Virginia Zimmerman

Before I started writing, I knew authors drew on their personal experiences to create realistic fictions. I learned this lesson in the 5th grade when I first met Jo March in Little Women: in a famous example of the write-what-you-know doctrine, Jo is encouraged to give up writing fantastical tales and instead write stories about the real world. Of course, authors who specialize in fantasy also draw on what they know, which I think I learned around the same time, probably from Madeleine L’Engle.

Before I gave this issue much thought, I imagined that drawing on personal experience meant giving your main character a twin brother because you have a twin brother or setting your novel in a small college town just like the one in which you live yourself. And it does mean that. But it also means building worlds out of tiny, seemingly insignificant remarks, images, and events. Authors collect these bits of reality and store them away until they discover that one of those bits is just what a character or a scene or a story needs.

In The Rosemary Spell, when the main characters go to their school library, I had in mind the library at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna, VA. I have only visited this school once, and I spent only a short time in the library, but the layout of the space, the light on the tables, it was what I needed, so I pulled it out of my memory bank and put it in the fictional school my characters attend.

I am currently in the process of revising a different book, and revising means lots and lots of deleting. Today I deleted a favorite scene involving a pigeon on a subway platform. The characters are traveling through Barcelona, and really, I just need to get them from point A to point B, but in the draft, I allowed the journey to take awhile, and I lingered over several stops along the way, trying to create a sense of the city. In revision, I realized that the journey was taking too long, and I had to face the painful fact that the pigeon was superfluous. So I cut him.

But cutting the pigeon feels wrong, because he’s real. When I was in Barcelona with my family, we saw a pigeon on the platform. Like my deleted fictional pigeon, he was fiercely protecting his territory, chasing people away and successfully keeping for himself a surprisingly large circle of platform–one pigeon all alone against the constant flow of people. It impressed me. I remembered it. And when I needed an image to show how fierce a small somebody could be, I summoned the pigeon. I plopped him on the platform on my page, and I let him hold his perimeter there.

At first, in the moment when I pressed “Delete,” I imagined that by cutting the pigeon, I was defeating him, a sad thought when what most impressed me was his strength and resilience. After holding all those people at bay, he was just callously deleted by the simple push of a button.

Drawing from personal experience comes with a sense of obligation that can make revision challenging. I feel a strange debt to the reality I ransack as I make my fictional worlds. Yet even though I cut the scene, the pigeon’s not gone. He’s safely stowed in my memory waiting his turn. Perhaps he will have a part to play later in the novel, or maybe this isn’t the right book for him, but he’ll show up in another book one day. At the very least, he’s here in my blog, still holding his own.

In recent years, I have marked the launch of a new semester with a photo of the books that I will be teaching. The row of titles reminds me of what I must accomplish in the coming weeks, but, more importantly, it is a promise–a promise of great conversations to come, of surprising connections, of new ideas, of turns of phrase that I will savor long after the semester has ended.

This is the picture of the books I taught in fall 2013. I always put the semester’s books on a small shelf that sits next to my desk, within easy reach. I turn often to look at the spines and to reflect on what they promise. It occurs to me now that it is a luxury to know what I will read in a few weeks’ time–it’s almost a form of time travel. When I read the first book, I will have the fifth and the seventh and the last in mind. All the books come together in my imagination and help me make sense not only of each individual text, but of all aspects of my life during those weeks.

This semester, I am on sabbatical, which means that I am not teaching and will instead be using my time to write. I will be no less surrounded by books than when I am teaching–in fact, I expect I will read and re-read a wider range of texts–but I don’t know exactly which books will end up on my shelf. One book will remind me of another which will mention a third which will have influenced a fourth and so on. Following this chain of books is not unlike stepping through a door into a magical world–a central image for both my scholarship and my creative writing these days. The threshold sits solidly in front of me, but what lies beyond is an undiscovered country that I peer at with wonder and hope and even some thrilling trepidation.

So, I can’t post a picture of my bookshelf, but on this day (the first day of classes at my university, a day of beginnings for the teachers and students all around me) I will launch the semester with a picture of the books that form that threshold. If you look carefully, you will see that seven of these covers show portals of one kind or another. I can’t wait to see where they take me.

“The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.”
–Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

I am nearly finished reading The Golden Compass to my children. I love this book and have read it many times, but this is my first time reading it aloud. Reading aloud makes you read slowly, and speaking the words allows you to notice them and sink into them and savor them. Pullman’s words are delicious, and as I consume them, I realize how they have consumed me. I keep discovering phrases and ideas that, during earlier, quiet readings, I folded into my world view.

One such idea is the one in the quotation at the start of this post: to let an idea develop, you must let it shimmer, and you must leave it alone. You should look away and think about something else. This is excellent life advice, but I believe it is especially appropriate for writers. If we look directly at our ideas, they might dart away, or they might freeze and stare sullenly back and grow dull. Looking away from ideas allows them to float where they will and catch the light and become something. Looking away might be the best way to find what we need.

The trick is knowing when to look back. You don’t want the bubble to burst, but you also don’t want it to drift away and shimmer all on its own with no one to see it and wonder at it. Pullman says that Lyra doesn’t look at the idea directly, and I think that’s the key. You need to look at something else, but you also need to keep the idea ever so slightly in view, just at the edge of your imagination. In this way, you will notice when the idea is ready to be faced head on.

I’ve been looking away from an idea for a few weeks now, and it shimmers at the edge of my mind, reminding me that it’s still there. I think it’s ready. I think I’ve waited long enough, and now the idea waits for me.

It catches my eye. I look right at it. It doesn’t burst, and it shimmers still.

How do you know when your book is finished? I asked this question last month at the wonderful Highlights Foundation Whole Novel Workshop, and answers ranged from the practical, such as a deadline imposed by a publisher, to the abstract–an inarticulate shrug that confirmed my suspicion that this is a question faced by all writers, a question with no certain answer.

Of course, a writer knows how her story ends, and once she writes that end, she’s achieved a first level of finished, but there are so many more levels. Are the characters rich and quirky? Are there any holes in the plot? Are there continuity problems? Is the action paced appropriately? Does the writer lean in when she should and race along when she should and shift from leaning to racing in ways that satisfy the reader? Are all the sentences lovely? Is the voice true? Each of these questions can lead to a full round of revision.

Revision means to see again, or to see anew. Every time a writer sees her book again, she discovers ways to make it better. Walt Whitman revised his masterpiece Leaves of Grass again and again over four decades. In his opinion, the book was never finished. But most authors publish and move on to the next book. Somehow, they come to the end and don’t go back again to the beginning. So, how do they know when it is finally time to type “The End” on the final page?

I think every writer will have a different answer, I suspect writers discover the answer is different for each book. For me, for now, I know I’m at the end because I’ve gotten to a point with my manuscript where all I’m doing is moving furniture around. I’m not crafting anything new. I’m shifting phrases from here to there, reorganizing bits of dialogue, and tinkering with diction. Metaphorically speaking, I’m trying the chair out in a different corner, deciding it looked better in its original spot, and carrying it back, adjusting the angle, wiping away a crumb. Stepping back to study the effect and agreeing with myself that it was worthwhile seeing the chair in a different spot, but it belongs back where it was.

I am not saying that a wise reader couldn’t bustle in and redecorate to great effect, but my ability to see my own work has reached its limit. I am ready to collapse into the chair, right where it is, and settle down, at least for now, with the knowledge that I’ve written a pretty good book.

This is the computer I’ve had since 2010. It’s traveled the world–Catalunya, the Oregon Coast, Orkney–and it’s been my companion as I’ve traveled deep into my imagination. On this unassuming machine, I wrote three novels and began a fourth. This keyboard has transformed the images in my mind into letters and sentences and chapters. It has performed a sort of techno-alchemy–its careful combination of metal bits able to produce fiction, which is better than gold.

Of course, I’m the one producing the fiction, but like writers since the dawn of time, I require an instrument in order to get my ideas on to a page. Whether a chisel or a quill or a pen or a typewriter, the instrument holds a special place in the writer’s heart. And in the hearts of the readers who love their works. I have a photo in my office of Jane Austen’s writing desk. Last year, I saw Charles Dickens’ ink pot. Imagine if we had Shakespeare’s quill. The instruments people write with become important artifacts, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a computer in a display case, with a reverent label–“So-and-so wrote here”–and awestruck readers gathered round. The computer seems to be an unmagical writing instrument, one that doesn’t deserve reverence or awe.

Yet, it’s the instrument (nearly) all writers use these days. This picture of E.B. White with his typewriter came up in a search of writers with their typewriters. Many similar photos of famous authors are scattered across the internet, but I didn’t find any pictures of writers with their computers. Perhaps the computer is too impersonal. The writer’s relationship with a pen, for instance, seems more intimate. You hold the pen, clutch it even. You grasp it in desperation. You stick it behind your ear or in your hair. You chew on it.

No one chews on a computer. But a laptop is a personal device. As I write this, I recline on a chaise lounge with my laptop on my lap. Some people use their laptops in bed. Many people are attached to their laptops and have difficulty leaving them behind. Like blankies or lucky coins, they bring them everywhere–to friend’s houses, to the pool, to Europe. So, at least with laptops, I don’t think the problem is that the computer is too impersonal.

I think the problem is that it is ephemeral. It lives only a short time. A writer might treat her favorite pen with great care and preserve it over many years. A typewriter might accompany an author throughout his career. And a chisel can outlive not only the prehistoric person who used it to carve out stories on stone, but that person’s entire civilization. A computer lives only a little while.

Four years to be precise. At Bucknell, we get new computers every four years. From a technology point of view, this is generous and wonderful. We are not burdened with slow, buggy systems. But from a sentimental point of view, it is a little sad. My laptop meets its end today. Tomorrow, a shiny new machine will greet me in my office. I will be grateful when I discover how fast it is. I will be grateful that I don’t have to restart it for no apparent reason at perplexing intervals. But I will not have written any novels on this new instrument. It will not yet have taken the stories in my head and shaped them into words and paragraphs and pages. But it will.

On my new laptop, I will revise A Sketch in Time and This Powerful Rhyme. I will continue to write The Story of the Stone. I hope I will write new books that haven’t yet formed themselves into ideas hovering at the back of my imagination. The new laptop will rest on my lap. It will come with me to Spain. And in four years, it will shut down and allow a newer, faster instrument to take its place.

We don’t keep our computers. We don’t cherish them. We don’t put them on display in museums or on websites. Perhaps we should.

Children's author Virginia Zimmerman with her Dell Latitude on its last day.

As I write this post, I am at the Highlights Foundation Whole Novel Workshop — Writing the Unreal. This is a week-long workshop involving delicious stretches of time for writing, presentations from amazing faculty, workshops of participant work, and lots of informal conversation that ranges over topics from robot cats to the challenges and opportunities of point of view. All this happens in a rural, mountain setting with unending supplies of food and drink.

This is my cabin. I’ve spent hours inside and on the porch writing and rewriting and thinking and free writing and then rewriting again. I’m working to make A Sketch in Time the best it can be. At the moment, I’m exploring whether changing the point of view to third person is the path to a better book. I usually write in the first person, so attempting third has involved working muscles in my mind that I didn’t even know I have. Like a physical workout, it is a little painful and a lot daunting, but it feels good. I feel the stretch not only in my words and in my brain but also in my imagination.

I was led to attempt third person by my miraculous faculty mentor, Laura Ruby. And this brings me to my title: mentors. The mentoring here is amazing. The faculty–Anne Ursu and Laura, with assistance and wisdom from Chris Heppermann and very special guests Deborah Kovacs and Tina Wexler–have all been wonderfully generous in sharing their experience and their knowledge. They have been careful and attentive to our particular challenges. They have been kind. I am honored to be able to add the faculty, and my fellow participants, to the list of mentors who push me to try new things, who ask me hard questions, and who love writing and reading and talking about books as much as I do.

I have taken pages and pages of notes because so many smart ideas have been spoken here, and I expect I’ll be referring to this workshop in many posts to come. But one remark that really moved me came from Deb: she said, “books are mentors, too.” I hope this rings true for any writer, and any reader for that matter, but it struck me especially since I came to writing from reading. The books I’ve read taught me to write. And as I stretch into third person, it’s the guidance of people mentors who keep me from collapsing to the ground in a quivering heap, but it’s the guidance of books that will show me how far I might be able to go.

My main subject in this post is the craft of writing. But Deb’s words also resonated because I think of books as mentors for life, too. The books we read teach us how to live our lives. I think of C.S. Lewis who wrote in his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” that stories equip children for the difficulties they will face in life: “Since it is so likely they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.” We learn from books how to be brave and sad and hopeful. We learn from them how to empathize with our friends, our enemies, and people very different from ourselves. Books teach us how to read. They teach us how to write. And they teach us how to live.

So to all my mentors, the people and the books, I thank you for all you’ve taught me and all I have left to learn. Shifting my point of view is just the beginning.

In William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, the speaker describes the poem as “the living record of your memory.” That is, a person lives on forever because the memory of him or her is inscribed on the page. And not just any page, but the page in front of the reader, whether a four-hundred-year-old handwritten page or the mass-produced page of an anthology or the illuminated page of a website. On all these pages, the idea of the person lives. This is a testament to the power of the printed word–it defies death and time. It endures as a living record of memory.

I think a lot about memory and words. I think about traces that endure beyond their moment in time and carry the past into the present. I think about words that give memory shape. I think about the magical literary calculus by which we use words to measure and map our lives. These thoughts guide me as I read, as I teach, and as I write.

Memory is the central concern in my new middle-grade novel, THIS POWERFUL RHYME. In this book, my characters use words to remember, to understand, and to live with loss. They read Shakespeare’s sonnet and ponder how a poem can be a living record. They discover that while some words preserve, others destroy, and in all cases, words perform magic.

I write today in awe of the magic of these words: THIS POWERFUL RHYME has been sold to Clarion Books. I could tell lots of stories about this development–one is an epic tale of years of writing and rewriting, one is a practical account of queries and emails, one is a glowing recollection of the only warm March day accented with a necklace of colorful shoes. But these are stories about me, my jewelry, and my book.

The story I want to tell is the one about memory. That is the story the book itself demands. When THIS POWERFUL RHYME is out in the world, its story–about memory and powerful words–will live beyond me and beyond my moment in time. It will be a living record about memory and will remind readers to record their thoughts, their doubts, their hopes, and their rhymes. I don’t presume that my words will be as enduring as Shakespeare’s, but as his words live on my page, I hope my words will live on pages yet to come. I hope my words will guide readers in the business of shaping memory and measuring life.

And so it is that this story about memory turns out to be a story about the future, because THIS POWERFUL RHYME is only at the beginning of its journey out into the world, and in any case, what is memory but the past packaged and preserved so that it may journey with us as we travel onward.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruin”

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I have a large single-volume encyclopedia in which I pressed assorted flowers and fall leaves over the years. My grandfather gave me the book, and it matters to me because it reminds me of who he was and what he wanted for me. It also matters because it holds these fragile traces, things of beauty that I long ago decided were worth preserving. The book is on a shelf in my bedroom, and I couldn’t tell you when I last turned to it for information, but it stands there, a sentinel of memory. Along with so many thin pages filled with knowledge, my relationship with a person who’s been dead fifteen years and my memories of fine fall days are bound up in this book. It is so much more than paper. It is so much more than words or information. It is memory in material form.

I heard a wonderful talk recently about books as “technologies of memory,” and the speaker showed fabulous images of nineteenth-century books in which readers had left traces of themselves. They left behind flowers, locks of hair, newspaper clippings, letters, and pictures. They also left behind their thoughts and feelings in notes they scribbled in margins or inside the cover. Like my encyclopedia, these books hold on to these people and preserve their memories. In many cases, the people themselves are long forgotten, but the traces they planted in the pages blossom into memories that live on.

I have written in lots of books over the years. The notes I’ve made, the passages I’ve underlined are a record of who I was when I read the book, and if I’ve re-read the book, and written in it with each reading, then the book becomes an archaeology of my reading self. Asterisks that I put in Jane Eyre when I was 18 share the margin with asterisks from when I was 22 and from the first time I taught the book many years after that. The pages of that book hold Jane and Brontë and multiple iterations of me. It is a sort of core sample that measures many years of a reader (me) as well as the fictional character that lives her whole life in those pages and the long-dead author who crafted Jane and invited me to leave bits of myself scattered along the margins of Jane’s life.

Many of the books I’ve written in are on my shelves. In some cases, I have newer, cleaner editions, but I keep these old books because they remind me who I am. And all the books together are another measure of memory. Jane Eyre, and the encyclopedia, and countless other texts range over the shelves in my house and my office. Each one preserves traces of my becoming, and collectively they offer a measure of how I became who I am.

I end with a photo of the copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light that I read and reread until it fell to pieces. I keep this book because it was important to me a long time ago, and that fact makes it important still. Sitting on my shelf, it joins with the many other books that measure my memories. Together, they shore up the fragments of my life and hold me together.

I have just started writing a new novel. I’ve written one experimental chapter and have an outline. It doesn’t really seem right to call it a “novel” at this stage, or even to talk about it as a real thing yet. The story has been taking shape for a while –a few months or a few years, depending on how I count–like an out-of-focus picture that finally resolves into something recognizable. But I settled on the characters only a couple of weeks ago. They are newborns, in a manner of speaking. Even so, I already know them pretty well, though I will know them better later.

It’s kind of like the friends you meet at camp: the environment is so intense that you get to know each other quickly. It doesn’t matter that you only met yesterday. It’s like that with new characters. I just named them a few weeks ago and decided how old they are and worked out who is angry and who is responsible and what the alliances are and why, but already the four children I invented have lives that are greater than what I’ve dreamt up for them. Already they have wills and ways that are somehow beyond my ken.

So, this evening, although I don’t have time to write the next chapter, I thought it would be a good idea to check in on my characters. See if I need to adjust anyone. See if I know what comes next for them. And I realized they’ve been developing without me. While I’ve been working on other things and spending time with real people, these made-up people have been resolving into themselves.

I suppose this happened in the back corners of my brain, and I just didn’t notice, but I can’t help but feel that my characters have come to life, at least a little, and I wonder what they do when I’m not writing them. Think about the characters you’ve loved, whose stories you’ve read and re-read. You know what they would do in situations they never face in the books they inhabit. That is, you can imagine them outside the bounds of the worlds created for them.

I’m still discovering what this feels like as a writer. At the end of that chapter I’ve written–a chapter that will certainly be rewritten several times and that may well end up deleted altogether–I left my characters feeling more than a little lost, trying to settle in to a peculiar hotel. When I sat down this evening to check on them, they were still in the hotel where I’d left them, but they’d moved around. The oldest sister took off her shoes. The main character stared out the window. It’s as if when you paused a TV show, instead of freezing, the people on the screen kind of milled around and chatted and developed in small but meaningful ways while they waited for you to come back and push “play.”

Even though I’ve only just begun my relationship with these characters, already their unique personalities shape what I can imagine for them. That my characters aren’t quite where I left them means they’re real and it means their story is worth telling. I can’t wait to find out what they’ll do next.

The university where I teach has a wonderful program they offer every January and March called Writer’s Boot Camp. It’s a full week during which we are given space and time to write with no distractions–no e-mail, no phones, no talking. The Boot Camp provides breakfast, lunch, and snacks, so we don’t have to take time to cook or scrounge food. It provides a staff member from the university’s writing center, in case we want to talk through some problems or get help with a draft. It provides a comfortable room filled with people who are writing and who together create an energy and creativity that practically vibrates in the room. Most importantly (for me), it provides a schedule.

I am good at carving out time to write. Even when I am at my busiest, I can usually find at least 30 minutes a day for activities related to creative writing, whether plotting, researching, or actually writing. However, I relish long, uninterrupted stretches to really immerse myself in the world I am building, and Boot Camp offers this. What’s more, the Camp director tells us when to take a break, and for me, this has been a revelation. It turns out that if I press on past my natural break time, I enter an amazing zone of creativity.

Left to my own devices, I take a short break roughly every hour. I usually hit a natural stopping point–the end of a chapter, or a conversation, or a paragraph–and it seems reasonable, productive even, to do some stretches or get a drink or make a quick call. I get back to work promptly, so I’ve never felt my pattern of break-taking was a problem. On the contrary, I might have argued that I had perfected the ideal writing rhythm.

At Boot Camp, the writing sessions are 75-90 minutes. On the shorter end, this is only fifteen minutes longer than I would work outside of Camp, but I’ve discovered that the extra time makes a world of difference. I think these extended sessions are effective for me for two reasons. First, I don’t stop at natural stopping points, like the end of a chapter. I keep going, and then the break comes after I’ve begun something new. Stopping in the middle or at the beginning means that when I return to work, I can begin immediately. I don’t have to rev up and think about how to start. I just write.

Second, sometimes the extra time feels a little uncomfortable. I really want a break. I have to resist walking away from my computer or, worse, clicking away from my document into the deep, dark void of the Internet. In resisting and being just a little uneasy, I often find myself accessing a remote part of my mind, a place where good ideas wait. Postponing break time leads me to this remote and wonderful idea place.

During this month’s Boot Camp, I’m in the very early stages of work on a new novel. This means that in every writing session I am making up people and places and problems. Yesterday, in that uneasy extra time before the morning break, I invented a legend; as I waited for lunch, I figured out what motivates one of my main characters; and in the pre-break moments of the afternoon, I solved a sticky problem in my plot. In each case, the burst of creativity came during the extra time.

Boot Camp ends tomorrow, and I will return to the regular business of my life. I will provide my own meals, I will fit writing in to a schedule crowded with a range of commitments, and I will decide for myself when to take a break. All time is not equal, and my Boot Camp experience has revealed that the extra push before a break can be the most productive, most imaginative, most valuable time. As I structure my own writing sessions, I will push past comfort into that remote creative space in my head. Just fifteen more minutes.