Why I write for children & young adults...
Once upon a long lost book...
Broken dolls, ancient Christmas decorations, dusty canning jars, overstuffed bookshelves—every inch of my aunt’s basement was stuffed floor-to-ceiling with thousands of obsolete objects she’d accumulated in her long life. And somewhere in the cobwebbed chaos was the long lost book that I’d been seeking for over twenty-five years.
For decades, I’d been on a mission to collect the books (many out of print) that I adored reading as a child—and I’d found all but one. But I couldn’t even remember the book’s title. I could recall the story in specific detail, but the title and author didn’t stick in my nine-year-old mind. I had already scoured used books stores, searched online, described every aspect of the tale to countless children’s librarians, but with no success.
Searching the cluttered cellar where I first read the book so long ago was my last hope of discovering the name of the story that had stuck with me for so long.
I dug through tables piled high with books, pushed my way through stacks of old games and abandoned toys to scan the spines of thousands of books lining one whole wall, knowing I had only this one chance to search.
Finally my eyes fell on a torn, peeling book with a title so simplistic, so spot-on to the central theme of the story it seemed impossible that it could actually be the book I was looking for. I pulled it carefully from the shelf and thumbed through the loose, yellowed pages, elation growing. Success. I had finally found: “A Room For Cathy” by Catherine Woolley.
As I packed the book carefully in my suitcase, my mind wandered over why this story remained in my subconscious for so long. Unlike the Judy Blume stories that I also devoured, it contains none of the agonizing humor of big brother responsibility Peter so resented in “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.” And not a single word is as spookily gripping as “Jane-Emily” by Patricia Clapp, in which a young woman’s heart-wrenching romance is torn apart by desire and duty when her nine-year-old niece is slowly tormented by her beau’s long-dead sweetheart.
Once, I even had the opportunity to rescue books from my former grade school when it closed down; books I know I read by my childhood scrawl on the checkout slip. True, I love many of those books, too. But none had stuck in my mind like “A Room For Cathy.”
So, why did this story resonate so profoundly within me that I hunted for it for a quarter of a century? It contains no high comedy or deep mystery—only a little girl desperate to be all grown up while clinging to the childish need to have everything her own way. Cathy’s story is simple. It’s all about her small family moving from their city apartment to a large country house where she can have the perfect room all to herself, only to have her dreams dashed when they must take on renters to make ends meet. As I re-read Woolley’s work now, I realize what it is that kept Cathy’s story alive in the recesses of my mind. Character.
My nine-year-old self recognized my own character in Cathy—despite the fact that she had the smug superiority of an elder sibling (while I’m the youngest of nine), and that she had the attitude of a privileged girl (while I grew up wearing hand-me-downs and drinking powdered milk). Just like me, Cathy was forced to share her things with siblings, had desperate dreams that no one seemed to understand, and regarded her mom’s discarded dresses and broken jewelry as priceless treasures. And beneath Cathy’s selfish, bratty surface, I could sense her character’s desire to do the right thing. Then, when Cathy managed to let go of childish impulses and make grown up decisions, she struggled with fact that being good doesn’t always feel good. Jealousy and bitterness vacillated quickly with selfless pleasure at another’s happiness—as they often did within me.
And so, twenty-five years after reading Cathy’s story, I knew it wasn’t the story itself that was so compelling, nor was it the spectacular writing that drew me back to the book. It was a character with emotional depth and complexity that kept Cathy’s story with me.
The intricacy of three-dimensional characters inspires me—in both protagonists and antagonists.
One great example is Uriah Heep from Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” who is one of the most subtle and cleverly-developed antagonists in literature. Nowhere is Dickens’ genius more evident than with the repetition of the word “writhe” as the text describes Heep’s dry hands moving slowly over each other. With that single word, he calls up the intricate depths of Uriah Heep’s well-developed villainy, without the need to restate a full description, even though Heep is absent from the text for great portions of the book.
It is from these writers and many others that I draw inspiration for my own work. As I began researching my Young Adult fantasy, “Exhumed,” I knew that I wanted to use the knowledge I obtained while earning my bachelor’s degree in Psychology to develop characters with emotional depth. Experience “Exe” Parsell, my extraordinarily gifted young heroine, thus grew very introverted and ashamed of her unnatural, magical talents that made her a total misfit in the ordinary, modern-day world of Nowhere, Arizona.
I’ve created intricate environments for my characters in “Exhumed” as well, by pairing the seemingly incompatible styles of the rough-and-tumble Wild West with the sleek sophistication of the Art Deco, 1930s-style magical world. By featuring elements of faux lawlessness in Exe’s everyday world in Nowhere, Arizona (a historic town dedicated to preserving “the Wild West as the Wild West Was Way Back When”), I was able to parallel those same elements of operating under the law in the magical world, where Exe’s real parents turn to espionage and secret societies to defy their tyrannical government.
The carefully-crafted details in my novels are designed to create people and places that resonate with my readers. The connection that’s forged for readers when they immerse themselves in well-developed characters and settings let them live vicariously through the story, growing and learning right along with the protagonist—just as I learned and grew right alongside Cathy.