A Word with Doug Wilhelm

Sometimes I start with the weather.

“November early-morning rain slides coldly down the street, swishes coldly under cars,” I wrote one Monday morning. It was early November, I was sitting in my car, and I had brought out my notebook. “It’s 7:30 but the city seems almost empty, as if no one wants to go out in this, to go to work in this. I’m waiting to talk with the eighth grade in the library. It’s chilly out.”

Writing a little bit about the weather is one way to start my morning three pages. This is the main way that I use my writer’s notebook: most mornings, every morning if I’m going well, I write three pages at least. Sometimes I’ll write what’s on my mind, or in my feelings; sometimes I’ll find myself working through something that’s bothering me. I never try to be smart, to be clever, or to “write” in the sense of composing something. In my notebook, I just write. I often think of it as downloading the junk from my brain. The goal is to fill three pages. That’s it.

Every writer I know, that I’ve ever talked with about this, also has a relationship with a writer’s notebook. It’s a personal relationship, so no two are ever quite alike. Some writers’ notebooks are like scrapbooks: the writer pastes in photos from magazines, and articles from anywhere, along with notes, jottings, ideas … scraps. Our notebooks are where ideas start, where they first get jotted down, and where we explore them (“What if?” is a favorite notebook question of mine). The writer’s notebook is a compost pile, messy but contained. Things can heat up in there. Ideas can grow.

Writers tend to be nerdy about their notebooks. I don’t like lines. I use a regular, old-fashioned student’s copybook, the kind with the marbled cover; you can find it anywhere, but not with unlined pages, so I send away for mine. Otherwise my notebook is totally unfancy. I like it that way, because most of what goes into my notebook is regular, relaxed, and ordinary. Everyday stuff. Plain old copybooks are good for this.

When I visit schools, I’m often asked for one best piece of advice to a young writer. I say, Keep a notebook. I talk about these different relationships — scrapbook, journal, download three pages every morning, whatever — that you can develop with it. If you write in your notebook almost every day, especially if you write at the same time every day — early morning? before bed? — you will develop a relationship with it. It will become a friend in your life. And the more you build a relationship with your notebook, the more relationship you will have with your writing.

Seventh graders will sometimes tell me, “I’m writing a book but I can’t finish it.” I think, In seventh grade? Isn’t that putting an awful lot of pressure on yourself? I say, Keep a notebook. If you’re interested in writing, it’s the most important thing you can do.

Just after I visited his middle school, a young man emailed me last week to ask for some “writing tips.” Well, okay!

1. Embrace the process. No good story or book is ever written in one draft. It can’t be. Just try stuff! Take an experimental attitude toward your first draft, then go back and re-read it as honestly as you can. Keep and improve on what seems to work; remove, rewrite, or re-invent what doesn’t. Push on with doing that until you really feel that you’ve got the best story you can make. And then:

2. Ask for feedback. Go to someone you know and trust, someone who is honest with you and is a good reader. If you’re a young writer, this can be another kid, a parent or other relative, a teacher or other trusted adult — someone whose response to your story you think will be worth hearing. Ask them to read it and be honest with you. Ask them to make notes on the page, or on another paper, so they can be specific about what worked for them — and, even more important, what didn’t. Invite criticism! Then sift carefully through what you hear, and embrace what makes sense to you. Enjoy the process of watching your story grow and develop, much farther than you may have dreamed it might. Never think you’re done or that it’s too much work … just keep trying it out and trusting the process.

3. When you’re ready, seek publication. At right I’ve posted the link for Teen Ink, which is both a monthly print publication and a web site that publishes good writing by young people. It’s a very, very fine resource for young writers. I’ve also posted a link to a page of more resources for young writers, from the web site of my friend Laura Williams McCaffrey, another Vermont YA writer who is also a school librarian.

Good luck! Next time I’ll write about keeping a writer’s notebook, which is an essential tool, I think, for writers of any age.

I want to thank everyone who has so kindly and thoughtfully posted comments in these recent first weeks of this blog. I hope you have a very happy Thanksgiving!

What is it that happens when you’re doing something creative — writing, playing music, even sometimes playing sports — and you lose track of time?

Athletes sometimes call this being in the zone. For writers, if we’re being honest, I think it’s what we want most. When you’re not sure where the time went — that’s when you discover you’ve written something that you didn’t know you could write. You feel both mystified and energized. This seems to be some of the better stuff you’ve ever done; you don’t understand what just happened, but you want to make it happen again.

What is that?

I don’t think anybody really, truly knows. Ernest Hemingway called it juice, the mysterious energy that powered and fueled his best work. In a very good book I’m reading, Our Last Best Shot: Guiding Our Children Through Early Adolescence, author and journalist Laura Sessions Stepp calls it flow. This, she says, is a thing that young adolescents “are ripe to experience.”

Citing a psychologist at the University of Chicago, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Sessions says flow “is a subjective experience that people report when they are completely involved in something … The experience of flow encourages kids to work their hardest, to master a challenge, occasionally even to begin choosing a career. It can be spotted in younger children — the preschooler playing make-believe, for example — but takes off in adolescents because of their rapidly expanding cognitive skills and their greater ability to sit still.”

Reading that, I remembered that flow became a part of Falling, my most recent YA novel. Matt Shaw is a very talented basketball player who has refused to play, all through his ninth-grade season, and has refused to tell anyone why. Instead, every day for months after school he’s been walking the streets listening to a certain type of hiphop, what I thought of as lone-warrior music, on his iPod.
In hiphop, this notion of flow is central. It is, basically, the product, what comes through the artist. What distinguishes an artist’s work is the quality of his (or her) flow.

Matt hears this lyric from his favorite artist, the fictional Jai Quest:

Got to find it
Time to go
Got to find it
Find my flow
Go alone
That I know
Got to go
Got to go

“The flow,” Matt thinks. “Yeah. Knowing you could step on the court and make it happen. You practiced, sure. But then, when you walked out there, you could just go. You could flow, that was it: you created and you didn’t totally know how. You just knew you could, so you did.”

Matt has lost his flow. But a little later, after he meets and connects with an appealing girl named Katie, Matt feels he has it back — “the very best of it, the awareness of yourself as magically moving in an energy where you were totally appreciated and you totally belonged and nothing could go wrong. It lasted until he walked up his driveway and saw the police car.”

Yep, yep: reality often intervenes and blocks, or baffles, or ends our too-rare experience of flow. We try to stimulate it through artificial means — energy drinks or coffee are just one huge industry that is built around this — but we never quite succeed. We’ll often remember the real thing with a distinct, fading nostalgia.

What was that? Will I ever get it back?

I think more and more that the sharing of juice or flow is the least talked-about, but maybe most important and sought-after, benefit that a good book or other creative performance brings to its audience. Maybe this is what makes the best books or CDs that good! Of all the novels that I have loved in my life, I believe I can link most or even all of them in this way: life comes through them. Somehow, in a really good book, this comes through the writer, who’s maybe at best a sort of medium, to the reader.

Isn’t this really what we’re after? Isn’t this the most memorable, meaningful, mysterious experience that we seek in both writing and reading? Maybe this is the same as love. I suspect it’s close, but I don’t know for sure. I truly don’t think anybody knows.

I just suspect, more and more in my life, that however much we writers, readers, and teachers may talk or think about character, story or style, it’s really this deeper, more mystifying energy or experience — this juice, this flow, whatever this is — that we seek to share.

What do you think?

To learn more about Falling, and to read the first chapter, please visit http://www.the-revealers.com/.

I spent two very rich and exciting days last week at Osceola Middle School in Ocala, Florida, where The Revealers was the book chosen for this year’s all-school read. When I get the chance to be part of an all-school read — especially the way that Osceola did it — I’m so struck and impressed by the difference that a project like this can make. Not just for the students, but for the whole school.

At Osceola I talked with math teachers, social studies teachers, language arts teachers, the technology teacher, and school administrators, and all of them had read the book along with their kids. It’s this, I have found, that really makes a one-school, one-book work: when everyone in the school takes part. To students, that shifts the sense and feeling of the project in a crucial way. It’s no longer one more task they’re told they have to do; it’s now an experience that says, “We are in this together. We are a community.”

I was first struck by this several years ago, when I arrived for the first of two similar days at a middle school in Vermont. I got there a few minutes after the buses had unloaded and the kids had gone in, so the sidewalk in front of the building was almost empty. There was just one guy, an adult, standing there. He saw me coming and asked if I was the author. I said yes, and stuck out my hand. He introduced himself and said, “I’m the head custodian at this school, and I read your book. So did my guys, the office staff, the cafeteria ladies — everyone here. Then we all joined the kids and the teachers in small-group discussions. It really has been a unique experience at our school.”

I think those two words — our school — sum up perfectly what an all-school reading project can be if everyone, really everyone, takes part in an active way. An experience like this can uniquely engage the whole school as a single community. Sure, it’s important to choose the book carefully — but I think it’s just as important to design the project so that everyone, really everyone, is included and has to make an effort: has to read the book and then gets to talk about it. How often do students, during all their years in school, get the chance to absorb a message like the one that this can send?

Thanks to everyone at Osceola! We had two days of very exciting, very lively, very creative conversations. I came home with a notebook full of ideas and observations and a very deep feeling of gratitude.

For more on all-school reads and other creative designs for engaging students and schools in a book, please visit http://www.the-revealers.com and click on “Using the book: a resource center.”

I’m writing on November 5. I spent today — the day after Election Day — in a middle school in rural northern Florida, a school that is mixed African-American, Latino and white. I spoke to everybody in the school, about 400 kids in each of three grades. It was very moving to see how very much the election means to these kids. I hope that whatever anyone’s politics, we can all see that young people all over the country now see new hope and new horizons for their own lives. I started one talk by asking the seventh grade for a round of applause for all the people of this country.

I wish you had heard them cheer.