I learned to read because of envy. Some little girl in my pre-kindergarten class walked in one day, waving a Little Golden book like it was a fan. During show-and-tell she read aloud to the class. The teachers all went nuts. How smart she was, how sweet she was and wasn’t she wonderful to entertain the other children? Phooey. A show-off in a pinafore is what she was and I wasn’t interested in being her audience. I buckled down to understanding the Little Bear books Mom had been reading aloud and soon there were two readers in my Pre-Kindergarten. With a little help from Dr. Seuss, I left Blondie behind in the dust. Since then, I’ve read most things with ease. The thing is, even a talent for reading won’t make every book easy and some worthwhile works require effort. I found that out in high school when we were assigned Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and all those Russian characters were confusing me. That is also where I learned the single greatest reading trick. When you sit down to read a challenging work, have something close you can write on. Let me go back to “The Cherry Orchard” This play may be instantly comprehensible…
I remember a few things about my first trip to Disneyland. I loved riding the flying elephants with my Dad and I screamed all the way through the Sleeping Beauty castle, terrified that Maleficent would appear. I don’t recall much more of that day but memories are like overstuffed closets; if you pull out one or two items, you’ll be surprised what you’ll find underneath. The hero in The Ocean at the End of the Lane has similar holes in his memories. He’s driving down roads he doesn’t remember to a childhood home destroyed long ago. Some neighbor ladies remember him and, at his request, take him to a duckpond behind their farmhouse. He stands by the pond, remembers someone called it “an ocean” and the memories crash in like a wave. Water’s important in this story, as is memory, and all the things we don’t know. As a child, our hero knows he was lonely but he doesn’t know what makes loneliness bad. So, other children play with each other while he stays inside and reads books. What’s wrong with that? His parents said they’ve lost their money but what he knows is they’ve rented out his bedroom; he’s not really…
Picasso’s Don Quixote If there’s a central bit of advice I’ve heard or can give, it’s “Don’t Give Up.” Don’t give up working, don’t give up trying, and don’t give up on anything if it gnaws at your soul. If you want to put something new into the world, you have forget giving up. Successful people know, first hand, how hard it is to succeed. The process involves a lot of failure and mistakes and they developed the fortitude to keep trying until they got it right. Once, I was disheartened to read F. Scott Fitzgerald rewrote some pages twenty times; now I wonder how he made his prose that good after only nineteen revisions. To make something of quality takes a kind of tenacity comparable to OCD. If you want to make something good, get used to the work it involves. Don’t Give Up. It takes another type of resilience to find the people interested in publishing your work. There are all kinds of venues looking for creative people but few of them will be interested in you. Your precious creation will be too long, too short, too old-fashioned, too avant-garde and mostly not what they’re looking for. Your…
There are stories that pass through your brain and leave, unnoticed and unmissed. Others are like summer romances that hold you until there’s a change in the weather. And there are stories you find by chance that stay with you forever. I’ve been rereading Bag of Bones for fifteen years now and I believe I’ve fallen in love to stay. That’s good because love is a driving force in this book, along with death and in a New England summer. Stephen King turned into a writer sometime while my back was turned. A first, he was a commercial success and a critic’s nightmare come true. I couldn’t stand his early prose, so I ignored him. Then one August day I was combing the shelves, craving a good ghost story. (Ghost stories and haunted houses are DOCs of mine.) This book was on the shelf and I was desperate enough to try anything, even a book by Stephen King. It hit like a tidal wave. Mike and Joanna Noonan have the marriage we lesser mortals crave. They like and understand each other and she knows when to deflate his ego. Not that Mike needs much deflating. He’s one of King’s Everymen,…
Everyone, from my college advisor on down, will tell you I love tales with orphan heroes. You name them: Oliver Twist, Harry Potter, Tensy Farlow, the Baudelaire children, I fell in love with each and every one of those books. (Well, I hated the ending of the Baudelaire series, but that’s another story.) The thing is, there are orphans and then there are orphans and they aren’t really alike. To explain what I mean, look at one of the most famous kid books to come out of the 19th century: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. You can’t get past the first page without learning Tom’s parental status. Aunt Polly’s first soliloquy says, “he’s my own sister’s boy, poor thing, and I ain’t got the heart to lash him.” So, Tom is an orphan but he doesn’t really fit the mold. Orphan heroes are usually vulnerable kids who miss the love and security of a stable home. They tend to grow up fast because they have to and any tendency toward mischief has been knocked right out of them. Can you think of anyone less like that than Tom Sawyer? Tom and his siblings may be orphans but they’ve never lacked…