Tag Archives: Writing

Some horn-tooting

My publisher just forwarded me the review from the March issue of School Library Journal of my four-book series Humans: An Evolutionary History. My first act was to call Joyce Stanton, the awesome editor who worked with me on the series, to thank her for pushing me to make each volume as strong as it could be.

This project was and is near and dear to my heart. It was also a lot of work. I’m pretty pleased with this review:

Gr 8 Up–The origin of the human species is always a topic of educational inquiry as well as fierce debate. Providing students with information that is credible, detailed, and appealing can be challenging: these books exceed the challenge. Stefoff provides an enlightening and entertaining history of the evolution of Homo sapiens, their ancestors, and cousins, from primitive origins to today. The clear, insightful texts are accented by intriguing sidebars and colorful photos, maps, and graphs. The author provides compelling details from the lives of innovators such as Darwin and Leaky, intelligently discusses the tools of the trade, and deftly explores many monumental discoveries, such as those of Australopithecus in 1924 (First Humans) and the Old Man of La Chapelle in 1908 (Ice Age Neanderthals), and of a “family tree” for mitochondrial DNA (Modern Humans). Readers will be drawn into these discussions and the mysteries that surround our evolutionary story.–Brian Odom, Pelham Public Library, AL

—School Library Journal, March, 2010

Writers, maps, and a cool coincidence

Yesterday I started reading Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (2004). It’s been on my radar for a while. I love maps–I’ve written several books about cartography–and was curious about how Turchi would handle the metaphor of the book as map. The immediate catalyst for getting Maps of the Imagination from the library was seeing it cited in Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife.

I am finding it a satisfyingly chewy read. Here’s an early example:

Discussing the idea that a story is unexplored before it is written and thus presents  overwhelming opportunities, Turchi notes, “This explains why it can be so difficult for beginning writers to embrace thorough revision–which is to say, to fully embrace exploration. The desire to cling to that first path through the wilderness is both a celebration of initial discovery and fear of the vast unknown.”

The last thing I did last night was glance at Turchi’s afterword, which describes the genesis of and influences on the book. He mentions “the work of Edward Tufte,” which rang  a bell. I had come across a reference to Tufte quite recently, but where and what?

I looked at the facing page, which is the last past of Turchi’s bibliography, to see if Tufte were cited. When I saw a citation for Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information I remembered that my friend Magda had tweeted last week about finding an online edition of that work.

Then I happened to glance up the page and saw my own name. Turchi included my Young Oxford Guide to Maps and Mapmaking (Oxford University Press, 1995) in his biblio. Made me proud.

Maps and Mapmaking was the longest nonfiction book I’ve written to date, 900+  pages in manuscript, and one of the most challenging, but also one of my favorites. Advances in cartographic technology have rendered out of date the parts of the book that deal with contemporary mapmaking. The sections on the history of cartography and on important maps and mapmakers, though, were near and dear to my heart.

I just ordered a copy of Maps of the Imagination for my shelves. From Powell’s, not Amazon. I had to add a bunch more books to the order to meet the $50 threshold for free shipping, but that, alas for my budget, is never a problem.

Bubblethrough

A short while ago I was lolling in a nice hot midday bath, drinking Diet Mountain Dew and reading an article about the galls of cynipid wasps, and a realization about my WIP came into my mind. I thought about it for a moment and became aware of several possibilities it raised.

The realization was that my MC’s primary emotion at the start of the novel, anger, is stronger than I have been portraying it, and that needs to be made clearer, earlier.

The possibilities include:

–placing the conflict between what she feels and what everyone expects her to feel right  in the opening paragraph, or at least page, which will make my opening stronger

–a more powerful emotional component to the quest on which she embarks (there is a good reason for the anger)

–a reason for turning her encounter with the other main character, in a pivotal scene that is the first big reversal in the story, into a physical attack rather than a conversation

–a more wrenching but satisfying emotional change for the MC when she finally lets go of the anger

I got out of the tub and got everything into my index card program asap. I’m calling it a bubblethrough rather than a breakthrough not because I was using bubble bath (I wasn’t), but because the realizations or ideas came to me not in a big flash but like a series of bubbles rising through a pond. Yay for the writer mind, working away down there.

Should you want to try the method, you’ll find the article in the December-January issue of Natural History. Or online. Mountain Dew optional.

Howard Zinn, goodbye and thank you

This morning when I checked my email, two messages caught my eye at once. A friend had sent me an email headed “Howard Zinn died!” And Zinn’s agent had forwarded me a link to this article in the New York Times.

It was through the agent that I had a connection with Howard Zinn. A few years ago, Zinn wanted to create a version of his best-known book, A People’s History of the United States, for young people to read. He was busy with new writing projects, though, and he didn’t have experience writing for kids.

Zinn’s agent suggested that I might be able and willing to adapt the book for young adults. I was honored and happy to accept. With Zinn’s book as my starting-point, I cut out some material to make the text shorter–this was the hardest part of my job. Then I added some explanations and definitions to make things clearer to younger readers. Howard Zinn read all of my changes, answered my questions, and supported me every step of the way.

The result was A Young People’s History of the United States, published in one- and two-volume, hardcover and paperback formats by 7 Stories Press. Like Zinn’s original book, it tells the story of American history from the “other side”–not in the words and deeds of explorers and generals and presidents, but in the voices and experiences of Native Americans, women, indentured workers, laborers, and activists.

Zinn believed that only by accepting all of our history, the shameful parts as well as the successes, can we know who we are as a nation. He also believed in the boundless power of ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things, and to bring about change. Through working with him, I shared both his outrage at injustice and his hope that people will build a better world.

His death is sad news and a loss to the world, but his was truly a life well lived.

Dreaming a story

Early this morning I had a long dream in which I came as close to lucidity as I ever do. I didn’t realize that I was dreaming, but I did have an awareness that the dream was a story and that I should be taking notes on it. I also had a sense that it was connected in some way to my work in progress. The image that came to mind was that the dream-story was at right angles to the WIP.

The dream involved a sister and brother, a library, and, like my WIP, a much-sought-after secret way of passing from one world into another. But the characters were younger than those in the WIP, and the overall tone was much lighter. It had something of the flavor of one of my favorite children’s books, Dan Wickenden’s The Amazing Vacation.

Unfortunately, my dream recall was not operating at best efficiency this morning, so the story slipped away as I was waking up. (Not helped by Zachary poking me and saying, “Want to do a crossword?” The dear man.) But I like the fact that I had a dream that on some level I was comparing with, or relating to, my WIP.