The Manhattan Rare Book Company has a very short book for sale, from 1924. It has just 32 pages, and — you can see it here — it’s one of only 170 printed copies. The book was written by an unknown young writer, and most of its 18 “chapters” are just one paragraph long. The chapters are not directly connected, as in a story — they’re more like glimpses of scenes. Their language is simple, spare. You can buy the book for $39,000.
Reading Matters
Doug Wilhelm is a full-time writer and an independent publisher in Weybridge, Vemont. His newest book is the novel STREET OF STORYTELLERS (Rootstock, 2019). His 15 previous novels for young adults include THE REVEALERS (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), which has been the focus of reading-and-discussion projects in well over 1,000 middle schools.
I like to look for parallels between what has unfolded in the music industry and what seems to be happening in the book world. Music, its production and consumption, went digital a few years ago, and so to a great degree has the world of books and reading. The way we make books — from the writer transmitting the text for editing, to the publisher sending final layout to print — has entirely gone digital, and many of us readers — more and more, many say, an irrestistible wave — are reading books digitally. As with music listening, many say, the old way of reading is on its way out. Forever.
But hold on a second.
I figure you’ll find as much truth in humor as anywhere, especially in this age of “The Daily Show”; and Ricky Gervais has posted a good essay on the Huffington Post's humor page that’s about the vital link between creativity and play. “You have to let yourself go to be creative,” he writes. “... If you’re writing or directing, give yourself enough time to play. Play the fool. Goad. Shock. Laugh. Trip over something that isn’t there.”
This advice is excellent — but it also made me wonder. When your livelihood depends on your creative output, how do you still make it about play?
There was a period when I was obsessed — were you? — with the Hardy Boys.
I look at my local library’s shelf-and-a-half that's crammed with the classic books, with their cheesy thin type on royal-blue spines, and everything comes back. The Hardy Boys was the first series I wanted to live in and never come out — just keep on sleuthing those mysteries that kept entangling Joe, Frank and their chums back in old Bayport, which for a classically friendly American town had a really amazing number of criminals and conspiracies.
Because I often visit middle schools as a writer of novels for young adults, I get asked questions. This is a great privilege. A lot are very interesting, and some recur: “How long did it take you to write the book we read?” “Is this story about you?” “Where did you get the idea?” I do my best to answer in ways that are both candid and interesting — but one question that kept coming up had me stumped, for a while. It was, “How did you get started writing?”
I had to think about that. I’d been a pretty good reader in elementary school, and in high school I got very busy on the school newspaper; but in between those times, something happened. What was it?
Then I remembered. It was Mr. Behr’s class.
When The Great Gatsby was published, on April 10, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald, living high in France after his early success, cabled Max Perkins, his editor at Scribners, and demanded to know if the news was good. Mostly, it was not. The book received some reviews that were dismissive (“F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S LATEST A DUD,” a headline in the New York World ran) and others that were pleasant but patronizing. ... For a writer of Fitzgerald’s fame, sales were mediocre—about twenty thousand copies by the end of the year. Scribners did a second printing, of three thousand copies, but that was it, and when Fitzgerald died, in 1940, half-forgotten at the age of forty-four, the book was hard to find.
from David Denby’s May 13 review of the new “Gatsby” movie in The New Yorker
Thousands of books are published each year, and the truth is nobody knows which ones will live on — which will find a permanent place on bookshelves, in bookstores, in libraries and in our hearts and minds. Nobody knows.
In 1925, the year of Gatsby’s publication, these were the top five bestselling books, according to Publishers Weekly:
1. Soundings by A. Hamilton Gibbs
2. The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy
3. The Keeper of the Bees by Gene Stratton Porter
4. Glorious Apollo by E. Barrington
5. The Green Hat by Michael Arlen
After an exhausting day, with all the tensions that come up between small child and parent, at last you make it to bedtime. There’s still some low-key power struggling, because the child does not want that light turned out and the parent longs for the blessed sliver of personal time that follows this ritual. And then ...
Then you settle together into a picture book.
And in that closeness of reading out loud, in the sharing of a story, the pointing to favorite places on the pages and the gradual shared relaxation, comes the redemption of everything. These times can be so warm and sweet that, years later, they’re almost too poignant for the aging parent to remember. And if you should one day spot one of those favorite books, or hear about someone else’s read-aloud memories, it’s like finding the memento of a long-ago love affair. Because, really, that’s what it was.
Writing for young adults, and talking with middle schoolers on school visits, gives me glimpses like little windows into American life today. Early adolescents may not yet be paying bills or carrying mortgages, but they very often feel the crunch of family stress, and the tension between hope and fear or dreams and despair, more intensely than they ever will again in their lives. They see things clearly — often things they can only live with, that they have no power to change.
Last week I shared some entries that middle schoolers had made in my pocket notebook, after I'd talked with them at their schools over the past year or so. Today I’m looking at a small stack of lined paper, each sheet the size of an index card. Eighth graders at a school in suburban-rural New Hampshire each wrote an idea for a realistic novel on one of these pages, after we talked recently. Their teacher then sent the stack to me.
If you were to make another story Mr. Wilhelm I think I would be an interesting character because I am fabulous and myself. I am bold and out there. My name’s Nathan. I am friends with 8th grade girls middle popular. 7th grade popular girls, middle popular. I can’t ever be mean because I feel too bad after the fact. Guys that are jocks make fun of me and I am a good singer (decent), play trumpet, do drama, and that’s me.
That’s written in purple ink on a slip of notebook paper. On a school visit recently, a boy came up after a classroom session and handed it to me.
I write for middle schoolers, and here’s a sample of what millions of them are reading:
honestly no one cares for you even your parents don’t want you, there gunna put you in care
I’ve had the flu this week, and when I don’t feel well I turn to humor. Written humor, not YouTube videos (though I’m not averse to those, and I’m a regular online watcher of “The Daily Show”). I have a bookshelf that’s a collection of the American humor writers who have meant a lot to me, from Robert Benchley and James Thurber to Calvin Trillin and, yes, Dave Barry — but the guy I love most when I’m sick was English. P.G. Wodehouse.
When I first saw that mindfulness, the practice of moment-to-moment awareness, can make your life suddenly snap to life, I was walking on a street in New Delhi on an ordinary morning, in the neighborhood near the railroad station where the travelers’ hotels are. I was 22, and I thought: I just figured it out.
I had come to India, as was not uncommon back in the mid-70s, from western Europe by overland bus in the company of hippies, mystics and other motley travelers. Weighing down my backpack was a load of books on Indian philosophy and Buddhism and the like. (The backpack is in the attic now, somewhere. One of the books is still on my shelf.)
Innovation and communication are keys to success in the 21st century economy, and employers consistently call for schools to develop these skills in young people. But among the toughest challenges that educators face is how to do that well — especially how to teach the creative process, the more so at a time of bone-cut curriculum budgets.
As an author of 14 novels for young adults, and a self-employed professional writer for almost 30 years, working with the creative process to get stuff written effectively is what I do. Can I share what I’ve learned about how to do it?
I think I can — and I believe I just have.
Although he wrote and published 39 books, the Viennese psychiatrist, neurologist and author Viktor Frankl is known around the world for just one. He wrote that one fast, in the first months after he was liberated from three years in Nazi ghettos and concentration camps during World War II. The Holocaust had taken his wife — who died in Bergen-Belsen, as did Anne Frank — along with his father, his mother, and his brother. In its original German, the book Frankl first published in 1946 is called Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen: Life in Spite of Everything. Its English title is Man’s Search for Meaning.
Fifteen years after Frankl’s death in 1997, Man’s Search for Meaning is ranked 193 on Amazon.com, where it has 900 customer reviews.
I want to write about meaning. I know you’re not supposed to.
You’re supposed to be ironic, to pretend you’re too clever for any direct discussion of meaning, for God knows what pitfalls might await if you ever went there. But as I’ve visited middle schools around the country in recent years, to talk about my book The Revealers at the end of all-school or gradewide reading projects, I’ve found myself talking about meaning — in front of a crowd, no less, of adolescents.
I began to fall in love with sentences when I had my first writing job, as a young, deadline-dependent reporter on a weekly paper in New Jersey. For this burgeoning love I had a matchmaker. He was the same one lots of young American writers had. His name was E.B. White.
This morning I got an email from an eighth grader in Ohio who had read my YA novel Falling for her advanced language arts class, and would get extra credit if she could get my responses to some followup questions. Falling is set in a real community, the place where I was living and raising my son when I wrote it — and this reader's questions related to the experience of developing a novel in, and about, the place where you're living.
Yesterday I had a Skype session with seventh and eighth graders from Messalonskee Middle School in Oakland, Maine, which just finished a community read with both The Revealers and True Shoes. We had a great discussion! Then this morning, the teacher whom I worked with to coordinate the session and I had a quick exchange of emails on how it had gone. I mentioned that True Shoes is an independent publication — last year I created my own publishing imprint, Long Stride Books, to bring out this and future books. The teacher responded:
"I had planned to ask you why you chose to publish True Shoes the way you did. Would you call that self-published? I just heard a segment on NPR about the self-publishing industry that has emerged in recent years and it was quite interesting."
Here's my answer:
On a memorable long weekend in early May the past several years I’ve taught fiction writing at Bread Loaf, the mountain campus of Middlebury College that is rightly famous in the literary world. The occasion is the annual New England Young Writers Conference. On a Thursday each spring (this year, it happened last week), talented high school writers from all over the Northeast and even farther — I had a student this year from Paris — travel up the winding road to Ripton, Vermont to work with professional poets, novelists, playwrights, and journalists over three-plus days that tend, you hear this over and over at the conference, to change people’s lives.
Picture the setting, because Bread Loaf itself is a revelation.
Picture the setting, because Bread Loaf itself is a revelation.
For many years I was just a writer, producing novels for young adults, and didn’t worry much about changes in the book industry. But these changes have become so huge — I’ve seen experts say this is the most profound time of upheaval in publishing since the invention of moveable type — that I got caught up, and everything changed for me. Now I’m doing much more than writing; and I’m trying my best to understand, or at least keep up with, whatever in the world is going on.
And I think if you really look at it, what’s actually happening is less troubling and worrisome than it first appears.