CGPassion, the Most Critical Component in Writing

Good morning. A good morning in Chautauqua is a very special experience, isn’t it? A good morning here is walking down brick lanes past fern-covered lawns, making room for moving bicycles, nodding hello to strangers, seeing the sun through umbrella trees, hearing the bells sing their morning hymns. That’s good morning, Chautauqua style. It’s also acknowledging that this is fertile ground any time of the day. Writers have gravitated to this place as a place of inspiration just as composers and scientists and, yes, presidents and political people of all stripes.

I have gravitated to this place as have my colleagues and we know that something extraordinary happens here each year, something frequently beyond what we writers that gather here for this conference expect, something almost outside of who we are and yet integral.

Maybe that’s why I come to my talk this year wanting to talk about a single important component of writing, a basic component, maybe the most crucial component in writing and that component is passion.

That’s something that fuels in a most extraordinary and unexpected way the idea we come to, the words we choose, that takes us places outside of who we are. Passion. What a brave statement I know. Nonetheless, a single most important component is passion, not passion in the short. Not passion in a sweet kiss or a climactic scene in an R-rated movie or even some obsessive desire to have something or win something. Not passion in the short. This passion that I am thinking about is a writer’s passion. A passion that fuels in a most extraordinary and unexpected way the very ideas we come to, the words we choose that take us into the most finite corners of experience and give us the way to express that.

And finally a passion that allows flow, that miraculous movement that takes us into places and moments outside of who we are. Some of you may know that I started out as a writer and a teacher, journalist first, then writer of picture books, Finally, novels, YA. Sometime about 17 years ago, driven by a fascination with making a book and wanting to be part of that, I sidled over to the other side of the fence and became an editor and publisher. And since then, I have worked with a lot of amazing folks over these years, Eric Carle, Patricia Polacco, Floyd Cooper, T.A. Barron, Janet Lisle, Virginia Hamilton, Brian Jacques, Ed Young, David Small, Judy St. George, Andrew Clements, Joy Cowley. And to tell you the truth, they are about as different as people can be different. Different sizes, different shapes, different voices, God knows different ideas, but they are the same in one way.

Book by book, they each have an extraordinary and personal passion for what they are writing or painting. And now you begin to know the passion that I’m talking about, that heart beating, feeling for an idea or a character or a color or some aspect of what will become a story.

This was the discovery that set me thinking. I realized that even down to the last author or artist of which I was fond as an undergraduate, from D.H. Lawrence to Sophocles to, my goodness, de Maupassant, or to more recently Anne Patchett and Ian McEwen, the authors that I have loved most have a passion, almost an obsession for writing what they do. But that is anything but the end of the story. It could be all too simple in children’s books. For example, merely to say, oh, Patricia MacLachlan had such a passion for writing Sarah Plain and Tall.

Or, Jane Yolen had a real passion for writing The Devil’s Arithmetic or Owl Moon. Something about that is almost trite, common. But true passion isn’t common. It never has been. Because that passion, that simple artistic passion, ignites everything. It ignites the original idea for the book. It creates voice that jump-starts beginnings, keeps the thematic thread hot, which in turn, inflamed, drives character to journey and quest and goal. It sets powerfully in motion, a story that will in the end, like a wildfire, not stop, but will transcend.

Ecstasy is the related word that comes to mind. The fire of story moving so passionately that at the peak of the narrative arc, the writer, the reader flows into an unexpectedly quiet, almost soundless reality. An “I see” moment. The fire of story: could the words of a writer that writes with passion truly be that hot, that integral? As a writer and editor and teacher of writing, I know that at their best, they are.

Indeed, they must be. Passion informs and flames the smallest word, the most modest image, the very thread and character of story. Above all, in whatever small corner or large passion insists that the writer go far enough.

Let’s begin then at the beginning of the idea itself. With the power of passion so crucial to what a writer writes, a writer’s choice of idea cannot be small potatoes. It cannot be derivative. It cannot be just okay because a writer intends to compensate with beautiful language. It cannot be just okay because a bookseller said that two people had come into her shop looking for a book on that topic. Having a mediocre idea for a book is like having low-octane gas. Maybe the car will go with low-octane, but it isn’t going to get to miraculous speeds on the road, and at low speeds it could well sputter along.

Young readers and old are not going to tolerate that for long. Think of the ideas for the books we have loved most. Hatchet by Gary Paulson is still one of my favorites, a boy whose plane goes down and who must survive in the wilderness. Missing May by Cynthia Rylant, who wants to contact her deceased aunt through the spirit world. How about the fantasies? Redwall by Brian Jacques about a mouse abbey threatened by a pack of bilge rats. Or Harry Potter, an unlikely hero with a Shazam sun on his forehead who disappears through a brick wall at the train station and ends up at Hogwarts, a school where Quidditch is played in the air with broomsticks.

The act of original creation requires passion, nothing less. But let’s look further, let’s look at a book’s parts, let’s look at beginnings. I must read hundreds of manuscripts every year, some from agents and some from slush files, but if the first paragraph and the first page do not hook me, I will go no farther. And I say this in my classes and in the office over and over, and I do believe it is the author’s passion for his or her story that drives that beginning, jumpstarts it. In Postcards from No Man’s Land by Aiden Chambers, one of my Printz Award favorites for young adult fiction, Chambers begins:

Not knowing his way around, he set off back the way he had come, but changed his mind about picking up a tram to the railroad station, not yet ready to return to Harlem, and kept on walking along the canal to wonder where he was going. Ten minutes or so later he came to when a tram climbed across his path. Suddenly he wanted to be in a crowd, wanted to feel the push and press of people, wanted noise and bustle and distraction, wanted to be taken out of himself. The past 24 hours had been a ruffle, wanted something to drink, wanted to sit and drink it at a touristy on-street table while watching the goings-on of passers-by, and though he could not admit it to himself at the time, wanted an adventure.

The wanting, wanted noise, wanting to feel, wanted adventure, repeating itself, demands our attention because it connects to our very rhythms. As our heart beats so close to our passion, we recognize it in one another and are drawn to it. I still love the promise-infused beginning of the Newbery-winning Midwife’s Apprentice by Karen Cushman. There:

When animal droppings and garbage and spoiled straw are piled up in a great heap, the rotting and moiling give forth heat. Usually no one gets close enough to notice because of the stench, but the girl noticed, and on that frosty night burrowed deep into the warm, rotting mulch, heedless of the smell. In any event, the dung heap probably smelled little worse than everything else in her life–the food scraps scavenged from kitchen yards, the stables and sites she slept in when she could, and her own unwashed, unnourished, unloved, and unlovely body.

Or even all these years later, the beginning of one of the finest young adult books ever written, Cormier’s Chocolate War:

They murdered him as he turned to take the ball, a dam burst against the side of his head, and a hand grenade shattered his stomach. Engulfed by nausea, he pitched toward the grass. His mouth encountered gravel and he spat frantically, afraid that some of his teeth had been knocked out. Rising to his feet, he saw the field through drifting gaze, but held on until everything settled into place, like a lens focusing, making the world sharp again with edges.

These beginnings taunt the reader. And where is the passion in them? Did you hear it? In that place from which passion comes, it begins with an idea that gets its drive from the author’s own rhythms. The rhythm of the heart, the rhythm of walking, the rhythm of breathing.

A writer’s heart must beat, a reader’s heart must hear it. I’m intrigued with how a passion-driven story pushes the written word to its edges. It is frequently as if there were a membrane on this side of which is the everyday, and that side of which is the beyond everyday. The writer who writes without passion jogs up to the line, using passionless or imitative or only descriptive words–peeks over, but too often stays on the safe side. Where it is safe, where there is no risk, where whatever is happening doesn’t have to be real.

On the other side of the membrane, that way lies a perilous path and perhaps truth. I swear this is what the writer is after. As much as action, as much as richness of character, the writer is after a truth that strikes a chord in the humanity of us.

Ironically, and so many writers don’t know this, it’s not just describing something, adding words, no. Adding adjectives, no. To achieve authenticity of experience and moment, it is selecting the…right words. I have loved seeing the Three Lord of Rings movies. That world moves, rushes to the extreme imagination, indeed into pure fantasy, but no one doubts the passion with which Tolkien created this secondary world. It goes right to your heart, your breath, and intriguingly, no one doubts the truth of it. It comes alive, this fantastical world of friend-adoring hobbits, subservient golems, helmeted night riders. It is that true.

But for Tolkien, this started long before the Lord of the Rings. The authenticity he achieves had its roots in a simple story about a furry little creature, part human, part not, that lived in a hill. Listen:

In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit, not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on, or to eat. It was a hobbit hole. And that means comfort.

How clever of Tolkien to know that to create his secondary world, he needed to go to the most particular reaches of his own reality, his own humanness, and to use the elements of that primary world. He had to go to the worms and the oozy comfort of the primary world. And where is the passion here? There is rhythm and love, which is so often a benchmark of such good writing, but there is also a writer loving a story so much that he or she uses words and experiences that have a hint of been there, done that, but only enough to hook you as the writer goes on to unfold sentence after sentence, rife, no, no, no, built with close detail and observation and wit that have never ever been written before.

That’s the length to which passion drives the good writer. That’s how far the writer will go. In reading The Tale of Despereaux, Newbery winner, I found myself reading it to see if it deserved the award. One of the clearest assurances I found was in the language. Yes, this is about a mouse. Yes, a mouse that reads. Yes, the mouse falls in love with the princess. Yes, the mouse takes a needle to the world, a sword and stands up to the villain. But Kate DiCamillo, like Tolkien, went to her own humanity for the authenticity of place and emotion that she needed for her fantastical story. Listen:

Who was there? shouted cook again. Despereaux wisely said nothing. The kitchen was sung. Hmm, said the cook. Nothing. It’s nothing at all. Just my nervous Nellie ears playing tricks on me. You’re an old fool, she said to herself as she turned back to the stove. You’re just an old fool, afraid of being caught making soup. Despereaux slumped against the spool of thread and as he leaned there, his heart pounding, his paws shaking, a small, wonderful something occurred. A midnight breeze entered the kitchen and danced over to the stove and picked up the scent of the soup and then swirled across the floor and delivered the smell directly to the mouse’s nose. Despereaux put his head up in the air. He sniffed. He sniffed some more. He had never in his life smelled anything so lovely, so inspiring. With each sniff he took, he felt himself growing strong and brave. The cook leaned too close, in close to the kettle, and put the spoon in and took the spoon out, and blew upon the spoon, and then brought it to her lips and sipped and swallowed. Hmm, she said. She took another sip, missing something, she said. More salt, maybe. She picked up an enormous salt shaker and sprinkled salt into the kettle, and Despereaux, feeling emboldened by the smell of soup, again set to work, pushing the spool of thread.

I had lunch with Holly McGee, Kate DiCamillo’s agent, and I told her that what won the day for me about this book was the beauty of the single images. At the heart of this story are three single images. Soup, a red tablecloth owned originally by Despereaux’s father and stolen by a rat, and a spool of thread owned by a threadmaster who starts out uncommitted, an anonymous guardian of the threshold and ends up a wise counselor to Despereaux. Soup, a red tablecloth, a spool of thread, and threadmaster. These are not the accoutrements of a fantastical world, concrete, intimately known, visual. These are the mortar of the primary world. Our world, Tolkien in his essay on fairies calls it the tree and leaf of the primary world.

And once again, did you hear the poetry driving these passages, the ubiquitous and that? Rather than being supplanted with an anonymous comma connects our heart to Despereaux and runs the full gamut. Listen:

A midnight breeze entered the kitchen and danced over to the stove and picked up the scent of the soup and then swirled across the floor and delivered the smell right directly to the mouse’s nose.

That’s the length to which passion drives the writer. That’s how far the writer will go. Poet Theodore Rilke wrote his student writers these used images he wrote so fresh and original that it startles not the reader, but yourself. Writers who reach the highest, the highest climbs, I’m sure, startle themselves. Sometimes, and this seems to be a well-kept secret, marvelously, totally, total original detail comes out of information itself, but information is rhythmically and artistically and organically drawn as the most adventuresome or the most dramatic.

Listen to the pure beauty and passion in this passage of simple information. It is E.B. White in Charlotte’s Web taking the reader aside to say:

A spider’s web is stronger than it looks. Although it is made of thin delicate strands, the web is not easily broken. However, a web gets torn every day by the insects that kick around in it, and a spider must rebuild it when it gets full of holes. And Charlotte liked to do her weaving during the late afternoon, and Fern liked to sit nearby and watch. In one afternoon, she heard a most interesting conversation and witnessed a strange, strange, event. “You’ve awfully hairy legs,” Charlotte, said Wilbur, as the spider busily worked at her task. “My legs are hairy for a good reason,” replied Charlotte. “Furthermore, each leg of mine has seven sections. The coxa, the trochanter, the femur, the patella, the tibia, the metatarsus, and the tarsus.” Wilbur sat bolt upright. “You’re kidding,” he said. “No, I’m not either.” “Say those names again. I didn’t catch them the first time.”

And of course, she does say them again. Her writer, driven by passion, probes the corners of experience and idea, often using the good humor of every day and comes up with precious detail that under the hand of the less passionate could simply be regarded as mundane. And yes, these very simple information words become organic because even they contain heartbeat and movement and direction and voice and wit. You are, I say to writers, beginning, if they are writers who haven’t discovered what drives beautiful passages. We are not going, you are not going far enough. Writers who reach the highest achievement fearlessly, go the last mile, go far enough. In the Newbery winner A Single Shardm the story about a humble Korean boy from the 15th century who wants to be a potter, the author, Linda Sue Park’s obsession for the beautiful Celadon pottery drives the scene and perhaps the very, very book. Listen:

The stirring, sitting, settling and bailing were repeated any number of times and Min was satisfied with the residue. It depended on the job at hand. If the clay was for a sturdy teapot to be used every day, a single draining might suffice, but for a finely wrought incense burner the clay might be drained twice or even three times. The ultimate drainage was reserved for the creation of the Celadon glaze. For this, half a dozen drainings might not be enough. Tree-ear sometimes wanted to cry out and beat his fists into the clay, in frustration when men made an abrupt gesture for yet another repetition of the work.

How proud the potters were of its color! No one had been able to name it satisfactorily. For although it was green, shades of blue and gray and violet whispered beneath it, as in the sea on a cloudy day. Different hues blended into one another where the glaze pooled thickly in the crevices on the raised surfaces of an incised design. Indeed, a famed Chinese scholar had once named twelve small wonders of this world. Eleven of them were Chinese. The twelfth was the color of Korea’s Celadon pottery.

Park’s passion is not for a pig, or a spider, or even a boy, though clearly she is very fond of Tree-ear, her main character. Her passion is for Celadon pottery. And a people humble, though they may be, who created it, and using information that in the hands of the less passionate could become only information, Park weaves it into a song, and she climbs out on the farthest limb to let us feel it too.

Was it Nabokov that said science without art is nothing, and fiction without facts is nothing? How far does a writer’s passion for his or her story, for idea, for character, for the moment take him or her? Does it take them far enough? It is interesting, isn’t it, that when a writer gets into it, together, they talk voice. Would you agree that if we laid these passages out, one next to the other, and read them, not knowing the author, we would not confuse one for another? Would not confuse E.B. White for Kate DiCamillo. Would not confuse Tolkien with Karen Cushman, because their writing voices are driven by the passions, the irregularities, the breath-driven pauses, the heartfelt accelerations of their very souls.

I often teach writing, and my goal is to take the writer out on the farthest limb, because it is there in that place where they would only go if they felt passion in the going, that there is a chance they will discover the new idea, the new word, the new combination of words, the new moment, the new scene, the new story.

It is sometimes dangerous out there, you know. You are so exposed. Limbs can break, the balance is everything, but maybe I tell them, maybe it is worth your courage. But you might say this is only for novels where there is time to go out on a limb. Surely this is not for younger fiction. Oh, but many people in this room know that passion is for the picture book too. Think Patricia Polacco, she always plays out on the limb. When she created the picture book Pink and Say, the story about two teenage boys, one black, one white, caught in a war between the states, she broke so many rules, the librarians didn’t know where to shelve the book.

It was long, it was about teenagers, it was historical fiction. How could it be a picture book? But it was, and it was driven by Polacco’s passion for story. Her characters, characters, a black teen called Pink and a white boy called Say, meet each other on the battlefield. Pink saves Say and carries him on his back to his farm. There are warm, healthy and days there with Moe Moe Bay, Pink’s mother, but then the hoof bits of war come to the farm. The boys hide in the cellar, Moe Moe Bay is killed. The boys discovered and taken to Andersonville Prison by Confederate soldiers. And then follows one of the most memorable scenes as Polacco shows almost cinematically, the boys’ hands stretching for one another as soldiers pull black and white apart to imprison them in the terrible Andersonville prison.

There is often in the arc of seeing her story just after action, the free flow into that space, the quiet of passion, the necessary quiet of passion. In the end, when the boys are separated. the end so clearly in sight, Polacco’s story derives its power from this profound, profound quiet. The writing of a novel or a picture book is not a question of spinning a chronological yarn, spicing it with tantalizing descriptions and giving it an appropriate conclusion.

The writer is more like a director of a symphony. I had a precious friend, whom in the quiet of her house and with her small wooden baton daily directed the New York Philharmonic. She particularly liked Beethoven of any number. One summer, she visited me in our Michigan cottage and we went to the village park to hear a concert. Her husband surprised her by buying a raffle ticket, giving her the opportunity to direct the orchestra. The members of the orchestra were used to this raffle, which gave some silly audience member the chance, to a chance, in a sense, to live out a fantasy. And at first, when she raised her baton, they just went on playing, Beethoven’s fifth, I believe, the way they always did. She stopped them, this ordinary person, this person who loved to direct an orchestra. She tapped gently on the stand and stopped them. And then catching their eyes, she swept her baton into the modulations she wanted.

The legatos, the moderatos, the vivaces of Beethoven’s powerful piece. The audience sitting on the lawn of that lakeside park loved it. The writer of passion and purpose is more the director. Patricia Polacco modulated the simple story of Pink and Say.

Why do we remember this story? Because she went out on a limb. She went right to the very edge of the threshold and did not flinch. In an editor’s life, there are moments when the editor becomes attached to the author or artist’s book in profound ways. Think of the cable between the two cars that is used to jumpstart a car to get it going when the battery is dead. It’s a charge between us because the author or artist has asked the editor in to the intimate place of raw idea to share some reality.

And one of my favorite experiences was working on Togo by Robert Blake. It was the Bluebonnet winner that year. Illustrated by Rob, it’s a story of a dog who brought the smallpox serum to Nome, Alaska, helping the more famous dog, Balto. Togo had started out as an unlikely hero, scruffy, born in a litter owned by the owner of a dog sled kennel, but too small to be a sled dog. But even as a pup, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. And one day when his master had taken a sled of dogs out, he jumped a chain link fence to catch up with them, which he did.

And this was just the beginning. He went on to become a dog sled leader, his master’s favorite dog. And then came the request in the middle of the night, there’s smallpox in Nome. We need to get serum in Nulato. To get the serum, Togo leads the sled through storm and ice breakup through freezing temperatures and 160 blizzardy miles to get the serum and pass it off to Balto, the dog who would become famous for bringing the serum in the last 30 miles.

Driven himself to the story, Blake wanted the reader to experience that run that became the Iditarod. For if you look at the book you will see that the steely blue ice art is framed in the beginning when we first get to know Togo, but when the race begins the art begins to break out of the very frame. Blake does not want you to hear a story from the outside sitting in bleachers as Togo and the dog speed by. He cares far too much about this story. He wants anyone who reads this book from youngest to oldest to be on that sled with him. He wants you to feel the biting wind, the hopelessness of getting there. He wants you to catch the eye between master and dog personally when all that is keeping them going is their loyalty to one another.

Rob Blake wants to create experience itself. That’s why. That’s why a writer pauses on a moment whether it is Kevin Henkes in Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse, Polacco in Pink and Say, or Ann Patchett in Bel Canto.

The writer pauses, expands it, explores it, turns it into a scene because the author needs the moment to come alive and that takes time and I often ask my writers and artists when they bring in their final work: what do you think? Did you go far enough? A story at its best starts in some indefinable place deep inside the artist or the author and moves outward. There’s risk in that for the artist or author as I have said: he cares so much.

He or she is out on a limb. His or her subconscious is taking him to new words, new forms, new art, and he is taking the chance in order to take the reader to that place. Perhaps all originality starts with a heartbeat.

One of the biggest problems for editors in receiving unsolicited manuscripts is that authors and artists don’t properly consider middles of manuscripts. And I have said more often than I want to count: a book, a picture book, a young fiction, a young adult novel is not a still life. There’s movement in a book, whether it’s Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar, moving from caterpillar to butterfly; Aidan Chambers’ Postcards From No Man’s Land, moving from naive boy to wise young man, or Despereaux, moving from princess-idolizing mouse child to brave needle-wielding mouse knight, and so on.

But here’s the thing: movement is not inherent in some chronology of story, moving easily from beginning to end. To use the wildfire analogy, the whiffs of fire that began in the early pages grow. Things happen in the middle that inflame the story, move it, increase the incendiary risks. That doesn’t mean there is some race of action that increases in intensity in the middle. No, no, quite the contrary. It means that the fire is growing at first quietly, but we hear the crackle, particularly in the middle of more and more to come.

The author, great modulator, great believer in his or her stories, is the one who does that. The writer makes it happen. It always amazes me when writers or readers do not see the essential role of quiet. I mentioned it with Polacco. I am talking about the quiet of passion and how it allows and builds and sustains the suspense and curiosity, passion-driven, of what happens next. A quiet spot in the middle that I will always think of when I think of beautiful books is in Sally Keehn’s Moon of Two Dark Horses.

It is a story about the friendship between a Native American boy and a white settler boy, and how the war on the frontier is tearing them apart. But in a wonderful middle scene, a test of who the Native American boy will become in the climax of the book, the Native American boy, Coshmoo, reveals to an unscrupulous settler the presence of a secret beaver pond that the boy was never to share. He makes the settler and the listeners promise that they will only take the beaver from one lodge and that they will kill no mothers, but the attack on the beavers quickly, quickly gets out of hand. The braves, seeing all of the unspoiled beaver lodges, go crazy, tearing apart one lodge and clubbing and spearing the beavers, then a second lodge, clubbing and staking and spearing and then a third, clubbing and staking and spearing and a fourth,

And here is the last page of the memorable middle:

Now, saplings broke beneath our feet as we climbed into the last lodge. Our shadows reached across the whitened maze of old roots and birch and poplar ranches. My heavy robe made my shadow look broader and more powerful than bitter weeds. Our breath misted the fragile air. Beneath our feet, a beaver family hid within beds of soft grass and fine wood chips. I use elk hairs, axe, to tear apart their lodge. I thrust my spear into a fleeing body. The beaver fought to swim free. I pinned it against a fallen log until it died. It was a mother beaver, fat with young.

It was a risk for author Sally Keehn to go that far. But middles drive to climaxes. I was with a friend who, talking about a society, at a society of children’s book writers. He said, “Everyone was talking about middles this year.” Yes, talk about them. They are much misunderstood. Middles drive to climax. They are initiating, accumulating action to convince the reader. They are often made of powerful scenes. Not scenes told, but scenes lived. “It was a mother beaver, fat with young.”

One of the most extraordinary middles I can remember ever reading came in A Single Shard:

The boy, Tree-ear, must go to Songdo to petition the governor to take his master’s glazed pots. He’s afraid. There are robbers. The way is rugged. Crane-man, his mentor, tells him a story: You must stop at the rock of the falling flowers in Puyo. When the boy asks why, Crane-man tells him. It is an old, old story. He reminds Tree-ear that the powers around Korea have always invaded Korea, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mongols, never leaving them in peace for long.

 

“500 years before, however, it was the Tang Chinese who made a sneak attack on the Korean Royal Palace. As the empire and the couriers fled the palace, the Tang were nipping at their heels. The king and his party were forced to retreat to the very highest point of Puyo, a cliff overlooking the Combe River. There was no escape. And bravely, the king’s guard placed themselves a little way down the path between the enemy and their king. They were overrun in moments. And all of the king’s concubines and ladies-in-waiting crowded around him, determined to protect him to the last, the women knew well that the Tang would not kill them. If they would be taken prisoner, probably to be tortured, their terror can hardly be imagined. And Crane-man paused and sipped at his tea.” (Notice that pause.) Tree ear was no longer lying down. “Is that all?” he demanded.

 

“Patience, monkey. The best is yet to come.” Crane-man stared into the fire for a moment. “The Tang army charged up the hill. And all at once, as if all their minds had become one, the women began jumping off the cliff. Every one of them preferred death to becoming a prisoner. Can you see it, my friend? The women jumping one after another from the cliff, their beautiful silk dresses billowing in the air, pink, red, green, blue, indeed like flowers falling.”

 

Crane-man reached out with his crutch and poked the dying embers of the fire. Tree-ear saw sparks flare up and fall again like tiny flowers. “Go, climb the Rock of the Falling Flowers when you reach Puyo, my friend,” Crane-man had said. “But remember that leaping into death is not the only way to show true courage.”

I want now to come to a climax, an ending, perhaps because that is where we know the rare book best. Just as in the beginning, in the middle, the climax does not only need to be dramatic or adventure-laden or shocking to be vibrant. The climax can be wonderfully funny, like the picture book Officer Buckle and Gloria, where the officer finally discovers that his beloved dog has been mocking him behind his back in front of audiences of children, mocking his stay-safe rules, and where the officer finally joins him to go forward as a team.

Or it could be the climactic turns of events that made all of Frog and Toad, or Grasshopper on the Road by Arnold Lobel, where the climax in the book may be something as slight as Grasshopper, engaging two dragonflies over their lifestyle.

Passion does not require a 20-piece band, does not require symbols, but it does require something. In Wringer, by Jerry Spinelli, one of my favorite climaxes, we know that even as the ticking clock of the annual pigeon shoot is running out, Palmer has found a pigeon whom he has made a pet, called him Nipper. And as the day of the pigeon shoot nears, he doesn’t want his pigeon to get shot by mistake, so he asks a girlfriend who is going to the shore to take Nipper away with her. But when he arrives at the shooting field, Palmer sees the girl:

“What about Nipper?” he asks. “What about going to the shore?” “Oh,” she says, “we decided not to go. We left the pigeon off in the city by the railway station.” The railroad station, one of the places where pigeons were collected for the annual shoot.

Could you see the author tightening the noose? Climbing out on the limb, modulating the action. Palmer runs back to the shooting field, sees nothing at first, watches the shooting going on, bam, bam, but then flying at the edge of the field, he sees a pigeon alone. So does a marksman, bam, tries to bring him down, but the pigeon doesn’t go away.

He circles the field once, twice, blocking the sun with his fist. Palmer watched the bird circle the field. His shoulder muscles flex to the rhythm of its wings, urging it on, urging it to fly away, but has circled a fourth time. And again, it was not leaving. It was simply circling and circling, in fact, impossibly. It seemed to be getting closer. Palmer shouted, “go away, go away.” It didn’t. It was Nipper. Palmer simply and suddenly knew it, and just as suddenly the horror of what he was doing struck him. For if Nipper truly was searching for him and found him, Palmer’s own stupid, unthinking, upturned face was nothing more than bait, luring his pigeon back to a second chance at death. This time the shooter would not miss, and Palmer covered his face with his hands. No, he prayed. No, no, no, too late. Palmer stepped away from the pole, then into the clear, under the shooting field, the better to be seen, for he knew now there was no stopping it. Downward came the bird, lazily leaping through the haze, gray in gray descending, gliding a summer sledder down a slope of sunmilk, and landed on Palmer’s head. Nipper’s toes clutched and moved on his scalp, and for a strangely wonderful moment Palmer felt himself crowned.

 

The shooter was slipping shells into the twin barrels of his gun, and suddenly out of nowhere there was Beans swiping at Palmer’s head, even as Nipper chuckled, sending the pigeon to the ground before Palmer could reach it. Beans was on the bird, scooping it up and springing to the middle of the field. He hoisted the bird above his head and gave a long, ripping screech of triumph. Palmer was running, too. He saw the shooter shoulder his gun. His scream, “no, no, no,” made a puff in the smokescreen cloud. He splashed through the fallen feathers which were deep in us here in the territory, between the shooter and the white box like October leaves. He pulled the bird into himself, circled himself around it, the comical many-voiced, eight-toed friend, blizzard blown into his life one day. He closed his eyes and buried his face in the bed of feathers and waited for the shot.

 

The boom, he waited and waited and heard only silence. And standing there in feathers up to his sneaker knots, Palmer felt a peace, a lightness that he had never known before, as if restraining straps had snapped, setting him free to float upward. For a moment, feeling in his fingertips the quick beating of Nipper’s acorn side heart, he believed he could fly. Through a pigeon’s eye, he looked down from the sky. upon the field, the thousands of upturned faces, and saw nothing at all to fear. He reached out then, held his pigeon out to the people, slowly turned so that all could see so that all would know, then cradling his pigeon in both hands, Palmer walked from the field.

This is too coincidental that there is a pigeon shooting day that Palmer happened to be in town, where it is held, happens to be in line to be a wringer, happens to have a pigeon drop into his room, happens for his friends not to take the pigeon away where it is safe, where the pigeon happens to see Palmer on the field, happens to sit on his head, coincidental. But in the hands of this artist, this man, Spinelli, who is not afraid to crawl out on the limb, Wringer is true, not just for Palmer in his world, but for his readers.

The story that is written with passion comes from an inside place. It empowers the narrative and allows the author to hand over to the reader experience and the sure knowledge that in children’s book life is good. That humanity holds promise, that ways that are chartered with independent thinking and values that matter, values that serve a greater whole, will hold sway. And that to me is why where a story comes from is so important.

Why the truly original story, the story that is true, passion driven, must be sought and cherished. It can be a fantasy, let Harry carry the mantle, or Frodo and Sam, or the new hero in our world, Despereaux.

It can be a contemporary fiction, like Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, or historical fiction, by Girl in a Cage, by Jane Yolen, and sometimes I think as much as any writer today, writers of children’s books are guardians of the human spirit.

They’re whispering their stories to the people who still have a chance to make a vast difference in this complex world. It is why, in my humble view, writers writing to market, writing for any reason from outside in, do not cherish the privilege and opportunity that writers have and readers expect in a good book. The writer who has a story to tell, who cherishes the privilege, passionately tells his or her story, connects it to the reader who needs assurance, no matter what our age, that humanity has it in itself to survive.

More than that, to call Faulkner to endure. The miracle is that each of these books that go to our heart or head or skin. The Wringers, the Givers, the Missing Mays, the Maniac McGees the Single Shards, the Hatchets, the Despereaux, the Winn Dixies, the Holes, when written with poetry and passion, represent creation in the true sense. They are original. To discover one of these stories, to write one of these stories, is to believe the story has never happened before, and that it was, is a story that needed needs for all the world to be told.

And that is my last word this morning. I know that I am among friends. I believe that, like me, you came here this morning to once again celebrate children’s books and the power behind the best of these books, and to confirm, certainly for each other, that along with food and water and sunshine, written words, particularly those in children’s books, matter.

We all take this to heart. Thank you.