A Word with Doug Wilhelm

This week as the holidays draw near, I’d like to try to do something really unusual — maybe, in fact, completely new — with a blog for young readers and writers.

I’d like to ask you to help me brainstorm my new book.

I’m working right now to develop an idea I have for a followup story to The Revealers. Because I write for young adults, most of my book ideas come from young adults — from listening to them, talking with them, observing them. As I’ve been visiting middle schools this year, this new idea has grown out of a number of conversations and encounters with kids. To help me develop it further, I’ve been asking young people to give me their responses to one simple question:

If you knew a kid who was just about to start middle school, what honest, kid-to-kid advice would you give him or her? You could call this “My advice on surviving middle school.”

I don’t want the advice you’d generally let a grownup hear! I want the stuff you’d only normally share with a kid.

Part of my idea for a new book is that a group of kids at Parkland Middle School, home of The Revealers, decide do a prank. They want to create a multimedia guide to surviving their school that they’ll call “Welcome to Darkland.” Or something like that.

I plan to start writing the first draft of this book right after Christmas. I’m not sure if the project will work or not — when I start a first draft, I never know for sure — but the writing process is always an adventure. When I was developing my last two books, The Revealers and Falling, I asked kids in schools for ideas and information. This time, the only difference is that I’m asking online.

This is real! I want your advice. What would you put in a prank project like “Welcome to Darkland”?

One fun thing about keeping a writer’s notebook is opening up one that you’ve recently filled, and seeing what’s in there. I don’t do this enough. I’ve done it today, though, and I want to share a bit of what I found.

I actually keep two notebooks. Last week I wrote about my old-fashioned copybook, the student notebok with the marbled cover that I try to write in every morning. The other is a small pocket notebook. That’s the one I want to give you a few glimpses into, as I open up a couple that I’ve lately been carrying around.

These notebooks are thin, black, and bent a bit from living in my back pocket. I like the old-fashioned Moleskines that you can find, these days, at bookstores and stationary shops. These come in several sizes. I use the smallest: It’s a simple pocket notebook, with a cover of stiff black paper, unlined pages (I don’t like lines) and a cloth-stitched binding. No wire spiral! Years ago, as a young writer and newspaper reporter, I started wondering why my pants were all getting small holes right above a back pocket — the one where I kept my spiral notebook. My Moleskine doesn’t poke holes in my clothes, and it’s thin enough to bend when I do. It goes with me everywhere.

Ideas and noticings go in the front, information in the back. That’s my system. If I notice something about you, or I want to remember something I saw in your school or I have an idea that’s worth remembering, I’ll write it in the front pages of the book. If you tell me about a book I should read, or if I want to remember your email address (or in which section of the airport parking garage I left my car), I’ll write that in the back. Eventually, the filled pages meet in the middle. This is the most basic, everyday tool of my writing process. I enjoy it, too! The notebook becomes a small friend. It keeps my ideas from disappearing, not to mention my car.

Here are some scrawled jottings from my last two pocket notebooks:

People say I got sarcastic. I say no — the world got ridiculous So we decided to stick it to the world. That’s a possible start to a young-adult novel.

Here are two things people told me about, mostly in schools: The daughter and her friends practice comebacks in the car on the way to school … Surveillance cameras in school. No one knows who watches them.

Here’s a quote: The difference between despair and hope is struggle. Dorothee Sölle

Some noticings: He’s a nice kid, except he sprays food when he eats … The red-haired girl with glasses brings her knitting to school, and clutches it all day … AJ chugs a Monster after he’s told it’s not allowed in the Boys and Girls Club. He looks nervous. Twitchy. His eyes flicker back and forth, and gradually all his extremities start twitching — head, hands, feet, his lower arms and legs — till he looks really uncomfortable. Sweat is beading on his face. He’s breathing in spasming jerks. I wonder, Is he okay?

Usually I don’t know what, if anything, will happen with these notes. Will I have a character sneak an energy drink in school, then be unable to hide its effects? Maybe. I don’t know! I do know that if I don’t write down things like these, I’ll almost always forget them. This is especially true of ideas. Ideas are like dreams, I think. In the moment after having one, you think you’ll remember it — but an hour later, it’s gone. If I jot down an idea, then it has a chance to grow.

Books grow from ideas and observations jotted in notebooks. This is why writers keep notebooks, just as artists keep sketchbooks. They help us live in creative relationship with our daily lives. It’s out of that relationship, even more than from the notebook itself, that our good work grows.