Hope in the Mail

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  It didn’t take thirty books for me to learn this valuable lesson—I caught on after the first one: Good fiction can be seeded in reality but should be given the chance to grow beyond it. New writers especially find it hard to deviate from events as they actually happened, but learning to let go of reality is key. When we’re too tied to how things really were, our imagination is shackled.

  So pulling characters directly from my vault was a shortcut. What I would recommend instead is that you springboard from what’s stored away inside yours and let your characters evolve into their own entities—something I will delve into more later. Because if you find that your story is following the plot and people of real-life events so closely it might be considered nonfiction, or if someone says, Hmm, you might want to get liability insurance, you probably should take a step back.

  Give your characters some room to grow.

  Let your story breathe on its own.

  True creative freedom begins with letting go.

  After I’d discovered that I loved writing in the voice of a kid, the next character I began developing was a teen sleuth I named Samantha (Sammy) Keyes.

  This time, I had no specific person in mind when I envisioned the character. Sammy was a hybrid of my past and my present. At this point I was a high school teacher, and Sammy became a sort of amalgamation of people and traits and was definitely influenced by the students in my classroom. Skateboard, high-tops, jeans, a quick wit, and attitude…that’s where I began.

  And what kind of kid was she?

  Poor. I knew that much. I also knew she lived in a bad part of town in a seniors-only highrise with her grandmother. I knew that she felt abandoned by her mother, that her father was a mystery, and that she felt trapped by her difficult circumstances.

  At the beginning of writing a book, you may think you know your main character, but the key to creating without cardboard is to acknowledge that—as with people in real life—it will take time and effort to really get to know them.

  So this time, instead of moving old friends around the page, I opened my heart up to a new one and allowed her to grow on me.

  I liked Sammy from the get-go. And spending time with her—getting to know her—was something I looked forward to each day. I found myself thinking about her and her story all the time. So much so that as Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief wrapped up, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

  She’d become a friend I wanted to spend more time with.

  But as with any new friendship, you can’t be sure how long it will last. At the time, I had no way of knowing that Sammy and I would evolve together through eighteen books. At the time, all I knew was that there were big things in her life that weren’t settled. Sure, she’d solved the mystery and gotten back at her archenemy—the sneaky and vindictive Heather Acosta—which was all very satisfying. But she was still living illegally with her grandmother, her mother was still MIA, and she still didn’t know who her father was.

  So I kept thinking about her.

  And she kept growing on me.

  And so I began working on Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man, a story that sprang from something kids in my classroom were whispering about—the same thing kids whispered about every year as Halloween approached: doing a ding-dong-ditch at the Bush House.

  The Bush House was considered the spookiest house in town, which was actually kinda pathetic. There was no peaky-pointy roof, no creaky sounds or slamming shutters, no bats in the belfry. It didn’t even have a belfry. It was a little box of a house much like the one my husband and I were renting, only completely obscured by bushes.

  Ooooh. Spooky.

  The Bush House was located only a couple of blocks down the street from us, and I ran by it all the time, sometimes with a child in the baby jogger and our two big Siberian huskies in tow, sometimes by myself. You really couldn’t see the house for the bushes, which started at the sidewalk and grew taller toward the structure, but still. Why was the ring-and-run thing such a thing?

  Having overheard my students plotting, I decided to try to put a stop to their plans. “Please,” I said, “just leave that poor man alone.” I told them how I’d heard he’d become reclusive after his wife had died and that he’d just given up on things.

  But one of the students said, “Oh, Ms. Van Draanen, haven’t you heard? He murdered his wife!”

  “Yeah,” another chimed in. “He murdered his wife, and he lives in that house eating rats!”

  “Rats? And murder?” I squealed. “Who believes that?”

  Well, they did.

  During school, I was not connecting this in any way to Sammy Keyes. And that night, when I was out on my own for a little sanity jog and came upon the Bush House, I was still thinking only of the kids in my classroom. And, a little stewed about their ridiculous need to ding-dong-ditch a poor, depressed man, I made an impulsive move.

  I cut up the walkway to go meet the Bush Man myself.

  My plan was to explain that the kids in my classroom harassed him because they thought he was a rat-eating monster who’d murdered his wife, and ask him what had really happened so I could relay it to them and maybe put a stop to the stupid ding-dong-ditch thing.

  I was still not thinking about Sammy Keyes. I was simply preoccupied with how to word things politely.

  And then suddenly, I found myself in darkness.

  The bushes had become thick and tangled, connecting overhead to create a craggy tunnel. It was like someone had clicked off the streetlights, and there was no light coming from the house. The temperature also seemed to have dropped. A lot! What had seemed like out-of-control-but-not-at-all-scary bushes from the sidewalk were now thick, thorny claws reaching out to grab me.

  My mind went into panic mode. These were no longer bushes, they were BOOOOSHES! And I started thinking there might be an ax murderer in these BOOOOSHES who was going to hack me into little bits and hide me in the BOOOOSHES and I’d never see my babies, ever again!

  So, yeah. I chickened out.

  But as I was thinking about the incident later, picturing my students getting up to the door, that’s when Sammy Keyes appeared in my mind. That’s when my writer’s imagination kicked in. I could just see Sammy and her friends making it all the way up to the Bush House door, but when they get there, whoa! There’s no electricity. How can you ding-dong-ditch when the doorbell doesn’t work? But they sure don’t want to have made it so far and fail. So, bam, bam, bam, they pound on the door.

  Only the door’s not latched, and it creeeeeaks open.

  And inside they see…

  Well, you get the idea. I took the teens, the house, the fear, the mischief, reworked them and infused them into a story. And as it unfolded, I discovered things about Sammy—the depth of her kind heart, the way she can muster strength and bravery when faced with danger…or mean kids at school. And as I spent more time with her, she became more and more real to me.

  At this point in my life I had a one-year-old and a three-year-old and I was working full-time. I had a standard school schedule; my husband had Tuesdays and Wednesdays off and worked weekends. It was a constant juggle, and the only time we weren’t working, writing, or parenting was Thursday nights, when we had a standing date to watch Seinfeld.

  Sammy was on my mind first thing in the morning, when I’d steal some time to write before the kids woke up, and at night after the kids were in bed. I thought about her when I was driving, jogging, vacuuming….I did chores puzzling out plot and imagining scenes in my mind.

  With each day she was becoming more and more real to me.

  And then one morning, about halfway through the writing of Skeleton Man, I woke up with a little bit of a song playing through my head. The melody was kind of bluesy and went, Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy…Through the darkness, I actually said, “Who are the Sisters of Mercy, and what are they doing singing in
my head?”

  Sammy Keyes had fully invaded. I saw her, heard her, felt her everywhere, and now she’d moved into my dreams, presenting me with new characters in her world.

  Who were these Sisters?

  As I moved forward in my day, they followed me, growing brasher and wilder in my imagination. By the end of the day, I knew they weren’t your average nuns in habits or sensible gray skirts. These were wild nuns. Ones who wore purple feather boas and purple spandex pants and put on rock ’n’ roll shows to raise money for the homeless.

  And with these new characters, a whole new story idea for Sammy was shaping up in my mind.

  The evolution of this is valuable in that it illustrates how fictional characters can invade an author’s world and create a sort of alternate universe, one that houses characters who feel so real to the writer that they come across as real to the reader.

  So let your characters in. Make the effort to spend quality—and quantity—time with them. Let them dance around your mind. Let them occupy your heart.

  Only then will they come alive on the page.

  It’s not just that the more time you spend with characters, the better you know them and the more real they seem; it’s also that they take on a life of their own.

  Which is always weird.

  Weirder still is the realization that your characters have begun influencing you.

  How can that be, when we’re the ones controlling them? It becomes a huge mental Möbius strip. And although the goal is to make yourself invisible in the story so your reader forgets who’s moving the plot and people along, it’s truly strange when your character turns things around on you.

  The first time this happened to me was while I was writing Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy. It was the weekend, a late fall evening. My husband was at work. The huskies were in the backyard. I was home with our kids (who were now two and four years old), catching up on housework.

  I remember being up to my elbows in suds, doing the dishes and running through some plot scenarios for Sisters of Mercy in my mind. So far in the story, Sammy had discovered that there was a girl about her age living alone in a camouflaged cardboard box on the outskirts of town. At the moment, Sammy was trying to figure out some way to help her. She didn’t want to risk going to the police—her relationship with the grumpy and suspicious Officer Borsch was already hazardous to her own living situation. Plus, the homeless girl was furious with Sammy for following her, and adamant that she not tell anyone about her. A runaway from bad foster care, she was terrified of being placed back in the system. And Sammy couldn’t exactly invite the girl to stay at the Senior Highrise with her—she wasn’t supposed to be living there herself!

  Still, Sammy was determined to help her. Rain was in the forecast. She had to figure out something.

  So, there I was, at the sink, deep into visualizing the next scene, when someone knocked on the front door.

  The kids zipped over and looked out the window. “It’s a lady!” my four-year-old announced.

  I dried my hands and opened the door, and through the heavy security screen I saw a woman about my age wearing a loud pink dress and dirty sneakers. Her face was deeply tanned and weathered, and she was carrying a bulging pillowcase.

  I’d had enough homeless people on my porch to recognize the signs. And I guess she’d had enough doors closed in her face to recognize those signs.

  “Wait!” she said, reading my mood. “I was just hoping you would dry my clothes. They’re washed, I promise!” She looked out at the cloudy sky. “There’s just not enough daylight left to dry them outside, and I really want to get out of this dress.”

  I had a kid wrapped around each leg, peering at her from behind me. I had my own laundry to do and dry. And who knew if there were lice in her clothes? Could lice survive the wash? Wait. There was no Laundromat nearby, so how had her clothes even been washed?

  My experience with the homeless was uneven. Who knew anything about this situation? Maybe this was a trick? I had my kids to protect!

  And that’s when a little voice in my head said, Sammy wouldn’t close the door. Sammy would help her.

  And that was the moment my character started moving me around.

  “Go to your room,” I commanded my kids, and when they scurried off, I went outside to better assess the situation.

  She hefted the pillowcase. “They’re clean, I swear.”

  I pointed to the bench on our porch. “Sit right there.”

  When I took her pillowcase, she let out a huge breath. “Oh, thank you!”

  I went inside. I closed and locked both doors. I loaded her clothes in our dryer and put the heat on high. Then I got back to the dishes.

  Which felt absurd.

  This poor woman, out at dusk in the gathering cold in a bright pink dress, looking for a way to dry her clothes. I wasn’t ready to invite her in, but I could at least go out, maybe offer her something to eat?

  First I let the dogs inside. Then I checked on the kids. Then I went outside, leaving the front door open and the security screen closed.

  “Beautiful dogs,” she said as I sat down on the porch step. “Your kids, too.” And before I could reply, she said, “I have two boys about their ages. They took them from me, but…” She fought against tears, and I did too. And for the next forty-five minutes I hung out on the porch with her. The kids eventually came out, as did the dogs.

  There was food involved, but it wasn’t a party or anything. The whole time, there was an obvious wariness on both our parts. She let on that she spent nights with a few other people behind some bushes near the mall, but the walls went up when I asked her about social services. She was not interested in discussing it or having me try to connect her with help. She just wanted her clothes.

  When they were dry and back in her pillowcase, I handed them over and asked, “Do you have a jacket somewhere?” because there wasn’t one in the clothes I’d dried.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said. “I just layer up.”

  I couldn’t imagine nights in the bushes without a jacket, so I made her wait while I decided which one of the three I owned I wanted to give her. She was completely jazzed to get my teal Lands’ End, and she put it on right away.

  Then she left, teal jacket over bright pink dress, stuffed pillowcase in hand.

  Already in Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy, Sammy had had a revelation about her living situation. Up until she’d discovered the homeless girl living in the cardboard box, she had grumbled about how bad things were for her—how she had to sleep on her grandmother’s couch and sneak in and out of the building, how everything she owned had to fit in her grandmother’s bottom dresser drawer….She was definitely disgruntled.

  But on the walk home from following the girl to her cardboard box, Sammy starts to see her own situation in a new way: Maybe she has to sneak home via a fire escape, but at least she has a roof over her head. At least she has a couch to sleep on. At least she has a grandmother who looks out for her and loves her.

  And in a parallel-universe twist of the Möbius strip, as the homeless woman walked away, I saw my own situation in a new way: Maybe it was intermittently leaky, but at least I had a roof over my head. At least I had a jacket to wear, food to eat, and kids I could care for and hug.

  So maybe, like Sammy, I needed to focus on what I had, instead of what I was lacking.

  As future stories unfolded, I learned to listen to my characters more closely. I let them teach me to be braver, kinder, more patient, more reflective, even funny. As writers, we create characters, but they, in turn, can mold us into better versions of ourselves if we let them. It’s strange and surreal…and also truly awesome.

  As to the homeless woman in pink, I never saw her again.

  And I’m sure she has no idea that Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy is dedicated to her.


  I had completed three Sammy Keyes mysteries and still didn’t have an offer on any of them.

  So I started on the fourth.

  Logical, right?

  Yeah…no. But here’s the thing: I felt I had to write it because Sammy did feel like a real person to me now. And although the mystery was resolved at the end of Sisters of Mercy, big things in Sammy’s life were still up in the air. And, most unsettling of all for me, she was carrying around a lot of not-so-buried anger. Even if the books would never be published, I couldn’t leave Sammy like that. For her to be okay, I knew she had to have a revelation about forgiveness that would help her deal with her anger.

  For her own sake, she had to find a way to forgive her mother for leaving her.

  So I started writing Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf, with the heart of both the story and the mystery centering around forgiveness.

  Back on the first page of chapter one of Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief, Sammy tells us that whenever she asks her grandmother why their nosy neighbor Mrs. Graybill is such a bitter old woman, her grandmother shrugs and says, “It happens to people sometimes,” and then changes the subject.

  Maybe Grams says that because she really doesn’t know much about Mrs. Graybill. Or maybe I was the one who really didn’t know enough about Mrs. Graybill, so how could Grams?

  Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf became a book of reckoning. Not for my characters, but for me. This is the book where I realized that a character’s backstory—their fairly detailed history—mattered. Even if it never made it onto the page, I needed to know each character’s history and their secrets. To truly understand the person they were, for their actions and evolution to make sense, I had to analyze their past.

  Also, in the first chapter of the first book a question had been posed about a character’s backstory that, three books later, still hadn’t been answered. That’s like introducing a weapon in your story and never using it. Why’d you put it in there? Good writing requires that you either remove it or use it.