Highlights from A.S. King’s Author Visit

The past week has been a busy one for me.  On Saturday night, I returned from the 8^th grade class trip to New Mexico, where we visited ruins and living pueblos, ate delicious New Mexican food, and saw breathtaking sights.  And the day before we left, the inspiring and entertaining A.S. King came for a thoroughly successful school visit!

I organized the visit earlier this spring, and since that time, A.S. (Amy) King has won an L.A. Times book award for Ask the Passengers and joined the faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I got my MFA.  She was an energetic, engaging presenter who gave students some excellent advice about writing and life. There’s no way I could capture all of the highlights of her presentations, but I’ll share a couple here.

Amy with 8th grade students.

The teacher side of me especially appreciated the way Amy told students that their middle and high school experiences won’t define them.  She didn’t minimize their current challenges and successes at all, but she told them that they get to choose which people and moments they let into the “personal suitcases” they carry around with them, and she emphasized the importance of how they respond to setbacks, rather than the setbacks themselves.  She also urged them to journal about the experiences that have shaped them and tap into their own emotions, so that they won’t hide anything from themselves, and so that they can use those emotions in their writing and other creative endeavors.

As a writer, I especially enjoyed Amy’s discussion of her writing process.  She explained that she doesn’t tend to write with a strict outline, and she told the story of how surprised she was when she was writing Please Ignore Vera Dietz and realized that Vera had a bottle of vodka under the driver’s seat in her car.  When Vera reached down for something, Amy genuinely didn’t know what she would find there.  At first, it was perplexing to her that practical Vera would drink while driving, but then it became Amy’s job to tell the story of why this practical girl would have a vodka bottle under her seat.  I love that idea; that if a character does something that doesn’t fit with the writer’s vision of him or her, maybe that seeming contradiction becomes the seed of a compelling story.

Amy also explained that in Everybody Sees the Ants, she initially included a house fire, which forced her protagonist, Lucky Linderman, to leave his ruined home and spend the summer in Tempe, Arizona.  She ultimately realized the fire didn’t work, but if she hadn’t let herself go where the story took her and write that fire, Lucky might not have journeyed to Tempe.  The fire got cut, but it got Lucky where he needed to go for the story to take off.

Usually, when a writer talks about “listening to characters” and “letting them drive the story,” I get the same feeling I’ve had on the few occasions I’ve gone to yoga classes, when everyone around me is breathing deeply, relaxed, and in the moment, but I can’t shut off my brain.  I feel anxious and a little inadequate.  Why won’t my characters whisper their stories in my ear?  Sometimes I’ve thought they might be talking to me, but half the time when I’ve tried to sit back and let them tell me their story, I’ve written flabby, meandering scenes that go on and on without any forward progress. So when people talk about staying open to what their characters want the story to be, I usually begin to worry that I’m approaching this writing thing all wrong.

But I didn’t get that anxious feeling during A.S. King’s presentations.  Maybe that’s because she was so warm and funny.  Or maybe it’s because she wasn’t saying that there isn’t any place for strategizing and cutting in the writing process.  In fact, her description of her writing process matched up with a lecture that Tim Wynne-Jones gave at Vermont College before I was a student there, about how writers should embrace their inner geniuses.  I’ve listened to a recording of the lecture, and Tim urges writers to look for interesting seeds that they have subconsciously planted in early drafts, and then decide which seeds they might develop.

I don’t think this approach means that everything that your “genius” subconscious plants in a draft is going to work.  In my current work-in-progress, I planted some hints that the main character might become a runner, so I tried to cultivate a running subplot, but it just clogged things up without adding anything valuable.  But I also subconsciously mentioned baking and pastries in an early draft of the beginning, and one of my VCFA advisors, Mary Quattlebaum, helped me to realize that my main character might have a passion for baking.  While the running idea flopped, my story started to come together after I embraced the idea of my protagonist as a baker.

A.S. King didn’t downplay what hard work writing is, and she gave students (and me) the sense that writing, or any creative pursuit, involves a balance of openness and strategizing, embracing and cutting.  She was a hit with 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th grade students, and current VCFA students will be in for a real treat when they get to hear her lecture this summer!

Technology in Young Adult Fiction

Well, it’s official. After missing a few exciting things and getting some encouragement from MFA classmates, I’ve joined Twitter.  I’m a little overwhelmed and still not clear on the nuances, but hey, that’s technology.

Speaking of technology, and in honor of my entrance into the Twittersphere, today I’m thinking about technology and social networking in young adult books.  We all know social networking is a major part of adolescents’ social lives, so it hardly seems accurate to write contemporary realistic fiction that ignores cell phones and Facebook and Twitter and G-Chats and Instagram.  But a number of issues arise when writers attempt to depict all this technology in fiction.

For one thing, even technology-savvy adults may not know as much about social networking as teens do, or we may not use social networking in the same ways.  I’ve been using Facebook and a cell phone for years, for instance, but until some students filled me in, I didn’t know that some teens post TBH (meaning to be honest) as a Facebook status and then have to write something “honest” on the wall of anybody who likes the status, and I didn’t know some teens use group texts to exclude and badmouth somebody who’s physically present but not receiving the texts. Plus, trends in technology change so quickly that a book that includes specifics will soon be outdated.

It seems to me that writers handle technology in a handful of successful ways:

1.) They avoid modern technology by writing historical fiction or by orchestrating some situation in which no one has technology access.

2.) They write sci-fi or fantasy and invent their own types of technology.

3.) They reference technology but without specifics.  Characters mention their phones, and readers can infer that they mean cell phones, but the writer doesn’t choose a specific brand or commit to any terminology.  Or characters chat with other characters online, but the writer doesn’t say whether they’re on Gmail or AIM or something else.

4.) They make up fictional sites that resemble real ones but have different names.   (This strategy is sort of like fictionalizing a setting, something I’m preparing to do in my novel-in-progress; if you give a place a different name, you can draw inspiration from a real place but nobody will hold you to the details.)  For instance, Sarah Dessen has invented a Facebook-like social networking site called Ume.com, which pops up in some of her novels, and Lindsey Leavitt has created another Facebook-like site she calls Friendspace, which includes a game called Authentic Life, for her new novel Going Vintage.

5.) They make technology, or a glitch in technology, part of the premise of a book.  Both Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler’s The Future of Us and Sarah Mlynowski’s Gimme a Call take the glitch-in-technology approach.  In The Future of Us, Emma and Josh, two teenagers in 1996, somehow access Facebook in 2011 and find out how they are faring fifteen years in the future by checking out their older selves’ profiles.  And in Gimme a Call, after dropping her phone in a fountain, a high school senior named Devi, who has just been dumped by her boyfriend, realizes that she can call herself as a freshman, so she attempts to keep her freshman self away from the guy who’s broken her heart. 

In the case of both of these fun, high-concept books, technology is a large part of the premise and readers are encouraged to think a little bit about how they use technology and social networking.  The 1996 versions of Emma and Josh are shocked, for instance, at how much private information their future selves reveal on Facebook, and Gimme a Call suggests how much teens rely on their phones.  But really, both of these books encourage readers to think more about another compelling idea: how small actions can impact the future in large and unpredictable ways.

Lindsey Leavitt also uses technology as part of the premise for her novel Going Vintage, in which 16-year-old Mallory swears off technology and resolves to return to the way things were in the 1960s after she finds out that her boyfriend is cheating on her with a “cyber-wife.”  In this case, there’s no technological glitch, but what Mallory learns via social networking provides the inciting incident that starts her journey.

I was excited to read Going Vintage because it addresses important questions about social networking and technology and how they impact teens’s social lives.  Leavitt shows how teens get back at each other on social networking sites (Mallory changes her boyfriend’s status to one that proclaims him “a tool” after she finds out about his online relationship), and the way online arguments can blaze up like forest fires (lots of other people get involved and write nasty things about Mallory after she posts that status).  Leavitt also reveals how impossible it is for teens, or any of us for that matter, to avoid technology altogether and still function.

So there you have it: five ways I’ve noticed that authors handle the challenges of social networking and technology in fiction.  What other ways can you think of, or what other books depict technology in effective ways?  Or, alternatively, any Twitter tips for me?

On this April Morning

Yesterday, I put off writing a blog post because I wasn’t sure what to say.  After a week that included the Boston Marathon bombings, the terrifying manhunt that shut down Boston, and a massive fertilizer plant explosion, it felt wrong to post about the relatively mundane details of teaching or writing.  And yet who am I to offer up thoughts on the sad, scary events of this week?  Yes, I ran a few marathons a while ago, so I know how joyful, loving, and chaotic the crowds are, and I can’t bear to think of the horrifying scene that unfolded when two bombs went off near the finish line on Monday.  And my brother lives in Cambridge, so I was especially shaken by the lockdown and search for the remaining suspect on Friday.  But so many other people are so much closer to these events than I am.  What could I possibly have to say about them?

But then today, I woke up thinking about April Morning, the Revolutionary War-era novel my seventh grade students are reading, which takes place during the Battles of Lexington and Concord.  The novel is set in the Boston area in an April long ago, and the fifteen-year-old narrator, Adam, both recounts the terrors of war and describes people’s courage and generosity in the face of fear and killing.  Adam recalls, “Many people were kind and gentle on that day; it wasn’t unrelieved horror, and fewer were cruel than you might have thought.”

And then I thought about the op-eds that my eighth grade students have written, after reading Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; Meghan Cox Gurdon’s Wall Street Journal article “Darkness Too Visible”; and Alexie’s response to Gurdon’s article, “Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood.”  I asked students to think about the tone and subject matter of Absolutely True Diary and consider Gurdon’s points about how intense and disturbing some young adult novels have become.  Then, they each wrote an op-ed in which they took a stance on whether or not people should be troubled by the trend toward darkness in young adult literature.

I’ve been grading their pieces, which they turned in just before the marathon bombings last Monday, and many of the students have written about how it’s impossible to shield teenagers from grief and trauma (a statement that feels especially true after this week), so why shouldn’t books explore difficult events and show how some people cope with them?  A few of them have also commented that dark young adult novels can be inspiring because they portray the mental and physical strength of individuals who confront horrifying circumstances.  They suggest that it isn’t fair to condemn the Harry Potter or Hunger Games books as too violent and death-filled without acknowledging the courage and compassion of the characters in those books.

So now, on this April morning as I look back at the past week, I am struck by the importance of stories that explore the human condition, in all its fear and devastation and goodness and joy.  I am glad there are books that explore sad, scary events, and I am glad there are authors who have created characters who are as heroic, brave, and kind as so many people have been this week.

Excited about E-Books: An Author Visit from Andrea J. Buchanan

Most writers I know are a little bit wary about e-books.  Some duck their heads and smile apologetically when they admit that they kind of like the Kindle they broke down and bought.  Many seem worried about what electronic publishing means for independent bookstores and the future of the book as we know it.  Not Andi Buchanan.

Andi speaking with the seventh grade.

Andi is the mother of one of my eighth grade students and the author of a wide variety of books.  She first published a book of personal essays called Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It, which sounds like just the kind of smart, honest, and funny exploration of motherhood that all of you moms would want to check out.   Then she edited three other essay collections about motherhood before diving in to writing for kids.  She co-authored four Daring Book for Girls books, and then most recently, she came out with a paranormal young adult novel called Gift.

Sounds impressive enough already, I know.  But I haven’t gotten to the part about e-books.  Gift first came out as an e-book, with a print edition following, and Andi thought about all of the capabilities of iPads and Kindle Fires as she wrote the story.  So the e-book includes some amazing features, such as letters that creepily appear on the pages and then fade, and a video link to a boy performing music from the book.  There’s also a short graphic novel at the end.  Oh, and there’s a Minecraft map of the world from the book that readers can play online.

Yesterday, Andi came to give a presentation and Q and A session for the seventh grade and then the library and reading clubs.  She talked openly about her writing process, her career, and how she developed the e-book options for Gift. I was especially inspired by her openness to technology.  Rather than worrying about the rise of e-books and clinging to nostalgia for the days when a book was just a book, Andi is eager to consider how e-book options can enable her to tell a more exciting story, and she is willing to collaborate with other professionals and pay attention to what engages kids.

And thanks to her author visit, I learned a valuable lesson: that if you want to get a room full of middle school students excited, you should mention Minecraft.  I suppose now I have to figure out what Minecraft is.

Middle School Girl Culture Mini-Course

Now that I’ve made it through the first week back from spring break, I’m finally getting around to writing about something that happened just before vacation: a two-day “Middle School Girl Culture” mini-course that included a successful Skype visit and other fun events.

Skyping with Jess.

My friend and colleague Maureen and I led a course for fifteen sixth, seventh, and eighth grade girls.  One of the highlights of the mini-course was a discussion of Jessica Leader’s book Nice and Mean followed by a Skype visit with Jess.  I am gradually refining my process for Skype visits, and I thought this one went especially well.  I always have students brainstorm questions beforehand, but this time we made sure that we had a varied list of questions, and then we set ourselves up so that we could go down the line and ask the questions in a logical order.  We were able to proceed more efficiently since I didn’t have to call on people this way.  We also came up with some back-up questions; in case Jess happened to answer someone’s question in her response to another question, there were some fallback options.  Jess was articulate and good-humored as she answered the girls’ questions about the characters from Nice and Mean, her writing process, and her own middle school experience.

One of the photos we examined from Lauren Greenfield’s “Girl Culture” collection.

During the mini-course, we also looked together at a handful of photographs from Lauren Greenfield’s powerful “Girl Culture” photo collection, and we went through some case studies that explored dilemmas related to social media sites.  These case studies came from the Ethics Institute at Kent Place School.  Facilitators from Swarthmore College’s psychology department led an empowering Strength and Resilience workshop that helped the girls identify their strengths, and we watched some of Rachel Simmons’s BFF 2.0 videos, which are aimed to “help girls deal with the new friendship challenges posed by technology.”  Finally, the girls made their own BFF 2.0 videos, in which they explored and gave advice for navigating the issues of group texts, TBH (to be honest) and ratings posts on Facebook, and online gossiping.

We also made time to venture out to the Comcast Center and Reading Terminal for our lunches, and we fit in a trip to Rita’s for free water ice in honor of the first day of spring (despite the fact that we were all wearing our winter coats).  It was a great two days, and I enjoyed exploring the issues that affect middle school girls today with a group of open and thoughtful young women!

Why I [Fill in the Blank]

It’s always interesting to me that I can read the same book at different times and notice very different things about it.  Recently, I began reading Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian for at least the third time.  I first read it several years ago, then read it with my eighth grade English students last year (and reading something I’m teaching really involves reading it more than just once), and am now reading it again with this year’s eighth grade.  This time, I was really struck by the main character Arnold’s description of why he draws cartoons.  Arnold explains:

“I draw because words are too unpredictable.

I draw because words are too limited.

If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning.  But when you draw a picture, everybody can understand it.

If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, ‘That’s a flower.’

So I draw because I want to talk to the world, and I want the world to pay attention to me.

I feel important with a pen in my hand.  I feel like I might grow up to be somebody important.  An artist.  Maybe a famous artist.  Maybe a rich artist.

Just take a look at the world.  Almost all of the rich and famous brown people are artists.  They’re singers and actors and writers and dancers and directors and poets.

So I draw because I feel like it might be my only real chance to escape the reservation.

I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats” (5-6).

After having read this novel more than twice before, I remembered a lot of parts of it in pretty specific detail.  But I did not remember anything about this powerful description of why Arnold draws.   On my current read-through, however, this passage struck me as the most compelling part of the first several chapters of the book.  I don’t know why this passage jumped out at me this time and didn’t before.  But once I focused on it, I remembered another piece I used to share with students, way back before I’d read Absolutely True Diary the first time: a short, poetic personal essay by Terry Tempest Williams called “Why I Write.”

This year, my students and I spent some time discussing Arnold’s reasons for drawing.  Then, we went around the room and read “Why I Write” together, with each student reading a sentence and then the next student taking over.  When I’d used “Why I Write” in the past, some students found it odd or confusing.  But this time, since we’d read Arnold’s very accessible reasons for drawing first, everyone seemed content to latch onto the lines that spoke to them and read past the ones that didn’t.  And once we were finished, I asked students to write their own “Why I [fill in the blank]” lists, about why they do something that’s extremely important to them.  Their lists were great—they helped me learn new things about some students, and many of them juxtaposed mundane reasons with profound ones and included opposites within their list (as Terry Tempest Williams does with sentences such as, “I write to remember.  I write to forget.”).

In fact, next time I’m discouraged with my writing, I think I’ll make my own “Why I Write,” list, and I also think “Why I [fill in the blank]” lists could be great tools for writers getting to know their characters.  It could be really telling for me to write a “Why I Bake” list for the protagonist of my novel-in-progress, or a “Why I Play Baseball” list for one of my secondary characters.  You should try one, too!  (And perhaps even post in the comments, if you are so inclined.)

I still think it’s important to change up some of the books I teach so that everything stays fresh, but this is the beauty of good books: depending on all sorts of hard-to-quantify factors, you pick up on different things when you return to them, so re-reading and re-teaching them never has to get stale.

The Value of Failure?

For the past few days, I’ve been thinking about the value of failure.

Sounds counterintuitive, I know.  But last week, I went with the other teachers at my school to the NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools) conference for a day.  I expected lots of information about how we can set our students up to succeed, but in two different workshops, the presenters talked about the importance of letting students fail sometimes.

One teacher was describing an impressively complex and student-driven project he calls the “World Peace Game,” and he explained that he sets the game up to “fail massively” at first.  Another teacher was talking about how she lets her students choose their own teams for a challenge-based learning unit, but only after she has set them up to “safely fail” at picking suitable groups for an earlier project.  That way, they can choose more wisely when the stakes are higher.

There are several reasons why teachers might want to allow their students to fail.  Some kinds of failure can teach a specific lesson.  I still remember the “quiz” that taught me to read the directions carefully before beginning any assessment.  I was in elementary school, and the quiz had all sorts of complicated questions.  Most of us slogged through problem after problem, sweating and grumbling at our little desks, but a few kids just sat there contentedly, giggling at the rest of us.  Turns out the directions said to turn the paper over without answering any of the questions.  After failing at that task, I learned my lesson for good. (But I also felt pretty duped by my teacher.)

In addition to teaching specific lessons, failure can also lead to success.  As both presenters at NAIS suggested, when students experience failure (preferably without any drastic consequences), they can learn from their mistakes, take more responsibility for their learning, and figure out how to succeed later on.

And more than that, we’re all going to fail sometimes.  As the teacher who designed the “World Peace” game put it, failure is a part of life.   Things are going to go wrong, so we want to help our students become resilient.  One way to do develop resilience is to experience failure and see that you can deal with it.

I know this rationally, but it isn’t easy to watch kids struggle.  It isn’t easy as their teacher, and I’m sure it really isn’t easy as their parent.  It isn’t even easy for me as a writer to let a fictional person fail.  But I like the idea of allowing for “safe” failure, and I’ve been thinking about ways I can incorporate safe failures into my teaching.

This could be as simple as including difficult but ungraded writing challenges—things like writing a poem that follows a strict form or writing for a set amount of time and then having a set amount of time to cut the word count in half without losing content.  I can also work on setting the bar high for writing assignments and then being truly rigorous about evaluating the work, even if that means that students do poorly at first and have to revise one or more times before they have succeeded, or I can give students more flexibility in choosing groups, even if I don’t think their groups will work, to let them problem-solve and manage conflict.

Letting students fail is scary because it involves giving up some control, and it’s hard to ensure that the failure will really be safe. I mean, I can ensure that everyone will be physically safe, but is it still a “safe” failure if two students argue during failed group work and one really gets her feelings hurt?  And is it still a safe failure if a student ends up with a slightly lower grade for the marking period?  It’s difficult to factor in opportunities for safe failure when grades matter so much to people and everybody always feels short on time.  But if we really want to help students develop resilience, then maybe we do need to let them struggle and rebound sometimes…just as we writers have to let our characters suffer and bounce back in order to create compelling fiction, and just as we’ve all had to do, in large and small ways.