A Word with Doug Wilhelm

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?