A Month from Today

A month from today I drive away to my new life in Indiana. I'll start driving on the morning of August 12 with the goal of arriving in Greencastle, Indiana, the next day in time for a Philosophy Department evening get-together.

One more month!

I'm overwhelmed by all that I need to do between now and then, homesick already for my sweet life here (homesick, and churchsick, and friendsick, and writinggroupsick, and more). And I'm also wild with excitement for the new life that I am envisioning for the coming year that I'll spend as the Frederick Visiting Professor of Ethics at the Prindle Institute of Ethics at DePauw University.

In my thoughts, Indiana has become the promised land, the land of milk and honey. In Indiana, I'll start writing again and I'll write my Newbery Award book AND a stunning adult memoir. In Indiana, I'll become reinvigorated as a philosopher and create a whole new ambitious research program for myself. In Indiana, I'll grow as a writer, teacher, and scholar. Oh, and I'll also eat better meals, and exercise more, and read a ton of books.

I love the weekly newsletter sent out by life-makeover guru Cheryl Richardson. I saved a recent one that was about the importance of changing our location if we want to make major changes in our life situation. She wrote, "When we change our environment, we interrupt the powerful force of unconscious patterns that keep us firmly rooted in failure." And she wrote, "Stop trying to create a breakthrough from within a structure that's set up to support failure."

A month from today, I'm off to a new environment that is going to transform all my unconscious patterns in wonderful ways. Indiana, here I come.

When Critics Disagree

At the retreat this past weekend, one of the questions that came up in our class was a terrific one: What is an author supposed to do when several readers of her manuscript disagree in their reactions to it?

A first answer, of course, is that she should do whatever SHE wants to do. It is, after all, HER book; it needs to express her voice and her vision.

And yet, it is also true that in some sense every reader's judgment of a book is irrefutable. If a reader doesn't think my chapter is funny, there is no point in my trying to insist to him, "Yes, it is!" If he thinks it's confusing, there is no point in my insisting on its clarity. And isn't connecting with readers the POINT of what we're trying to do? And now my readers are disagreeing with each other: one hates the other's favorite scene; one dislikes the other's favorite character; one doesn't "get" the other's favorite funny bit. What to do?

Now, every author has to accept that we cannot please every single reader. Even War and Peace has its detractors. Whenever I check reader reviews of a book I've just read on amazon.com, I'm bound to see five-star reviews offset by one-star reviews. So it may simply be impossible to please all readers, especially if some readers have a standing aversion to a certain genre, or type of story line, or kind of humor. Oh, well.

That said, I do think that an author can often do something to correct what reader B hated in a chapter even while keeping what reader A loved about it. When I was writing the first chapter of my forthcoming book about an honor student who is facing expulsion for mistakenly taking her mother's lunchbox instead of her own, a lunchbox that happened to contain a small knife for cutting her mother's apple, I wanted to establish Sierra as a girl who is somewhat smug and self-righteous, secure in her role as top scholar and student leader. Then in the course of the story, she is going to have to reexamine her self-image and the various assumptions that undergird it.

When my writing group read the first draft of the chapter, some of them said that they simply didn't like Sierra, as she had been presented, and weren't going to be able to root for her as the heroine of the story. But others said that my portrayal of her somewhat problematic character was the most brilliant part of the book. What to do?

Well, what I did was to keep Sierra pretty much as she was, but simply tone it down a bit. I took out two or three thoughts that she had that most set up some readers to dislike her, thoughts that were just a tad over-the-top. And that was enough. On a second reading, everyone liked her, even as they recognized her flaws.

So maybe we can at least try to please everybody. At least some of the time.

Restored and Rejuvenated

I did come home restored and rejuvenated from the SCBWI retreat this past weekend in Colorado Springs, even after giving four talks, and twelve 20-minute-long one-on-one manuscript critiques, plus engaging in an evening Q&A session with Linda Ashman, the delightful author who led the picture-book track for the weekend. I felt that my talks went well, and that my critiques were insightful and encouraging, and that the Q&A had some sparkly moments.

I love doing things that I'm good at doing.

So much of my life as a philosophy professor involves doing things that I'm not particularly good at doing. Sometimes I teach material I don't know as well as I wish I did, and I can hear myself explaining it to my students in a way that even I know is confusing. Sometimes I attend a colloquium talk and truly don't understand a word of it. Once I had to serve on a university budget committee where one budget algorithm was explained to us by invoking the quadratic formula - that was a terrible day!

But if there's one thing I do know how to talk about, it's how this particular author goes about writing a children's book. And I think I do have a gift for reading an aspiring writer's manuscript and seeing instantly what works and what doesn't work, and being able to communicate that in a positive, inspirational way.

That's what I did for the past two days. I loved every minute of doing it.

Sturdy Structure and Peppy Pacing

Of course, when I actually sat down to prepare the FOUR talks I have to give as the facilitator/leader of the SCBWI writing retreat this weekend, it was much less daunting than it had seemed earlier. I found quite lovely outlines for previously given talks in my file helpfully labeled TALKS, and added some new material to draw on things I've learned through writing some of my more recent books, and made a handout, and now I'm packed and ready to go.

Some presenters at events like this draw on examples from other people's books to illustrate various points in their talks. That is certainly a very generous approach and allows them to focus on the very best examples of what we should be doing as writers. But I'm going to take the route of focusing on examples from my own books, not because I think they're so great - they're not - but because I know exactly how and why I made those creative choices, often after having made much less successful previous creative choices and now having to correct them. Perhaps self-servingly, I've decided that anybody can sit down and read wonderful books and marvel at how wonderful they are. What's most fun for me, as an attendee of talks, is hearing how the person presenting figured out what she was going to do in her book, and why. I could listen forever to authors discuss, not how to write generally, but their own creative process specifically, and then distill lessons from it to apply in my own case.

So I'll talk about One Square Inch, and how hard how I had to work to make Cooper active rather than reactive in the face of his mother's mental illness, how I had to eliminate entire characters to make his situation more urgent, shorten the time frame of the novel to increase dramatic tension, switch from third person to first person to add immediacy and directness, and change the ending in which I - an author of over 40 published books - actually made the most egregious error possible of having the central truth at the heart of the book not discovered by Cooper himself but delivered to him by an adult authority.

I may not be an expert on Writing with a capital W, but I AM an expert on "Mistakes Made Quite Recently by Claudia Mills and How You Can Avoid Making These Mistakes in Your Own Writing."

So that's the heart of what I'll have to share with the retreat attendees this weekend in Colorado Springs.

Advancing to Retreat

This weekend I'm heading down to Colorado Springs for the SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) summer retreat, held at the Franciscan Retreat Center. There is nothing more delicious than the thought of a weekend spent in seclusion at a peaceful meditative place, a weekend designed to send the registrants away rested, restored, rejuvenated, and inspired with new insights about how to grow as writers.

Unfortunately, I'm the facilitator/leader of the retreat. I'm the one who has to find a way to restore and rejuvenate my fellow attendees. I'm the one who has to come up with the new insights about how we can all grow as writers.

When I agreed to take on this assignment, several months ago, I had visions of spending most of the summer preparing the FOUR talks I will be giving. I made up titles for the talks, titles like "Sturdy Structure and Peppy Pacing: A How-to Guide" and "Finding the Funny Bone: Humor in Middle-Grade and YA Fiction." I was all excited about actually figuring out how to create sturdy structure and peppy pacing in a book, and how exactly to develop a story's comic potential. Wouldn't it be satisfying finally to KNOW these things?

But of course, my summer didn't turn out that way. I had that house-salvaging project. I had my week teaching in Utah. I had those conferences in Roanoke and NYC. And I also had to write up detailed comments for the dozen manuscripts for which I'm giving one-on-one critiques at the retreat: the people who are receiving these critiques are paying significant money for them, so the critiques had better be wonderful.

So now there are two days left before the retreat, and I'm sitting here thinking: sturdy structure, peppy pacing, developing characterization, enhancing humor, "Manuscript Makeovers: 20 tips for revision." What ARE 20 good tips for revision?

It's really not as bad as it sounds, as I do have drafts of various former talks that can be dragged out and spiffed up a bit. And I've been known to have amazing revelations at the very last minute, indeed, on the spot. And I do have thirty years of experience that I'm drawing on. And . . . .

But I still wish I knew more about sturdy structure and peppy pacing, for example, exactly how to make it happen, and how to tell somebody else how to make it happen.

I now have two days to figure it out.

The Kerlan Collection

I did manage to write that one thank you note yesterday, and to print out my student's paper (though not to read it), and actually also wrote three book reviews for Children's Literature. But I spent most of my surprisingly productive morning bundling up two sets of manuscripts, for How Oliver Olson Changed the World and One Square Inch, to donate to the Kerlan Collection.

It is one of the nicest things in my writer life that the fabulous Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota, repository of so many manuscripts by so many brilliant and famous authors, two decades ago agreed to accept my donations as well. For years I wondered what I was supposed to do with my original manuscripts: those precious handwritten pages, those scribbled-over drafts, those long letters from my editors. How could I just throw them away? But, hater of clutter/hoarding that I am, how could I save them without crowding myself out of my own house? And now I have the satisfaction of both saving them and not saving them, by sending them away to be preserved - forever? - in the temperature-controlled vaults at the Kerlan.

I visited the Kerlan two summers ago to give a talk there and had the thrill of seeing my manuscripts - my manuscripts! - in a display case in the hallway outside the collection. And I saw the students to whom I was speaking handle the manuscripts - my manuscripts - while wearing white gloves! Of course, that was quite an amazing thing for me to behold.

But it was mainly just a tribute to the creative process itself - to the sacred task of putting marks down upon paper, blindly, hopelessly, draft after draft - and then, lo, here is a book. The journey did lead somewhere, after all.

So yesterday I assembled all those stages of the journey, from handwritten notes, to versions commented on by my critique group, to drafts revised from editorial suggestions, to the final edited and copyedited manuscript, to an inscribed first edition of the book itself. Now they are on their way to Minneapolis, the work of many months and years, to their sweet resting place.

Inertia

I am home from my merry week of wandering, which climaxed in a most inspirational conference of the PLATO Institute (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), devoted to sharing philosophy with pre-college-age children and youth. The PLATO program, held at Columbia University Teachers College, ran for two days of lively and helpful talks and discussions. They even put up the out-of-town speakers at an elegant, quiet boutique hotel on West 77th Street, On the Avenue, which boasted the world's most comfortable beds. And I loved getting to spend two nights in a city I love so much.

But now I'm home. And I have to do all the pesky little tasks that mounted up while I was away, as well as face the fact that there is MUCH I have to do before I depart to my new life in Indiana in - gulp - six weeks! And I am paralyzed with inertia. I don't want to do any of these tasks. I forced myself to make a master to-do list, with 81 items on it, and the smallest items on the list still feel overwhelming to me. And of course the longer I go without doing any of the items on the list, the more overwhelmed I feel.

What to do? One option would be to give myself a couple of days off, say to myself, look at all you've accomplished already this summer! And you've just come back from a tiring, though wonderful, trip. What's wrong with relaxing for a weekend? But then I hate to think of how terrible the to-do list is going to appear to me when I return from a weekend of enforced sloth.

So I think I'm going to try a different strategy. If the smallest item on the list feels overwhelming, come up with items that are still smaller. If "write this one thank you note that I need to write" feels too overwhelming, then try: "go to the cupboard where you keep your stationery and pick out a card" and "address the envelope." I know once I do those two things, then "actually write something on the card" will seem more doable. If "grade this one paper from a summer independent study" feels too overwhelming, then try: "print out the paper" and "give it a preliminary skim-read." At that point, I'll probably decide just to write up a few comments, give it a grade, and move on.

Okay. I have a plan. I will locate one card and address one envelope. I can do this!