Middle Grade Ninja Episode 07: Author Jacqueline West

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NYT Bestselling author Jacqueline West and I discuss her career in publishing as well as her approach to writing and her background as a performer and English teacher. She shares many tips for how to write successfully and gives recommended resources for aspiring authors. I also read a small selection from Banneker Bones and the Giant Robot Bees.

Click here to see Jacqueline West face the 7 Questions.

Jacqueline West is the author of the NYT-bestselling middle grade series The Books of Elsewhere, the YA novel Dreamers Often Lie, and the new middle grade fantasy The Collectors.

She is also the author of two poetry collections, Cherma and Candle and Pins: Poems on Superstitions, and her poetry and short fiction appear in a variety of publications.

She lives in Red Wing, Minnesota, with her family.

Eliza loves hunting ghosts--too bad she's spending the summer helping her scientist mother study weird plants instead. But when a mysterious plant goes missing, things in the plant shop go from strange to downright spooky. Is Eliza digging in dangerous ground?

☆ "West’s tale, decorated with Aly’s eerie, cartoon art, is well worth reading on its own—the writing manual takes it to a whole other level." 

- Kirkus, starred review

JacquelineWest.com

7 Questions For: Author Jacqueline West

Jacqueline West is the author of the award-winning middle grade series The Books of Elsewhere. The Books of Elsewhere, Volume One: The Shadows (2010) garnered starred reviews, several state award nominations, and a spot on the New York Times Bestsellers List. The series is published by Dial Books for Young Readers (a division of Penguin Random House) in the USA and will also be published in Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Indonesia, Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, and Catalan. 

Jacqueline's short fiction for adults and children has appeared in a variety of publications, and her poetry has received many honors, including two Pushcart nominations, a Rhysling Award nomination, and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize. Cherma, her series of poems about Wisconsin's Bohemian immigrants, was published in March 2010 by the University of Wisconsin's Parallel Press chapbook series.

Click here to read my review of The Books of Elsewhere, Volume One: The Shadows.

And now Jacqueline West faces the 7 Questions: 

Question Seven: What are your top three favorite books?

I’m just going to pretend I missed the words ‘top three,’ because I don’t think I could narrow my favorites down to that number without pulling out most of my hair.  
 

What are my favorite books, you ask?  Well, I love everything by Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan is my personal favorite), Margaret Atwood (especially The Robber Bride), Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine!), J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey gets me every time), T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Roald Dahl, Annie Dillard, and the Bronte sisters.  I also love To Kill a Mockingbird and Calvin and Hobbes.  And I think Hamlet is probably the single best thing that has ever been written. 


Question Six: How much time do you spend each week writing? Reading?

I have a hard time calculating this, because I do both, sporadically, all day long.  When I’m drafting something new, I try to write at least a thousand words a day.  Sometimes this takes just an hour or two; sometimes it takes all day, with lots of time wasted between sentences.  (I’m embarrassingly good at Plants vs. Zombies.)  

As for reading: I always read multiple books at once, and I’ve got a different in-progress novel in almost every room in the house.  I seem to finish two or three per week.

Question Five: What was the path that led you to publication?

It was the shyest, simplest, most old-fashioned path.  I’m not the type of writer who could (or would) pitch a concept in an elevator at a busy book convention.  Just imagining it terrifies me.  

I spent years developing my writing, experimenting with styles and forms, getting poetry and short stories published here and there.  I finished the book that would eventually become The Shadows, which took several additional years.  I did my research.  I found out what agencies were looking at books like mine.  I wrote a query letter, revised it about thirty times, and sent it off to agents.  Then I sat back and waited, telling myself that it was never going to happen so I might as well not get my hopes up.

But I got lucky. Chris Richman, who was just starting his career as a junior agent at a now-disbanded agency, pulled my letter and my sample pages out of the slush pile.  Within just a few months, Chris had multiple publishers interested in my book, and we got to pick the one that felt like the perfect fit.   

Question Four: Do you believe writers are born, taught or both? Which was true for you?

I think it’s something in between, really.  I didn’t study writing in college or earn an MFA, and while I know those programs can provide valuable things, I don’t think someone can enter such a program NOT a writer and emerge as one.  

I’m primarily “self-taught,” I suppose.  But being a self-taught writer doesn’t mean that I haven’t studied intensely, and practiced, and researched, and learned.  Becoming a writer requires years of devoted reading, followed by years (and years) of writing.  The love of stories may be innate, but the skill it takes to build them comes with time, attention, and effort.

Question Three: What is your favorite thing about writing? What is your least favorite thing?

I love the times when the writing is going well, and it feels like I’m actually traveling into another world, getting to watch and listen as my characters move through their lives.  I love the moments when the right set of words comes together, and there’s a sudden spark of energy, like electricity running through a wire.  And I love picking up something I wrote a long time ago, reading it objectively, and realizing that I actually like it. 

My least favorite things are the opposite of these:  When I can’t get into the magic world, when the right words refuse to come together, and when I realize that something I wrote and thought was promising is actually an utter mess. 

Question Two: What one bit of wisdom would you impart to an aspiring writer? (feel free to include as many other bits of wisdom as you like)

Read like crazy.  Write like crazy.  Repeat. 

Question One: If you could have lunch with any writer, living or dead, who would it be? Why? 

Truman Capote.  His gossip is art.  

www.jacquelinewest.com

www.thebooksofelsewhere.com

Book Review: THE SHADOWS (BOOKS OF ELSEWHERE VOLUME ONE) by Jacqueline West

FIRST PARAGRAPH: MS. MCMARTIN WAS definitely dead. It had taken some time for the neighbors to grow suspicious, since no one ever went in or came out of the old stone house on Linden Street anyway. However, there were several notable clues that things in the McMartin house were not as they should have been. The rusty mailbox began to bulge with odd and exotic mail-order catalogs, which eventually overflowed the gaping aluminum door and spilled out into the street. The gigantic jungle fern that hung from the porch ceiling keeled over for lack of water. Ms. McMartin’s three cats, somewhere inside the house, began the most terrible yowling ever heard on quiet old Linden Street. After a few days of listening to that, the neighbors had had enough.

Jacqueline West will be here Thursday to face the 7 Questions.

Esteemed Reader, Friedrich Nietzch once wrote, "if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you." Or maybe it was his sister. Either way, I'm still not entirely sure what it means. But it inspired Hitler, who was a painter. In The Books of Elsewhere, if you stare into a painting, the painting stares into you. And that ought to be worth an email from author Jacqueline West asking why I used Hitler to segue to her book for children:) 

What is it about paintings that so captures the imagination of writers? Certainly enchanted paintings have played a central role in the works of Rowling, King, Wilde, Dahl, and many, many others. Perhaps it's that the frame of a painting sometimes looks less like the boarder of a picture and more like the edge of a window to another world. An Elsewhere TM where the viewer could tour alien landscapes, meet interesting characters, and maybe even get in an adventure. For most viewers this will never happen because they don't have the magic old-fashioned glasses. 

Meet eleven-year-old Olive Dunwoody. She has the glasses. 

West didn't just kill off poor Ms. McMartin in paragraph one for no reason. She's left that old stone house on Linden Street vacant so Olive and her family can move in:

It wasn’t long before someone heard about the old stone house for sale at an astonishingly low price and decided to buy it. 
These someones were a Mr. Alec and Mrs. Alice Dunwoody, a pair of more than slightly dippy mathematicians. The Dunwoodys had a daughter named Olive—but she had nothing to do with the house-buying decision. Olive was eleven, and was generally not given much credit. Her persistently lackluster grades in math had led her parents to believe that she was some kind of genetic aberration—they talked to her patiently, as if she were a foreign exchange student from a country no one had ever heard of.

Observe how West identifies conflict between her characters in their introduction, which is a writer's trick worth making note of. After all, the whole point of crafting characters is to get them in conflict with each other and as many other conflicts as can be had. Conflict keeps pages turning. 

Olive's parents are nerds of the highest order to such an extreme degree as to make Elissa Brent Weissman blush. For this reason, it's hard not to be fond of them, but seriously:

“We met in the library at Princeton,” answered Mrs. Dunwoody, her eyes glowing with the memory. “We were both reading the same journal—The Absolutely Unrelenting Seriousness of Mathematics for the New Generation —” 
“Or ‘Ausom’—get it?” interjected Mr. Dunwoody. “‘Awesome.’ Very clever.”

Nerds!

I suspect Olive will grow up to be a nerd of a very different sort: an English nerd, which is a nerd just as awkward as a math nerd, though usually possessing a greater fondness for alcohol:) Olive is aloof and introspective. She doesn't appear to have friends, but that's an unfair judgement as she just moved. Still, if there weren't fantastical figures about for her to get in an adventure with, I'm certain she would invent them. Olive's mind is quite a bit like a writer's mind, and I suspect writer's everywhere will identify with this passage, which might have been taken from my own youth:

In her bedroom, Olive dug through the closet looking for a pair of slippers to wear for protection against the chilly stone floor. But there were no slippers to be found. Olive owned six pairs of slippers, but none of them were ever where they belonged. This was because Olive's body often did things without consulting Olive's brain, which was usually busy with something much more interesting than putting things away in the right place.

In any case, West puts Olive at odds with her parents from the start and keeps them at odds for much of the novel. There are many plot conveniences derived from this device, but more, it creates conflict, which keeps pages turning. Olive's issues with her parents are not the main conflict, though I might argue that a girl who feels out of place in her family might be more prone toward seeking out fantastical worlds of escape than one who doesn't. 

West has a whole adventure planned for us rooted in a greater conflict that will stretch over the series, but that doesn't diminish the brilliance of Olive's smaller conflict with her parents. Every scene she has with her parents is made more interesting and more readable because of the conflict, and is there such a thing as a book that is too interesting or readable?

Eventually, Olive puts on the magic old-fashioned glasses and is able to travel to a wonderland inside the houses paintings complete with talking cats who never seem to have good news:

“Keep your eyes open. Be on your guard. There is something that doesn’t want you here, and it will do its best to get rid of you.” 
“Get rid of me?” 
“Of all of you. As far as this house is concerned, you are intruders.” Horatio paused. “But don’t get too anxious. There’s very little you can do about it either way.

And so begins an adventure that will suck the reader into West's world as Olive is sucked into a painting. The Shadows is an exciting first novel in what promises to be a wonderful series and you should add it to your reading list.  That's where I'll leave my review and my description of the plot as to avoid spoilers.

But I do have two more passages to share and one last point to make about craft. First, read this:

And the painting at the top of the stairs still seemed to be keeping a secret. Olive stood in front of it for almost half an hour that first night, until her eyes crossed and bits of the trees popped out at her. Nothing. Nothing but the feeling that there was something not quite right about this painting. 
And it wasn’t the only one. 
There were paintings all over the house that gave her the same funny feeling. Right outside her bedroom door, there was a painting of a rolling field with a row of little houses in the distance. It was evening in the painting, and all the windows in the houses were dark. But the houses didn’t look like they were sleeping comfortably, just waiting for sunrise to come and start another day. The houses looked like they were holding their breath. They crouched among the trees and blew out their lights, trying not to be seen. Seen by what? Olive wondered.

One of the things that had attracted me to read The Shadows in the first place was the promise by other readers that it was a scary book. And I was not disappointed. There are some definite moments of unease and creepiness. I'm admittedly not a parent, but I think most children will enjoy the book and few will have nightmares. Some will, though:)

My second point about craft is to note how West chooses to reveal the magical properties of the paintings surrounding the Dunwoody family. She doesn't bluntly state that a person can travel through them, or even that the paintings gaze into the Dunwoodys in a most Nietzchian fashion. Instead, she draws out the suspense by slowly revealing there's maybe something going on with those paintings:

The shadows suddenly rippled and bent, and within the shadows, a pale splotch darted out of the undergrowth. Olive froze, staring at the white path. She blinked, rubbed her eyelids with her fingertips, and looked again. Yes—there it was. Something was moving inside the painting, a tiny white shape flitting between the silhouettes of the wiry trees. Olive held perfectly still. She didn't even breathe. The tiny white shape made one more quick plunge toward the path, then dove back into the thorny black forest. And then the painting, too, was perfectly still.

When writing middle grade, writers are too often tempted to cut corners as the text must be as sparse as possible (there are acceptable word counts to strive for). Pacing is worth considering and shorter is almost always better, but some effects are worth slowing down for. By drawing out the reveal of a magical object, a writer can heighten suspense and work the reader into a vulnerable frenzy of wanting to know more, which is a perfect state in which to terrify them:)

As always, I'll leave you with some of my favorite passages from The Shadows:

Mr. Hambert, on the other hand, was sweating like a mug of root beer in the sun

In the big old house, their belongings looked small and out of place, like tiny visitors from outer space trying to blend in at a Victorian ball.

Her parents had warned her not to let her imagination run away with her ever since she was three and had woken them night after night wailing about the sharks hiding under her bed. “Olive, honey,” her father had patiently explained, “when a shark is out of the water, it is crushed by the weight of its own body. A shark couldn’t survive under your bed.” Three-year-old Olive had nodded, and went on to imagine sharks slowly suffocating among the dust bunnies. 

Half of Olive’s brain said, That cat just talked! The other half of Olive’s brain said stubbornly, No it didn't  All Olive’s mouth said was, “What?”

In the distance, she heard her father knocking his toothbrush on the sink. The house creaked. A twig of the ash tree tapped softly against her window, again and again, like a small, patient hand.

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: All reviews here will be written to highlight a book’s positive qualities. It is my policy that if I don’t have something nice to say online, I won’t say anything at all (usually). I’ll leave you to discover the negative qualities of each week’s book on your own.