Episode 52: What advice would you give us about writing books?-with Jacqueline Woodson.
Hello! Welcome back to another great episode. Today authors Grace Lin and Jacqueline Woodson answer the kid question, “What advice would you give us about writing books?”
TRANSCRIPTS:
Grace Lin: Hello. I'm Grace Lin, children's book author and illustrator of many books, including the middle-grade novel When the Sea Turned to Silver and the picture book A Big Mooncake for Little Star. Today, I am here with Jacqueline Woodson, the author of many books, including the memoir Brown Girl Dreaming and the novel Harbor Me. Hi, Jacqueline.
Jacqueline Woodson: Hey Grace.
Grace Lin: Thanks so much for being here today.
Jacqueline Woodson: Oh, thanks for having me.
Grace Lin: Okay. Well, are you ready for today's question?
Jacqueline Woodson: I think I am.
Grace Lin: Okay. Because today's question was specifically for you. It's from a person named Alina. And Alina says ...
Alina: What advice would you give us about writing books?
Grace Lin: "We studied you in our class. What advice would you give us about writing books?"
Jacqueline Woodson: So, that's a really great question, Alina. Alina, I love that name. That was one of my friends in fifth grade, who was also a Jehovah's Witness and I actually mentioned her in Brown Girl Dreaming. The advice I'd give is to read. You learn to write by reading and studying the way other writers have done it. And I encourage people to read slowly, to not raise through book after book and try to see how many books they could possibly read, because A, it took writers a long time to write those books. And B, if you read slowly, you'll understand stuff like how writers get dialogue on the page, how they make setting, how they get you to feel certain ways. If you're reading a passage and you start tearing up and getting really sad, going back and reading that and seeing just what words the author used to get you to feel that certain way.
Jacqueline Woodson: And read broadly, read picture books, read middle-grade books, read poetry and really study the way writers have done it before you because I wouldn't be here writing if it wasn't for the writers who had come before me, who I copied and then eventually found my own voice.
Grace Lin: Which authors do you think greatly influenced you the most?
Jacqueline Woodson: I would say definitely Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelo. One of my favorite books as a kid was a book called Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor. Judy Blume, of course, was a big influence. Virginia Hamilton, Walter Dean Myers, and present-day writers like Ocean Vuong and Cornelius Eady. And, I don't know, there are just so many. Every time I read a book, I love Carson McCullers, I just read it a bunch of times to really, really learn about style and voice and form. Of course, Tony Morrison. James Baldwin was one of my early influences.
Jacqueline Woodson: A writer named Audre Lorde wrote a book called The Cancer Journals that I think I read the first time when I was probably in about the eighth grade. And it's a memoir of her coming to terms with her cancer, but it's also about politics. It's about poetry. It's about what it means to be female, to be of color. It's about so many things. And, the fact that this tiny book could be about so many things kind of blew my mind because I always thought that if you had to talk about a lot of stuff, you had to write really thick books and that's not the truth.
Grace Lin: Well, I wanted to touch upon when you were saying you read it again and again, and I think that's a really good tip too because I know sometimes when we get a book and we're so excited about it and we do read it really, really fast, but a good tip is if you read it really, really fast is to go back and reread it slowly and do what you were saying that slow reading the second or the third time around if you can't resist reading it really quickly, the first time.
Jacqueline Woodson: It's so true because then you know the ending, you know what's going to happen in the book and you can really take your time to see how we got to that ending and how those things did happen in the book. My son who's 12 was talking about how he reads books. Actually, he listens to a lot of audiobooks and he said the first time he reads it for the story and the second time he reads it just to remember it. And the third time he's really studying how the author did what the author did, but then it becomes almost like the alphabet to you. I can quote certain books, whole passages of them because I've read them so many times. And so the story and the way the story is told kind of gets inside of you in a way that really helps you execute it. It really helps you use those tools in your own writing.
Grace Lin: You mentioned earlier that looking at passages that made you cry. Do you remember the first book that made you cry?
Jacqueline Woodson: I think it was Stevie by John Steptoe, as a little kid, which was this picture book about, excuse me, about this little boy who comes to live with this other family and the kid telling the story is a kid named Robert. And he does not like Stevie, he's jealous of Stevie. Stevie's breaking his toys. Stevie's a little kid so Robert's mother kind of coddles him. And, Robert is like basically, "I don't like this kid, Stevie." And he comes because his mother works. Stevie's mother works probably as a domestic or something away from home and so she has to drop her child off with this family. And for the whole week, he doesn't get to see his mom. And then finally, his mom comes and they ended up moving away and Robert realizes how much he liked this kid and how much he's going to miss him.
Jacqueline Woodson: And, again, it's a book, that's what, maybe 30 pages, but it has very, very little text on it. But I was crying at the end of it. And I was like, "Oh, I'm going to miss Stevie too." So, I think that was one of the first. And another I remember as a very, very little kid, The Little Match Girl. I mean, I boohooed forever when my teacher read that book to us. And I cried because of the unfairness of things. And for me as a writer, as a young person growing up wanting to be a writer, my first question was what can I do to change a world where a kid is so poor that she has to sell matches and then eventually freeze to death, like I want to write a different world. But I was devastated by that book.
Jacqueline Woodson: And it was a good devastation because a good devastation activates you, right? It makes you want to change the world. And I do think that books can do that. They can make you go, "Wait a second. There's a world that exists where a small child can have some kind of ending like that. What can I do because I have power and what can I do one day? And what can I write that's going to make it different?"
Grace Lin: Yeah. That's a lot like ... I remember that Little Match Girl story and that too traumatized me too when I was younger. And I know that my mom would tell me these Chinese folktales, which also had these really tragic endings, like a woman who committed suicide because her husband died building the Great Wall. And I remember those things just haunting me. And now as an adult author, taking those stories and changing the endings of my own books because I just remember feeling like that's just so unfair. And being an author, having that power to change that unfairness is very satisfying.
Jacqueline Woodson: Exactly.
Grace Lin: Well, thank you so much, Jackie. That was such a great answer to today's question. So thank you so much for answering it. And thank you Alina for asking it.
Jacqueline Woodson: Thanks, Alina. And thanks, Grace for having me on. It's so fun to talk to you as always.
Grace Lin: Thanks.
Jacqueline Woodson: And I'm so glad you're doing this.
Grace Lin: Thank you. Bye.
Jacqueline Woodson: Bye.
Today’s BOOK REVIEW comes from Alison Morris! She’s reviewing the first book in the Love Sugar Magic series by Anna Meriano.
Have you ever wished that you had the ability to cast spells or perform magic? That is the case for Leo, the main character of the first book in the Love Sugar Magic series by Anna Meriano. Leo learns that she is one of several women in her family who have the ability to cast spells and that her older sisters already knew they had this ability and they haven't told her, they've been keeping it a secret because they think she is too young to use her magic responsibly and they think she needs to wait a few years. But Leo is not interested in waiting. She steals the family spell book and decides she'll just try a couple of simple spells herself and let me tell you things do not go as planned.
If you want to find out the havoc she creates by trying magic, you should pick up a copy of A Dash of Trouble, which is the first book in the Love Sugar Magic series. I hope you love it just as much as I do.
Thank you Alison!
Alison Morris is a nationally recognized children's book buyer with an infectious enthusiasm for reading and 20 years' experience matching books to readers. As the Senior Director of Title Selection for nonprofit First Book, she oversees the curation of children’s and young adult books on the First Book Marketplace, hand-selecting a diverse range of titles that speak to and address the needs of kids in underserved communities, with a keen eye to inclusion, authenticity, and kid-appeal. She previously served as Senior Editor at Scholastic Book Clubs, Children's Book Buyer for Wellesley Booksmith and The Dartmouth Bookstore, and was the founding blogger of the ShelfTalker children’s book blog for Publishers Weekly. She'll be joining us from her home near Washington, DC where she spends LOTS of time discussing books with her husband, illustrator and graphic novelist Gareth Hinds.
More about today’s authors:
Jacqueline Woodson is the recipient of the 2020 Hans Christian Anderson Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award. She was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, and in 2015, she was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She received the 2014 National Book Award for her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, which was also a recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, the NAACP Image Award, and a Sibert Honor. She wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Jacqueline grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from college with a B.A. in English. Her books include New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin and Harbor Me; The Other Side, Each Kindness, Caldecott Honor book Coming On Home Soon; Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster; and Miracle’s Boys, which received the LA Times Book Prize and the Coretta Scott King Award. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
Grace Lin, a NY Times bestselling author/ illustrator, won the Newbery Honor for Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and her picture book, A Big Mooncake for Little Star, was awarded the Caldecott Honor. Grace is an occasional commentator for New England Public Radio , a video essayist for PBS NewsHour (here & here), and the speaker of the popular TEDx talk, The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child’s Bookshelf. She is the co-host of the podcast Book Friends Forever, a kidlit podcast about friendship and publishing (geared for adults). Find her facebook, instagram , twitter ( @pacylin) or sign up for her author newsletter HERE.
Special thanks to the High Five Books & Art Always Bookstore, Ms. Carleton’s 2nd grade class at Jackson Street School for their help with our kid questions and reviews.
