So you want to be a writer?
Kate DiCamillo shared some hard-won advice at Saturday’s KidFest, at the Morristown Festival of Books.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re 10 or if you’re 55. You should read as much as you can. And you should find some way to make a deal with yourself about how you’re going to do the work,” DiCamillo, 53, told a packed hall in the Presbyterian Parish House.
She knows what she’s talking about. The former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature is a New York Times best-selling author and National Book Award finalist, with a pair of Newbery Medals and 22 million books in print.
Her children’s titles include Because of Winn-Dixie and The Tale of Despereaux, which both became movies; and Flora & Ulysses, Raymie Nightingale and the new La La La.
DiCamillo discovered the power of storytelling as a sickly child in Pennsylvania. Each winter she was hospitalized with pneumonia.
“I felt very small, alone and worried in the hospital,” she recounted.
Slideshow photos by Kevin Coughlin:
DiCamillo’s father brought her some figurines of people and animals, invented a story, and challenged her to recite it back to him. She felt a connection with her dad, and no longer felt so isolated or apprehensive.
In elementary school, she lived for story time, when a favorite teacher read aloud to the class. She was astonished to learn that the class bully loved those stories, too.
By the time she graduated from the University of Florida, DiCamillo fancied herself a writer.
“I got a black turtleneck, and trotted out to the world saying, ‘I’m a writer’… I kept up that charade for 10 years,” said DiCamillo, who resides in Minneapolis.
As her 30th birthday approached, she woke up.
“I realized I could spend the rest of my life pretending. And so I actually started to write. By the time I was 30, life had kicked me around enough that there was something tender and broken in me that I could get to in a story, and that I could see in other people.”
She was 36 when Because of Winn-Dixie, about a girl and a dog, was published. The response from librarians, teachers, parents and kids was overwhelming. Once again, a story had forged strong connections for DiCamillo.
“That 10 years that I spent wearing my black turtleneck, telling everybody that I was a writer, it doesn’t work. You have to find some way to make yourself do the work.
“Because it is work, and we forget that,” she said. “We think, oh, I’m supposed to be a writer, then I will sit down and this will come out right the first time. It doesn’t. So the deal I made with myself was two pages a day.”
Be dogged.
“You’re going to have to re-write and re-write and re-write,” DiCamillo said
Be prepared, and alert.
“Carry a notebook with you. Eavesdrop on people. Pay attention to everything. The world is your business, in your writing,” she said.
Don’t get too hung up on politeness.
“I learned to stare at people without my mouth hanging open. But I feel that staring at them is something I’m supposed to do. The writer must never be ashamed at staring,” she said, quoting Flannery O’Connor:
“There is nothing that does not require your attention.”
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