Making of a Writer (9780307820464)

by Nixon, Joan Lowery

  Books by Joan Lowery Nixon

  FICTION

  A Candidate for Murder

  The Dark and Deadly Pool

  Don’t Scream

  The Ghosts of Now

  Ghost Town: Seven Ghostly Stories

  The Haunting

  In the Face of Danger

  The Island of Dangerous Dreams

  The Kidnapping of Christina Lattimore

  Laugh Till You Cry

  Murdered, My Sweet

  The Name of the Game Was Murder

  Nightmare

  Nobody’s There

  The Other Side of Dark

  Playing for Keeps

  Search for the Shadowman

  Secret, Silent Screams

  Shadowmaker

  The Specter

  Spirit Seeker

  The Stalker

  The Trap

  The Weekend Was Murder!

  Whispers from the Dead

  Who Are You?

  NONFICTION

  The Making of a Writer

  For more than forty years,

  Yearling has been the leading name

  in classic and award-winning literature

  for young readers.

  Yearling books feature children’s

  favorite authors and characters,

  providing dynamic stories of adventure,

  humor, history, mystery, and fantasy.

  Trust Yearling paperbacks to entertain,

  inspire, and promote the love of reading in all children.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2000 by Joan Lowery Nixon

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company. Originally published in hardcover by Delacorte Press, New York, in 2000

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82046-4

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Pat,

  whom I cherish

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Epilogue

  Top Ten Writing Tips

  About the Author

  Introduction

  You love to read. You love to write. Many of you have written to me to ask, “How can I become a published writer someday?”

  My answers to your letters often include the advice to read, read, read. A love of reading leads to a love of writing.

  I also suggest that you write for your own pleasure every chance you get. In some letters I’ve explained the importance of character development. In others I’ve suggested ways to make story beginnings exciting. I always try to help you understand the process of creating a story.

  Writing is much more than learning a few rules from a necessarily short letter. Writing is a complicated mixture of talent, art, craft, structure, free-flowing ideas, unleashed imagination, soaring hopes, wondrous insights, giddy joy, deep satisfaction, dreadful insecurity, total misery, strong persistence, and solid determination.

  Writing is an ever-developing awareness of people and events that has its beginnings in childhood.

  At some point nearly every writer takes stock of a lifetime of accumulated experiences. Sometimes it’s surprising to discover the writer’s special awareness, which began in the early years and has subtly guided the direction that person has taken.

  This book is about the incidents that happened when I was young that helped me grow and develop as a writer.

  I hope that what I share with you will not only entertain you, but will also lead you to keep your eyes and ears open to the insights and ideas that will come bursting into your own imagination.

  Happy reading. Happy writing—now and in the future.

  Chapter One

  When I was young I filled notebooks with my writing. Sometimes I jotted down special thoughts, bits of description, verses, and short stories.

  The number of greeting cards I designed, with personalized verses inside, would have shaken the marketing department heads of Hallmark. Every member of my family received my illustrated poems on holidays, birthdays, other special occasions, and sometimes just-for-fun days. It made my relatives and friends feel special, and I suppose it also saved me money at the greeting card store.

  When I was ten, I mailed one of my poems to a children’s magazine to which I subscribed. I can’t remember the name of the magazine, but it had a page devoted to children’s writing and art.

  My poem was titled “Springtime,” and I remember that one line was “and children play outdoors because they’re glad it’s spring.” There must have been some literary license involved because in Los Angeles children played outdoors all year round.

  In April 1938, two months after my eleventh birthday, I opened the just-arrived issue of the magazine. There on the children’s page was my printed poem, with the byline Joan Lowery, age 10.

  My name! My byline! In a magazine that people all over the United States would read!

  I can still visualize my name in print under the words I had written. This was what it was like to be a published writer. In print! With a byline! Delirious with success, I knew I was on my way.

  Chapter Two

  When I was a baby my parents and my mother’s parents, Mathias (Matt) and Harriet (Hattie) Meyer, whom we called Nanny and Pa, bought a white stucco duplex on the corner of 73rd Street and Gramercy in Los Angeles. They added a large, square room that connected the two sides of the house through my parents’ and grandparents’ dining rooms. Since my mother had been a kindergarten teacher, the room was outfitted like her former classroom with an upright piano, a sturdy work table and chairs, easels and poster paints, a school-sized blackboard, a ceramic pot that held damp clay, a dollhouse, and a roomy space for toys. Everyone called it the playroom.

  My parents’ side of the house was arranged in a square, and my grandparents’ side of the house was shaped like an upside-down L. After my sister Pat was born, when I was five, she and my other younger sister, Marilyn, shared the second bedroom in our parents’ side of the house. My bedroom was on my grandparents’ side of the house, at the far end of the upside-down L.

  The two sides of the house were quite different, although both had cha
irs and sofas upholstered in the stiff, prickly plush fabric that was in fashion then. I can’t remember what color they were because they were all covered in homemade slipcovers of printed fabric that didn’t match but had been purchased at a “good bargain.” The object was to protect the furniture underneath. The slipcovers were removed only for special guests and parties at which there would be no children.

  I can see now that the slipcovers cut out a lot of the stress to which children are subjected. With the furniture well protected, no one cared if we climbed onto the sofa with our shoes on to color the designs in our coloring books, or sat there munching on saltine crackers.

  The gas stove in my mother’s kitchen was fairly new. It looked like a table on white enameled iron legs with the oven on top, next to the four burners. Nanny had an old, heavy iron stove whose oven was like a dark cavern underneath the burners. Mother had an electric refrigerator, but Nanny had a wooden icebox out on the service porch.

  Two times a week the iceman arrived in his truck, picked up a huge block of ice with tongs, and carried it on his back to replace the melted ice in the icebox. There was a pan underneath into which the melting ice could drip, and Pa had to empty this heavy pan at least once a day.

  The children in the neighborhood loved to jump into the open back of the ice truck, grab slivers of ice, and run before the iceman returned. If he came back too soon, this good-natured man would pretend to scowl. He’d shout, “Who’s taking my ice?” and then take a few steps toward us as we ran away squealing.

  Nanny loved to cook and to bake, so both sides of the house were rich with the fragrances of pot roast and onions, cinnamon-sugar cookies, rich chocolate puddings, and comforting chicken soups.

  Our grandparents and their activities played a big part in our lives.

  Each spring Nanny and Pa bottled their own root beer. We all loved root beer, especially in black cows, sodas made of vanilla ice cream and root beer. Nanny cooked the root beer mixture and scalded the bottles, and after the brew had been poured into the bottles, Pa would cap them with a small metal bottle-capping tool that could be operated only by exerting great physical strength.

  The bottles would be stored on the service porch, and after a certain period had passed in which the carbonation did its work, the root beer would be ready to drink.

  It was delicious, and to add to the fun and excitement of each summer, every now and then a bottle on the service porch would explode with a noise we could hear all over the house.

  It was best when I was young and could scream at the explosions. When I grew a little older I often had to help clean up the sticky mess.

  I watched Nanny make fudge, which, at an exact time in its cooling, Pa, with his strong arm, beat into a creamy texture. Nanny taught me how to darn socks and took me with her when she visited her circle of friends in the neighborhood. Mrs. Christiana offered me cookies. Mrs. Ritemeyer, who subscribed to the Los Angeles Times’s rival newspaper, the Examiner, always saved her Sunday comics for me.

  Nanny and Pa were wonderful companions and the best of baby-sitters. Tall, quiet Pa and chatty Nanny, who barely reached five feet tall, were infinitely patient and spent hours playing Chinese checkers, whist, and poker with us as we graduated from our early years of fish and slapjack. With both parents and grandparents close at hand, my sisters and I were tucked into a snug, secure environment.

  In some of my earliest memories I see myself running to my grandfather and saying, “Pa, will you read to me?”

  Pa, a sun-browned man with curly, graying hair, had retired from his job as a mail carrier. I could usually find him reading in his favorite armchair because he dearly loved good books. When I appeared, carrying as many picture books as I could hold, he’d close his own book in the middle of a sentence. He’d wait until I’d climbed up in his lap; then he’d begin reading.

  Mother, who also loved to read, shared countless books with me, and later with my younger sisters, Marilyn and Pat. After I was grown Mother liked to remind me that before I was old enough to read or write, I’d sometimes come to her and say, “I have a poem, Mama. Write it down.”

  Apparently, from a very early age I understood that words could be put together in a wonderful way, then written down and kept forever. Even before I was old enough to begin gathering memories, I wanted to be a part of this writing-and-keeping process.

  When I was young we didn’t have television. It hadn’t been invented. No one had dreamed up the Internet or electronic games to keep us solitarily indoors, so—unless it was raining—all the kids in the neighborhood got together outside and played red light–green light, hopscotch, hide-and-seek, and tag.

  Adults had not yet organized kids into regulated teams for sports, so we made up our own. Occasionally, when conditions were right, we enjoyed a weed fight in the vacant lot in back of our house.

  A perfect weed fight had to take place after a rain, when the dirt was loose and muddy. It was also important—for obvious reasons—that neither of my parents be at home. As all the neighborhood kids gathered in the lot, we’d choose sides and form teams. Then we’d grab handfuls of the tall grasses that covered the field, their roots tangled in balls of damp earth, and let fly.

  It was great fun to throw dirt clods at each other until we were exhausted. The clods weren’t hard enough to cause any damage, and no team actually won or lost the game. We simply ended up sweaty and itching, with dirt in our hair and ears and sifting down the necks of our shirts.

  In our neighborhood we often played outside until just before dinner. Then we all dashed to our own homes so that we wouldn’t miss the fifteen-minute radio dramas designed just for kids: Jack Armstrong: the All-American Boy, Little Orphan Annie, and Uncle Whoa Bill, a local children’s talent program heard in the Los Angeles area.

  But my very favorite radio program, the one I couldn’t bear to miss, was The Lone Ranger. It came on at seven-thirty in the evening. As the Lone Ranger and his “faithful sidekick,” Tonto, raced through canyons and across plains in their urgency to make the West safe for humanity, I could close my eyes and envision broad vistas of sun-scorched earth, glowing campfires, and dark night skies swept with glittering, oversized stars. In my mind the bad guys looked as mean as their voices, and I was sure that the settlers who were helped by the Lone Ranger had grateful, happy expressions on their upturned, trusting faces. The bad guys always lost, and the good guys—with the help of the Lone Ranger—always won. It was a comfortable world and satisfied my sense of justice.

  My father, Joseph Lowery, an accountant, had an orderly, disciplined mind. When I was seven and school began again in September, he informed me that good students always got plenty of sleep. Therefore my bedtime on school nights would be at seven-thirty, not a minute later.

  “Not seven-thirty!” I complained. “That’s when The Lone Ranger comes on!”

  Daddy was adamant. “Bedtime must be the same each night,” he insisted. “Your routine shouldn’t be interrupted by something as unimportant as a radio program.”

  “The Lone Ranger is important,” I insisted, but my arguments didn’t help. Tearfully, I obeyed, and Mother tucked me into bed exactly one minute before seven-thirty.

  I didn’t have long to feel sorry for myself. Suddenly the power of the theme music, the William Tell Overture, swirled through the room, and the familiar voice of the announcer began: “A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty, ‘Hi-Yo, Silver!’ The Lone Ranger rides again.”

  In her living room at the front of the house, Nanny had turned the volume of their radio high enough that I could hear my favorite program in my back bedroom.

  It didn’t take long for Daddy to knock at the door to my grandparents’ side of the house. Since he and Nanny had to shout to be heard over the radio, I didn’t miss a word they said.

  “Your radio is so loud it’s causing the house to vibrate,” Daddy shouted.

  “I’m sorry, Joe,” Nanny yelled back. “I’m getting older, and
perhaps I’m becoming a little hard of hearing. I don’t want to miss my program.”

  With Pa in compliance, the radio volume wasn’t turned down until the end of the half-hour program.

  Daddy didn’t attempt to argue. Instead, the next day he brought home a small radio and placed it on the night table next to my bed. He told me I could listen to The Lone Ranger on my own radio if I was in bed before seven-thirty.

  However, he neglected one bit of instruction. He didn’t tell me when I had to turn the radio off. So often, after The Lone Ranger ended, the radio went under the covers with me as I explored the radio band, looking for other programs of interest.

  On one memorable evening, I discovered an amazing radio show that gave an abrupt turn to the direction my life was taking. I Love a Mystery, with its heavy footsteps, creaking doors, ear-shattering screams, and heart-stopping murders, was not just scary, it was absolutely terrifying. It was exactly what caring parents like mine would never, ever allow their children to listen to. At the end of the fifteen-minute episode I lay in bed trembling, frightened of the shadows in the corners of my bedroom, sure that the scrabbling sounds I heard outside my window were those of a crazed murderer. I whimpered to myself. When I fell asleep I had nightmares.

  I loved every minute of that radio program, and during all the years it was on I tried never to miss an episode.

  During a visit to our branch library, I accidentally stumbled across a mystery novel written for children. Although I read eagerly and avidly, until that time I had had no idea that mystery stories could also be found in books. I was thrilled. What an exciting way to write! What a marvelous way to tell a story! The mystery novels for children that I found and devoured were not as nerve-shattering as I Love a Mystery, but the books filled my need for breath-holding suspense.

  At that early time in my childhood I promised myself that someday I would write books and someday I, too, would become a mystery writer.

  Chapter Three