Monday’s Portrait: Portrait of a hobby

Saturday I drove 40 minutes south for the first annual Teen Book Fest at the Provo City Library.  When I arrived, the first thing I encountered was the table where high school students could register for extra credit.  Before I realized what the table was for, I got in the back of the line.  When I discovered it was not the line for me, I was very happy I didn’t need extra credit, and also a little sad.  I loved those students.  They clustered around doorways in groups of three or more, tried not to look too interested, and asked the authors questions like, “What is your favorite kind of cereal?”  They were the ‘teen’ in the Teen Book Fest. 

And what was I?  Not the teen.  Not the book.  Certainly not fest, darn-it.  If I hadn’t hired a babysitter to come and watch my kids for me, I might have stayed home.  It’s hard to go time after time to these author events and wonder, ‘Will I ever get my revisions done? If I do, who will want to buy my book?’  But I convinced myself that I could learn something by attending, so I put on my new red pea-coat and headed out the door.

I’m so glad I did.  It was wonderful to see Ann Cannon, author of  The Loser’s Guide to Life and Love, and hear her read from her book.  She talked about the inspiration behind Scout, the book’s female protagonist, who happens to be a closet romance-reader.  For fun Cannon brought along The Romance Writers’ Phrase Book and she entertained us all by sharing some choice excerpts.  I loved what Cannon said about writing characters who are real, and how a part of the author goes into what she/he writes.

I also got so much – courage, inspiration, illumination – from the panel I attended with contemporary YA fiction writers Sara Zarr (Once Was Lost), Ann Dee Ellis (Everything is Fine) and Carol Lynch Williams (The Chosen One).  They talked about why they write for teens, why they write realistic stories that come with the hard-edge of truth, and the challenges they face as writers.  I loved what they said about the writers who influence them, and about the importance of hope in their writing.

While I was at the Book Fest, I had the chance to speak to another local author, Ally Condie.  Her new book, Matched, will be released soon.  It has already received great reviews and a lot of media attention.  I can’t wait to read it.  I’ve heard Condie speak at other author events and admire how honest, funny, and kind she is.  I loved what she said recently on the blog, throwing up words.  When I read what she wrote about writing as a hobby I thought, “That is it, exactly.”  So I’m going to let her words be my portrait for today – my portrait of a hobby:

Ally Condie on Hobbies vs. Passion

Self-portrait: Sixteen

Sophomore Year

I’ve heard several young adult writers talk about the fact that they have an inner age similar to the audience they are writing for.  I never liked that idea.  After all, who wants to be stuck in adolescence?  Not me.  I liked to think that I had surpassed the terrors of the junior high locker room, the politics of the cafeteria, the acne, the hormones, the turf wars.  Finito.  So why did I always find myself writing for and about teenagers?  I wasn’t sure.

Until I spent a week this past summer at the intensive “Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers” workshop at BYU.  Part of the workshop consisted of meeting for three hours each morning with nine other writers in a classroom critique format, led by author Ann Cannon.

Cannon was a completely dynamic teacher and moderator.  Our very first morning together she introduced an exercise that challenged my thinking about who we write for and why.  First, she asked if we tended to write for a particular age group.  Well, asked directly like that, I had to acknowledge that my protagonists are always fifteen or sixteen years old.  Next, Cannon had us turn to our neighbor and interview her — but at the age she wrote for.

I turned to my talented (and beautiful) friend Jen White, and learned all about the sticker club she had when she was twelve, her favorite t.v. show, and best of all, her romantic first kiss — behind her best friend Katy’s trash cans.

Then Jen started quizzing me.  And I found myself right back in high school, singing in the school choir, playing soccer, and preparing for the terrifying back surgery that would put me out of school for three months.  It would completely disrupt, and ultimately disintegrate my social life.

When our interviews were done, we went around the table introducing the person we had questioned: starting with their ‘inner age’.  What was fascinating was that each one of us had undergone some sort of trauma at the age we most often wrote for — from a parent dying, to moving to another state, to a difficult situation with peers that caused an inner schism – a question of identity.

What I realized is that there was something about ourselves that we had learned at that point in our lives — something about our strengths, our weaknesses, our perceptions of the world.  Something that we had never encountered before — never even fathomed.  And I think that whatever that was — that nugget of hard-earned truth, so forcefully introduced, we were each still wondering over it.  Trying to understand it.  Wanting to communicate it. 

For me, struggling through the pain of surgery and the subsequent pain of abandonment I felt from my friends, I learned that I could do hard things.  But not alone.  I needed good friends.  Even more, I needed my family — it was my greatest and earliest ephiphany.  And that is what my stories revolve around: that struggle between the inner sphere and the outer, the strength of family, the importance of friends.

Now I know that, at least for me, writing for teenagers doesn’t mean being stuck at a developmental stand-still.  It doesn’t mean that we perpetually live at the age we write for.  But we retain something inside from that time in our lives, something illuminating, and it is struggling, always, to come out and shine.

Post-op, 1991