A Word with Doug Wilhelm

It doesn’t come from thought.

I don’t know where it does come from, exactly, and I don’t think it matters much whether I understand. What matters is that you learn, are always learning, how to work with the flow of ideas and creativity in your writing, or in whatever you do that draws on this mystery. It matters that you try, and in trying that you learn to work with the energetic process that can come through you.

And it doesn’t come from thought.

I first noticed this in my first full-time newspaper job, on the weekly Bernardsville News in Bernardsville, New Jersey. Our tiny newsroom was upstairs in a converted 19th century train station — Bernardsville is still on what used to be the Lackawanna Railroad line —  and it was a windowless, narrow chamber with steep-sloping walls from the pitched roof outside. I am very tall and couldn’t stand up in the room anywhere. Our weekly deadline was late Tuesday, and as it approached in late afternoon I would sit at my desk with piles of notes. I’d have been working on several stories, none of which I would have tried to write before the deadline pressure got intense. I’m not recommending this! But that’s how it would be, every Tuesday afternoon.

I would go through my notes for a story with a yellow highlighter. I wouldn’t highlight the key passages properly, because there wasn’t time for that; instead I’d mark along the sides of the scrawled segments that I liked, some of which might be good quotes for the story. I’d do this intently, with no time at this late point to plan anything out. Instead I would go into an odd, unthinking focus.

I would sit there with my notes. Maybe I’d page back through them, or maybe not. Mainly I would just … sit. And, in a minute or so, I would start to write. Then, as I wrote, with no time to think, something would start to shape the story.

That it didn’t come from thinking was what I discovered then, in my haphazard, deadline-powered experience. I wasn’t consciously working out these pieces of writing, I was just writing them. Had I done prewriting? Yes, absolutely I had, with my ragged rushed highlighting — but what I had not done was any kind of outlining or planning. No time for that.

Instead I just wrote. And, somehow, surprisingly, it came out pretty well. I got good feedback! I discovered a certain power that could come through me, absorbing my material and giving my story an order and flow that was often surprising and wasn’t perfect, but could be worked with, wrestled with, as the story (usually too long, at first) began to smooth and squeeze into a final form. I could work with this process, I could learn to do it better, and I didn’t have to do it only under panicky pressure. But my process has always remained, since then, basically the same.

I inform the work and fill the well by doing the research or observation or interviewing, making notes all along. I always then mark up my notes — that’s key, for me — but I don’t try to map out what’ll come next. I may do some freewriting before I start the actual draft, but it’ll be sketchy and generally aimed just at helping me start. Then I just … do.

I sit and start to write. I try not to think while I’m doing it, because thinking gets in the way. With revising, too, I don’t think through what a piece needs, I go more by feel. I re-enter the process, feeling as I read what is needed, then just do the work. I can’t explain it any better — and, again, I’m not sure it’s important to understand why a creative process works for you. Everyone’s process is personal. What matters is to feel for what works.

And to keep doing it. Some days of course what comes out will be better, with more mysterious energy and surprising results – and some days it won’t be like that. Either way, what you do can be useful and can bring the work along. You can keep the process going. When the inevitable  thoughts and worries do come, you can note what seems helpful — because some will be, probably — and then try your best to let go what is just anxiety.

Because it doesn’t come from thought.

And that’s about all I know.

Over the weekend I got this question via email from a middle schooler at Magnolia Science Academy in San Diego, California:

Do you have any advice for a new author? Because I’m writing a book (I know, I’m a kid, but I’m a pretty good writer).

Here’s my response:

1. Keep a notebook. This can be any type of notebook, big or small, plain or fancy, but it should be separate from your regular school notebooks. You can carry this writer’s notebook everywhere, or lock it up in your room at home to stay private — but try to write in it every day. Some writers just use their notebooks to jot down observations and ideas. Others keep a “freewriting” time when they write anything, really, in their notebook for, say, ten minutes, or to fill three pages. I suggest that you take the second approach mainly. If you make time, even just ten minutes, to write in your notebook each day, you’ll start to develop a relationship with it; and the more you have that, the more you’ll have a relationship with writing. Most writers’ notebooks are the place where their ideas first hatch.

At first, or before too long, writing in your notebook will start to seem like a chore, yet another thing you’re supposed to do. If you keep doing it anyway, you’ll start to look forward to spending time with it. Then your writer’s notebook can become a friend in your life — a friend for your life. But you have to give it your time and energy, especially after the first excitement of having it and writing in it start to flag. Push through that, and you’ll begin to build something real.

2. If you have a writing project you want to complete, like a story, write on it a bit every day at the same time if you can. If you miss a day, that’s okay, but do your best to write every day that you can. You may only have half an hour, say before dinner or before bed — but if you come back to your writing at this time every day, before long you will realize that you’ve really started to accomplish something. Don’t wait and think you need a whole weekend or a week to write. Instead, make it a part of your everyday life. Writing at the same time every day lets the mysterious inner rhythms of creative work start to develop and prepare to help you, each time you come to your project.

3. If you’ve written something you think may be promising or possibly good, don’t decide you’re done at that point — because that’s almost always just the beginning. Ask someone you trust for their feedback, and listen to what they say. Try to read your own work — this is very important! — as if you were coming to it for the first time. Be honest with yourself: does what you’ve written work as well as it possibly could? If you can then see how to make your work better, take a deep breath, be grateful for the insight and the ideas, and start working on the next draft.

Understand that writing is always a process. If you think, “I have to be done with this,” then you won’t be able to write well. If you can always be trying to learn how to improve your work — if you can always be open to the process, no matter whether it takes you through two drafts or ten — then you have a chance to do good work. And that’s all that any of us ever have: the chance to do good work. The more you do it, the more you’ll learn to trust the creative process, give it your best energy and be open to what it can show you.

If you want to try to get something published, there are some very good outlets for young writers. Check out these links (they’re also at right, under Blogroll): teenink and my YA author friend Laura Williams McCaffrey’s resources for young writers.

Good luck … keep a notebook … and write for fun! The more you enjoy doing it, the more you’ll keep doing it. Dreaming of publishing a book or getting famous probably won’t keep you going for all that long. What can keep you going as a writer — and all writers have to learn how to keep going — is building a real relationship with your writing, and learning to enjoy it in your life.

Early this month I had the pleasure of visiting Roth Middle School in Henrietta, N.Y., outside Rochester, where every student in all three grades — six, seven and eight — was taking part in a schoolwide reading and discussion project with my young-adult novel The Revealers. On the day of my visit, as each grade filed into the auditorium for its hourlong talk with me, a very cool slide show was projecting onto a big screen up on stage. The slides were photos of Roth students and teachers, taken during the classroom readings of my book. As each image flicked onto the screen, it was accompanied by Michael Jackson’s funky and inspiring song “Man in the Mirror,” with its lyrics:

If you want to make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself, and then make a change

The idea, as principal Denise Zeh discussed with each grade when she introduced me, was to challenge every student, in reading and thinking and talking about this novel that portrays middle-school bullying and social pressures, to take a clear look at themselves and the role they’re playing in the school community. I think the kids got it. (They liked the song, too.)

What we had together was a powerful and memorable day — and along with the slideshow and this personal focus, one creative and quite effective aspect of the program was the school’s selection of two dozen “author ambassadors.” I met these students first, spending time with them at the beginning and end of the day; during the hours in between, they were very active in helping me connect with their fellow students.

I was so impressed with the author-ambassador idea that afterward I asked Sheryl Diana, the librarian at Roth who led the organizing of The Revealers project, to write a brief description of how this part of the project had been put together and how it worked. Below is what Sheryl kindly wrote in response. To learn more, contact her at Sdiana@rhnet.org.

Roth has posted its slide show of The Revealers “schoolwide read” online, together with photos of my visit — in particular, of my interactions with the author ambassadors. To view those great photos, click here.

Roth Middle School’s “Author Ambassadors”
by Sheryl Diana
Roth Middle School was proud to have Author Ambassadors to welcome and assist Mr. Wilhelm during his visit. We spent the month of September reading The Revealers aloud in homerooms. As librarian, I have always tried to include as many students as possible in an author visit. For Doug’s visit our teachers had the challenge of recommending one student per team, using the criteria that the student should be an avid reader or writer, or have demonstrated a special interest in The Revealers.

I received 24 recommendations (not the ten I had expected), and was able to include them all. I met with the students briefly the day before Doug’s visit and gave them general instructions.

On the morning of the visit, the ambassadors met with Doug during our 20-minute homeroom time. He asked each of them to give their name, and one interesting thing about themselves. They were delighted! At each of our three grade-level assemblies, the ambassadors from that grade met Doug in the auditorium before the rest of the students arrived. They were able to chat with Doug, and had front-row seats. A few of them chose to help introduce him.

At each grade-level lunch, the ambassadors ate at the table where Doug was signing books. They were able to talk to fellow students and to Doug during that time. The conversations were as varied as the students. At the end of the day, the ambassadors gathered in the library for an informal chat with Doug about what he’s writing now. They enjoyed every minute of his visit. One of our teachers created certificates for the ambassadors, which Doug graciously signed and distributed. They each left with a signature, even if they had been unable to purchase a book.

Thanks to Doug’s flexibility, and remarkable memory for names, every student in the school felt important and listened to that day, none more than the wonderful ambassadors!

Years ago, I was young, living in Asia, teaching English for a meagre living, and trying to write a book when I didn’t know how. I had been a newspaperman back home, and that helps in some ways: You do write for a living, but you learn to do it in a hyperated rush on deadline. You come to depend on that deadline, on that external pressure. If you leave a job like that behind — and I, living then in Kathmandu, Nepal, had left mine a long ways behind — and you’re trying to write a book on your own, you can wonder:

How do I do this?

Today, about 28 years later, I resumed working on a new young-adult novel, which if it gets published (always a big if) will be my 12th. I started it last winter. Recently I’d had to take a break, to get married on Labor Day weekend (it turns out this, like writing a book, involves a lot of work), then to work again through the first half of the story-in-progress, revising the draft, getting back to the point when the first draft stops — then to spend a week reading, making notes and trying to brainstorm the second half. Which I hadn’t started yet.

And all that is fine, necessary; but there comes that point when you do have, once again, to start writing. Today, Monday morning, that’s where I was. And no matter what I do, how well I try to research and generate ideas and otherwise prepare, when I face that blank screen I never know what is going to happen. I just don’t.

But I do start. That’s the key — just to start, and not to go back over and over but to push ahead. It doesn’t have to be great; it’s just a start. A rough draft. Once I do get started, I work on the project every day that I possibly can, from 8 to 10 a.m. if I can make that time, or later in the day if I have to. Before my two hours end, my goal is to write at least 1,500 words.

Today I did that, a little more in fact. And when I had moved on to other projects in my day, I remembered something I once read in a book. It was in a long, very wonderful novel, War and Remembrance, written by a very successful author, Herman Wouk. The book came out in 1978 and I read it not long after that, when I was living overseas and trying to write. Wouk’s novel is 1,056 pages long — and it encompasses, in a thrilling, absorbing and moving story, virtually all of World War II. I’m pretty sure I read it twice, along with Wouk’s previous novel, The Winds of War. (I was a long way from home, I had time, and they were worth it.)

One important character in War and Remembrance is an elderly, successful Jewish scholar and author who, for much of the story, is a refugee on the run from the Nazis. Amid all the adventures and dangers and horrors he experiences, this character tries to keep his work going. He mostly does, too. At one point he says, of his morning’s work, something like this: “I did my 1,500 words.”

I was impressed by that, even then. I thought, Is the real author telling us something? Is this how he got these massive, world-scale novels written — by doing his daily 1,500 words?

This morning that line came back to me. I don’t know if I’m remembering it exactly, but I’m almost positive about the 1,500 words. And I do think Wouk was telling us that this how to do it. Set a daily goal for your writing, then meet it every day.

Myself, I find that setting and meeting this particular goal, which is challenging but achievable — 1,500 words is a fairly good workout, especially if you’re finding those words inside yourself and you start out not knowing where they are — allows you satisfaction. A book is a very big project, and you may or may not be able to achieve the one you dream of; but each day you can do 1,500 words. And over time, those words do do add up. You and I may never write anything like War and Remembrance … but we can do a certain number words a day. We can.

And if we do … who knows where we might end up?

When my YA novel The Revealers first began to catch on, I got a few requests to visit schools where kids were reading the book. I thought this was interesting — and surprising. I mentioned it to a more experienced author friend, who said, “Doug, schools like to bring in authors! For a lot of children’s writers, school visits become a big part of their livelihood.” I had no idea.

Well, now I do. Visiting schools, mostly middle schools, around the country has become quite a big part of both my livelihood and my creative life. My new year of visits starts this week, with a Friday visit to Rivendell Academy (don’t you love that name?) in Orford, N.H. So this is a good week to set down the five top reasons why I like (I could even say love) to visit schools:

5. I meet kids who could be characters — because they are. “I write for you,” I often tell middle schoolers — “so tell me something about yourself.” One sixth-grade girl in Ohio told me, “I like to catch snakes and bring them home.” I said, “How does your mother feel about this?” She said, “Oh, she doesn’t like it very much!” And I remember the boy who sat way in back, dressed all in military camouflage, at a Massachusetts school. “I like to bake things,” he told me. “I like to bake cakes.” In my current novel-in-progress I have a boy character who dresses all in camouflage. Did that idea come from that kid? Who knows?

4. I get told what to read. Many middle schoolers are vacuum-cleaner readers — they read constantly. I’m often asked what books to recommend, but it’s much more fun to ask them what they’ve liked lately. Years ago, volunteering at the book fair when my son Brad was in middle school, I noticed that kids kept coming in eager for new three books I hadn’t heard of: Tangerine,  Holes, and something called Harry Potter. (If you haven’t read Tangerine, try it!)

3. I can share and “air” what’s in my notebook. Writing is mostly a quiet, private process, which is fine; but when students or teachers ask what I’m working on, or how I work, I enjoy pulling out my little notebook. Like every writer I’ve ever talked with about this, I keep a notebook; it’s where notes, noticings and ideas first go, and where they may start to grow into something. I’ll pull out my plain, black, Moleskine pocket book, show that it has no lines (I don’t like lines in notebooks), and maybe read a page. The notebook I filled over the summer begins with this, which I heard somebody say: “All it takes is a little more attention.”

2. I may get asked a question I’ve never been asked before. I often tell kids I really appreciate it when this happens — and when it does, I always say, with a big (probably goofy) grin, “I’ve never been asked that before!” You may ask, “Well, what were some of those questions?” And the truth is, in that moment, before an audience, I’ve never pulled out the notebook and written those questions down — so I don’t remember. See, that’s what happens when you don’t write things down. My project this year: Write these favorite questions down.

1. I get ideas — and I test ideas. As I said up top, school visits aren’t just part of my livelihood, they’ve become a huge part of my creative process. Last year, when I wanted characters to do a lunchroom prank, I asked middle schoolers in Pasco, Florida what that prank should be. I’ve asked kids to write down for me the nastiest text messages they’ve ever received. I’ve noticed their shoes, their hair, the slogans on their t-shirts (my favorite: two seventh grade girls in St. Petersburg, Florida walking side by side with shirts that said, Unique), and more. Sometimes I know what I’m looking for; sometimes it’ll just be there. And I’ll write it down.

Will this become part of a story, a scene, a character? Again, who knows? It’s a process. And that’s something — the flowing, evolving, surprising nature of creative work — that I never get tired of talking about with young people who have open ears, and vacuum-cleaner minds.

Like the guy said: All it takes is a little more attention.

Check out Doug’s new book, his first YA nonfiction: Alexander the Great: A Wicked History

Do kids today need grownups to hire people to show them how to play?

Last week in the Boston Globe, columnist Derrick Jackson said a charter school in that city has hired a national nonprofit, Playworks, to come in and teach students how to play “old-school activities like jump rope, hula hoops, four square, capture the flag, circle dodgeball, and kickball.”  (See “Let the Kids Play.”)

Jackson writes, “Whoever thought we’d need a national crusade for kickball?” And he quotes Boston College psychologist Peter Gray:

“’All cultures until modern times played in age-mixed groups, where younger kids learned skills from older kids and older kids learned to be nurturing and caring. This is how kids educated themselves. This is how kids learned to assert themselves while not antagonizing other people.’’’

I’m not so sure about the not antagonizing people part. I expect in my old neighborhood we drove some adults crazy, noisily playing games till all hours outside. Today I have a 22-year-old son I’m very proud of, who played organized sports from grade four through sophomore year in college (he’s a senior now). Those sports were great for him, and I admired and appreciated the adults who made time to coach — but Brad was in his teens when I realized he had hardly played a game in his life that adults had not organized, scheduled, coached, refereed, and costumed.

Yesterday, Sunday, I watched a young teenager that I know, a very bright guy with a whole load of ingenuity, spend about eight hours sprawled on a couch playing World of Warcraft on the Net.

I think World of Warcraft is amazing in a lot of ways. It creates an imaginative (very imaginative) world in which players all over the world can use their wiles and ingenuity to become powerful. It’s incredible to look at. But what I also notice is that all the imagining in online gaming like this has already been done. You play, you do battle, you gain power and have adventures — but you don’t dream up anything. It has already been dreamed, designed, and created before you start.

I visit middle schools often, to talk with students who read my books, and I see that the power to imagine and create is still strong in young teens. It doesn’t go away. But with fewer and fewer art and music programs in schools, and with so many of kids’ outside-school activities shaped and dominated by adults — by online-game designers, and by parents who coach and costume and organize — where do kids find the blank spaces they so need to fill on their own?

Creativity requires blank spaces. The young artist needs an empty page; so does the arising writer. I think the filling of spaces around the home with improvised play is not much different, and just as key. In our old neighborhood we invented and played for years a game that all of us still remember. We called it Flies and Mosquitoes.

Nobody that I grew up with seems clear today on what the actual rules of Flies and Mosquitoes were. We know it involved a small group of kids searching for a larger group of kids who could hide anywhere, as long as it was outdoors, all over our block. I remember sprinting through backyards to find hiding places up in trees that I could have fallen out of, and down in basement window wells that were grubby and slippery with rotting leaves. I remember the feeling of crouching there, waiting to make a wild break for it the moment when I was about to be found. Whatever the rules were, we loved Flies and Mosquitoes. I wonder if there’s any neighborhood today where kids would try such a game, or where grownups would allow it.

Okay, so kids are safer. I guess. But is anything preconceived and organized by grownups ever quite the same as some grubby blank space you can fill on your own? In real quality of experimenting experience, can an online gaming or networking community ever come close to a tribe of kids annoying adults all over a neighborhood?

And who will remember, in years to come, those magic young hours they spent on Facebook, or playing World of Warcraft?

This week a middle schooler emailed me this question:

I cant think of anything to write about.  So, I was wondering how you thought of what to write about in all of your books?

It can be hard to understand where ideas come from, and how to develop them, and what to do when you don’t seem to have any. Nobody has all the answers to these mysteries, but here is how I answered this seventh grader:

Yes, the idea can sometimes be the most elusive thing, the hardest thing to find. I don’t think you can “think of” anything to write about. I really don’t! You have to pay attention to what’s going on, both outside you and inside.

Keep a writer’s notebook. Start to write down things you notice, things that inspire you, ideas you have. If you read or hear something that really strikes you, take out your notebook, write that thing down, then write about it for ten minutes. Don’t stop, just let stuff come up! You’re learning to flow with yourself, and with noticing your life. This, as far as I can tell, is where ideas come from.

Before long, you’ll realize how many ideas you actually have. When one seems like it might be a story, write about that for ten minutes. Ask yourself “What if” questions. “What if the girl was in, hmmm, this situation? What if she did that? What if she had a friend who …”

Write these questions down, and then write what they make you think about. Just keep flowing with it. You don’t have to answer every “what if” question, you’re just growing an idea. There are no rules for this, except that the more energy you give to this mysterious process, and the more space you let it have in your life, the more it will develop and your ideas will grow. Before long you may very well realize that you’re ready to start writing a story.

I also would think about writing a story, or stories, rather than a book. If it grows into something long enough to be a book, great — but it’s always a story, and writing stories is always what you need to be thinking about, as a fiction writer. A good short story that really works and that you’re proud of is going to be a much, much more valuable and helpful experience, for a young writer, than getting 40 pages into a book and then running out of gas or growing frustrated and giving up because it’s too much work and takes too long and you lose interest.

You build up to being able to write longer pieces, just like you build up being able to run longer distances, play an instrument for a longer piece, or dance a longer time. Just like you wouldn’t want to try to run ten miles the first time you go running, if you start writing by trying to write a book, you’ll probably become exhausted and have to give up. And that wouldn’t be a good thing! Write things that you can start and finish. Ask people for feedback. Go back to them and make them better. In time, you’ll be able to make better and better stories … and that’s the important thing, not how long or short they are.

I hope this is helpful!

best,

doug

This is a letter I wrote recently to a northern Florida community newspaper:

I wrote the book The Revealers, whose use in C——- Middle School was the subject of a recent critical letter by ———. The letter, sent to several local papers, led to the cancellation of the reading of my novel in mid-story.

Like the letter writers, I’m a parent — I have a son in college and a stepson in middle school — and like them, I’m involved with a church (I’m writing this on Sunday, before heading off to co-lead our church’s Coming of Age program for teenagers). I bet we also have in common a concern about the overwhelming flood of information and entertainment options that are available to young people today, much of it pretty edgy if not cynically exploitive. I despise “South Park,” for one — don’t even get me started! (The kids know not to.)

The real issue is how to respond. The letter writers, having apparently looked at one page in my book, have chosen to campaign against it, calling it offensive and corrupting to young people. It’s easy to say, as some local people have, that if these parents had read The Revealers as a whole story, they might feel differently. I’d like to think they would.

The Revealers is actually a pretty moral story. It deals with bullying, in the complex and various ways that bullying happens in middle schools all over this country. The heroes of my story are three kids who stand up to the culture of bullying in their school, who find a way to make everyone face the truth. In order for The Revealers to mean something to real kids, almost all of whom will at some point have to cope with bullying in some form in their own lives, my story has to be honest. It has to feel real.

Young adults are demanding readers. The second they think a novel is preaching at them or sugarcoating reality, most of them will put that book down. So a YA novel that’s full of an author’s ideas about how people should act, instead of how they actually do, simply won’t do young readers much good. On the page in my book where the letter writers find offensive language, the character speaking is a bully whose word choices mimic what an abusive parent has been saying to him. Many real children live in similar situations. Can I tell them exactly how to solve that problem? Is growing up today really that simple?

I don’t think so. All through their lives, our kids will have to deal with other people’s choices, including those that are hurtful or dishonest. They’ll have to find their way through the Internet age’s flood of communication, entertainment, exploitation. We need to help them learn to guide their lives wisely — I think the letter writers and I agree on this. There are many resources that can help. Religious books, of course, are one. I believe that honest realistic fiction is another.

What can a story like mine do for young people? It can give them an experience that respects the realities they have to sort through. It can help them see how different choices may work out in real life — and it can help them learn to empathize, to feel what another person is going through. In short,  it can help them to grow up.

But to do any of this, a realistic story has to keep one basic trust: It has to be honest. It can’t pretend that people never hurt, lie, or swear. It has to keep faith with the realities of kids’ lives. That’s what I tried to do with The Revealers, which has been read by public schools, private schools, Christian schools, Catholic schools, and Jewish schools, so far without any corruption that I’ve heard about. I hope that in the future, my book will be read in C——- Middle School once again.

Doug Wilhelm
Rutland, Vermont

I was visiting a middle school a couple of weeks ago where everyone had read The Revealers. It was evening: I had spent the day in school talking with the kids, and now we were waiting for a parents’ forum on bullying and my book to begin. I was sitting with some students, when one asked if she could write something in my notebook. I had told the kids that day about my writer’s notebook, pulling it from my pocket to show them and explaining that if I noticed something that day, if I heard or saw or learned something from them that I wanted to remember, I would write it down.

“Sure,” I said, and I handed my notebook to the seventh grader. “Here you go.” She took it and wrote down for me a couple of evil text messages she had recently received. They were amazingly cutting and cruel. She added, in my little book, that in my new novel for young adults I should write about “texting abuse (lies).”

Now I want to know more — a lot more. My impression is that the number of nasty, cruel, harsh text messages being sent every day by young teenagers to each other is far greater than anyone — even the teenagers themselves — suspects. And because the book I’m currently writing is a sequel to The Revealers, in which the kids’ use of technology is up to date in both positive and negative ways, I want to know about nasty texting. What is in the cutting messages kids are receiving?

Have you received — or sent — a nasty text? If so, What did it say?

I’m asking you to share these messages with me, not so I can repeat them but so that I can write a realistic new book. You can share with me the kinds of texts that have passed through your phone in one of two ways:

1. Post a comment here. (If you do that, others will be able to read your comment.)

2. Send an email to me at dwilhelm@together.net. (Then only I will read what you share.)

Because I’m writing fiction, I won’t share or repeat what you send me! You will help me understand, and write realistically about, the dark side of what is happening with texting among teens today — the kinds of harsh and cruel messages that really are being sent.

This is only part of my new story, but it’s an important part, I think.

Will you help me by telling me the truth?

I recently asked middle schoolers around the country to help me develop a followup novel to The Revealers. I asked them for true, uncensored advice on how to survive middle school.

Here’s what I said during several school visits: If you were talking with a younger person, someone you knew and cared about who was starting middle school next year, what would you tell them? Please write that, I said — and when you’re done, pass it in to me.

This week’s post is the final in a series of three that share the most interesting and most revealing advice they gave. The first week, I posted kids’ tips for dealing with teachers and other adults in school. Last week, the kids spoke from experience about dealing with other social groups, cliques, and other kids.

This post passes along kids’ most personal wisdom — how to act in middle school, whether you should try to be yourself or not, and what to do about drama, rumors, and the pressures to belong.

Here’s the advice I collected:

Be yourself. Don’t try to act like anyone else and always do your homework.

Do all of your work. Don’t be stuck up or a lot of the older girls especially won’t like you. To be popular, just try to be nice to everyone and don’t butt into other people’s problems. Try to stay AWAY from gossip. Gossip always turns out bad even if you don’t start it.

The one thing that I would want to say to a sixth grader is to be yourself. If you don’t be yourself then you will fall into the wrong category of people. There are three categories — popular, almost there, and what populars like to call the “Losers.” If you are a kid who does not want to be popular then pretend to be someone you aren’t. Then you will fall into the wrong category. This is what I did wrong.

To survive in middle school, you’ve gotta first of all keep kind of organized. If all of your stuff’s just thrown in a pile, then you’re probably not going to do well. You should try to make friends, because there are like groups in the middle school like preps, jocks, skaters, nerds, punk, wanna-be gangster kids. You should try to make a good group of your own with your friends in it because that’s how you will survive.

If you want to be a popular kid and a good student you have to be sorta two-faced. To teachers you need to be a good kid and listen and answer questions but to kids you got to be the tough guy or rebel and I guarantee you will be popular. Then kids will want you around them and look up to you and you will still be a good student and get good grades.

One huge problem in mostly seventh grade is DRAMA. Some people are kind of addicted to it, and those are the people you don’t trust. Only tell your secrets to a few people and do the best of your ability to pretend to like everybody. Keep the drama for the llama, and stay out of it. Also, flirting with people will help you stay on their good side. Ha ha.

Don’t be fake. Middle school is the time to mature and start becoming who you want to be like, feel like, sound like, and look like. Sometimes that can scare kids, but don’t fret. You can pick a group such as jocks or sporty kids or the class clown kind of kids. If you’re lucky and calm about it, you might be friends with everyone. Friends are key.

Some advice I have is don’t get caught up in all the rumors or gossip. Try to avoid all the drama. Get good friends that don’t hate or dislike you, but also keep up your grades or you’ll be swallowed up in all the stress.