Hope in the Mail

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  Just like I do with a mystery that isn’t fairly plotted, I get annoyed when I read books with obvious patches. The explanation dump that accompanies the author’s need for a new character, or some unrevealed-until-now talent, or coincidental knowledge, or a convenient past experience…it always feels like a bad Bondo job to me.

  And I didn’t want an ugly patch in Sammy World.

  Ugh to Bondo!

  But…where was the solution? Everything I thought of felt like a cover-up. How could I have made such a stupid mistake?

  On a flight home from New York after my second “dress to kill” Edgar Awards banquet, where Sammy Keyes and the Curse of Moustache Mary was one of five nominees, I resumed agonizing over the fact that it was time to start the “April” book and I still didn’t know what I was going to do about the age issue. It had been a great few days in New York celebrating Sammy, but it was marred by knowing that I was harboring this terrible secret.

  It was a five-hour flight, I had a window seat, I was pretty exhausted, and it would have been easy to close my eyes and tell myself I’d figure it out later.

  But instead, I closed my eyes and forced my mind onto the issue. Every time it wandered off, I brought it back. And swirling around inside the batter of my mushy thoughts were Lana and her single-mother situation, her desire to be a star, and her lying about her age.

  She kept popping up. Like a lump in the batter that wouldn’t smooth out.

  Deceptive, self-absorbed, secretive Lana.

  Half the flight later I was nodding off when, ding, it happened. As we were cruising at thirty-five thousand feet above the earth, my mental oven popped open and there it was, the most beautiful, fully baked, brilliant solution.

  Bondo wasn’t even in the same universe as this solution!

  I gasped.

  I literally held my cheeks.

  And then I dove into my bag, pulled out a notebook, and started scribbling. By the time I landed in Los Angeles, I had Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen sketched out and was dying to get going on it.

  This idea—this solution—made it look like I had planned the age mistake. It made complete sense with the characters’ personalities and with the events up to that point and opened up a whole new story line for the series that would work great moving forward. No spoilers, but instead a useful nugget for any writer: Learn to explore the moral failings of your characters for plot devices and behavior motivators—it will open up new and interesting paths for you.

  I told myself that I would never spill the truth about having made the mistake, but here I’ve gone and told you, not just to advise you to look at things from a different angle, but also to warn you to be careful. Whatever you put into your first book, you will live with for the rest of the series.

  And also to stress that if you’re fortunate enough to gain an audience for a series of books, be aware that your readers may want to know things about the world you’ve built—things you have not yet considered. This is a huge compliment. It means they’re thinking about your world outside the story line you’ve presented. It means they care.

  Fans like that will find your mistakes, and when they do, they will not gleefully exclaim, Aha, I caught a mistake! Their suspended disbelief will come crashing down around them and they will be really disappointed—even upset—to think that they care more than you do.

  Bottom line: Series-building—world-building—is an honor not to be taken lightly. And in the event you do make a mistake, respect your readers by avoiding a sloppy patch. There is always a solution out there. Even if you have to go to thirty-five thousand feet to find it!

  When my sons were becoming independent readers, I was reintroduced to early chapter books. We’d spent lots of time with picture books, but the step up to books that were more text-heavy, with only the occasional black-and-white illustration, was a big one.

  I found that my sons had limited patience. Without illustrations to hold their interest, they would be upside down and backward on the couch, going, “But, Mom, it’s so boring!”

  “No, it’s not,” I would assure them. “Just sit here and give it a chance.”

  That was a tough sell. Once they’d decided that a book was boring, there was no convincing them otherwise. So back to the library I’d go, bringing home stacks of books, hoping I’d found some that spoke to my kids.

  Through this process, I started analyzing what worked for them and what didn’t. And it sent me back to remembering what had worked for me at that age and what hadn’t. When I was a kid, I “read to the illustration.” I wanted to know what it was about. I would tell myself to get to the picture, then take a break. Of course, often I’d keep going, but usually I’d read to something—the illustration, the end of a chapter, a break in the chapter…some marker that seemed like a good place to rest.

  My boys also helped me remember what made me want to stop reading when I was a kid. Besides the author taking too long to get into a story—long, descriptive paragraphs being the prime offender—the biggest culprit was coming upon a dense double-page spread of text.

  Too many words.

  It wasn’t just the two unillustrated pages of text; it was the density of that text. If what faced me was a wall of words, I got tired just looking at it and would want to stop. But if the pages had short, punchy paragraphs or back-and-forth dialogue, I could make it through and keep going.

  I didn’t look at it this way at the time, but it was the white space on the page that made me a stronger reader. It gave me the motivation to keep going, and made me feel proud of myself when I turned the next page.

  My sons inspired my Shredderman books, and when I began writing them, it was with a keen eye on creating stories that my kids and their friends would like.

  White space—check!

  Lots of action—check!

  Kid humor—check!

  Enough exclamation points to drive the literati crazy—check and double-check!!!

  Shredderman is the cyber-superhero alter ego of Nolan Byrd, a fifth-grade boy who power-walks, forgets that his socks are supposed to go inside his pant legs, and loves to nerd out on computers and science. He is also the favorite target of a big hulking bully named Bubba Bixby.

  Being around lots of kids Nolan’s age and having a son who was a science nerd with very little interest in ordinary tasks (like making sure his socks went on the proper side of his pant legs) got me into the groove of the character, and the project turned into a “quartet” of illustrated books. Each book is slightly longer than the previous one (to build those “reading muscles”). Shredderman’s influence expands with each title, spreading from Nolan’s school, to his town, to the country, and finally to the world.

  The books—and their antibullying message—were really well received, and the premise of a nerdy kid taking down a brawny bully by using his brains and a secret website he builds was enthusiastically embraced by critics and teachers.

  Time went by, and the internet—and how people use it—changed. Suddenly the bullies online were worse than the ones on the playground. And I started getting asked, How is what Nolan does any different from what Bubba does?

  Online bullying is an awful problem. And even though Nolan’s purpose for having his website is to do good—which includes getting Bubba to stop being mean to kids at school—and even though his site is a defense against an ongoing bullying problem, we don’t want to give kids the wrong idea regarding internet use.

  Here’s where having an underlying theme and an overarching story line to your series can save you. Because the Shredderman quartet isn’t just about stopping the bully.

  It’s about redemption.

  That doesn’t come into clear focus until book four (Enemy Spy), but when it does, concerns vanish. And the fact that the tech (and illustrations of it) is now outdated (e.g., bulky computer monitors) doesn’t matt
er either. Because the stories themselves appeal to kids, and the themes of finding the superhero inside you and standing up for yourself override them. And that the series is wrapped in the unifying theme of redemption helps it hold up over time.

  What will stay constant is the need to match budding readers with their interests and reading ability. So if you’re considering writing chapter books, make sure your vocabulary is appropriate, the sentence length and structure are accessible, and the design—including white space—appeals to kids.

  Then try out chapters on your intended audience. Pay attention to them. Are they engaged? Excited? Asking for more? If so, great. If not, listen to what they tell you. Pinpoint the place or the reason you lost them, and revise accordingly.

  If you’re fortunate enough to find yourself in a position where you’re being asked for a sequel to a book you’ve written, congratulations. And conventional wisdom says, Do it!

  It’s also just nice to have readers who are invested enough in your story to want a follow-up. I cannot even begin to count the number of times I’ve been asked for a sequel to Flipped. Who’d have guessed that a “small story” would grow to have such a large impact and become a feature film?

  Not me.

  The requests for a Flipped sequel have come from both kids and adults, and although some are downright demanding, most are very polite. And passionate. Pages and pages of passionate. Elaborate-suggestions-for-sequel-plots passionate. Begging-to-name-Bryce-and-Juli’s-future-babies passionate. Promising-me-their-kingdom (or at least their collection of Pez dispensers) passionate.

  The Pez offer was tempting. (There were pictures.) And the truth is, it would make great financial sense to write a sequel to Flipped.

  Yet, I have held out.

  This is not because I have a limited imagination or wouldn’t like the money. And it’s not because I don’t have a story in mind of what happens to Bryce and Juli. I do.

  It’s because I think it’s the wrong thing to do.

  With Flipped, I wanted to achieve a delicate balance of realistic and idealistic. And I like that the ending is an awakening. A sunrise. What’s ahead is up to Bryce and Juli, and we trust them now to make good choices.

  My hope was that the reader would close the cover and collect their thoughts. I wanted the story to linger in their mind, to settle in and help them reflect on their own relationships. Writing a sequel would obfuscate that purpose; it would spoon-feed an answer about the characters’ future, when what’s important is how the story impacts the reader’s future.

  What path do you want to take?

  What kind of people do you want at your side?

  Are you ready to find the courage to be true to yourself?

  Since for many of my readers applying these questions to their own life has been the impact of reading Flipped, I believe I’m making the right choice by not extending the story.

  Because sometimes a sequel subtracts.

  Even if the sequel is a great story, well executed, the net result can be less than the sum of the parts.

  There is no rule about sequels, and there are myriad reasons to write them (or not). So my best advice if you do find yourself in such a fortunate position is simply to remain clear on the purpose of your work and let that purpose guide you.

  The most common question I get asked is Where did you get the idea for that book? I used to assume that the person asking wanted to know generally how I develop ideas for the stories I write. You know, little tips and tricks to stimulate the imagination.

  But after I’ve given my best advice, the questioner usually persists. What they really want to know is how I got the idea for a particular, specific book.

  Which, no matter how often it happens, is always a little surprising to me. Maybe that’s because I don’t really want to know too much about an author’s personal thread in the story. It messes with the picture I’ve painted in my mind. It makes it so I can’t shake off the author’s presence, and the whole idea (in my opinion) of fictional work is that the reader becomes so absorbed in the story that they forget there’s an author at all.

  Also, an idea is not the story. An idea is the seed of a story, and I believe writers should be seed collectors. Not only should you gather ideas, but you should give them a chance to germinate in the fertile soil of your mind.

  Give. Them. Time.

  The hardy ones—the sustainable ones—will eventually push to the surface. When they do, warm them in the sunshine of your focus, care, and love, and they will bloom.

  Still, I find that people are really fascinated by a novel’s origin story. So what follows is a handful of those—ones selected to illustrate how ideas were planted in me, and how those ideas grew into stories. I hope you enjoy them, and I hope they will help you find new ways to recognize and nurture seeds of your own.

  Structure is not story. The idea of two sides to a story—boy’s side, girl’s side—is a mechanical device. The story is something completely different, and in the case of Flipped, it’s one about two kids learning to see each other for who they really are (instead of what they look like).

  It’s a story I wish I’d read when I was a kid.

  Or a teen.

  Or, shoot, an adult.

  As it was, it took me way too long to learn how to look beneath the surface of people. Especially guys. Like my friends, I would fall for the gorgeous ones.

  I will drop you now inside my Dark Era, take you back in time to my early twenties, when the Bad Stuff had happened and life seemed to be all about survival and digging a way out of the Pit of Despair. My family—Mom and “the kids”—were a tightly knit bunch then as we struggled to rise out of the literal ashes of an arsonist’s destruction of my parents’ factory while also grieving Dad’s death. We worked long, hard days that folded into weeks and stretched into years, but a sense of purpose kept us going.

  During the Dark Era, I learned a lot of skills. By necessity, I became a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, a roofer, a drywaller, a janitor, an accountant, and a heavy-equipment operator—and if you’ve ever read in one of my book bios that I was a forklift driver, this was the era of that.

  When we’d finally reached a point where we could hire people to help us, we weren’t very good at holding on to employees. And no wonder. The pay was lousy and the work was often labor-intensive. And there was the unspoken expectation that hired hands should be willing to work as hard as we did.

  We didn’t really understand how strange the dynamic was to outsiders. We were focused on the work, not on the fact that we were too young to be tackling this enterprise. I look back and see so many flaws in our reasoning and approach, but at the time it was all about helping our mother and doing what we could to not have our father’s life and legacy end on such a tragic note. We were worker ants, willing to get up early, pull on our boots and coveralls, hit the job hard, and keep at it for as long as it took, even if that meant sleeping on cots at the business and working weekends.

  What hired hand could live up to that?

  So employees came and they went; some were good and deserved better, others were just out of their element. And over time it became clear that we needed a different way to screen potential hires. Competency in basic math was important for the job, so the future teacher in me came up with the idea to have applicants complete the standard paperwork and also take a relevant math test. I constructed one, and while I was at it, I came up with a second test that had diagrams of equipment they’d be using with attendant questions asking fundamental things like which valves should be opened or closed to effect a specified change, or what a certain gauge indicated. You didn’t really have to know anything about the equipment; it was just applied logic.

  When the applicants turned in their paperwork, I jotted down little notes based on my initial impression of them. Nothing elaborate. Just one or two words li
ke polite, salesy, shifty…that sort of thing. And at the end of a very long day, I reviewed all the applications and graded the papers.

  The results were dismal. Scores were shockingly low on both tests, but the equipment diagram test was a disaster. There was only one applicant who had done well—really well, in fact. The trouble was the notation I’d jotted down about him.

  Hoodlum.

  I didn’t have to try to remember which applicant this was. I knew immediately. Long scruffy hair, full beard, tattered Levi’s jacket…and he smelled like cigarettes. I’d actually been anxious for him to leave. To me, he was scary. Almost menacing.

  The next-closest scores belonged to an applicant whose notation was Boy Scout. I remembered exactly who he was too, and in our family of Scouts, that description meant only good things.

  But his second-best scores didn’t compare to the Hoodlum’s.

  My brother had seen the Hoodlum drive off in an old primer-gray truck—loud, wide wheels, lots of junk on the dash, rock music blaring from the stereo. When I told him about the Hoodlum’s nearly perfect score, he said, “There’s no way we’re hiring that guy.”

  Enter the sibling dynamic. After a little back-and-forth about it, I started digging in, convincing myself that we should hire the Hoodlum. After all, what were we judging here? He’d scored great on the tests!

  The ensuing argument went something like this:

  Him: Forget it. We’re hiring the Boy Scout.

  Me: No, we’re hiring the Hoodlum.

  Boy Scout!

  Hoodlum!

  Boy Scout!

  Hoodlum!

  Boy Scout!

  Hoodlum!

  Eventually, as we always had before, we reached a compromise: We would hire both applicants. My brother would train the Boy Scout, and I would train the Hoodlum.