Hope in the Mail

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  But now a fan of backstory, I liked the idea of exploring what Holly’s life was like before she met Sammy. And the more I thought about her past, the more I wanted to give Holly her own book.

  Regardless of where I began Holly’s story, the ending should have been easy. It was already written in Sisters of Mercy. Holly is rescued by Sammy and becomes part of Sammy World.

  But I didn’t like that as the ending of Runaway. I thought Holly should have her own ending, one centered on her, instead of Sammy’s rescue. And the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to make an overt connection between Holly and Sammy. Holly’s story wasn’t about being rescued. It was about courage and determination and directing your own destiny and…I wasn’t sure what all exactly, but I knew it had to be unique. It shouldn’t look or sound or feel like a Sammy Keyes book.

  But…how to accomplish that when all the signposts led to the rescue? Holly’s future had already been established in Sammy World. And to be consistent, I couldn’t deviate from what had happened to her in the series after the rescue.

  So I liked the idea of telling Holly’s story—actually, I found it gripping territory to explore—but I didn’t love the ending.

  And so I didn’t begin writing.

  I didn’t stop thinking about it, however. Years went by. I wrote Sammy #5 and #6 and toyed with the idea that Holly’s story could be told through journal entries. That would certainly set it apart from the structure of a Sammy Keyes book.

  I wrote Sammy #7 and #8, where Holly’s presence expands in Sammy World, and I found myself even more obsessed with her backstory. What had made her a journal writer? Could poetry—another structural departure from the Sammy Keyes series—be a part of it?

  I wrote Sammy #9—Psycho Kitty Queen—in which Holly plays a big role and consequently occupied even more time in my mind. I was all in on her story being her journal. I was all in on including some poetry. But the ending. The darned ending. I still didn’t have one I thought did her justice.

  And then one day…

  Which is always how it happens.

  I was out on a run along a lovely dirt path that leads through groves of eucalyptus trees—a path where I often came upon a homeless person or two, a place where my mind naturally wandered to thoughts of Holly. And on this day, I was again thinking about her journal—where it had come from, how it had become her lifeline—when, bam, the ending hit me.

  I stopped in my tracks and gasped, my eyes suddenly burning with tears. In the middle of the path, in the middle of the day, without any apparent reason, there I was, crying. (Which sounds melodramatic, I know, but any teacher who has read the book will completely understand this reaction.)

  So there it was, seemingly out of the blue, the perfect ending.

  And, just as unexpectedly, with the ending came the beginning. Because once I knew where I was going, I knew exactly how the story should start.

  Finally, after more than six years of thinking about it, I was ready to write Runaway.

  So, yes. I’m a believer in knowing your ending before you begin. Realistically, by the time you reach it, your ending won’t be exactly as you envisioned it, or it will have shifted forward or backward on your story’s timeline. But knowing what you’re driving toward before you begin will contribute to your story becoming a tightly woven whole, and your readers will come away thinking and talking about story and theme and message, rather than a fumbled ending.

  Jumping into a novel is fun. And when you’re raring to go, it’s easy. But how do you keep that energy flowing through the whole novel? How do you move forward if your story has lost its momentum?

  The sagging middle is real. It’s that place, midbook, where things begin to drag, where writers wait for an idea to come along to push them out of their rut. It’s where many writers take an unproductive page-killing side trip in a desperate attempt to rev up their story.

  When people—especially Sammy Keyes fans—began asking me how I’d learned tight plotting, the question caught me off guard because I’d never really analyzed what I do. The obvious thing to say was that I’d absorbed ideas about how to plot from all the reading I’d done. And I’m sure that’s true. But I’d never dissected the structure of a book or tried to figure out what in the plotting of it made me want to keep turning the pages.

  Well, except for chapter-ending cliff-hangers.

  Cliff-hangers are awesome…and obvious.

  But when I analyzed my own Sammy Keyes stories, it suddenly occurred to me that I’d picked up ideas about plotting from watching Seinfeld.

  The Seinfeld sitcom had four main characters: Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer. In most of my favorite episodes, Elaine has her own story thread, as do George and Kramer, with Jerry being like a maypole that keeps the other characters tethered. There’s a weaving of the various subplots, so the focus shifts from what’s going on with Elaine, to George’s awkwardness, to Kramer’s quirky antics, with an occasional convergence in Jerry’s apartment. And the very best episodes were the ones that wrapped up with all the story lines coming together to reveal a unifying theme or common thread.

  Those very best episodes made my brain tingle with Aha and kept me coming back every week in hopes of another tightly braided adventure.

  I gave this absolutely no analysis when I began writing about Sammy Keyes. But I can see now that the Seinfeld influence was definitely instrumental in my crafting the basic structure of each book in the series.

  There’s the apartment where Sammy lives with Grams, which is the pole tethering Sammy. It’s the place where she feels loved and accepted and can hang out or hide out. But instead of the subplots following different characters around, we follow Sammy through three different strands of her life.

  There’s her home life, which includes living illegally in her grandmother’s apartment, plus the dynamic of her family (not knowing who her dad is, being upset with her absentee mother, and unintentionally doing things to worry or upset her grandmother).

  Then there’s her school life, and the bubbling cauldron of anxiety that is middle school, including that wicked wasp of a girl, Heather Acosta.

  And finally, there’s the mystery. Out of all eighteen books in the series, only one central mystery takes place at school, so the mystery is what gets Sammy out and about, cruisin’ the streets of Santa Martina on her skateboard, hiding in bushes, sneaking into the Heavenly Hotel, and getting trapped in spider-infested basements.

  Weaving those three subplots (home, school, mystery) together creates a story line that has no room for a sagging middle. We move from the stressors of home, to what’s happening at school, to Sammy gathering clues, without any “filler.” One scene tags another, which tags another, all the way to the end, when they come together for the big finish.

  So if you find your story starting to sag, consider adding a thread to work with. It’s not possible to construct a plait with a single strand. You can twist it, but it won’t hold. It’s also hard to work with two strands. But three? Three’s perfect. Once you get the hang of braiding with three, it moves along quickly and you’ll find it to be self-supporting. (You can go for four, but four takes more finesse and can slow down the overall feel of your story.)

  Some practical examples: If your main character is a kid, try giving them a job—dog walking, yard mowing, computer repair…something that gets them out of the rut of school and home. Or give them a passion for something. They can join a club, do public service, be on a sports or debate team.

  For adult characters, give them an ailing parent they need to attend to periodically (or just a cranky one to visit). Or weave in a pet, or a child, or a neighbor, or a night class, or a gym membership (that they use), or the unexpected appearance of someone from their past….The options are infinite.

  I recommend this with the caveat that you don’t just paste it in. It shouldn’t be a stran
d that’s over on the side, not woven into the whole of your story. It shouldn’t just be an action for your main character to take; it must also set other action in motion. In other words, it can’t be a drag on the story; it has to be there to propel the story along and, ideally, to support the theme.

  Theme is key to the whole operation. It’s the rubber band on the end of the braid. With it, everything stays tightly woven. Without it, the threads of your story may overlap, but they’ll have a somewhat loose or frayed feeling.

  So next, let’s explore what theme is and the further merits of using one.

  So what is theme?

  I had trouble grasping what teachers meant by theme when I was in school. It was a nebulous thing that always felt sort of esoteric and elusive. Not at all something I could analyze or memorize or even enjoy, like, say, the diagramming of sentences.

  Turns out, theme is really not a hard concept to grasp. It’s the Big Idea that umbrellas your story. And, ideally, its presence is felt but never stated. You might give it one mention to nudge focus that way, maybe two, but no preaching or teaching or interrupting-the-story-to-bring-you-this-very-important-message.

  I have become a huge fan of theme. Often, it’s the thing that makes me commit to writing a story. It’s something I want to think more deeply about, something I want to delve into alongside my reader.

  More than the exciting adventure or character growth, the theme is what I want the reader to be thinking about after the story is over. It’s the concept they can apply to their own life, one that might help them in pursuit of their own personal happy ending. Or something to help them sort through their feelings, or assist them with how to react to or endure situations that may arise in their future by providing a mental trial run.

  Please don’t mistake theme for message.

  Everyone hates overt “message” books, and that includes kids, who can smell them from across the library. If you’re contemplating writing for children or teens, do not (do NOT) tell them what they should think, or what they should do, or how they should feel.

  Instead, offer them food for thought—something to chew on after the book is done.

  For a practical example of using theme, let’s do a quick analysis of how the three threads of Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf are unified by its theme of embracing forgiveness.

  Mystery: For all the suspects Sammy follows in an effort to solve this story’s mystery, the culprit turns out to be someone who’d grown vengeful because of the victim’s unwillingness to forgive her for something she’d done years before.

  School: Bad-girl Heather’s sneaky actions early in the book result in huge embarrassment for Officer Borsch. He doesn’t know who’s behind it, but when cornered by Sammy near the end of the book, Heather breaks down and begs Officer Borsch to help and forgive her.

  Home: Nosy neighbor Mrs. Graybill winds up in a nursing home. At first Sammy’s like, Good riddance, because the woman has been on a relentless mission to prove Sammy’s living at the Senior Highrise illegally. But then the bedridden Mrs. Graybill won’t stop with her agonizing sounds, and what she’s moaning and groaning about is wanting to see Sammy Keyes.

  Which makes absolutely no sense.

  She hates Sammy!

  But she won’t shut up, so when Sammy finally visits her, what comes out is Mrs. Graybill’s backstory and why she grew into being such a bitter old woman, along with deathbed regrets about it. And what she begs for now is Sammy’s forgiveness.

  So we have separate threads that touch on the theme and crisscross each other throughout the book. And the rubber band at the end that holds them tightly together is Sammy’s epiphany that in order to not become a bitter person like Mrs. Graybill, or wind up like the culprit, or even like Heather Acosta, she has to find a way to forgive her mother for the things she’s done.

  Sammy’s takeaway brings the theme into sharp focus, but it does so in an organic way, without sermonizing.

  The cool thing about being in tune with theme is that as your story unfolds, you can find ways to incorporate it in places you didn’t foresee. You can also go back during the revision process and shore it up.

  So what’s the Big Idea behind the story you’re writing? What is it you’re trying to convey or explore? What’s your purpose for writing the book? Even if your purpose is simply “entertainment” or crafting a “story about nothing,” a theme can create satisfying cohesiveness. And if you define your theme and write with it in mind, you’ll find that opportunities for weaving it in will present themselves and that your overarching story line will be tighter and stronger for it.

  And if you’re writing to explore—to dig more deeply into a subject or emotions (or the ever-elusive meaning of life)—watch for a theme to develop. Because it will, and when it does, you can go back and reinforce it in the revision process to make it feel like it was there all along.

  Aside from the words you use on the page, there are lots of ways you can create a vibe or mood for your story by manipulating how and where you choose to place those words. A great example of that is a story told in free verse. You know, where an author…

  Takes a thought

  And breaks

  It

  Into lines that

  Flow

  and tumble and

  fall

  Down

  the

  page.

  Free verse can be very dramatic. It can also feel like the author totally cheated, turning a fifty-page manuscript into three hundred artsy-fartsy choppy pages.

  The decision to use free verse should be made for its contribution to the storytelling, not as a way to appear cool. Or pad pages. And all decisions you make on where to place or how to break your words should be done with the big picture in mind. Ask yourself: Does it improve the telling of my story?

  Sometimes simple is better, and if that’s the case, get out of your own way.

  And sometimes artsy really does contribute, so if that’s the case, use it.

  My first novels were written with the straightforward structure of even-length chapters. It was the style I was most familiar with, and once Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief was written that way, the die was cast for the entire series.

  Flipped, too, was written in standard chapters, but here the point of view switches chapter by chapter, with each of the two main characters telling their side of the story.

  Then, when considering ways to write Holly’s story in Runaway, I settled on the journal format, with touches of poetry throughout, to give it a structure very different from the Sammy Keyes books.

  With the Shredderman books, I wrote with an eye toward white space on the page to appeal to and encourage kids who were becoming independent readers—something I will expand upon later.

  But here I want to focus on the structure of The Running Dream because I think it’s a good example of what considered structure can contribute to the telling of a story, even when the reader doesn’t recognize it’s there.

  To set things up, here are the pertinent basics:

  Story premise: Jessica, a star high school runner, loses her leg in a horrible accident and feels like her life is over.

  POV: First person.

  Takeaway: Sometimes the finish line is actually a new starting line.

  The story opens with Jessica in the hospital after the accident/amputation. The sentences—her thoughts—are short. Choppy. Incomplete. The whole first section is that way, and it’s done in an effort to capture the feeling of breathlessness. Have you ever had a panic attack? That. Terror and racing heart and the inability to breathe…all of that is projected to the reader with the assistance of structure.

  Then, as Jessica adapts to her new reality, the sentences lengthen. So do the paragraphs. Her thinking and her view of the world change and expand, and this is reflect
ed in the easing flow of the language.

  Most readers don’t even notice the specifics of this because, like Jessica’s recovery, it’s gradual. But they feel it as they move through the pages, catching their own breath along the way.

  More obvious in this book is the use of sections. Sections are commonly used to signal a change in time or location or narrative viewpoint. They help introduce a shift that’s difficult to achieve with a segue or chapter break.

  In The Running Dream, each section begins with its own chapter one…because in anything hard, you have to go back to the beginning, pull yourself together, and try again.

  What’s not so obvious in The Running Dream is the underlying purpose of the section breaks. There are five of them: “Finish Line,” “Headwind,” “Straightaway,” “Adjusting the Blocks,” and “Starting Line.”

  They represent a race run backward.

  They represent that sometimes a finish line is actually a new starting line.

  And the choice of five sections?

  That’s for the five stages of grief.

  I don’t expect every reader to pick up on this, and that’s okay. It’s more like a backdrop to the action onstage—once it’s noticed, it becomes clear how much it contributes, but even if it’s overlooked, it affects the experience of reading the story.

  So think about different ways you might reinforce your story through structure. There is absolutely nothing wrong with straightforward chapters—if that’s what works best for your story, don’t mess with it. But there’s no harm in considering alternate or supplemental ideas, and you may hit on something that contributes—even as unseen support—to the power of your story.

  Dialogue is the vocalization of your characters’ thoughts. What your characters say helps to show us who they are. It’s the way we begin to really hear them. Dialogue contributes to the creation of “voice,” and it can make or break the reader’s engagement with a book.