Fine!
Fine!
We’ll see who lasts longer!
Yeah, we’ll see!
I made the call while I was still fired up and began worrying about it immediately after hanging up. Hadn’t I been anxious for the guy to leave? Didn’t I think he was scary?
What had I gotten myself into?
I’d asked the Hoodlum if he could start the next day—a Saturday. He’d said yes, but I’d heard the reluctance in his voice.
So maybe he wouldn’t show up. Maybe I’d admit to my brother that, yeah, I’d been dumb and move on.
But Saturday morning, the Hoodlum appeared. Early, even. So I issued him his boots and coveralls and showed him around, and before long we were on task, doing a pretty mundane, repetitive job.
And that’s when the questions started. And they never seemed to stop. As one workday bled into the next, he kept asking me seemingly random stuff. What did I think of this, what did I think of that, what was my favorite book, band, movie….He was not chatting me up. He just liked to talk. Actually, no. It was more than that. He liked to debate, and there was no getting away from it.
It wasn’t the questions that bothered me, but the inevitable follow-up questions. Like Is it your favorite song because of lyrical content or chord progression?
WHY CAN’T IT JUST BE MY FAVORITE SONG?
And then one day there was this: “Do you believe in ethical absolutes?”
Ethical absolutes? What the bleep?
I’m pretty sure I was kinda testy when I asked him to explain.
“You know,” he said, “when something’s always right, or always wrong?”
“For example…?”
“Like…say…is it ever okay to murder someone?”
This from the Hoodlum.
WHY DIDN’T I DO A BACKGROUND CHECK?
I wasn’t very good at answering these questions. I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking philosophical thoughts over the last few years. I’d made to-do lists. Long, practical to-do lists. Ones that would roll over to the next day, and the next. Bottomless to-do lists that left me too exhausted to spend time mind-jockeying over things like ethical absolutes, or whether I liked a song because of its chord progression or its lyrical content, or what the rational principles for establishing universal values of right and wrong should be.
I had work to do!
But after work, the questions lingered. And it bugged me that I didn’t have answers. Were there ethical absolutes? Was it ever okay to murder someone?
At the time, I was in a relationship with a guy we’ll call the Dashing Man. He was the classic tall-dark-and-handsome variety, and really, he looked like he should be running around in a white puffy shirt with a fencing sword in hand. I had fallen hard.
During dinners out with the Dashing Man, I would ask him questions posed to me by the Hoodlum. I wanted to discuss them so I could go back to work with ammunition. Well-crafted answers!
So I asked, “Do you think there’s such a thing as an ethical absolute?”
The Dashing Man gave me a dashing squint. “An ethical absolute? What’s that?”
“You know, like, say, is it ever okay to murder someone?”
“To murder someone?” Deeper squint, not at all dashing. “Wendelin, what’s gotten into you?”
Clearly, the Dashing Man was not helping me stockpile ammunition. As a matter of fact, my questions began to annoy him. Why couldn’t his favorite song just be his favorite song? Why did I want to analyze everything? Why was I asking all these questions?
Which only created more questions inside me.
Questions that were starting to change the way I saw…everything.
So, to make a very long, very convoluted story short, the Boy Scout turned in his boots and coveralls after about a month.
And I married the Hoodlum.
So. What’s the Hoodlum story got to do with Flipped, a book about a girl who raises chickens in her backyard and likes to climb trees? What’s it got to do with a boy who hates that annoying girl and avoids her at all costs?
The seed idea of learning to see past a person’s surface was planted with the Hoodlum experience, but it stayed dormant for years, until it was watered by new experiences.
As a teacher, I saw teens doing the same thing I had done—crushing on someone because they were cute or gorgeous or hot or whatever. Girls did it, boys did it, and usually very little attention was paid to whether there was substance to back up those strong emotions.
Turns out, it’s a pretty universal thing. Almost certainly instinctive. But more is required for sustainable relationships than biological drive. For those, you have to learn to dig a little deeper.
In addition to teaching six classes each day, I ran the computer club, the chess club, the school newspaper, and the yearbook. So I really didn’t have time to be anywhere but in my room during the school day, and there were always students hanging around at break, at lunch, and after school. They ate their lunches, played chess, caught up on homework, or found a quiet corner to shed some tears.
Their constant presence was how I learned that kids can be really good at giving each other really bad advice. They mean well. They’re trying. But wow. Cringe. No. Please.
And of course my attempts at sharing hard-won wisdom regarding romance fell on deaf ears. They knew I meant well. They could see I was trying. But I was a teacher.
Wow. Cringe. No. Please.
But still. If only I could really talk to them.
If only they would really listen.
But how, when they were in a place where they only wanted to listen to each other?
And this was when the seed popped through the surface.
Why not let my characters do the talking?
The idea of two characters learning to really see each other “in the proper light” grew fast and strong. The sycamore tree, the chickens, the Basket Boys, the everything-else were offshoots that sprang from a seed that had been germinating for years.
It was springtime for Flipped.
It burst out and became its own living, growing, blossoming thing.
Not a hoodlum in sight.
Another seed was planted at an event in Birmingham, Alabama—a breakfast hosted by my publisher. It took a series of forever flights to get there, and I arrived at my hotel room late and exhausted. I called home to check in. The kids, then six and eight years old, were not happy. I could tell from my husband’s voice that he, too, had had a long day.
“Remind me why you’re doing this?” he asked.
The truth is, I wasn’t really sure. My in-house publicist had arranged things. It was part of some national English teacher conference. Who knew there was such a thing? And why hold it so late in November? Regardless, in a moment filled with optimistic energy, I’d committed to going.
That energy had abandoned me when a delayed flight had messed with my connection. And now, in my travel-weary state, all I knew was that I had to get to bed. Breakfast was early and I was booked on an afternoon flight back home the next day. I didn’t even bother to unpack.
At breakfast, I sat at a round table with a handful of librarians in a moderate-sized room that held perhaps twenty such tables. I remember the publisher introducing all the authors present and saying a few words about each writer’s most recent contribution to children’s literature. I remember he ended his remarks about Sammy Keyes with “Long may she wave,” which I thought was awesome.
But really, that’s pretty much all I remember about the breakfast.
What I remember about afterward was being dropped off at the airport, stressing to get through security on time, and then finding myself crammed up against a window in sardine class with a couple and their unhappy almost-two-year-old, the three of them more than filling the middle and aisle seats.
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br /> I called my husband before takeoff. Between juggling work and child care, it had been a long twenty-four hours for him, too. “So you’re telling me you flew to Birmingham for breakfast,” he said, summing up my summary.
“Looks like,” I said.
The almost-two-year-old grabbed and yanked my hair. I cowered farther against the window and whimpered.
Add sticky hair to the trip’s delights.
“You okay?” my husband asked as the kid squalled and lunged again.
Like I could explain? “I’m really looking forward to being home.”
A moment of silence from him and then, “Promise me you’ll never go to Birmingham for breakfast again.”
That was a no-brainer. “I promise.”
The trip immediately worked its way into our family lexicon. “Is this another breakfast in Birmingham?” became code for assessing whether a trip was worth taking. Because from all indicators, breakfast in Birmingham had not been.
But about a year after the breakfast, a completely unexpected thing happened: A school district in Alabama wanted to hire me for an extended stay so I could visit all their middle schools. The head librarian had been at the breakfast and had, apparently, taken a shine to me.
So I returned to Alabama, and this time I unpacked. This time I learned firsthand what “Southern hospitality” is all about. Everyplace I went, people fussed over me, making sure I was doing okay and had enough to eat, making sure the students were respectful and attentive. I had never been ma’am’d before in my life, but now every single sentence directed my way ended in ma’am. Even the school lunches were different from anything I’d experienced, and I came to discover the secret ingredient that made my most-loathed-as-a-child vegetable, lima beans, delicious.
Bacon.
I even went up for seconds.
So I had a wonderful time in Alabama, but the thing I loved most was listening to the language that surrounded me like an ethereal chuckle—the colorful expressions that floated past me. Dumber’n a mud fence. Madder’n a wet hen. Makes my teeth itch. Poor as pig tracks…I was the California-raised daughter of Dutch immigrants. It was all new to me.
On my very last day, while I was out to lunch with all the librarians and the superintendent of schools, the Southern expressions were flying as the conversation turned (as it invariably does when school folk get together) to what was going on in education. “Oh, he’s happy as a pig in sunshine over that” came flying one way. “I’m sick of ropin’ dead cows” went the other.
Since they were busy talking among themselves, I surreptitiously began scribbling down the expressions on a paper napkin, trying to recall others I’d heard during my time there so I could share them with my husband when I got home.
And I was just starting on the back side of the napkin when I got busted.
“What y’all doing?” a librarian asked me.
I blushed, then fessed up with a guilty smile. “Writin’ down the way all y’all talk?”
The group near me leaned in. “What y’all got so far?”
I read them my list, and when I was done, they said, “Well, shoot. We can do better’n that!” and proceeded to shower me with expressions. Even the superintendent chimed in.
So breakfast in Birmingham wasn’t a hard paddle up a dry river for nothing after all. Because of it I met some wonderful people, talked to a gazillion kids about Sammy Keyes, had an enlightening cultural experience, and returned home with a scribbled list of expressions and great stories to share with my husband.
Breakfast had a dessert course, how nice!
And that, I thought, was the end of that.
There was no thought in my mind of writing a book using Southern language or a Southern setting.
None.
I was up to my earlobes attending to books under contract and stressed by the pace. Under pressure to write the Shredderman quartet between Sammy Keyes books, I had worried aloud to my husband several times that I’d overcommitted. Even though I was now a full-time author with a six-hour writing day while my kids were in elementary school, the deadlines nipped hard at my heels. For some inexplicable reason, it felt like I had less time to write now that I was doing it full-time. How could that be?
The situation was a complete flip from my precontract writing days, when nobody seemed to want my work or care that I was writing at all. It was strange to look back and realize there had been a certain luxury in nobody wanting my stuff. Not that I would trade back—I’d worked too hard to get to this point! So I checked my complaints, redoubled my efforts, and focused.
And then one night…
Yes, that is the way it always goes.
On this particular night I was losing the battle to wait up for my husband, who was working a swing shift. As I dozed off, a scene from an almost-dream went through my mind: a car careening toward a tree, kids yanking on a rope.
I snapped to, then told myself it was only a dream. Everything was okay. But as I started to drift off again, there was the car again, careening toward a tree, and kids yanking on a rope.
I stopped the scene in my mind, tried to steer it in another direction. But it seemed to have a mind, a direction, of its own, and as I drifted off again, there it was, that car, careening toward a tree, and kids yanking on a rope.
But this time there was a voice that went along with it.
A boy’s voice.
One with a Southern accent.
Joey’s blood got mixed up in mine the same way mine got mixed up in his: drop by drop, pact by pact. And there’s times that makes me feel good, but there’s times it creeps me out. Reminds me.
I sat up, wide awake now, and breathless. And rather than ask the boy who he was and what the devil he was doing in my head, I grabbed a pad of paper and wrote down what he was saying.
The words just flowed, and before long, out of my pen came, “I swear to howdy, if you tell a soul.”
I stopped short.
I swear to howdy.
It was a favorite expression of a woman I had gotten to know during my extended stay in Alabama.
And this voice in my head—it could have been one of any number of the kids I’d spent time with there.
But…it had been at least six months since I’d visited Alabama.
Why was this boy talking to me now?
Let me take a moment to confirm that creative writers are all a little crazy. We do hear voices. We talk about our characters like they’re real. We feel the story like it’s actually happening. And what happens to the people who populate our books matters to us.
It matters a lot.
By the time my husband came home from work, my character had a name, a family, a personality, and a mischievous best friend. And I was a goner. I barely greeted my husband before shaking the pad of paper at him. “Here. Read this!”
Despite his weary-from-a-long-day state, he obliged (because he’s that kind of guy). When he was done, he gave me a baffled look, flipped back through the pages, and said, “What is this?”
So I told him about the car and the tree and the rope and the dream. I told him about the boy in my head.
That I could hear him.
That he had a story to tell.
I was wide awake and trying to explain why this boy, this story, was crucial. “What got him to the point where he thought this was okay to do? How does any kid get there? It starts with little things and escalates. You don’t see it coming and then all of a sudden it’s too late!”
Okay, I’ll admit—it was after midnight and I was definitely not “reading the room.” And I was a little manic, already talking about my characters like they were real.
My husband returned the pad and sighed. “It’s wonderful, but…are you sure you want to start on this? I thought you were stressed about your deadlines.”
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nbsp; But it was too late. I was possessed. And, unfortunately for the rest of the family, I dove into the story and didn’t emerge until I’d reached the end. It was short. Only 126 pages. I didn’t know if a book that length was even publishable.
And it didn’t matter.
Because that’s how it is when you write from a place of merging passions. This wasn’t just a story about two boys and the mischief they got into. This was a story about friendship and what it meant to be a true friend. This was a story about the burning rubber of wrong turns on the highway out of childhood. This was about finding the courage to take a stand, about pulling your friend back from the brink.
The voice came to me from across the country, but it spoke for every kid who’d ever longed for a best friend to share adventures with, and for every kid who’d learned the hard way that some secrets are better confessed.
I titled it Swear to Howdy, sent it to my new librarian friends in Alabama for their reaction, took their suggestions, and mailed the manuscript to my editor with a note that basically said, “Surprise!”
And she said…
“What is this?”
But then she read it.
And I didn’t have to explain a thing.
So, as you pursue your dreams, remember this: Dishes and laundry and the mundane can wait. They will call to you and try to convince you that you don’t have time for creative pursuits, but I promise you—dishes and laundry and the mundane can wait.
They may multiply as you put them off, but they can wait.
Instead, learn to listen to the voices that call from your heart.
Learn to follow the story.
Because the story should be the thing that cannot wait.
And then there’s the story I battled against writing. The one where a teen who loves to run gets in an awful accident on the way home from a track meet and winds up losing a leg.
Ugh. What an awful idea. I believe in books that uplift. Create hope! One about a girl who becomes an amputee in the prime of her life?
NO!
So how in the world did the idea seed itself in my brain?
Hope in the Mail Page 12
