of the work, you’re raking for Whoever sent the angel.
7. It’s messy work, there’s no getting around that.
8. Be grateful when the sun comes out.
9. Raking is not more significant or less significant than anything else.
10. When the hour is done, walk away humbly.

I was on a panel yesterday at the Brooklyn Book Fair with Mitali Perkins, Kate Milford and Anjali Wason. The title of the panel was “Making It” and it dealt with the tough situations the panelists put their characters in and how those same characters “make it” - that is, survive. It was wonderful panel and the questions from Anjali (the moderator) and the audience were very insightful. Being in that panel got me thinking about many things. What is it in me that likes to put my poor young characters in such dire straits? Pancho loses his dad and his sister. DQ has a rare form of cancer. Marcelo has to spend a summer working in a law firm! Oh, my goodness. In answering a question from the audience, Mitali Perkins said that she wanted to write something funny and I remember thinking how wonderful it would be to write something light and airy and fluffy. Do I have it in me? I hope that humor and a certain lightness of being will always be a part of whatever I write no matter how serious the topic or how dire the straits that my characters find themselves in. I think that this lightness of being that I seek so much has much in common with hope. No matter how serious the topic, hope needs to be part of the mix. And humor. I think what saves serious, realistic fiction from being too dreary to read is hope and humor and love. Love is not something that is directly conveyed from author to reader. It is more of an aura, a feel that the reader picks up. The love I’m talking about is the love of the author for his characters - so that even when they are in a rough spot, they are still very much loved. I’m not sure that there are any literary tricks to convey this love. It is either there, in the author’s heart, or it isn’t. For some inexplicable reason, my poor young characters will probably always find themselves confronted by a reality that can be harsh sometimes (and kind and beautiful as well). I can promise you that they will also find in themselves a way towards hope and love.

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.

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.

Donna Freitas, a teacher in the Religion Department at Boston University and a writer of young adult novels (The Possibilities of Sainthood - Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008), invited Cheryl Klein (my editor at Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic) and me to talk to her Religion and Children’s Literature class tomorrow. I thought I would jot down some thoughts here in preparation for some of the tough questions I may get asked. In particular, I’m worried about someone asking me: “What role does religion play in Marcelo in the Real World?” So here’s a practice run of what I might say. Marcelo, the protagonist of Marcelo in the Real World, is a young man consumed with God and all things religious. God and the Holy Books that pertain to God are his “special interest.” Marcelo prefers the term “special interest” to the term “obsession” because obsession has certain pathological connotations. When you are obsessed with a subject you are forced by an inner force to think about that subject. A special interest, on the other hand beckons your attention without compulsion. Marcelo enjoys thinking about God. He chooses to think about God and read the Holy Books that pertain to God. He would rather do that than anything else. His religious interest is non-denominational. He likes all religions. He reads all kinds of Holy Books. He manifests no sense that one religion is better than another. Moreover, Marcelo’s interest is not simply intellectual, he hears something that for lack of a better word, he calls “music” that no one else can hear. This music fills him with a sense of “longing” and of “belonging.” What happens when someone with Marcelo’s faith, let’s call it, is asked to function in our modern corporate world? I believe that this question, at the heart of the book, is ultimately a religious question. It is not a question that is associated with any religious dogma. It is the question of how a a faith can survive the pressures of the modern, competitive, ego- centered world. What do you do if like Marcelo, you are suddenly overcome with the question: “how do I live with all the suffering?” What if the suffering in the world grabbed you like an iron hand around your throat and wouldn’t let you go? What if you are privileged to see and sense God’s goodness in you, while at the same time, you are forced to witness the pettiness and meanness and evil that surrounds you? How do you go on living? These are the questions, living, burning questions of Marcelo’s life. To Marcelo, these are “religious” questions - and so, I would say, that the role of religion in the book is in the asking certain type of questions when the asking is done with mind, heart, body and soul.

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

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.