Virginia Zimmerman

This photo captures Neil's attentive, generous conversational style.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the great good fortune to meet Neil Gaiman. He came to my university to talk about reading and writing and technology, and he also generously answered a wide range of questions from students (and me!) about his books and his writing process. When this picture was taken, he was talking to me about the Hempstocks, a family that appears in several of Neil’s books. (I won’t say which ones: I’ll leave the joy of bumping in to them in unexpected places to my readers who, I hope, are also Neil’s readers.) I love the idea of characters who live beyond the confines of any one book–I wrote about this very subject here–and I love that we discover these characters through careful, slow reading.

“Slow reading” is something we talk about in English departments. It means that we move carefully through a text so that we can notice and appreciate how the words work. There is certainly a place for fast reading, for devouring a wonderful book that you can’t put down, that won’t let you go, that consumes you, mind, body, and soul. But reading slowly is equally satisfying. When you read slowly, you discover that writers are magicians, that they take, to paraphrase Neil, the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and a handful of punctuation marks and make whole worlds. When you read slowly, you discover that  characters like the Hempstocks are real, and if you look for them outside the binding of a book, you will find them. When you read slowly, you notice lovely turns of phrase and you can take the time to tuck those phrases inside yourself and make them part of the language you use to live in the world.

These are the phrases I carry around with me these days. I sprinkle them across the places of my life: I put them on sticky-notes that I affix to my computer, I use them as epigraphs on my syllabi, and I actually carry them around in a leather-bound notebook. I discovered these phrases through slow reading, but in the notebook, they inspire me as I embrace slow writing.

When Neil spoke at Bucknell, he talked about his notebooks, and he inspired me to take up writing by hand. I like the idea of separating inspiration from keyboard and screen. I like the idea of producing an object that holds my ideas and will hold them long after I’ve moved on to other ideas. I like the idea of handwriting, of feeling the way the twenty-six letters and punctuation marks unspool and take shape.

So, I started writing in my notebook. Sometimes I make notes. Sometimes I free write. Sometimes I draft paragraphs or snippets of dialogue. Whatever I write, I write slowly. And in the beats, the pauses as my pen scrolls into the next letter, the next word, I find ideas. Writing slowly by hand, just like reading slowly, gives me the time and space to move more carefully through my own head.

I won’t stop composing fiction on my computer. But as I prepare to write books that I hope readers will both devour and read slowly, I will savor the inspiration that comes from writing slowly. I will use my notebook to compose myself.

Place matters. It matters a lot. What would Harry be without Hogwarts? What would Mary be without the secret garden? From Wonderland to Panem, places in books for young people matter to the characters who must find their way through the challenges places pose or make their way back to the places they call home. These fictional places also become important to readers. When you hopefully tap on the back of the closet in search of Narnia, your hope draws the place off the page and into the real world.

Even the dull, ordinary places of our everyday lives matter because we become ourselves  in those places. I grew up in a small, split-level house in the DC suburbs. It is not a beautiful house, nor is it especially interesting, but I was brought home from the hospital into that house, I played there with friends I still hold dear, and I wrote my first poems and stories there. When I went off to college and was occasionally homesick, that was the house I longed to return to. When I woke up on my wedding day, I awoke in that house. I brought my children to that house when they were babies, and now they have their own relationships to the house. It has been one of the places of their becoming, too.

My mother has now moved out of that house, and I’m struck by how hard it is to say good-bye to a place. I made a final visit, and I stood in my old bedroom and looked one last time at the walls that held me for so many years. I found the old piece of tape on the ceiling that makes a shape like an airplane. I slid down the sloped wall between the staircases. I rested my hand on the solid trunk of the tree I planted in the backyard in 1981. All these were gestures of farewell.

Of course, these details of the place live in my memory, and the truth is that for a long time, they have mattered more in my head than they do in reality. The tree matters not because it is so solid, but because I remember carrying the sapling home from school on Arbor Day. That sapling has lived only in my memory for over 30 years, and the tree is just today’s manifestation of all those years of becoming. My room stopped being my room long ago, and when I think of “my room,” I picture a bedspread that’s long gone and shelves that used to be a different color and quotes on index cards taped up on the wall that turned yellow and curled and got thrown away.

The room as I remember it hasn’t existed in the real world for many years, and as I realize this, I discover there is no need to say good-bye to the places where we become ourselves. They grow into us and live in us and never leave us. Just as Wonderland and Neverland and Mowgli’s Jungle are real and vibrant many, many years after they were imagined, the house where I grew up will live always in my mind. And bits of it will show up in my books and will help my characters become themselves, and those bits will outlast even my memory. Careful readers may recognize a tree or an airplane made of tape, and they will know that wonderful, fictional places are actually and always real.

When I was young, I was obsessed with the film Chariots of Fire. I don’t really know why. I wasn’t a runner, though I briefly flirted with sprinting during the heady days of my love affair with the movie. Perhaps I was enchanted with the era. Perhaps I was stirred by the music. Perhaps it was simply that it is such a good film. Whatever the reason, I watched it over and over (on Betamax, and if you don’t know what that is, look it up!), and I wrote quotations from the movie on note cards and taped them up around my bed. I listened to the soundtrack on my walkman (something else for young readers to look up), and I made my dear friend Kristen take pictures of me running in the surf at Rehoboth beach.

I was so obsessed with the stories that weave together in the film that I wanted to know more. Back in the early 1980s, the way to know more was to go to the library. There was no internet. No Google. No Wikipedia. I went to the public library and used first the card catalog and then the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature to track down information about Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams. I still remember seeing Abrahams’ name on a list of record holders in a reference book and feeling that I’d discovered something astounding, like the Rosetta Stone or Atlantis.

All of this research took time, a considerable amount of time, and it was an experience that involved physically searching, as opposed to typing a term and then clicking a link or two. I had to find the right catalogs, flip through cards and pages, and then walk to another part of the library, where I took books off the shelf, turned more pages, and squinted at fine print. The research involved physical labor, of a sort, and all this effort made what I learned stick with me. I owned the information because I worked so hard to find it.

I recently watched the film again, for the first time in many years, with my children. I thought it would seem dated to them or even dull, but to my delight, they liked it very much, and, like I did thirty years ago, they wanted to know more. “What happened to Aubrey? What happened to Jennie?” Without even moving from the comfy spot where we were snuggled up to watch the film, I woke up my laptop and typed these questions into search boxes. Answers popped up instantly. How amazing! How wonderful! Children have questions, and answers appear as if by magic.

But also, how sad.

“Search” means something different now, something fast and powerful, yes, but also something just a little soulless. There is no journey that leads to owning what is found. Knowledge seems like something that is generated effortlessly by search engines. It is not something that we laboriously craft or that we struggle to seek out.

However, I must confess that while writing this post, I googled Harold Abrahams to make sure I was spelling his name correctly, and I was grateful that I did not have to finger through a card catalog to get that information. What’s more, that search serendipitously turned up a YouTube video of Abrahams—truly extraordinary! My local public library in the early 80s did not have a film archive: there was no amount of labor a kid working on her own could have undertaken to get access to that film. And remember how I felt about finding Abrahams’ name on a list–think of the triumph and joy I would have felt had I found this video, available to me now only because of the internet.

So, in the end, I think my point is this: it is wonderful that so much material is so readily available, but something is lost when the search involves little more than clicking. I hope all my readers will find ways, at least now and then, to relish a difficult search. To work hard. To turn some pages. To navigate stacks and touch knowledge. For it is the labor of the search that really teaches us something and makes us own what we learn.

A couple of weeks ago, on February 15, I visited a middle school in Northern Virginia and met with two groups of 7th and 8th graders who are students in a creative writing elective. First, I just want to say how wonderful it is that this school offers such an elective: kudos to the administrators who authorized what’s sure to be a life-changing experience for the students and to the teacher, who is clearly admired and adored by her students. Second, I want to thank the school librarian for organizing my visit and for being so much more than a person who says, “Shhh.” I’m not naming names to protect the privacy of the kids involved, but Mrs. A and Mrs. H, you have my deepest thanks for a wonderful visit.

I decided to talk with the kids about where the real and the fantastical meet in fiction. For example, I showed them some of the real places that I turned into settings for fictional events, and I talked about how I drew on stories about the Spanish Civil War that people have told me but I also did historical research. Both of those ways of understanding what really happened in the past helped me create fiction about that time.

We talked about that familiar piece of advice most writers seem to get at one time or another: write what you know. And I tried to explain that even writers who make up fantastical creatures and extraordinary lands still fundamentally write what they know.

I asked the students to try bringing together realism and fantasy by choosing a place they know well–a place at school–and setting a portal there, a portal that opens into another time or place. They only had four minutes to draft this scene, and the results were astounding. We only had time for a few students to share what they wrote, but I was terribly impressed by their creativity and their ability to write lovely and evocative sentences. It turns out that there is lots of potential for magic in a middle school, at least when good writers are in charge.

It was such a treat to share my experience with these young writers, partly because it was so fun to talk about my process and my books but mostly because it was so thrilling to meet the people who will write the essays, poems, and novels that will change the world one day. We live at a time when too many people forget how necessary books are. We use literature to know ourselves, to make sense of things that happen to us, and to build our world. The world needs writers more than it knows, but these kids know. And I know, and you do, too.

I love and admire many things about Madeleine L’Engle’s books, but what might impress me most is the way she creates a constellation of characters. She invents a whole world inhabited by an array of people, and her novels rise up out of this world, with characters that crossover from one book or series into others.

Meg and Calvin grow up and become  characters busy in the background of books that feature new young people. One such person is Zachary, who intersects with both Vicky and Polly and is one of several connections between the Austin stories and the Murray stories. Such intersections give the world L’Engle creates depth and substance. They make it real.

Any writer of fiction must think about world building, but for L’Engle, the world is not bound by the pages of a single book or even the volumes of a series. Her characters simply exist, and they come in and out of books just like real people meander in and out of our real lives.

L’Engle is certainly one of the writers who has most influenced me, and I aim to follow her lead and craft constellations of characters who my readers will stumble upon when they aren’t looking for them, and these unexpected encounters will make the characters and their worlds more real. I’ve had this intention for a long time, since I started writing fiction, but I actually wrote the first such encounter this week. I won’t spoil the surprise–part of the fun is that “Hey, what are you doing in this book?” moment–but I do hope that putting a fully developed person that readers will be happy to bump into in the background of a different story will enrich the experience of my own constellation, small for now, but growing.

I am visiting my mother, and I have culled from her bookshelves a little stack of books that belong to me, childhood favorites that kept their places on the shelves even as my room stopped being mine. Some of these books are inscribed by great aunts and uncles I barely remember, but the details of the cover illustrations are as familiar as the pattern of freckles across the bridge of my nose. The books feel like family.

One of them is The Secret Garden. It has a spring green cover and a rectangle of roses framing a picture of Mary unlocking the garden door. The illustrations are by Tasha Tudor, and the cover image promises the reader that just as Mary will find a beautiful world when she opens the door, the reader will find a wonderful world when she opens the book. I teach The Secret Garden, which means I read it once or twice a year. I use a scholarly edition of the text that includes articles about the novel and other supplementary material, and it works very well for teaching purposes. But the book itself is not special. It is only words printed on bound paper, paper that is the path into a wonderful story but that has no wonderful properties of its own. The book I had as a child—given to me for my seventh birthday, the inscription reveals—is itself wonderful, magical even. Not because it introduced me for the first time to Burnett’s words. Not because the Tudor illustrations fueled my imagination. The book is magical because it has become a symbol of the presence of The Secret Garden in my childhood. This particular book—this very one—is my story nearly as much as it is Mary’s.

So, I will take The Secret Garden and the other books home, and set them on the shelves in my bedroom where they will remind me who I was. And I believe they will, thus, help me do a better job of being who I am. I don’t need to read them, though I probably will. I need only note their hues in the landscape of my bookshelf, pull them down, from time to time, to enjoy their familiar weight in my hands, and know that those pages hold memory and possibility and me.

For the first time in over a year, I am back in Barcelona in the apartment where I wrote A Sketch in Time and where I imagined that Micah, Jamie and Celia lived. I have visited this apartment many times over many years, but it has a new dimension for me now. As I move around this space, I bump into my own memories of past visits but also into the made-up things that happened here. In a funny and wonderful way, both are equally real.

I have also found that some real objects that I borrowed from reality and plopped into my fictional world are different from how I remembered them. There is a desk that plays a central role in the book, and I based the desk on a real desk, one just next to me as I write now. However, in my imagination and in the novel, the desk grew larger. It became more polished and elaborate. The color of the wood changed from a dark chocolate brown to a lighter brown with hints of red. I didn’t make these changes on purpose, and when I found myself face to face with the real desk, I was surprised to find that it is different from the desk in my book.

I have not had the chance to visit Sils, the place at the heart of the novel, and I wonder how it will be different from how I wrote it. The Sils in the novel is rooted in the real, but it is infused with layers of experience that exist only in my novel, and so I suspect that I would find it, like the desk, to be a shadow of the Sils I have now in my imagination and that I set down on the page. Yet, the two Sils will co-exist, each adding depth to the other.

What I have discovered, being here in Catalunya, is that not only does the real lie at the foundation of the fictional, but the fictional reflects back onto the real, casting light and shadows and making something magical that hovers on a border between two worlds, both of them real.

On the first day of class in my Young Adult Fiction course, I read Where the Wild Things Are to my students. I do this because it introduces many of the themes we will encounter throughout the semester and also because I love to have the excuse to read the book aloud. But the book brings into the classroom much more than the practical and the pleasurable. When I read those words and turn those pages, a magic is released and reminds all of us, if any of us had forgotten, that literature written for young people plucks at our souls and makes them sing.

Where the Wild Things Are is a wonderful place in the truest sense of “wonderful,” but I have always found the most magical part of the book to be the last line. Max sails back home, in and out of weeks, to find his supper waiting for him: “and it was still hot.”

My students and I talk about why this is such a perfect ending to the story, and I often make the argument that it all hinges on the word “hot.” If the food was warm, we would know that Max’s mother had set the dish in his room but then had wandered away, turning her attention to something else. Because the supper is “still hot,” we can be sure, as can Max, that his mother has taken special care with his supper. She knows what he needs and when he needs it. She doesn’t need to be in his room, or in the final illustration, because Max knows she is there for him. The hot food makes her love plain.

Lots of children’s books, for young readers and older ones, are about journeys away from home, and these are fascinating and wonderful. But sometimes the journeys that move us most are the returns. When Wendy flies back into the nursery, when Alice runs inside for tea, when the Pevensie children tumble out of the wardrobe, when Harry goes to bed in his four-poster, readers are reminded that part of the magic of going away is the magic of coming back.

Sendak captured this magic with beautiful simplicity. Maurice Sendak has gone away. He sails off “in and out of weeks,” and my heart breaks because I know he won’t come back. But I take comfort, as will countless readers for years to come, from the simple fact that his words will never leave us, and we can always come back to find them waiting for us. Still and always hot.

Charles Dickens was born two hundred years ago today on February 7, 1812. Few literary figures have achieved such lasting renown as Dickens, a writer at once widely respected and popular both in his own time and now. Even children of the twenty-first century who may never have read a word of Dickens are familiar with Scrooge and Tiny Tim. Most people recognize, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and “Please, sir, may I have some more?” Dickens left a mark not only on English literature but also on Western consciousness.

So, I wonder in this vaguely public forum, what sort of mark did he leave on me? As an academic who specializes in Victorian literature, I am not a typical reader of Dickens. I have read many of his novels (though fewer than I’d like to admit), taken and taught graduate seminars on his works, and published a chapter on his use of archaeological imagery in my monograph, Excavating Victorians. However, I am writing, as I try to do in “The Wardrobe Door,” as an author of children’s fiction, so I ask again, what sort of mark has my reading of Dickens left on my writing?

I think the answer has to do with people and places. I suspect Dickens’ impact on me is greater even than I might realize, but I can acknowledge with certainty an influence on the way I craft characters and their homes.

A striking physical trait can define a character quickly and effectively. This can be some aspect of the character’s appearance or a habit of movement or a speech pattern. Flora from Little Dorrit is a good example. She speaks in unending sentences that strain syntax, delightful to read aloud. She has other qualities, certainly, but this is the one that defines her. I have a character in the book I’m writing now whose speech pattern is nearly the opposite of Flora’s: he speaks in clipped phrases. When he reappears at a key moment, my characters and my readers recognize him immediately because of his distinctive way of speaking.

The spaces people inhabit tell us a tremendous amount about them and their world. So much attention is given to Dickens’ people that we often forget to attend to his places, which are just as highly wrought. Take Coketown, the fictionalized version of Manchester where Hard Times takes place. In a chapter title “The Key Note,” Dickens describes Coketown as follows:

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
Those mad, melancholy elephants amaze me every time I read this passage. What genius to offer such an unsettling, alien image of an industrial town! I don’t linger over whole towns in my writing, or I haven’t yet, but I do give careful attention to my characters’ most intimate spaces: the pile of books on Micah’s bed is probably the most striking example. In fact, because my characters have to draw places, details of space are important for them to notice and make use of. In other words, such images are not only thematic or atmospheric but essential to my plots.

Thank you, Charles Dickens, for Miss Havisham, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill, Bill Sykes’ dog, Bleak House, and those melancholy elephants. I join the many who write in your wake.