Alumni Voices with Jodell Sadler–“We Get What We Need:” Can A MFA Thesis Become Your Platform?

Jodell

I can remember being smitten by the interplay of art and words in the picture book form. I entered my third semester at Hamline on the wings of adventure, ready to jump in. I brought picture book faves, armed myself with printouts of research, completed dummies of my own book ideas, and was charged to move forward. Then, my faculty advisor, Jacqueline Briggs Martin, reminded me our focus would be on the text and I should look into something else. Ha! Puzzled, my world spun 360 degrees, and I flat lined before I realized what Marsha Qualey said often during our residency was true: “We get what we need.”

Fast-forward 24-hours, and, together, Jackie and I talked about an idea that fascinated me: Pacing. The many movements within the picture book form and its impact on the reading experience was a thrill to explore: the back and forth, the ebb and flow, art and words, and this got me thinking about all pacing does to connect the many elements in a picture book together into a tapestry, which weaves its way into a child’s heart for a lifetime. A lifetime. So my MFA Critical Thesis was born, but resources? There were only a few. A handful of articles on pacing existed at the time, a page here or there. I was really carving new ground and innovating my ideas on this subject. 

What happened next? I really challenged what I believed to be true of pacing: action drives story, we move ourselves to move our readers and story, we enhance the emotional journey, and support theme. I reviewed hundreds of picture books (now thousands), devoured them, and kept seeing key tools surface. Once I started jotting down the nuances of how each tool interacted and connected art to words, I became ever more amazed and ended up researching my original idea, the interplay of art and words, through a new lens, the lens of PACE.

I’ve shared my pacing material in articles in Writer’s Digest’s Children’s Writers & Illustrator’s Market and Webinars and Tutorials and in my online pacing courses, and more recently jumped into agenting.

I landed in my shiny new agenting shoes daring myself to toss my small pebble into a very big pond to see what kind of ripples I could create. I prayed I could make a difference for writers and illustrators. Since then, I have placed many projects for authors and illustrators—it doesn’t get much better than that.

So, long story short? After earning my MFA from Hamline University, I’ve grown ever more obsessed with how much pacing can do to enhance a book project. Though this journey, Pacing Writing to Wow has become my platform, and it’s helped hundreds of writers edit manuscripts stronger, and when I think back to that day Jackie urged me look further into what I was exploring, I had no idea it would become such a huge part of my success as a writer, editor, and agent—and would ultimately lead me into a career I love in children’s publishing. I can only say, Thank you! I really can’t thank Marsha Wilson Chall, Ron Koertge, and the whole Hamline Faculty enough for allowing us (me) the opportunity to “...get what we need.”

Happy writing day!

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Jodell Sadler is a 2009 graduate of the MFAC program. She lives, writes, teaches and agents in Rockton, Illinois. To learn more about her, please visit her website, Sadler Creative Literary.

Alumni Voices with Polly McCann: The Writing Process: or Why I Love Being a Failure

On the highest shelf of a storage closet, in the furthest part of my basement, behind a room someone painted purple—for reasons known only to them—are three boxes. I’ve never opened them. What’s in them? A photography darkroom kit I would have done anything for twenty years ago. Now they are just dreams put on a shelf.

I wanted to be a famous artist, like Modigliani or Picasso, or Mary Engelbreit. I envisioned art installations at galleries with photo emulsion-washed linen—fifteen feet high. Anyway, I’ve never done an installation, not one. And my gallery sales to date: two paintings. I could say I’m a failure at becoming a famous artist. But then, there’s something about the writing life that flourishes in failures. 

So to all your storytellers out there who constantly dip your pen into that inkwell (and don’t always feel like the Olympic-sized winner you really are) I wanted to explain why I love being a failure. Possibly, you have a similar list with vague intentions to use those castoff failures somewhere or other: There was the time I failed at being a banker, but I know that that bank vault scene in my middle grade novel is truly accurate. Or what about the time I failed at being a secretary, a janitor, a nanny, or a preschool teacher? they could be professions for my characters’ parents. Then there were those failed friendships, a marriage, ten consecutive summer gardens, the time I tried to sew pants. Okay, so maybe all of you haven’t failed at as many things as I have. But you might be thinking that life is fodder for art, or writing, or something like that. Right?

Sure, maybe the missteps we own are the crap we shovel into the compost heap called the writing life. Well, I think there is more to it than that. Our failures form not just what we write, but how we write. Something about our writing process changes from experience. The kind of failure that I’m talking about are the kind in which you mastered something; truly loved something only you put it away in order to write. We all have these failures hiding on a shelf in our closet, but you know what I love about being a failure? Failing to become that museum quality artist is exactly what made me into the writer I am today.

Let me describe my process. Here I am writing my first novel, or third (or at least the one I promise not to throw away this time). I feel totally confident from all my Master’s level classes: I’ve got Plot from Marsha Qualey; Point of View from Phyllis Root and Jackie Briggs Martin (I can still hear them talking about ducks “Oh, no, mud!” they are saying in very duck-like voices); I have endowed objects, and talismanic words in my dialogue just like Ron Koertge said I should; I have Eleanora’s third leg of the three legged stool—Setting; and I have asked myself WWJRTD? What would Jane Resh Thomas do to find out what my character truly desires; and I’ve even tried to build a world which follows find Anne’s heroic monomythic journey. I’m left alone to face something worse than the blank page, reams of really bad free writing. That’s when the beauty starts.

Now that I’ve built a framework out of the best advice anywhere (Thank you Hamline MFAC!) but my poor novel still resembles a scared rabbit in the headlights, my failures kick in. Suddenly I know what to do: Ah, now it’s time to sketch in the layout. Now it’s time to add contrast and color to my characters. Now it is time to paint the scene. My writing process takes on new terminology unique to my own experiences and failings. I know that because I’ve learned how to do one thing well, I can learn another. That includes writing a novel, or maybe a graphic novel, or a play. So in fact, my past failures weren’t really failures, they were just the beginning. My failure was really the foundation of everything. It’s what I write and more importantly it’s how I write.

One of my favorite authors, E.L. Konigsburg sums up the process of calligraphy writing in her novel, The View from Saturday, and I think loving our failures as storytellers works pretty much the same way:

            "You must think of those six steps not as preparation for the beginning but as the beginning itself."

       

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Polly McCann is a 2011 graduate of the Hamline MFAC program. To learn more about her writing and illustrating, please visit her website.

Exploring space

Last January Laura Ruby brought to our first faculty meeting a New Yorker article written by John McPhee on “Structure.”  (January 14, 2013, p. 46). And she made copies for those of us who asked. Such is the pace of the residency that I did not read the article last January—nor when I got home (no excuse). But last week, cleaning off my desk, I found it again, and finally….

McPhee writes about his difficulties and strategies in organizing the pieces he writes. He recalls his high-school writing teacher, Mrs. McKee, and shares her philosophy in the words he says to his own writing students: “You can build a strong sound, and artful structure. You can build a structure in such a way that it causes people to want to keep turning pages. A compelling structure in non-fiction can have an attracting effect analogous to a story line in fiction.” 

I’m not going to try to summarize his entire article but rather focus on the section in which he refers to his writing of Encounters with the Arch Druid. This section seems useful for both fiction and non-fiction writers. For this book McPhee went on three journeys:  “A, in the North Cascades with a mining geologist; B, on a Georgia island with a resort developer;  C, on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon with a builder of huge dams. D—David Brower, the high priest of the Sierra Club—would be in all three parts.”  Going down the Colorado River, McPhee, Brower, the dam-builder and the guide come to Upset Rapid, a place so dangerous that the guide, by rule, “had to stop and study the heavier rapids before proceeding.” Readers learn that people have died in Upset Rapid.  When the guide is ready to proceed they get back in the raft, except for David Brower. “Brower was waiting for us when we touched the riverbank in quiet water.” The dam builder asked him why he did not ride through the rapid. Brower replied: “Because I’m chicken.”

McPhee ends that section right there and leaves a half inch of white space.  Then a new section. “… that describes Brower as a rope-and-piton climber of the first order, who had clung by his fingernails to dizzying rock faces and granite crags. The white space that separated the Upset Rapid and the alpinist said things I would much prefer to leave to the white space to say—violin phraseology about courage and lack of courage and how they can exist side by side in the human breast.”

McPhee left space for the reader to make sense of David Brower and form a conclusion about the complexities we all carry within us—so much more effective than the writer telling us, concluding for us.  As readers, we take to heart that which we have discovered for ourselves, perhaps more than the lessons we are given.

Like McPhee, we sometimes leave a space in the telling that lets readers put together contrasting traits in a character’s make-up.

 First to mind is the bear in I Want My Hat Back (by Jon Klassen) who loves his hat and needs his hat, a clue to a gentle nature, but who is willing to do we-aren’t-quite-sure-what to get his hat back, revealing perhaps a not-so gentle nature. 

Hunting the White Cow by Tres Seymour is one of my favorite picture books, I think because there is so much white space—not contrasts within a character, but just so much we don’t know: why did the cow “go wild”? how does the cow get that rope “broke off” without breaking her own neck? what’s  going to happen when the girl learns cow calling?

In a more serious work, Liza Ketchum’s Newsgirl , there’s a big white space around the relationship between Amelia’s mother and Estelle.  Readers can piece together what makes sense to them.

I’m sure there are more examples of writers using “white space.” This feels like an issue worth exploring further. Perhaps we can share titles of books which make effective use of space, leaving out.  

I’m wondering, too, if there are times when we don’t want to use white space, but want to tell the reader exactly what is going on. Here’s what we learn about Opal’s daddy, “the Preacher,” in Chapter 2  in Because of Winn Dixie: “My daddy is a good preacher and a nice man, but sometimes it’s hard for me to think about him as my daddy, because he spends so much time preaching or thinking about preaching or getting ready to preach…” “Sometimes he reminded me of a turtle hiding inside its shell, in there thinking about things and not ever sticking his head out into the world.” We have a  pretty complete picture here. There's not too much to guess about.

What’s the difference in these two instances?  Perhaps it comes down to what do we want the reader to pause over, to imagine? What is critical to the story? What do we have to make clear in order to move the story along? The daddy’s change is an important part of the story in Winn-Dixie, so we need to be clear where he is at the beginning. The mom’s relationship with Estelle in Newsgirl is almost a part of the setting. As such, we only need to know that both Mom and Estelle care about Amelia. We don’t need to pin down their relationship to each other.

All of this makes me want to look more carefully at my own writing to be sure I am telling what needs to be told and leaving room for the reader to make sense of some of the puzzles.

More later…maybe January.