On sunny, summer days, I loved walking dogs along the lake. On rainy, cold, snowy days, it was the pits. I walked a lot of dogs – smart ones, dumb ones, beautiful ones. But the dog I remember most was Whitney, a yellow Labrador who lived in a fancy apartment on Lake Shore Drive.

            I walked her for an hour every day. When her parents went out of town, she stayed with me. She was the smartest dog I’ve ever met. Sit, down, come, fetch, stay. You name it. She waited for me outside the corner grocery store, never taking her eyes off of me through the window. She ran next to me in downtown Chicago, off leash. We bonded. We connected. She would follow me with her eyes, waiting for commands. Amazing! We had a great time together.

            I’ve thought a lot about her over the years, especially when I started Lucy’s story five years ago. I knew I wanted to write about a girl who had lost her mother. But how? I’ve always been fascinated by how children internalize trauma, the way they cope and adapt. As an English lit doctoral candidate at NYU in the early ‘90s, I studied psychoanalysis and became familiar with concepts such as transitional objects, unconscious desires, magical thinking.

            And I thought, what would Lucy’s story be if she had a dog like Whitney? And so I came up with Superior, Lucy’s faithful companion, who brings Lucy back into the world after her mom dies.

            From the beginning this was the hardest novel I’ve ever written. I had so much I wanted to talk about: memories, special summer places, longing, nature, fear. I knew what would separate Lucy’s story from other dead mom books would not only be the complexity of the characters but how and if I could put her loss into a larger context.

            But what would that be?

            Then one day, making grilled cheeses for my middle daughter and her best friend, I listened to them talk about the most annoying boy in their class. I’d heard about him for years, how he called them names, teased them, shot rubber bands at them. But what surprised me that day was how they reacted when I asked if they knew why he did these things. He’s a jerk, they said. Plain and simple. When I suggested that he (who I knew nothing about) might be unhappy and taking it out on them, they looked at me as if I had two heads.

            This kind of reaction isn’t unique to Emma and Rebecca. I started noticing it over and over again in the kids I knew, this assumption that people’s behaviors define them. It’s a rare kid who has the innate ability to look below the surface, to make that connection between what’s happening in another kid’s inner and/or home life and how he/she acts in the world. 

            And so I came up with Ian Richards, a kid who seems the opposite of Lucy. Confident, funny, mean, popular. He made the story hum, snap, move forward. Not only would Lucy learn that he’s more complicated than she imagined, but somehow he’d help her understand all that had happened to her. But how?

            I couldn’t put it together.

            At a particularly low point in my writing, when I couldn’t figure out what it is that I wanted to say or how all of these seemingly abstract pieces would fit together, I was introduced to a very interesting woman. She’s a psychotherapist who works exclusively with women who have lost their mothers and she agreed to talk to me about her experiences.

            A lot of what she told me made sense. How girls who have lost a mother would forever feel a profound sense of loss. How they’d always hate the stepmother (initially). But this really struck me: how kids always “create” a story to explain events that happen to them. And they do this in order to make sense of it and to protect themselves from pain, from the unknown, from feeling different.   

            This gave me a way to not only tie Lucy and Ian’s stories together, but to include the reader as well. Because no matter how severe the “trauma” is, all of us tell stories to protect ourselves.

As a mom, reader and writer, I’m most interested in the inner life of a kid. So it was very important to me to get the inner lives of my characters in A MILLION MILES FROM BOSTON just right.

And so that has gotten me thinking. Kids spend a lot of elementary and middle school years learning the five-paragraph essay. Learning how to critique poems and stories. And yes, there are lessons to be taught in how to write creatively. But the key ingredient, I think, especially for fourth and fifth graders, is inspiration. Because truth is that writing is hard, difficult, painful. Down the road you may write a book that will not get published. You may write 200 pages and only use one page. The only way you can do this is if you love writing, if you've been inspired. If you can connect writing to a pleasure, a neccesity, a wish, a dream, a way of being. You can't help a kid find that by drilling a lesson into his or her head.  They need to see someone who loves writing.  They need to feel that they, too, have something valuable and important to say. 

And so no, when I speak to kids I'm not going to have some crazy lesson plan where we write outlines and I bombard them with definitions of plot, structure, characterization, blah, blah. I'm going to help them be inspired, to fall in love with their words and themselves as writers. That's how you introduce creative writing to kids.

Don't get me wrong, I like talking about how I got started writing and all of that. But what excites me most is talking about the writing process. Revision. Foreshadowing. Symbolism.      

Thank you Ms. Matlaw and Pollard!

People read for many different reasons, escape, enjoyment, adventure, to experience something "other" (a foreign land, a personality type, themselves...). Sometimes I read for all of those reasons, but mostly I read to learn. About writing. And I find that often I'm drawn to the same type of books, psychological novels, about women, families, dysfunctions, sadness, tragedy. Hmm. 

For me, a novel doesn't have to be perfect. Often I'm more interested in novels that don't work, or have flaws, especially if they've taken giant risks. Such as this adult novel I read recently, THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG, by Muriel Barbery.  I can understand much of the criticism I've heard from friends: pretentious, difficult, confusing. But oh, I loved it. And for what it tried to do: melding themes of friendship, hiding oneself, class issues, philosophy. Appearances can be decieving! Look out for what's hidden in the basement!! And my favorite: there IS a soul mate for you out there. Sometimes you just have to look in the most unlikely places.

And how could I not love a line like this, even if I am a huge fan of analysis?

This is 12-year-0ld Paloma speaking: "As far as I can see, only psycholanalysis can compete with Christians in their love of drawn-out suffering."

Ha!

And I said, "Yes, I have an agent, but no, that's not the secret." He raised his eyebrows and said, "what is the secret?"

Is there a secret?

In the first couple of years of writing I thought that if I kept writing and sending out that eventually I'd get published. Then I thought, well, if only I had an agent I'd get published. Then I thought, well, if only I could learn a trick or two at a SCBWI conference I'd get published. And then if only....

Somewhere a long the line I realized that I had to stop thinking that an external force would suddenly decide if I would be published or not. It was up to me. It's all about one thing: the work. REVISING. You have to be willing to fall madly in love with something you write and then cut it the next day. You have to be able to resee and change a character's personality. Everything is about the work.

Luck helps. You have to have talent. A few tricks might help. And certainly having an agent helps you get in the door to closed houses. But if you want to get published you have to workand work and work at writing. And you have to figure out how to revise. 

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6646955.html

But I have a funny feeling, thinking about this as a sports story. At first glance, I'm not sure why. On the surface it's a novel about how Madison Mitchell, a 12-year-old superstar, deals with the pressure of being the only girl in an all boy baseball league. But for me this has always been a coming-of-age story, about a girl who is estranged from her friends because their interests are changing, who longs for her father, who is trying to figure out how to "break free" of her strong mother. It's a novel about a girl who doesn't quite understand gender politics. Oh, yes, and it's about baseball. So you see, baseball always comes last for me. And those game sections were the toughest to write!

I think it goes back to what interests me most. As a writer, reader, mother and person, I'm most interested in the inner lives of kids. I always start a book figuring out my  character's psychology and what she/he will learn. Then I search for plot!   

Here's the library's phone number: 617-796-1360 

Village Books is located at 751 South Street, Roslindale, 617-325-1994.

For more information about this wonderful day, check out Mitali's blog:

http://www.mitaliblog.com/2009/02/happy-valentines-day-new-england.html