Alumni Voices with Jamie Kallio: Work for Hire:Just Do It

Not too long after I graduated from Hamline, I was stalled on my middle grade novel. A fellow Hamline grad set me up with her editor at a book packaging company.  This place hired people to write kids’ nonfiction.

I let this particular editor know that I was really interested.  I told her my interests were in writing for children and history. Not too long afterwards, I was contacted by the company. They were looking for authors to write titles in a series about the early history of the United States. I signed up for The Mayflower Compact.

My assigned editor sent me the guidelines for the project.  Pages of guidelines.  Footnotes were required. A thing called sidebars needed to be incorporated.  I had to come up with primary sources.  The text had to be of interest to sixth graders but written at a third grade level. And the kicker? The manuscript was due in 30 days.

As I stared at the (pages of) guidelines, panic set in.  What the hell had I done to myself? Didn’t I already have enough on my plate? A carefully-researched manuscript written in 30 days? Impossible!

When the hyperventilating passed, I told myself to buck up. I was a professional.  I mean, I had degrees.  I could do this.  So I descended on my library and checked out every single book I could find on the Mayflower, the pilgrims, early American colonies, Native Americans, the Chicago Manual of Style, and anything else that looked helpful.  I found myself researching Increase Mather, the Little Ice Age, and scurvy. I learned that the original Thanksgiving feast lasted about three days, and everybody ate mostly venison.

Research

In a whirlwind, I wrote. I met my deadline and sent a draft to my editor. She sent it back with suggestions and corrections. I looked over the manuscript and made the changes. After I hit send on my final email to my editor, I realized I’d done it. I’d completed an entire piece of writing—from beginning to end—by a certain deadline. I was getting paid for it. And best of all, I was getting published.

More projects came my way, and they keep coming. Sometimes, in my enthusiasm, I take on too many of them.  Working a full-time job with weird hours presents its own set of problems, let alone trying to fit in research and writing. And unfortunately, many times my beloved fiction writing gets pushed to the back burner while I meet a work-for-hire deadline. Sometimes I collapse among piles of books on subjects like climate change or invasive species and scream that I’ll never do another work-for-hire project again.

But I always do.  And here’s why: I really do love history. I love research. I love the extra money. I love fitting information together like a puzzle. Most of all, I love going to Amazon, typing my name, and seeing a list of titles pop up.  Titles that I wrote.

Work-for-hire has been good for me.  It broke me out of my holding pattern. It got me moving forward. It taught me how to work with editors, how to let some battles go in response to what a certain project needed.  It taught me to manage my time a little more wisely.

So if you have a chance to take on some work-for-hire? Do it.  Do it just once, for the experience. You might learn something new.  You might find yourself having fun.

And I might serve venison this year at Thanksgiving.

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Jamie Kallio is a January 2011 graduate of the MFAC program. A veteran public librarian, she lives and writes near Chicago. You can find earlier Inkpot posts by/about Jamie here and here. 

Alumni Voices: Jamie Kallio

 Zen Writing

 As I sat down in front of my computer this morning, a litany of thoughts circled through my head, the same ones that always assault me when I get ready to write:

    I hate this.
    Why am I doing this to myself?
    I’d rather scrub the toilet.
    Why couldn’t I have been an accountant?

If I’m honest with myself, writing has ceased to be fun for a long time. I liken it to trying to push my body, inch by inch, through a brick wall. It’s painful. Even more painful are those days where I’ve spent hours in the chair, as I’ve been told to do by the masters, only to have 500, maybe 700 words to show for it.

So again, I ask myself, why am I doing this?

For anyone else feeling the same way, I encourage you to look back on your life, to when making up stories was simple. When your heart and mind were both open, when ideas whispered to you in the wind, and there were all sorts of possibilities in the starry night sky.

Back when writing was fun.

When I was a kid, I wrote because I had an almost obsessive desire to create. Picking up a pen and facing a blank sheet of paper opened the door to a type of magic all my own. I could forget myself for hours in the worlds I designed, make new friends in the characters that bloomed across the page, have adventures that otherwise would never occur in my physical life, because I was a girl, because I was poor, because because because.

As a teen, my purpose for writing changed. I sought books to answer questions, and I used writing to make sense of those answers. Writing gave me a voice; it gave me power. It gave me something I otherwise didn’t have a shred of: confidence. I kept stacks of journals and felt unfinished if I’d not deconstructed my day within them.

Then along came college, the study of writing, and writing degrees. Next, the teaching of writing and guiding students. Then, serious writing projects with the sole goal of publication. Finding an agent. Making enough money to live off so I could quit my day job.

And there, I think, is the trouble.

In his essay collection Zen In the Art of Writing Ray Bradbury tells writers to adhere to three rules: Work, Relaxation, and Don’t Think. Work, because without it, one will never learn. One will never fail and learn from the failure. Work, and work a lot, because without the quantity, there will never be quality. “The artist,” says Bradbury, “must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers."

Okay, I understand all of that, but where does Relaxation come in? All this talk to work and quantity and brains in fingers sounds rather exhausting to me.

“By work,” says Bradbury, “…man releases himself from obligation to anything but the task at hand.”

Lack of experience leads to fear, which leads to tension, and—in my case—rips the fun right out of writing. But by doing the work, continually and over time, your body will develop a rhythm. It’s sort of like the adage, “fake it till you make it.” Keep sitting down, keep writing, and eventually, the brain in your head will shut off, and the brain in your fingers will take over.

You will relax. When you relax, you will stop thinking. Stop plotting. Stop planning and making yourself crazy by analyzing Every. Single. Word. You. Put. On. The. Damn. Page. You will open yourself back up to the joy of creation.

This is good to remember. It’s good to remember that you will likely need to rewrite your story 5,000 times. It’s good to tell yourself that it’s not going to be perfect that first, second, or fifteenth draft.

Even if we already know this, inherently, it’s good to remember it again and again.

And then Bradbury addresses the same question I asked myself earlier today: Why do I do this?

“We are working not for work’s sake, producing not for production’s sake…What we are trying to do is find a way to release the truth that lies in all of us.”

Bam. There it is. I write because if don’t, I am unsettled, irritable, out of sorts. I am restless and agonizing. I feel like a rabid squirrel is clawing around in my gut, desperate to be released. I write, as I have always done, because I must. I must capture the way I see the world, express how I feel about it, set it down in words, and maybe, it will reach someone else out there, someone who needs that truth.

I write because it’s who I am.

I know how to make magic. I know how to disappear to somewhere else. I can swirl away on magic carpets or flip backwards a billion times like a ninja. Only I have the power to release my stories. No one else is going to do it, and in fact, no one else can do it. All I need to do it sit back, wake up my fingers, and take a ride.

How fun is that?

***

Jamie Kallio is a January 2011 graduate of the MFAC program. Her book, Read On: Speculative Fiction for Teens was published in August, 2012 by Libraries Unlimited. She is a youth services librarian in suburban Chicago.

For more information:

Read a 2013 Inkpot Interview with Jamie.
Visit her blog, Going Charlotte: Re-reading the Classics of Children's Literature.

Inkpot Interview: Jamie Kallio

Jamie Kallio is a January 2011 graduate of the MFAC program. Her book, Read On: Speculative Fiction for Teens was published in August, 2012 by Libraries Unlimited. She is a youth services librarian in suburban Chicago.

Please describe the book in under 50 words. With the explosion of interest in teen paranormal romance, reading choices need to be as diverse as the teens who read them. Designed to spark reader interest and engage teens, this guide is filled with scores of book lists for fans of science fiction, popular fantasy, and paranormal fiction. 

Would you tell us a bit about the story’s development? This project was nonfiction, so I approached it differently than I would fiction. It’s a reference material intended to help teachers, librarians, parents, and speculative fiction readers find books that go beyond Twilight and Harry Potter. First I spent a lot of time gathering resources. Then I researched the history of fantasy and speculative fiction as it pertains to YA readers and began to form the introduction. Next came all the reading and then writing all the annotations.  It was long, hard work (I began in December of 2010) but it was extremely rewarding. The biggest challenge in the rewrites was the index! Talk about needing super-sharp organizational skills! 

How did it come to the attention of its editor? It was by word-of-mouth; my previous supervisor wrote a reference book for Libraries Unlimited, and he recommended me for the Read On project. 

What research was involved? Lots and lots of reading YA fiction/fantasy/science fiction/horror.  I pored over review journals such as VOYA, School Library Journal, and Booklist, and relied heavily on a database called Novelist. 

What was your critical thesis on? My critical thesis discussed how teenagers had the mental and emotional capacity to read, understand, and enjoy complex fiction.  While researching my thesis, I kept coming across all these “rules” on how to write teen fiction, and I didn’t agree with many of them (i.e. always use 1^st person; don’t include the point of view of an adult character; don’t write about extremely heavy or dark material). I realize now that my critical thesis directly informed how I wrote Read On: Spec Fiction for Teens.  My intro to the reference book is basically a condensed version of my thesis about how teens can and will read complex fiction and are currently the demographic that the publishing industry focuses on.  Very weird how it all fell together! 

What was your creative thesis? My creative thesis was my historical fiction middle grade novel. 

Did you discover and fall in love with any books while in the MFAC program? Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary Schmidt. Reading that book gave me the permission to not only go ahead with my historical fiction for middle graders, but to also let loose with imagery, symbolism, and heartfelt character emotion.  

Without naming names, tell us who your first readers are (e.g., live-action writing group; online writing group; editor; agent). When do you share a piece of writing? Online writing group (of other Hamline grads!) 

Can you briefly describe your writing life? How has it changed since you graduated?  I have learned that writing is about 90% diligence and 10% talent. You can be the greatest, most creative writer in the world, but if you don’t do the work, your talent is not going to help you. You have to make appointments to write and stick to those appointments just as you would a doctor’s visit. I have more of a regular writing schedule now, and if I only get down 500 words a day, so be it. It’s still progress.  

What are you working on now? I am still working on my historical fiction middle grade novel!

What would you like to say to current or prospective students? My experience at Hamline really changed my writing for the better. The lectures, workshops, and faculty involvement helped me to go deeper in both my creative and critical work. And I met some lifelong friends!