Clements, Andrew

I only remember one English teacher from high school, Mrs. Rappell. With her help – more like insistence – I discovered I was good at writing. But frankly, I was lazy. I only wrote when I was inspired. I wrote about thoughts and feelings of the moment. I wrote when it seemed to come naturally. I didn’t spend much time at it, and apart from essays and papers during college and graduate school, writing was little more than a hobby.

All through the seven years I spent as a teacher I continued to write, mostly poetry and songs. My wife and I began performing my songs, and we moved to New York to see if there was a career in music for us. I wrote ten or twelve new songs during our first few months in the city. That was the first time I had ever really worked at writing in a sustained way. Our career in music never happened, but the songs and the writing experience remained.

Then I went to work for a children’s book publisher. Writing tasks came thick and fast: catalog text, flap copy, advertising copy, story summaries, letters to authors and illustrators, even business plan writing. My colleagues came to depend on me for a lot of the company’s writing. And one day the publisher asked me to write a story for an illustrator who needed a project. That became the picture book Big Al, and my career as an author was off and running, or at least off and meandering.

I’ve written a lot of picture book texts. The picture book is a small container – typically about a dozen page-turns from start to finish. It’s a real challenge to put a substantial idea into so small a package. The story must be told economically, simply, and dramatically.

Yet, the language must be rich enough to evoke an illustrator’s best work. I continue to write picture books, and expect I always will.

While I was visiting at a school, a fifth-grade boy asked, “When does writing become easy?” I had to tell him the truth. Never – at least not in my experience. It takes discipline to write. It takes some doing. To write something, sooner or later I have to go off by myself and put one word after another, word after word after word, until it’s done.

I recently figured out that if I took all the words in my first novel, Frindle, and ran them end-to-end with no returns and no paragraph or chapter breaks, I would have one string of words as long as three football fields. And now, when I get to chapter six or seven in a new novel, I say to myself, “Only two more football fields to go.”

But when the writing goes well, I don’t think about counting the words. I get drawn into the lives of the characters, and into building a world for them to explore. I usually have an idea of where a book will end up, but sometimes I am surprised. I often start with a simple idea, a “What if?” situation. What if a boy decided he was going to make up a new word? What if a girl began to publish her own newspaper? What if a boy’s father was the janitor at his school? Once a character is placed in a particular situation, then it’s simply a matter of continuing to answer this question: “What happens next?” Answering that question leads me to the end of the story.

I have learned that I cannot sit around and wait for inspiration. I have learned to begin working, and let the inspiration come from the writing itself. The old rule, ‘Never stare at a blank piece of paper,’ – or a blank computer screen – is a good one. Beginning is important. If I can get a story started, the ending will come.

No writer is self-created. I have many debts. I owe so much to my wife, Rebecca, and our four boys for the joy and stability that fuel my work. I owe so much to my parents for making good books a part of my childhood. I owe inspired editors who have helped me again and again. I owe the words of the Bible. I owe Shakespeare, Yeats, E. B. White, Bob Dylan, and Margaret Wise Brown. And of course I owe the teachers and librarians and parents who have chosen to share my books with children.

Writing for children is a great privilege, and I am grateful for it.

         – Courtesy of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

 

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