Let Me Hear Your Heart: Figuring Out Narrative Power

Good morning, writers. I have wanted to invite you to Chautauqua for some time to share with you the magic of Chautauqua. I’m not sure if you can discover the call of the bells, the delight of walking across the brick walks that lead across Chautauqua. You might not hear the music coming from the nearby amphitheatre that seemed to always wind through the air. But for now, here is a keynote address that I gave at the Hall of Christ at Chautauqua those years ago that some writers remember still, and I want to share it with you.

Let me hear your heart, figuring out narrative power.

Good morning. I admit to you that I succumb to all of the magic that is Chautauqua, and I try humbly to add a little bit to it too. For me, each year, I come on a kind of search. I come as writer and editor in search of some part of the craft. I admit that I am intrigued by how story works and how writers make stories that work. Make stories that ultimately matter. All kinds. Novels, picture books, middle fiction, sometimes nonfiction. I am most intrigued by the source of narrative power. A search that is almost as elusive as the very air we breathe, but elusive as it may be, I am ready now to share what I’ve discovered.

The title that I scrawled across my talk is, as I said a moment ago, “Let Me Hear Your Heart, Figuring Out Narrative Power.” Asking that is ordinarily something like asking you as writers to bring spirit to your story or passion or energy or love for story.

Certainly all of that is crucial, but I am asking more. I want to stretch this petition right across the craft. I am saying to you today, let me as a reader, as one of your editors for the week, hear your heart in the shape of your story, the characters you choose, in the words you choose, in the motion of your story, and the emotion, the authenticity of it, and perhaps most important, the idea.

Let me hear your heart. That’s what I’m asking. It makes sense. The measure of our heartbeat is the measure of how alive we are. How alive we are to the gentleness, specialness, ferociousness, beauty of life. How alive we are to the hugeness of it and the smallness of it. But where to start as a writer, perhaps way before we write, perhaps with the simple act of not only living life, but seeing it, physically seeing it.

Do we see the fawn teasing the doe in the field during a rainstorm, its legs splayed, ready to turn and outrun her? Do we see an ant pulling a grain of sand five times its size in tugs and sideways jerks, almost comedically attempting to pull the grain up a giant curb? Do we see the rain on the windshield creating miniature canyons of water, or a child sitting on a curb eating a pistachio ice cream cone, perspiration creating v’s in his wet hair trailing down his forehead?

In passion by life, do we take time to see? Ah, but not only with our eyes having seen in the large and the small, do we interpret what we have seen with that same fineness and fierceness and zest for life? Do we put two and two together, put three and five together? Do we add life up and wonder at it?

Andrew Clements, author of Frindle, with whom I worked, said that as he looks back now, he feels there was evidence that he was a writer when he was about five. He was so engaged, he was so engaged with life, not only seeing it, but thinking and searching for the words and the thoughts around what he was seeing, interpreting it. Five-year-old style, of course.

More and more I feel the–before idea for story has awakened us in the night, before pen has been taken to paper, long before–writers engage in this kind of life. Day after day and moment after moment, moment after: writers, you see life in the truest sense of the word and begin to add it up.

Where do the stories of Sue Monk Kidd, who wrote The Secret Life of Bees, Patricia MacLachlan, who wrote Sarah Plain and Tall, Karen Hesse, who wrote Out of the Dust, Jerry Spinelli who wrote Wringer and Stargirl, where do their stories begin?

Is it not HOW they see life? How their hearts beat for it? They don’t flinch, and they take all of this to their stories in the written page.

Sue Monk Kidd writes when her young Lily first sees the wooden bowsprit of the carved woman in the beehouse where, having run away from the heartless father, she had come: “Even though she wasn’t dressed up like Mary and didn’t resemble the picture on the honey jar, I knew that’s who she was. She had a faded red heart painted on her breast and a yellow crescent moon worn down and crooked, painted where her body would have blended into the ship’s wood. A candle inside, a tall red glass, threw glints and glimmers across her body. She was a mix of might and humble all in one. I didn’t know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up.”

There are the images themselves, but there is also, there is also, “the mix of might and humble all in one.” It is “what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up.” Seeing and interpreting life.

Patty MacLachlan writes, in Sarah Plain and Tall, the moments after Sarah, now on the prairie, had told Pa and the girls and Caleb about sand dunes back east in Maine: “Next to the barn was Papa’s mound of hay for bedding, nearly half as tall as the barn, covered with canvas to keep the rain from rotting it. Papa carried the wooden ladder from the barn and leaned it against the hay. ‘There.’ He smiled at Sarah. ‘Our dune.’ Sarah was quiet. The dogs looked up at her, waiting. Seal brushed against her legs, her tail in the air. Caleb reached over and took her hand. ‘It looks high up,’ he said. ‘Are you scared, Sarah?’ ‘Scared? Scared!’ exclaimed Sarah. ‘You bet I’m not scared.’ She climbed the ladder and Nick began to bark and she climbed to the very top of the hay and sat, looking down at us. Above, the stars were coming out. Papa piled a bed of loose hay below with his pitchfork. The light of the lantern made his eyes shine when he smiled up at Sarah. ‘Fine?’ called Papa.

 

‘Fine,’ said Sarah.

 

She lifted her arms over her head and slid down, down and down into the soft hay. She lay, laughing, as the dogs rolled beside her. ‘Was it a good dune?’ called Caleb. ‘Yes,’ said Sarah. ‘It is a fine dune.’ Sarah did it three more times. At last Papa slid down, too, as the sky drew darker and the stars blinked like fireflies. We were covered with hay and dust and we sneezed.”

What makes that such a remarkable passage anyway? I’ve never forgotten it. Again, there are some lovely words, but it’s the rocking rhythm of the paragraph that takes us, the echoing of words, the heartbeat of it. You have to see life and feel the heartbeat of it in order to write about life, to let go to it and interpret it.

I still recall T.S. Eliot’s profound discussion of this in tradition and talent. He contends that the artist collects images and experiences and ideas into him or herself from everywhere. The person with the artist’s eye, he says, takes everything in. Nothing is lost on him or her and the everything stays in some unfathomable place, mixing, matching, moving, until the artist needs it and pulls it up wittingly and unwittingly to create poem or story.

“Numberless images” B.F. Skinner calls them. So all of this, prior to setting pen to paper. But now let’s move to the writer, searching, taking that passion, that heart to the very idea for a story. Why? Because out of that kind of passionate engagement for idea comes dedication enough in the writing. Courage enough. Commitment enough. Because passion, heart drives the idea. And finally, the story itself and affects every corner of it. Do you doubt that when Jerry Spinelli first started to think about the strange Stargirl he was extremely excited about, maybe in love with the idea for that book? About a girl who is totally out of step, who in a high school common is common, she is a supreme outsider, her sin totally unexpected: to love life and human beings and all the human condition too unconditionally much, too unconditionally much. Do you doubt that Lois Lowry loved the idea for The Giver: about Jonas who dares to have a perfect society in order to only live in a less perfect one? How about Gary Paulsen, who loved the idea for Hatchet, the boy, son of a divorced couple, who had to survive alone in the wilderness after the small plane he was traveling in went down?

Do you doubt that Linda Sue Park loved the idea for A Single Shard? The story of Tree-ear, the poor servant boy who carried his master’s celadon pot to SongDo past the robbers, thereby winning for himself a place as the potter’s apprentice.

These authors loved the very ideas for their story and they loved their stories and we know because we see and feel it: in every bone of the story we can hear their heart. So many manuscripts that come across my desk are just fine, thank you. Competent, pleasant, but so many do not go to a new place with originality and freshness and spirit neither in idea nor character nor telling. They do not go to the heart, perhaps because they didn’t begin at the heart.

There may be a terribly practical reason for selecting an idea that you an author can love. When a writer has chosen a story he or she loves and think their readers will love, an author will push all the elements of good writing. Will go far enough with images, with scenes, with rhythms, with words. Will break out of the ordinary to the extremes he or she needs to go to crack a fresh, original, rhythmically-driven story that is not derivative and word by word is the writer’s own.

At times it is heart as heartbeat to heartbeat. My mother died this year, bless her, and I started reading to the women who were her fellow residents at the assisted living home on Thursday nights because I knew how lonely my mother’s evenings sometimes got. I started reading them Sarah Plain and Tall, that beautiful book. It’s probably why it is on my mind today. I read them paragraphs like this one where Sarah is revealing just how much she still loves her home, Maine.

“In Maine, the barns are attached to houses sometimes,” said Sarah. Caleb grins. “So you could have a cow to supper, Sunday supper.” Sarah and I laughed. “When there are bad storms, Papa ties a rope from the house to the barn so no one will get lost,” said Caleb. I frowned. I loved winter. “There is ice on the windows on winter mornings,” I told Sarah. “We can draw sparkling pictures and we can see our breath in the air. Papa builds a warm fire and we bake hot biscuits and put on hundreds of sweaters and if the snow is too high we stay home from school and make snow people.”

Do you hear the heartbeat in that small passage? “Papa builds a warm fire, and we bake hot biscuits and put on hundreds of sweaters,” ta-da and ta-da-da-da, and she lands on a detail small and clearly original and I, “if the snow is too high, we stay home and make snow people.”

As I read passages like this, the words wash over my octo-anogenarians like the general summer rain or the generalist snowfall. They just wanted more. I never told them Sarah Plain and Tall was a children’s book. In reality, it isn’t. I remember one time asking Scott O’Dell how he had written his wonderful Island of the Blue Dolphins. He said, “in iambic pentameter.” I’ve never really checked that, but I took that to mean he used the rhythms of his soul, the beats of his heart. He needed us to feel what he was feeling and since the thing we share is a heartbeat, it is there we meet. He weaves rhythms into the books so compellingly. How? You could fairly ask how. Okay, it helps to study haiku that will also get you to the extraordinary beauty of simple images.

It helps to read people like Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, poets and lovers of concrete images. But I swear sometimes, I think being a writer means having a commitment to life itself, to the rhythms of life itself. As much as studying any book of poetry then, to me being a writer means being able to throw off your shoes and run in the waves or slide down a pile of hay to feel the passion and the rhythms of moments that a writer wants to give to their stand-in for life, their characters. So often, a new writer wants a road map, wants rules, wants some answers to what makes good writing. This is they began to write.

I remember when I was writing full time and attempting my first novel. I remember taking a novel by young Richard Peck and analyzing its form page by page so that I could write my own novel. Huh. This is how long a chapter is. The rise and the action seems to be here. Let’s see. Now I need a lull. And so on. I used Richard’s book, Are You In the House Alone? as a kind of how-to. Well, okay. We all have to begin somewhere. A few rules or recipes won’t hurt. A few conferences won’t hurt. But now, having worked with great storytellers like Brian Jacques and Janet Lisle and Sally Keehn and Andrew Clements, I’m amazed at how often these people begin with a heartbeat.

Their passion for story is the wind in their sails, and when a character comes to them, or an idea, listening low to the ground, they sense the character’s heartbeat, as surely as their own. Brian Jacques, having been ill, was lying on his stomach in the grass in his Liverpool backyard one afternoon. He wasn’t a writer back then. He had a BBC radio show. Why the sun was beating on his back, and he was looking through the blades of grass, when along came a little mouse, dressed in a cowl and a robe, looking as if he had somewhere to go, somewhere to fear, someone to fear. That mouse became Matthias, in Brian Jacques’ first book, Redwall.

Andrew Clements had this idea about a teenage boy, Robert, who wakes up invisible, really invisible. But it wasn’t until he discovered how Robert’s heartbeat that he began to understand that even before he woke up, unable to see himself, Robert was invisible. Invisible to his parents, invisible to his classmates, to everyone around him, just plain and visible, now Andrew’s heart began to beat out sympathy and confidence, a demand that Robert needed a life. He needed to be seen. What a motivation. In the classic novel, Things Not Seen, Andrew gave him that life through strong images and unforgettable moments, woven into a demanding reality. And Andrew did it, using an authorial voice that no reader could doubt. He saw with a passion his character’s path, just as clearly as Brian saw Matthias the mouse’s path.

Now let’s talk about character, the core of story. We might use head words, like “be sure to come up with original character or a courageous character” and “create an individualistic character”–head words and true words, but when you put fingers to computer, it is simpler than this. Your heart needs to beat not only for your story, but for your character. That energy, that spirit poured from you right into the character itself. You cannot be shy or tentative about that. You cannot flinch.

When Stargirl is first described walking through the high school lunchroom, Spinelli’s narrator says, “Stargirl? What kind of a name is that? That’s it, Stargirl Caraway. A star girl. Yeah. And then I saw her at lunch. She wore an off-white dress so long it covered her shoes. It had ruffles around the neck and cuffs and looks like it could have been her great-grandmother’s wedding gown. Her hair was the color of sand and it fell to her shoulders. Something was strapped across her back but it wasn’t a book bag. At first I thought it was a ukulele. Half the lunchroom kept staring. Half started buzzing and suddenly Kevin’s eyes boggled. The girl was picking up her ukulele and now she was strumming it and now she was singing, strumming away, bobbing her head and shoulders, singing: I’m looking over a leaf clover that I overlooked before. Stone silence all around. And then came the sound of a single person clapping. I looked. It was the lunch line cashier.”

When we know the power we have, when we feel the passion for our story and our character, we sometimes actually stage scenes. We draw firm lines in the sand to let the reader know just where we are beginning our story and then we do what we need to do to make the reader believe it. And from page to page and paragraph to paragraph a writer has a choice. Tell the reader or show the reader and there’s a time for both. Don’t let anybody tell you differently. But Spinelli didn’t need explanation here. He needed scenes. Show.

And after the clapping he writes: The girl was standing, slinging her bag over one shoulder and marching among the tables, strumming and singing and strutting and twirling, heads swung, eyes fouled, her mouth hung open disbelief. She wasn’t gorgeous. She wasn’t ugly, a sprinkle of freckles crossed the bridge of her nose. Mostly, she looked like a hundred other girls in school, except for two things. She wore no makeup, and her eyes were the biggest I had ever seen, like deer’s eyes caught in headlights. She twirled as she went by, her flaring skirt brushing my pant leg, and then she marched out of the lunchroom.

I could almost sing that passage, couldn’t you? I one time gave a speech called “Sassy Is As Sassy Does,” the point being that the truly unforgettable character like Alice, like Harriet, like Maniac, like Grandma Dowdel, like Lucky, is sassy. I think that is close to being true, but if you look at Stargirl, she is not so much sassy as star-like. Saucer-eyed, naive, innocent to the world, a deer caught in the headlights, yet totally original and compelling. She is probably what we all hope we are, but the society eschews. And how do you think Jerry Spinelli felt about Stargirl? That’s an important question. What did he bring to the table? I would call it total love for this truly unforgettable character.

He set her before his readers with no doubts that she is one original character and that Jerry is on Stargirl’s side. In fact, I can feel Jerry Spinelli walking right beside her, bone to bone, heartbeat to heartbeat. I don’t know about you, but by the time I left high school, I was so ready to leave it. The social boxes that we were put into suffocated me, and at times I felt as if I couldn’t climb out. The language, the cliques, the do-this-es and don’t-do-that, conform or die, Spinelli’s heart had to be for the girl who dared to stand up to that.

I like to think it has given kids all over this country another choice. How about Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson? About young Melinda Sardino, who ruined an end-of-summer party by calling the police after one of the fat cats from her school raped her, remember? How everyone at school now hates her? They are not knowing what actually happened to her, but that her call ruined the party. Ruined the party.

It begins: “It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate and a stomachache. The school bus wins. Wheezes, wheezes to my corner. The door opens and I step up with the first pickup of the day. The driver pulls away from the curb while I stand in the aisle.”

I’m repeating that sentence. “The driver pulls away from the curb while I stand in the aisle. Where to sit? I’ve never been a backseat waste case. If I sit in the middle, a stranger could sit next to me. If I sit in the front, it will make me look like a little kid, but I figure it’s the best chance I have to make eye contact with one of my friends, if any of them have decided to talk to me yet.”

Have you read Speak, yourselves? Do you doubt the heart that Laurie Halse Anderson had for this character when she wrote it? The story feels so true. It is hard to believe that the character Melinda isn’t about Laurie Halse Anderson herself, though I know that it isn’t. Laurie loved that young girl into existence and cast it as the main character. She made us love her. Right from the first two paragraphs, the detail is close. It is also slanted, but Melinda is the screen for everything, every scene, every aside, every way of looking at life or classes or the Beast, her name for the boy who raped her.

There is never, never simply objective description in this book. Never say, of the drawing she was making or the past that she wrote. Melinda writes this book and you read her, get to know her by reading her take on the world and talk about the authenticity of voice. It is the voice of a beating heart. I was lucky being the editor of Patricia Polacco’s Pink and Say, a book that probably should never even have been: too long for a picture book, neither fact nor fiction, and whoever heard of a long historical fiction text in a picture book anyway?

Well, you know the answer to that. Driven by Polacco’s absolute devotion to her characters, her ability to pour her heart into her characters and images. She wrote a story, not for any one age group, but for every age group. And in creating her characters, she turned stereotypes upside down. It is Pinkus Aylee, the young black man on the run in the civil war who can read, and Sheldon Curtis, the poor young white farmer from Michigan who’s had no education. And so, and so it is Pink who teaches Say to read and it is Pink’s mother, Moe Moe Bay, who hides both of them, even as the rebels and who loves them: equally holding Say in her arms as she would her own child. Until marauders shoot her and the two boys are forced under the road again and eventually end up in Andersonville Prison, the only situation that can really separate these two friends.

Polacco never flinched. She has tremendous capacity to love her characters, to love ideas, and is never shy about telling a story that will engage our best human selves. You know, I mentioned this because in children’s and YA books, we–editors, teachers, parents, librarians, most of all kids–like a character, boy or girl, who has values or discovers them.

We like a character who has the courage to do the right thing and who will stand up at the right time. However, this is no how-to recipe, nor is a superficial comment. It is a need of the heart to believe that we human beings are capable of the right spirit and the right courage.

Such characters and the scenes they live in, driven by the characters, driven by the author’s own heart, become exquisitely powerful. Oh, I have so many favorites. My oldest favorite must be Jerry in The Chocolate War, when he faces the brute Janza, who represents Archie and the gang, the Vigils, who have been tormenting Jerry for refusing to sell chocolates in the annual school sale. Jerry agrees to settle their differences in a refereed fight in front of the whole school, but then in response to an unfair punch by Janza, Jerry throws a vicious, unfair punch of his own.

“Triumphantly, he watched Janza floundering on weak, wobbly knees. Jerry turned toward the crowd, seeking what, applause? They were booing, booing him, shaking his head, trying to reassemble himself, squinting. He saw Archie in the crowd, a grinning exultant. Archie, a new sickness, invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing it, not disturbing the universe, but damaging it. He had allowed Archie to do this to him.”

Look what Cormier’s heart took him. Look at the story, the characters, the moments in the passionate interpretation and words. A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had another, another animal, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage not disturbing, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.

Or consider Stargirl; she was not asked to the prom but she goes anyway, in a gown the color of buttercups, arriving in a bicycle with a sidecar covered in flowers. But she’s no one child when she dances, she dances alone, claps alone, and then the nondescript rate of Raymond Studemacher does the unthinkable: asks her to dance and everyone is intrigued and after their dance Stargirl whispers to the bandleader and he begins to play–of all things–the bunny hop. Within seconds a long line was sneaking across the dance floor and Stargirl led the way. Once again she had the school in her spell. The line curled out past the tennis courts where she waggled her fingers at the stars and then churned her fists like an eggbeater.

 

They danced out across the golf course. Their dancing legs a single flowery creature, a fabulous millipede. And then they were lost to the night. It seemed they were gone for hours. It finally someone called their back.

 

And then there a flash of yellow Stargirl leaping from the shadows. The rest followed out of the darkness, large, powder blue, many headed, billowing, hop, hop. There were still smack on the beat. The jealous, spiteful Hillary Campbell comes up to Stargirl and says to her: ‘you ruin everything,’ she says. But Stargirl doesn’t strike her back. She gently kisses her on the cheek. She was gone by the time Hillary opened her eyes. Her sidecar was waiting. Stargirl seemed to float down the promenade in her buttercup gown. She climbed into the sidecar. The flowered bicycle rolled off into the night. And that was the last any of us ever saw of her.

We can hear Jerry’s heart. He has made us believe through the charm as well as the passionate storm of moment that we human beings are surprising creatures. And yes, amazing too. And we as readers want to join with Jerry Spinelli and Stargirl herself in wanting to be not mediocre, not ordinary, not sycophants or followers, but different kinds of leaders, leaders outside the box, not afraid to stand up, who can climb into a flowered bicycle and roll off into the night.

Sometimes I think the test of a good book is, can you sing it? In the spring, I went to my book group, which I’ve been part of for seven years. And one of my favorite commentators in the group is Refna Wilkins, a former Putnam editor, looking at the book that we were discussing that day, The Gathering. She said, “I didn’t care about a single character.” Almost nothing could be as damning for a writer, nothing.

And for a writer of children’s and YA books, it is the worst combination. A reader needs to care about your character, not in a mild way. The reader needs to be intrigued, involved, hooked, dedicated. The reader needs to love your character. And I, to this day, love Anna and Caleb, and Sarah, plain and tall. I don’t remember if I will remember the actual story of Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky, but I love Lucky even now.

I didn’t know Tree-ear in A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park all that well. He had the distance of some Eastern cultures for me, but I walked in his shoes and when he walked the rugged and dangerous route to SongDo to give the Emperor his master’s celadon clay pot, talk, talk about standing up. I walked with him and cared deeply. If you have room for one sign on your studio wall, write: will my readers care about my character? Will they love him or her? Will their heart beat for him or her?

And I just don’t know if you can get that out of a how-to book. I think it’s got to come from, from you. It’s got to come from how much you care. I’ve always been intrigued with storytellers. They have so many attributes that we writers are searching for. For one thing, voice. For another thing, pacing. They know how to bring a character to an audience as it has never been before, as it has never seen the character before, to keep an audience on the edge of his chair.

And there are wonderful, wonderful lifts to their stories, surprises, hairpin turns, climaxes that make our ears buzz. And they know how to write a story, move a story, that has always intrigued me. As a writer, I may not be able to move around a room like a storyteller. Raise my voice like a storyteller and soften it and sing key words out or exclamations like a storyteller–but I can be the storyteller in my writing. I can choose a story, a character, I believe in and let my passion move my story in words. I can raise my voice and soften it and move my story to climax or just like a storyteller can. That goes for a novel or a picture book: here’s an analogy that light that I like: a good story, passion-driven, is something like a storm perhaps. It begins with a hot sunny day with the slightest hint of weather; the winds begin to blow slightly, and the famous clouds seem to gather there across the horizon, and the winds blow something harder, and the clouds seem to begin to roll–yes the rolling promising something, neither a simple storm, but maybe a tornado, maybe rain. We can feel it until it all seems to stop and all the earth is still and the sky turns an ambiguous yellow. It is as if the earth is holding its breath.

Do you remember the narrative storm in Speak? Melinda has always felt safe in the art room, even from at least…I’m starting over that. Do you remember the narrative storm in Speak? Melinda has always felt safe in the art room, at least there. And she is alone there now with her drawing. She didn’t see the clouds on the horizon, but now the air is still an ambiguous yellow. Check your heart as I read this. See, see, if you hear Laurie Halse Anderson’s voice.

I stay after school to work on tree sketches. Mr. Freeman helps me for a while. He gives me a roll of brown paper and a piece of white chalk and shows me how to draw a tree in three sweeping lines. He doesn’t care how many mistakes I make, just one, two, three, like a whiz. He says, over and over, I use up a mile of the paper, but he doesn’t care. Then God crackles over the intercom and tells Mr. Freeman he’s late for a faculty meeting. He gives me a new piece of chalk and tells me to draw roots.

 

You can’t grow a decent tree without roots. The art room is one of the places I feel safe. I hum and don’t worry about looking stupid. I say but I try one two three one two three I don’t worry about the next day or a minute one two three somebody flicks the light off my head snaps up it is there Andy Beast little rabbit heart leaps out of my chest and scampers across the paper leaving bloody footprints on my roots he turns the lights back on I smell him I find out where he gets that cologne I think it’s called fear this is turning into one of those repeating nightmares where you keep falling but never hit the floor only I feel like I got smacked into the ground at a hundred miles an hour I am a deer frozen in the headlights of a tractor trailer is he gonna hurt me again he couldn’t not in school could he why can’t I scream say something say anything why am I so afraid?

Do you doubt that Laurie Halse Anderson’s heart was beating while writing that passage? And do you hear the heat of words? One, two, three. One, two, three. First slow and safe and confident. Melinda drawing in the safe place. One, two, three. One, two, three. And then do you hear? Do you hear the shift? Punchy sentences. As her fear grows, lights flick off. Head snaps up. It is here. Then in the classroom alone, she is confronted by Andy Beast as she calls him, the boy who raped her. Why, she says, am I so afraid?

Can you follow the storytelling in this passage, the storm of it? It is an energy that comes from your, the writer’s, deepest sense of what fear is. The deepest, heart-beating sense of what fear is. You cannot write a passage like that from your head alone. You need to sense the storm, grow the storm, be left with the stillness, and if you are lucky, rise to a scene that will both, that will make your heart beat and ours as reader and editors. A story is not a still life.

When I workshop with writers, I often declare that there are story plateaus and they can’t figure it out. Oh, believe me, my own stories have had plateaus. Writers sometimes just can’t get their narrative wings up, but they must, I say. A novel is not a still life. A lot of writers believe that if they can avoid adjectives and adverbs, find just the right details, learn how to describe what they see or imagine, select an interesting character, discover their voice, that they are well on their way to writing a book.

There isn’t nearly enough passion in that description for me, not nearly. Passion will be the wind beneath their narrative sails, moving the storm of story to its thunder-roaring conclusion. A writer needs a heart for his or her story, for every part of it. It will inform every corner, but it affects nothing so much as the climax of a good book. I think of a great climax as ecstatic because the writer summons up all that he or she has. The writer climbs in, heart and soul, using his or her very rhythms to convince the reader that the story’s storm will break.

This is the moment when the character is in the eye of the storm, the moment when the sky splits open, this is the moment when he changes her mind, when she stands up, when the boy hears an airplane motor, the girl runs away, the moment after which the sky may, only may, change. It takes every last beat of the writer to rise to a climax if the writer wants to get it right. And I assure you it is not all noise, such a transcendent moment can be a whisper. I discovered Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on Plum Creek again last summer here at Chautauqua, and I had no idea how powerful the grasshopper scene was.

The little family had faced every kind of prairie disaster and change until it seemed no more could come to challenge them. And then the grasshoppers came by the thousands. The insects hatched right there on the little family’s prairie farm in the eighth, in the eighth, in the eighth, until they became a shivering brown carpet on the very ground, the little pioneer family walked. But then one day, a hot day, a good hot day, almost as if some captain had said to them, it is time to move on, grasshoppers began walking, shoulder to shoulder, and they walked. No, they marched up to the little house, and shoulder to shoulder, they marched into door sills and into the windows, and they marched on into every room, shoulder to shoulder, down the inside wall, and across the floors, and they marched up the outside walls, and still they marched hundreds and hundreds of tiny green-brown creatures, and then they emerged on the other side, marching, moving out of windows by the hundreds and thousands, and down the outside wall, and then out into the yard, hundreds and thousands, the humans covered from them, two days went by and three and then and then as if that captain gave a second signal, all at once in the heat of the fourth day they rose into the air, hundreds and thousands becoming a green brown cloud and finally floating away to the west, it was a signal too for the little family who understood perhaps for the first time that they could survive almost ever anything and would.

Isn’t that grasshopper scene ecstasy? Do you know that is one of the marvels that you have to play with as a writer? Do you know how far you can go? Have you snaked across the nighttime fields with Stargirl? Watch those grasshoppers with Laura Ingalls Wilder. Have you risen to the challenge of Pink and Say, separating at Andersonville? Is this kind of movement, and out-and-out literary power in your bones?

Is it in your heart? This year Ron and I got tickets to the Philharmonic. It’s all about heart. When the director stands up wriggly and launches into a passionate engagement with clarinets and bassoons and drums and violins, when he launches into legato, vivace and dante, I sometimes stop breathing, I am so taken, but I think of writers because that is what you do when you tell your story, long or short, novel or picture book, nonfiction as well. Do you know the power that you have?

One of my favorite books still is Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo. You may remember it starts in a grocery store with a little dog getting into some vegetables, sending them rolling all across the floor. And here is the paragraph that I can never forget:

And then the dog came running around the corner. He was a big dog and ugly. And he looked like he was having a real good time. His tongue was hanging out and he was wagging his tail and he skidded onto a stop and smiled right at me. I had never before in my life seen a dog smile, but that’s what he did. He pulled back his lips and showed me all his teeth. Then he wagged his tail so hard that he knocked some oranges off a display and they went falling everywhere, mixing up with the tomatoes and onions and green paper peppers.

 

And the manager screams ‘Get that dog!’ The dog went running over to the manager, wagging his tail and smiling. He stood up on his hind legs. You could tell that all he wanted to do was get face to face with the manager and thank him for the good time he was having in the produce department. But somehow, he ended up knocking the manager over. And the manager must have been having a bad day because lying there on the floor, right in front of everybody, he started to cry. The dog leaned over, real concerned and licked his face.

 

‘There,’ said the manager, ‘somebody call the pound.’ Wait a minute, I hollered. That’s my dog. Don’t call the pound.

That of course is our girl. In such a few pages, she creates an original story out of an ordinary world. Who would have guessed a grocery store could be a star stage? Using elements all her own, the ordinary is not good enough for her. Tired images are not good enough for her. She focuses on two original characters, a girl and a dog, and she launches them, heart quietly beating into their world to make their way.

Kate DiCamillo loved her story into existence, and we as readers and writers came along with her. No question.

Many of you are already published. Some are on the edge of publishing. Some of you are coming new to the field. Bless you all. And I say to everyone at every stage: give us a story we can care about, a character we can love. Shape a storm of story in the large and small, no matter what genre, a story that affirms the humanity in us, the ability to stand up, to survive, to do the right thing, and to find our way.

And don’t flinch. Don’t ever flinch.

Thank you all on this magical morning in Chautauqua for letting me be with you. It is a great privilege. Thank you.