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I’m wearing my favorite “Wantagh Grapplers” sweatshirt with the sweet cut-off sleeves and Incredible Hunk visuals.
Do I look tough? I might have thought so at the time.
I wrestled for one year at 92 pounds, did okay, and that was that.
Yes, a lot of hair.
I’m exactly twice that kid’s size today.
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I recently wrote a throwaway post on Facebook that got a surprising amount of attention. It was about soaking dishes. Yeah, wild, I know. I wrote a sentence that owed something, perhaps, to a specific moment in William Steig’s Doctor De Soto picture book.
I say “perhaps” because it’s hard to pin down where influences end and ideas originate. It spins in a circle, consciously and unconsciously. Who knows.
What I had written was: “I’m a pot and pan soaker. So was my father, and his father before him. It’s always been that way with my family.”
It made me remember De Soto and look up the scene:
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Forgive the blur. The good doctor informs his wife, “Once I start a job, I finish it. My father was the same way.”
So, sure, he does it far more economically & elegantly than I managed to on social media. In my defense, he’s William Steig writing a book and I’m only James Preller blasting out a few thoughts on Facebook.
Here’s the full text from the page in case the blur is too hard to read:
That night the De Sotos lay awake worrying. “Should we let him in tomorrow?” Mrs. De Soto wondered.
“Once I start a job,” said the dentist firmly, “I finish it. My father was the same way.”
“But we must do something to protect ourselves,” said his wife. They talked and talked until they formed a plan. “I think it will work,” said Doctor De Soto. A minute later he was snoring.
One comment before the main thing:
I’m as opposed to adverbs as the next guy, probably more, but “firmly” sure does a lot of good work in that phrase, said the dentist firmly.
A clear signal. There would be no debate. This strikes me as that rare thing: a good adverb.
Something interesting happens on this page, where “scene” meets “summary.”
We are in a scene from the beginning, of course, announced by those two words: That night. It’s a variation on the “one day” trope of so many picture books: things are always so until . . . one day something happens. Story begins with scene.
We find ourselves with the De Sotos, flies on the lavender wallpaper, listening to them discuss the mortal danger of treating the fox’s toothache. Then comes that great sentence:
They talked and talked until they formed a plan.
The camera doesn’t move to a new perspective, it just pulls back and suddenly there’s a great distance. We are transported to the land of summary: They talked and talked until they formed a plan.
I wonder how Steig arrived at this sentence. Did he try to write out that full conversation in early drafts? Did he wrestle with it for days, weeks? Did he worry about the length, the slowness, the slog? This was intended, after all, for a 32-page picture book. There wasn’t time to waste. It could be that Steig immediately went to summary, instinctively knowing that he had to keep the plot moving forward.
So there’s this: Summary allows the writer to play with time.
The writer can make time move quickly, cross decades in a single sentence, or can slow it down to a drip, drip . . . drip. Even slower than real time.
In my current work-in-progress, a middle-grade novel tentatively titled Shaken (Macmillan, 2024), I decided to make a leap of four months from one chapter to the next. Those four months occur in the gap between those two chapters, the way that in a comic or graphic novel there’s a sliver of time in the spaces between each panel. This leap required a sentence or two of summary. Time passed. Winter turned to Spring. That kind of thing (but not those words).
Aside: Do you ever notice, btw, how very young children are unable to summarize when they recount, say, a movie they just watched? it’s always: and then, and then, and then, and then, etc. The art of summary is really about prioritizing. Recognizing what’s significant and what isn’t. Elmore Leonard’s great rule for writing: “Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.”
Let me make up an example on the spot:
He spent the summer working on the cabin, rising early and laboring until dark, while the loneliness filled up inside him. One September day, there was a knock on the door . . .
Summary –> Scene. The storyteller (and his listeners, one assumes) is not interested in all those dull empty days of summer. That part is boring. Let’s skip it. So the storyteller makes time fly by, an entire summer in a sentence.
Then there’s a knock at the door.
Time slows to a crawl.
He pauses, uncrosses his legs. Puts down the novel — Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men — spine up on the end table. He gazes out the window. The last light of evening had long ago died. A faint drone of tree frogs pressed against the panes. Who could it be at this hour? Should he rise to answer it? He coughs, and waits.
Anyway, yeah, it’s cool how Steig pulls that off in the middle of a scene — a sentence of summary, omitting at least an hour of discussion — before he returns us right back to that same “moment” (without ever moving the camera; the focus just gets tighter).
He ends the page with another great understated sentence.
A minute later he was snoring.
A minute has passed in the distance from a period to the capital letter of the next sentence. A minute later. And lo, the good doctor is asleep! Resolved and at peace. Troubled no more. The plan has been set and he needs his rest.
I’d turn the page, right?
Wouldn’t you?
What is the plan, anyway?
Steig didn’t tell us. He withholds. That’s actually another technique worthy of discussion. The vital importance of being clear, and answering questions for the reader as soon as possible (to avoid confusion), but also to recognize the value of not answering every question.
How those unanswered questions can prod the reader to do the single best thing that any reader can ever do — turn the page.
William Steig was a writer who knew what he was doing.
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My local newspaper, The Albany Times-Union, just ran a feature article about me.
Yes, I find that vaguely horrifying but also a good thing, I suppose.
It’s nice to be seen.
It’s funny, in this business people will commonly say things like, “If this book reaches just one kid, impacts just one child, it’s all worth it.”
And I always think: Yeah, no.
I’d like to reach a lot more than that.
Articles like this help.
Thank you, good folks at the Times-Union newspaper for making this happen. Just one question: What’s a newspaper?
Ha, ha, ho. Sorry, that hurts.
Naturally, it took me 48 hours before I could actually force myself to read Jim Shahen’s piece. Today I wrote and thanked him for making me not look too much like a total blithering idiot. Some writer!
Anyway, perhaps my out-of-town fans will enjoy reading this . . .
His most recent work, the middle-grade mystery-thriller “Exit 13: The Spaces in Between,” came out at the end of July. “The Spaces in Between” is the second installment in the “Exit 13 series” (Preller describes it as a hybrid of “Schitt’s Creek” and “Stranger Things”) which tells the story of siblings Willow and Ash McGinn. On a family vacation, they’re forced to stop at the Exit 13 Motel where spooky mystery surrounds the business and its employees. Various confounding events to keep the family from checking out and resuming their trip, forcing the McGinn kids (and their goldendoodle Daisy) to get to the bottom of it all, lest they stay stuck at the Exit 13 forever.The quick-paced, supernatural series is a tonal departure from “Upstander,” the book Preller released immediately preceding “Exit 13.” That one deals with the heavier issues of having a sibling struggle substance abuse and being a participant in bullying. For Preller, being able to explore different genres, themes and difficulty levels has been crucial in enabling him to sustain his writing career.
“I published my first book in 1986; I was 25 then, and I’m 62 now. I’ve spent more than half my life as a published author,” said Preller. “It’s kind of a lot, when you think about it. I’m a little unusual in the breadth of my work. Whatever memo there is about branding yourself, I missed it.
“The master plan, to the extent that I have any control over it, is to write quasi-literary middle-grade novels, but also have something more commercial for mass-market release,” he continued. “I’m a survivor, I just keep scrambling around and I’m fortunate to keep coming up with new material.”
A Long Island native, Preller was drawn to children’s literature shortly after graduating from SUNY Oneonta in 1983. Upon graduating, he moved to New York City and waited tables at Beefsteak Charlie’s to make ends meet while seeking lofty literary goals.
Soon after, he got a job at Scholastic and his professional ambitions took a turn.
“I liked to write poems and took myself very seriously, but poetry wasn’t going to pay the bills at all, plus, I wasn’t very good at it,” he recalled. “I got hired as a junior copywriter at Scholastic and I saw ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ I realized what a kids’ book could be: anything. A world of possibilities opened to me.”
In 1986, he sold, wrote and published his first book, the picture book “Maxx Trax: Avalanche Rescue” about a truck that takes action when an avalanche threatens to destroy the energy station and imperils his family.
“Maxx Trax” eventually sold 1 million copies and Preller’s writing career was underway. He left New York City for the space to start a family in a more affordable climate here in Albany County. From a work standpoint, Preller’s output was varied, writing a mix of early readers and film adaptations — “Space Jam,” “The Iron Giant” and “Godzilla” — for Scholastic. From 1998-2007 or so, he struck gold with the 42-book “Jigsaw Jones” series. Since then, Preller has balanced the lighter, preschool-and-elementary-aged material with books that reflect more serious themes.
If there’s a throughline from “Maxx Trax” to something like “Upstander,” it’s that Preller tries to base all his work in reality. For his first middle-grade novel “Six Innings,” he relied on his own family’s experience with pediatric cancer as a reference. To add verisimilitude to the mountain hiking-based “Blood Mountain,” he regularly corresponded with a park ranger in Lake Placid. Even “Maxx Trax,” has a real-world connection: Maxx, like Preller, is the youngest of seven siblings.
“Every book is different and has its own challenges,” he said. “A lot (of the interest in mid-grade literature) was my own children getting older and wanting to write some things with a little more depth and grit in their content. I can go into deeper things than I can with ‘Exit 13’ or (the spooky story series) ‘Scary Tales.’
“I tell kids when I speak at schools, that even if you aren’t writing about a human, whether it’s super-powered trucks like Maxx Trax or writing about a dragon or a wombat, you’re still drawing upon your own emotions and experiences,” Preller added.
With the new “Exit 13” out in stores, Preller is now looking ahead. He has four more books under contract — a middle-grade novel dealing with a student-athlete coping with post-concussion syndrome and three picture books — that will keep him busy well into next year. And there’s another idea or two percolating for beyond then.
If Preller has it his way, he’ll sustain this level of activity for years to come, and hopefully continue inspiring kids to read.
“I’m 62 and live in a town with a lot of state workers who are retiring,” he said. “Do I want to still be publishing new books at 75? Absolutely.
“I have no ideas or high hopes when a book comes out and I’ve learned to let go of the outcomes,” Preller continued. “I’m very aware that this is entertainment and I just want to give the reader the best possible experience, so they’ll go, ‘Oh, I’ll read another book.’ ”
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In her most excellent book, Still Writing, Dani Shapiro talks about “writing in the dark”:
“There is only one opportunity to write in complete darkness: when you’re at the beginning. Use it. Use it well. The loneliest day in the life of a published writer may be publication day. Nothing happens. Perhaps your editor sends flowers. Maybe not. Maybe your family takes you out for dinner. But the world won’t stop to take notice. The universe is indifferent. You have put the shape of your soul between the covers of a book and no one declares a national holiday. Someone named Booklover gives you a one-star review on Amazon.com.
So what is it about writing that makes it — for some of us — as necessary as breathing? It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive. Time slips away. The body becomes irrelevant. We are as close to consciousness itself as we will ever be. This begins in the darkness. Beneath the frozen ground, buried deep below anything we can see, something may be taking root. Stay there, if you can. Don’t resist. Don’t force it, but don’t run away. Endure. Be patient. The rewards cannot be measured. Not now. But whatever happens, any writer will tell you: This is the best part.”
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I agree with Dani Shapiro.
But here we are.
Publication Day. A kind of death.
One other thought that I had recently:
Writers don’t finish books, readers do.
Thank you for your interest, your time, your support.
Exit 13: The Spaces In Between, now available in bookstores, etc. This is the second book in the “Exit 13” series by Scholastic.
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