Young Adult Literature « Francisco's Journal

July 4, 2010

Integrity

Filed under: Integrity,Religion,Uncategorized,Writing,Young Adult Literature — Francisco Stork @ 10:55 am

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.

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February 28, 2009

Beginnings- Marcelo in the Real World

Filed under: Current Events,Marcelo in the Real World,Uncategorized,Writing,Young Adult Literature — Francisco Stork @ 6:09 am

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.

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November 12, 2008

The Writer as Actor

Filed under: Marcelo in the Real World,Writing,Young Adult Literature — Francisco Stork @ 8:33 pm

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.