Archive for Readings

Writing Tips #2: A Look at One Page from DOCTOR DE SOTO by William Steig (Scene & Summary)

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:

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.

CLICK HERE for Writing Tip #1.

Annals of Bad Ideas: Children’s Book Division!

Two things upfront:

1) Jean Craighead George is an absolute legend in the field of children’s books, considered one of the all-time greats, deservedly so;

2) This book from 2003, however, was a bad idea.

Well, not the book, actually. Jean Craighead George is a brilliant writer and a keen, informed naturalist. A book about the language of cats makes a lot of sense. But somewhere along the line, somebody — an art director? — came up with a nutty idea.

And nutty is good, right? To be playful and silly and fun? Um, right?

Usually that’s okay. There’s always room for bad ideas. Because over time, they get weeded out. People come to their senses. Like this book cover, for example:

 

I’m sorry, but that’s just wrong. 

Of course, we can understand how misguided ideas occur in the beginning. But you’d think that eventually, sooner or later . . . somebody would . . . 

Oh, nevermind.

Here’s Jean’s book, How To Talk To Your Cat

 

I imagine the conversation went something like this . . .  

Art Director: “Hey, you know what would be soooooo cool? We could take photos of Jean interacting with cats and . . .”

Editor: “Wait, real cats?”

Art Director: “No! Illustrated cats!”

Editor: “So, like, photos of Jean Craighead George — sometimes on all fours — combined with illustrations of cats? Have I got that right?”

Art Director: “Yes, that’s it exactly!”

Editor: “Genius! But how do we talk Jean into this?”

Art Director: “Leave it to me.”

Editor: “Oh no, you’re going to give her cat nip, aren’t you?”

Art Director: “I’ll slip it in her tea.”

Editor: “Anything else?”

Art Director: “Make sure Jean wears a big bangly necklace.”

 

I don’t know. Maybe it’s me. This is a book with 70 reviews on Amazon, averaging 4 1/2 stars. People love it. After all, it’s Jean Craighead George! She’s awesome. There’s great information in it, an engaging text, well organized, on a topic that any cat lover would find interesting. 

And the special effects are amazing.

 

A Paragraph from Rebecca Solnit’s ORWELL’S ROSES: “How Much He Recounted Enjoyment”

Hang with me here for a minute. Rebecca Solnit’s first sentence on page 24 from Orwell’s Roses is a doozy — it carries a lot of weight — and I was tempted to not include it here. A challenging task for a distracted blog scroller like yourself, and maybe not necessary to convey the main idea from this brief excerpt, but I decided to roll with it. Who am I to omit even one sentence from Solnit’s brilliant paragraph, now with freshly-drawn stars and exclamation points in the marginalia of my copy. I defer to her genius. 

Okay, here we go . . . 

 

Perhaps his relentless scrutiny of the monstrosities and underlying dangers in the present and the future defines him, but it’s also been used to characterize him as though he was what he saw, or that was all he looked at. I returned to his writing after the roses startled me, and there I found another Orwell whose other perspectives seem to counterbalance his cold eye on political monstrosity. One of the striking things was how much he recounted enjoyment, from many forms of the domestic comfort that might be called coziness to ribald postcards, the pleasures of nineteenth-century American children’s books, British writers like Dickens, “good bad books,” and a host of other things, and most of all animals, plants, flowers, natural landscapes, gardening, the countryside, pleasures that surface over and over again in his books all the way through Nineteen Eighty-Four‘s lyrical evocation of the Golden Country and its light, trees, meadows, birdsong, and sense of freedom and release. 

 

That’s it, that is all. The thought for the day. Amidst the ugliness and the horror — perhaps even because of it — Orwell consistently took pleasure in the beauty, the joys, that life continually offers us. He planted a rose garden when the world was on the verge of horrific warfare.

Madeleine L’Engle: I Am Still Every Age That I Have Been . . .

“I am still every age that I have been.
Because I was once a child, I am always a child.”

 

“Because I was once a searching adolescent,

given to moods and ecstasies,

these are still part of me, and always will be…

This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in

any of these ages…the delayed adolescent, the childish adult,

but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide…

Far too many people misunderstand what putting away childish things

means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel

and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old

or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old

means being grownup. When I’m with these people I, like the kids,

feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up,

then I don’t ever want to be one.

Instead of which, if I can retain a child’s awareness and joy,

and be fifty-one,

then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.”

-Madeleine L’Engle

The Blessed Unrest: On Teaching, Writing, Ted Williams, and Martha Graham’s Splendid Advice to Agnes de Mille

I’ve tried something new recently. I’m teaching an online class for Gotham Writers, “Writing Children’s Books: Level 1.”

I’m enjoying the experience, mostly because of the students. I find myself thinking about them a lot, how to structure a lesson, how best to respond to a wide variety of writing and ambitions. I suspect that if I calculated the pay per hour, I’d be making below minimum wage. But payment isn’t just about money, as we know. I’m getting things out of it, too. Inspiration, engagement, clarity, connection.

But how best to respond to student writing? I mean, sure, say something positive, say something constructive, be encouraging. That’s all pretty obvious & within my nature. My friend, a far more experienced teacher, told me that every writing student wants to get published. That’s the dream, the aspiration. Maybe I’ll write a book one day. Lots of people have that thought, and certainly most anyone taking a writing class. I don’t know why, but the notion surprised me. Could it be true? Probably yes, I guess. 

In life, we receive when our antenna is up; we absorb when we make ourselves spongey, receptive. When I came across an amazing quote by Martha Graham, I was ready to hear it. Her words clarified so much for me. The excerpt comes from Agnes de Mille’s 1991 biography, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham. At the time, de Mille was experiencing great uncertainty and dissatisfaction with her work, both in her own sense of it and how it was received by others. 

 

I talked to Martha. I remember the conversation well. It was in a Schrafft’s restaurant over a soda. I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent but no faith that I could be. Martha said to me, very quietly, “There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and (will) be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours. Clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself and your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open . . .  No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

 

Beautiful, right? 

And in so many different ways. 

I’ve decided, for my class, that there are essentially two paths open for me when responding to someone’s work. The first might be to address it from a publishing point of view. Discuss the marketplace, the types of things that are published, the “proper” length & format, things that are typically frowned upon by editors today, etc. All to help them realize the great & noble dream of publication. And I have pretty much zero interest in that type of instruction. I mean, there’s a whole cottage industry out there making promises to unpublished authors, “The 7 keys to becoming a bestselling author,” etc. I can’t help but suspect there’s a degree of flimflam to all that, snake oil salespersons preying on the innocent. Maybe that’s unfair. It’s surely good information to have at some point along the journey. But I’m not that guy.

As for the second path, yes, I can align myself with that. If I can encourage someone to express themselves, to tap that vein of creativity and authentic feeling, it seems worthwhile. One true thing. Help them in some small way to become better artists and writers. Because if you can do that, the “author” part just might follow. Eventually.

When the class started, I mentioned baseball legend Ted Williams. When asked about his goals for the upcoming season — Did he hope to bat for a .350 average? Mash 40 homers? — Williams replied, simply, that his goal was to put a good swing on the ball. Process over result.  

Here’s to putting a good swing the ball, folks. The rest will be what it will be. But somehow in the process you’ll express something of yourselves, get in touch with some meaningful memories, awaken the sleeping spirits that reside deep within, experience Martha Graham’s “blessed unrest” and possibly become a little more alive as you move through the days.

Oh, one line that I especially love in that whole thing?

It was in a Schrafft’s restaurant over a soda.

I admire the simplicity and directness of that sentence. In a passage full of spoken words and abstractions, that simple line grounds us in the reality of the scene. Two women talking in as ordinary setting as one could imagine. It is not easy for writers to leave a sentence like that alone: It was in a Schrafft’s restaurant over a soda. It seems too artless, too plain: the clever writer all too invisible. Of course, that’s the point. De Mille gets out of the way. She disappears. It was in a Schrafft’s restaurant over a soda. It’s all the reader needs.

So that’s the last thought bubbling up the straw. Companionship. Connection. Conversation. Two women, two artists, sitting together and supporting each other. Just talking. Maybe that’s the biggest lesson of all. Be there for each other.

Maybe it’s time to give that friend a call.