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When Are You Going to Write a Novel for Adults?
When I give a speech about writing, inevitably I get asked the question, When are you going to write a novel for adults? Evidently, some people feel that writing for children is some kind of starter exercise. Real writers write for grown-ups. Thanks to J. K. Rowling, this is beginning to change. Rowling's unbelievable talent and incredible popularity have done so much to legitimize the craft of writing for children—not that it needed legitimizing for those of us who love it, but nonetheless.
So how do I answer the question? I say: I have no interest in writing for adults. The idea itself gives me an almost overwhelming urge to take a nap.
Even in my late teens and early twenties, when I too believed writing for kids was not real writing, I still wrote for children. I just didn't know it. It was such a relief when I realized that I was a children's writer. Suddenly, I went from having one book idea I wasn't too keen on to having hundreds of book ideas I couldn't wait to write.
Like all of my protagonists, I never really turned thirteen either. So for me, the real question is not When are you going to write for adults? but Why do you always write from a child's perspective?
Childhood, for me, was a confusing and painful time. Everyone remembers where they were on 9-11 or, if you are over 40, when President Kennedy was shot. Thankfully, I did not have this kind of violence in my childhood, but there was a lot of death. In one six-year period, my father, my sister, my favorite aunt, my uncle, three of my grandparents, and the family dog died. If you toss in a lot of alcoholism and a sister with Autism, the growing-up experience becomes very confusing indeed. And so I have more of those intensely vivid childhood snapshots.
This doesn't mean I write what I call autobiographical fiction. I do use my life and my experience, but not directly. I have, for example, never killed off a character in any of my books. Though I'm sure I will, I dread the day. There is a character with Autism in Al Capone Does My Shirts (Putnam 2004), but she is not my sister. The character Natalie is in fact the sister with Autism I wish I'd had. And the protagonist, Moose, is the sibling I wish I'd been.
Autobiographical fiction can be extremely powerful, so I don't mean to demean it in any possible way . . . I just don't want to write it. It doesn't, strangely enough, hold my attention. I already know what happened in my childhood, the problem is I don't understand it. To gain mastery, I seem to need to take wild flights of fantasy and make up a whole pack of lies. My most successful characters aren't based on real people. My most successful characters pop onto the page when I least expect them. I rarely know where they came from.
In a way, this process resembles childhood itself. When grown-ups look back on their childhoods it all seems so set. But nothing is set when you're a child. How could it be when the very means of considering experience—the brain itself—is still forming? Memory is a sleight-of-hand performance in an adult brain, but for a five-year-old, memory is flat out wrong an amazing amount of the time. So maybe, just maybe, if I'm very, very lucky, the books will come out of some childhood place, deeply untrue, and completely honest.
Growing up is both inexplicable and miraculous. Not just for me, but for each of us in very particular ways. I try with every book to get some grasp on the very different passage each character must make in order to begin to leave childhood behind.
Every book is its own peculiar Antique Road Show junket. When I return, I have in my hand another small piece of myself—a piece I can't find any other way. I write for kids because its the only way I know how to write. I write for kids because it's how I know who I am. •
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About the Author:
Gennifer Choldenko's second novel, Al Capone Does My Shirts (Putnam 2004) won a 2005 Newbery Honor Award, was short-listed for the Carnegie, and has been on the New York Times bestseller list for six months. Her first novel, Notes From A Liar And Her Dog (G. P. Putnam's Sons 2001) won the California Book Award and was a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. Her first picture book, How To Make Friends With A Giant illustrated by Amy Walrod, will be published in Summer 2006. A new novel is also due out in Spring 2007.
Selected Bibliography:
How To Make Friends With A Giant (Putnam 2006)
Al Capone Does My Shirts (Putnam 2004)
Notes From A Liar And Her Dog (G. P. Putnam's Sons 2001)
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