I had to update the website to include Marcelo in the Real World (due out in March) and I took the opportunity to change the title of this section from Blog to Journal. Why? The simple answer is that ‘journal’ is a word that I am more comfortable with. It makes me feel better. It gives me the sense that I am writing things for myself (as in a journal) except that someone may read them. There was something about calling this a blog that put pressure in me. I felt guilty for not writing in it more frequently, for not commenting on this or that current event. I don’t know, somehow thinking that I was ‘blogging’ made me feel funny. It made me feel kind of pretentious and self-important. It made me feel phony. So now I write the same kind of stuff as before, but I feel better. I feel more honest. Why? I’m not exactly sure. As best as I can figure, writing in a journal (even if it is a public journal) gives me a sense of freedom. Here’s what I am musing on, thinking about, you’re welcome to read it, if you like. I write with a view that what I say may be helpful, interesting to someone and yet I keep a sense of integrity about the process by writing what touches me and affects me, like in a journal.
October 19, 2008
February 5, 2008
Young Adult Literature
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.
October 30, 2007
Originality
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.
