Been laying low on the blog front for the past few weeks cause lots of stuff is on the plate. All exciting. Lots good. Challenges galore. Hey, it’s life – and while there have been many times in the past when I felt a bit numb, as if days were “just passing” in uneventful, unremarkable ways, this certainly has changed for me. It’s pedal to the metal at this point of my life and in that mindset I am finding more fulfillment than ever before.

Weird how, like a magnet, I have always been drawn to people who find deep meaning in (and hold great passion for) their work. My best teachers always reflected that. The people I idolized as a kid always seemed to represent this. And though it’s taken me way, way longer than I ever would have imagined to “get comfortable in my own skin” the dawn of this phenomenon is upon me. The older I get, the shorter life seems, yet the richer and more wonderful, too. No one is exempt from pain in this world but freeing myself from self-inflicted pain and having stopped being my own worst adversary really has helped me a ton.

It’s a skill I wish someone would have taught me a long, long time ago. (Oh Common Core, the shortcomings you have.)

Indeed I am reading, reading, reading all the time but the thing about all the reading I am doing is that it never feels like I am getting the chance to read enough. (I even wonder if I get to write enough, which is another reason I have pulled back on blogging so prolifically. I was cranking 5,000 blog words a week there for almost two years… but I think that ship is sailing for me. The deeper writing of constructing meaningful stories for young readers beckons more than any other type of writing right now and with so many hours in the day, one must make choices, right?)

Family, literature, friends, yoga, good food, meaningful work, an occasional glass of wine and travel. The math of my mid-life is adding up to these things. Low key yet rewarding. Simple, for the first time ever, suffices. More than suffices, actually. Simple rocks! And the fact is, I am lucky to be able to have all that I do. (Side note: 20 years ago, I probably would have said “bo-ring”. Nowadays, exotic seems way over-rated.)

I recently saw a survey which considered teacher’s biggest gripes and the number one, highest scoring blip on the chart was… can you guess?

• Problematic assessments.
• Unsupportive work environments.
• Lack of parental participation.
• Too little time.
• Too many “mandates”.

Nope, wasn’t any of these. The highest scoring element was “lack of engaging/user-friendly curricular materials.”

I wasn’t shocked. Are you?

Personally, my entire writing career was born out of a quest to try and solve this problem, first and foremost for myself (i.e. if I couldn’t find YA books that my kids would dig, I was going to write them.)

What amazes me is that 1) it gave birth to a full-fledged publishing career (I have a new bookcoming out – yet again – on September 15 and 2) that this problem of a lack of engaging curricular materials is still being cited as numero uno across the spectrum of today’s modern teaching force. Of course “you” might now have this problem but as a nation on the whole “we” certainly have this problem.

And when you think about some of the resources being distributed down the halls in science, math, history and yes, even ELA, you have to scratch your head and wonder, “Why are we still living in the 1950’s with some of this stuff?”

Of all the gripes of women and men,

What gripe is worse than,

“What might this classroom have been?”

Yesterday I talked about making your play your work and your work your play. Natural to that idea is the notion that work ought to be fun. (And I agree, work ought to be fun.)

However, work isn’t about being fun. In fact, I believe that the harder one works, the less the word fun even matters to the conversation… because work becomes thus transformed into that which is meaningful.

Once a person is vested they tend to find more value in the triumphs – and more disappointment in the shortcomings. But the momentum of really dedicating oneself to achieving something builds an aspiration to see the effort work out well. And the more blood, sweat and tears one puts in, the less willing one becomes to give up and the more likely one becomes to keep plodding on through times of turmoil.

Play leads to fun. Fun leads to a sense of reward. A sense of reward leads to a desire for a deeper sense of reward. A deeper sense of reward is more often found through determined effort. (i.e. When we “work” for things we appreciate having attained them much more than when things are merely given to us.) Determined effort is often characterized by discipline, focus, tenacity, and learning from our mistakes. Remove “fun” and “play” from the equation and we may never get to the deeper levels of determined effort. Remove an aspiration for determined effort from the occasion and the quest for fun becomes vapid, superficial and tiring.

Kids enjoy having a good time. But they love being challenged in a personally meaningful way. We forget this at our own educational peril.

Fun: a jumping off point to help work transform into that which is meaningful.

(Side note: It’s interesting that so many teachers instinctively know this and so many administrators consciously disregard this in our modern classrooms when seeking out curriculum tools to help better educate our kids. Bubble tests? We’ll buy those til the cow comes home. Manipulatives for math? YA titles for ELA educators? Sorry, we don’t have funds for that.)

The day after Labor Day has always been a fun one for me. Though I think as kids we are socialized to believe we ought not to like school (i.e. “Aw man, school is back.”) I always enjoyed being in a classroom… as long as I was stimulated and learning something.

When school captivated me, the clock on the wall disappeared and the sense of Csíkszentmihályi’s flow theory really rang true (even though I could never have identified the concept when I was 12). I mean who doesn’t like learning?

When it’s meaningful, when it’s purposeful, when it’s relevant and engaging, learning is top shelf stuff. And I firmly believe that this is as true today as it was back when I was sporting corduroy jeans and a mullet. (Okay, the jeans are hyperbole. ) Point is, when people are enjoying what they are doing they will do a better job of doing it. Conversely, when people resent what they are being asked to do, they will often underperform and seek out the quickest way to librate themselves from the task.

The day after Labor Day is always a time to reflect on this very simple notion. Engagement matters. It matters to students, it matters to teachers, it matters to school site staff. People who find joy and meaning and relevance and excitement in the work will do a better job at their jobs this year.

And those that do not, will not. Effort can’t be legistlated. Successful schooling is a battle of hearts and minds.

Make your play your work and your work your play.

-Phil Jackson, The Zen Master

Yesterday I was talking about how the end is not the end at all. See, re-writing the way I do before I ever show it to another soul prevents me having to have the chat about “oh, and I plan to fix that” or “wait, see I am going to change this” because whenever I have had that chat about my books with people, I always felt like a little school boy with my tail between my legs, enduring conversations with adults as they lead me through the tedium of things I already know.

“You need to do this. And you need to do that.”

“I know, Dad. I know.”

“Well if you know, why didn’t you do it?”

“Sorry, Dad.”

Sheesh, I hate being on the wrong end of those conversations. However, if I do ALL the work, and get the book to the point where I really don’t feel as if I need to do more, then my conversations with the people who read my book will al take place in the realm of, “Oh really… hmmm. Good point. I hadn’t considered that.” Or “Wow, that was a blind spot to me, I totally thought I covered that.”

Every conversation once the book is in “really ready form” is thus productive and helpful to me.

Additionally, there are times when I am free to disregard their opinions. It rarely happens with small stuff or plot holes or character inconsistencies – I almost always go re-address those aspect of feedback – but then again, there are often way fewer o those type of comments simply because I remained patient and did not show the book until it was time for me to do so.

Note: I will fix grammar and parallelism and misspellings and the such if I catch them but the thing about publishing with one of the majors is that the book will, I know, be copy-edited… which means that multiple who like to read books like the Chicago Manual of Style just for fun will go through my book with a fine-tooth comb before it hits the shelves. So, no, I am not necessarily reading for mechanical errors. Especially since when you pen a 55,000 word book it’s practically impossible to be your own proofreader – you simply develop poor vision for small things because you’ve been over the book a zillion times in your head and on the computer screen before.)

Ultimately, my feeling is that a climax isn’t really a climax unless it’s a HUGE pay-off – like I said, for the characters as well as for the reader – and in order for everything to really pay-off, as the author, I had to have known the true soul of the book which, as I also already stated, I really can’t know until I’ve written it.

The end thus becomes, in a way, the first real beginning. And going back to page one once I feel great about the climax is truly when the work gets fun. In a way, I guess, all writers are mystery writers, revealing a “what is going to happen next” story to the audience.

And once you know what happens next, it’s way easier to go back to the beginning to throw in the dead-ends that will really prove not to have been dead-ends, the cliff-hangers that actually proved to be the least of the character’s real worries at the time, instead of the height of them, and stuff like that.

Be a patient writer, I say. Go do all the work, get it spic-n-span and then release it out to your inner-circle for feedback. That’s the way I do it and, as I’ve discovered, it’s a strategy that results in heightened productivity.

So as I come to the end of writing my next book for Disney I realize that I follow a pattern whenever I write a new novel, a pattern which suits me well.

I recognize that the end is NOT the end at all. Once I get to the last page I am eager and excited to go right to page one and re-read the whole darn thing. Why? Because I need to round, fine tune, and tie off some stuff.

See, often in writing the climax of a book I will hit upon the true soul of the novel. I mean sure, when I first began at page one I always suspected I knew what that soul would be. And yes, I’d always suspected I’d know the shape that soul would take. But until you actually pen the soul of a novel, it never fully reveals itself to you.

And once it does, as a writer, I become eager to go back in, starting at page 1, and make sure that I have done the kind of polish that makes the piece presentable to a reading audience for the first true time.

Some writers show their work to people as they go. To their agent, to their editors, to their trusted confidantes, to their dog. (Hey, we’re all starving for praise and my dog is reticent to scorch my work… I like her attitude!) Me, I’ll show my outlines to these people as I develop the project but I never show my fiction until I believe I have gotten it to the point of it being “really ready”.

And “really ready” to me means that I have written a piece that will take the reader to the best point I can take them on my own. None of this “oh, and I plan to fix that” or “wait, see I am going to change this”… that’s not how I work.

If there is work yet to be done, I like to go do it my feeling being that why should I try and verbally explain what I plan to do as opposed to just making sure I go do it and get it done right?

Because look, I know that once my editor sees the book, once my agent sees the book, once my dog sees the book, everyone is going to weigh in with a comment. (Yes, even the freakin’ dog!) And feedback is good. I like feedback. Once you mature as a writer you learn about how these people are on your side. They really want to help make the book the best it can be and as such, if they see something (which they inevitably will) they will let me know about it.

And then we will chat and then we will weigh things and then I will head off to go do re-write number 2, 3, 4 or 5.

But re-write number one, that’s my territory.

Getting a bit long… more on this tomorrow.

The back story hurt occurs later in the work. It’s a moment when the hero reveals more of themselves to the audience, a time when the hero shows their vulnerability by letting the audience better see the hurt which exists inside their soul, a pain they have been carrying for quite some time.

In The Hunger Games we come to learn that despite all which our hero has done to harden her heart she is still a human being, still a simple girl, who was once upon a time greatly hurt by the absence of a father and the absence of male love in her life. She’s had to become strong for the sake of her family – especially for the sake of her sister – but it hasn’t come without a personal cost to Katniss. In Animal Farm we learn that animals were perpetually exploited for their value, sold for meat, and slain for feasts, raised to work and then worked until they died. They were never valued by man with any sort of compassionate respect, and for generation after generation, this has stung. Hamlet reminisces about the joys of youth as contrasted by the skull of his dead jester, Yorrick, illuminating how what once seemed fun and jovial is now really nothing more than a painful reflection on the nature of his own naïveté from years gone by. Hamlet comes to discover that his entire back story is a lie, a coddled illusion of protection and worthiness, neither of which he no longer has. (Like I said, if you are gonna go Shakespeare, you are going to go deep.)

Cinder-Smella is an orphan, Teddy (from Homeboyz) once lost a close friend to the violence of the streets, and Maureen (from Nerd Girls) has a history of embarrassing herself at school in highly comical ways which causes her to feel like a perpetual social outcast. All three harbor pain.

Good stories deepen character, raises the emotional stakes of the plot and better allow the audience into the inner world of the hero when they get to see the hurt from the past that the protagonist carries in their heart – despite the fact that the hero often tries NOT to give access to this part of their inner lives.

The back story hurt is the “I was hurt long ago, long before you even met me” type of moment for the audience. And it is so, so, so important. Why?

Because when you build relationships with people, when you build friendships, you start to learn things about folks that not everyone else gets to know.

As a result, you become more intimate.

Think about your own close friends. Do you not know something about them that many, many other people do not? And does this not make you feel closer to them in some way? More attached and more vested in their well-being.

More tomorrow on The Back Story Hurt…

The other day I realized that I’ve been writing for over 30 years. And I have been studying the art of writing for over 25 of them. And now that I am at a place where I am a professional writer (I’ve fulfilled publishing contracts for 16 different projects and am currently working on more) I’ve come to the very dangerous conclusion that, “By goodness, I gotta kinda know some stuff by now, don’t I?”

Well, despite scores of written work that might prove evidence to the contrary, I’ve decided that a cool little project for me would be to kind of riff for the next few months on, well, writing.

See, my own writing education was piecemeal. Mostly, it was self-directed even though I majored in English in college and took a boatload of Creative Writing classes, as well. I’ve read scores of books on writing and yet, I still read new ones all the time. Why? Cause even if I can just find one nugget in a $17.95 book that illuminates something about the craft for me in a way which can benefit my work, I consider that a steal. (Often, however, I gotta admit, there are a lot of charlatans out there selling “How to Be a Writer” books which pretty much shock me in their lack of quality.)

But one universal thing I believe all writers encounter once they become published is that we are asked by folks, well, “How do I become an author?”

I figure I should frame some kind of answer to that. Will it be “the” answer? No way. Will it be a good answer? I certainly hope. But I do think there is something there, a quilt to be fashioned from all the patches I’ve absorbed over all the years I’ve been busting my own butt to learn how to do this.

Now, is everything teachable? Nah. Some cellists just know how to hit notes that others do not. (And I have to admit, when I see some of my favorite writers hit them and I realize that these notes are not in my own author bank, I get envious; but be who you are is also a really good lesson I’ve learned. Dystopian, futuristic fantasy, that’s not me. Character driven YA… much more in my wheelhouse.)

Yet, are there certain aspects which are teachable? Most definitely so. In fact, I don’t think one can ever discover they really have no talent for writing until they’ve been writing at the peak of their aptitudes for quite some time – and by that time, it’s usually too late to do something else anyway because most probably you will have already published a book (or 16 of them *wink-wink*).

So stay tuned, check back in, and feel free to take what’s worthwhile and junk the rest.

Riffing on Writing… methinks the time has come to set sail with this idea. Stay tuned.