I heard David Shannon speak last weekend.
David Shannon of
No David! picture book fame. He's a
wonderful speaker, an organic storyteller really, and he held my
attention—along with every other person's in the room—for the 45 minutes that
he spoke. Or perhaps a better way to put it is that he interacted with my
attention for that time, because he didn't keep my attention clutched in his
hands, still and silent, but instead, he danced with it: asked questions, made
eye contact, created call and response moments, made connections…and asked for
the same in return.
One thing David said was that he puts his dog Fergus—this
cute little white terrier—into every one of his stories. And so he becomes an
interactive game for David's readers. Where is Fergus in this story? Is he in the background? Is he a toy? Is he partially
hidden? In a very clear and simple way,
Fergus has become a recurring image, a through-line for David—from idea to
idea, from story to story, from book to book.
Maybe David draws Fergus because a furry dog is fun to
create. Or maybe he includes Fergus because he loves him so. And maybe—just
maybe—Fergus has become a sort of gauge, a way for David to mark his growth as
a writer.
Who knows.
But like I said, David got my attention dancing,
and the idea of recurring images is how I dipped and shimmied and spun. I got
to thinking about the objects that repeatedly show up in my stories. (Mind you,
I am not an illustrator, so I'm not talking about visual objects but objects,
instead, drawn with words.) For instance, I write about trees. A lot. And so,
in effect, I have a long-standing relationship with trees as story elements.
I had the urge, after listening to David, to go back through
my work and search for those tree moments, to place them side by side in
chronological order, and to trace the arc of my growth as a writer along their
branched arms, from one to the other to the other. We are drawn to the ideas
and images and concepts, I believe, that have the most to teach us. Early on we
don't know why we are so curious about them, but, still, we are…and so we play
with them, repeat them, explore them. Slowly, though, their meaning becomes
clearer. Maybe we connect them, for the first time, to a piece of ourselves.
They take on a different resonance. They express more. There is something
glorious, I think, in appreciating that progression of meaning. Something
sacred and intimate and wise.
What images recur in your work? How have they evolved over
time? What can they teach you about yourself as a writer and human being in
this wide and wonderful world?
Tam
A few weeks ago, after
finishing another draft of my work in progress, I found myself once more at the
edge of the forest, resisting the next leg of a seemingly unending journey,
unsure of what kinds of confidence-gobbling monsters were waiting for me.
Sometimes the landscape of revision smells too strongly of fear.
The next eye-opening
step was to analyze our shrunken manuscripts—we had all followed directions and
arrived with our 250+ page novels shrunken down to 30 pages through reducing
the type face and in some cases, dividing it into two columns per page. From
there we went to work with brightly colored markers tracking narrative arc,
macro and micro plotting, emotional arc over the entire story and by scene, and
dialogue. Standing back and taking in
this map of our stories revealed some surprising unconscious incompetence—in
other words, the places that needed work. Now we knew what we didn’t know. But
never fear; Darcy reminded us that the first step to fixing something is
figuring out what needed fixing.
Whenever I walk into a library, I take a deep breath; all of
those words, all of those ideas! All of the stories, all of that information
within four walls, under one roof! I just want to let it soak into my pores. I
love the dusty paper smell mixed with the sharp scent of ink—one sniff and I’m
ready to sit down, open a book and fall into the images conjured up by the
words. 
First, last Tuesday night Lois Lowry spoke at the San
Francisco Main library. Author of over forty books and winner of numerous
awards, Lois Lowry, (now in her seventies) has just finished the final book in THE GIVER quartet, answering many of the questions she’s received from
readers since her original THE GIVER won the Newbery in 1994. She spoke on a
number of topics but what especially interested me was how she got her idea for
THE GIVER, a story about a dystopian society that had gained enough technology
to create a lifestyle that had no memory of sadness or pain. She told us that
all her ideas come from asking the question, “What if?” It was the question she
asked after a visit to her elderly
father who was slipping into dementia and had lost his most painful memory--that
his other daughter, Lois’s sister, had died as a young woman. Lowry
first thought that it seemed like a good thing to forget the painful
memories in life. She wondered, what if we could offer this to people? What
if we could forget all of the sad and painful things that had happened to us? From
that questioning came the idea for THE GIVER.
The second author visit was Rita William’s-Garcia at the West Oakland Public Library talking about her multi-prize winning book ONE CRAZY
SUMMER, the story of three sisters sent to spend the summer with their estranged
mother who is an activist with the Black Panthers in the late 1960’s. Rita
spoke to an enraptured room of all ages about where her idea came from—it
started with the question, “What would it be like to be a child in this very
electric time and place?” It’s another kind of ‘What if?’
