Birthdays, Reunions, and Sequels

It’s been a while since I’ve done a newsletter, but I wanted to put one out now in order to celebrate the first anniversary of the release of Tales of a Fifth Grade Knight.

Thanks in part to you, beautiful reader, Knight has now sold a few thousand copies! And while that doesn’t exactly make it a best-seller, it does mean that you and I and enough other readers to fill a cruise ship have taken an interest in Isaac and his friends, and I’m pretty happy about that. (Especially when I imagine us all on a cruise ship together.)

Otherwise, this has been a pretty lazy summer for me, though it started with a fantastic event at my college reunion, where some of my classmates asked me and another children’s writer (the incredibly talented Sarah Frances Hardy, author and illustrator of Puzzled by Pink) to present about the process of writing for children.

I was reluctant to speak, seeing as I’ve only published one book so far. But given that I’ve written quite a few stories, I decided to go ahead and talk about my outlining process and how I put together a structure for a story before I begin writing—not so much because it makes writing any easier, though it often does, but because having an outline makes writing a lot less scary.

Among my slides I included this picture of Garth Nix’s hand (at the top of this post), part of a photo series in which Wofford College asked writers to fit onto their palms as much writing advice as they could. This advice from NIx—the author of the Sabriel and Keys to the KIngdom series—has stuck with me, in particular his admonition to “believe in your stories.” (Though “obtain magic ring” is also a good one. The importance to a writer of having, as I do, a loving and supportive life partner can’t be overstated.)

Why “believe in your stories”? For me it goes back to the main thing that makes an outline useful, which is its power as a security blanket. Writing doesn’t make you an Indiana-Jones level adventurer, but it does take some courage to gamble hours of your life exploring a world you may depart from empty-handed. And when I say “empty-handed,” I’m talking about more than not getting published. When I write I don’t worry as much about getting into print as I worry about the story not living up to the vision I had when I first conceived it, about it not being as funny or suspenseful or magical as I’d hoped.

Even with an outline—which in itself takes hours to put together—I often get stuck. I’ll spot a plot hole I should have seen earlier, one that’s going to take a lot of rewriting to close. I’ll put two characters in a room and find they have no chemistry together. I’ll put my characters in danger and discover I have no good, non-cheating way to get them out.

These setbacks test my faith in the story. I’ll put down my pen and walk away, tempted to throw the whole effort in the trash. And if I didn’t feel compelled to at least try to believe in that first vision I had for the work, it’s possible I would abandon every story I started. Usually, though, I come back to find that the place where I got stuck presents an opportunity to make the story bolder and deeper—and that what I know about the story already contains clues to how to accomplish this.

So if I have a plot hole, I might resolve it by asking, “why would my character be reluctant to pursue the safest/most obvious course?” If a scene lacks chemistry, then maybe I just haven’t connected with the characters’ passions. No way out? Well, that’s just a matter of invention. But the solution won’t come unless I trust that it lies within that germ of a story, and that I just need to take time (and probably go through at least a couple of drafts of the part that’s giving me trouble) to see it again.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” I like that. And while not all writers are heroes, I do believe that most of us act out of that kind of faith.