Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Inkwell welcomes author Erin Bow, author of the Newbery Honor
Award-winning book SIMON SORT OF SAYS. We'll be talking to Erin for
the next two weeks, focusing on the book, which was long-listed for
the National Book Award, and which won a Schneider Family Book
Award. And we'll also focus on the life of writing and the writing
life.

Here's a teaser for the book: "Simon O'Keeffe's biggest claim to
fame should be the time his dad accidentally gave a squirrel a holy
sacrament. But the story the whole world wants to tell about Simon
is the one he'd do anything to forget: the story in which he's the
only kid in his class who survived a school shooting. Simon Sort of
Says is a testament to the lasting echoes of trauma, the redemptive
power of humor, and the courage it takes to move forward without
forgetting the past." <https://www.ala.org/winner/simon-sort-says>
  

    
Erin was trained as a physicist but somehow ended up writing poetry
and children's fiction.  She is the author of three volumes of
poetry (writing as Erin Noteboom) and six novels for younger
readers. Born on the American prairies, Erin now lives in Ontario,
Canada, and sporadically appears on the WELL as <erinbow>.

Leading the conversation is seanan forbes, a queer, disabled writer,
researcher, book doula, teaching artist, and prospective PhD
student. seanan lives in libraries and the early seventeenth
century. Rumor has it that they once climbed on a meteorite, which
goes to prove that sometimes rumors are true. You can follow them
down rabbit holes on Instagram, where they hide behind
@immoderately.foxed. 
  

    <scribbled by seanan Sat 24 Aug 24 14:47>
  

    <scribbled by seanan Sun 25 Aug 24 07:22>
  

    
Hi, Erin! 

Take three. Let me have a serious go at opening this without errors.


There are many choice beginnings. Let’s start between books.  

You’d been writing in a serious vein for a long while. During
scattered musings and conversations, you brushed the wisps of the
furthest clouds of thought about your next project. One theme was
consistent. You wanted to write something funny.  

How did you come to SIMON SORT OF SAYS — or how did SIMON come to
be? 
  

    
Yes, I've always wanted to write a funny book.  Some of the books I
imprinted on are funny, from PG Wodehouse to James Herriot to  Terry
Pratchett.  I'd like to think I'm funny in person, and there's
humour sprinkled through all my books, so you'd think writing
something funny wouldn't be that hard.  

You would be wrong.  

Somehow in my first (goodness, it's NINE) nine books, I became an
author whose work will make you cry on a bus.  Book number ten is
SIMON SORT OF SAYS, which I describe as a comedy about PTSD, a
comedy about recovering from trauma.  

What I discovered is that, for me to write it, a comedy needs to be
about something hard. When I'm talking to grown-ups I cite MASH,
which I grew up watching. MASH took all sadness and anger and trauma
of war -- very much in the national consciousness at that time --
and turned it sideways and made it funny.  It's not spoon of sugar
to help the war go down.  The energy of the trauma is also the
energy of the comedy.  

(When I talk to middle school kids, I pitch it this way: do you know
what's funnier than farting? Farting at funerals is funnier than
farting.)  

So that's why -- in the wake of my own kids being in a lockdown -- I
wrote a comedy about a kid who survived a school shooting.  
  

    
Sometimes, humour’s what keeps us going. That’s true in
relationships, as well as trauma, and through the minor miseries and
repetitive actions of everyday life. In the hardest of times, the
choice may be “laugh or die”. 

There’s a reason for survivors of and people dealing with trauma
turn to laughter for perspective and release. Shared laughter’s all
the better. MASH is a great example. It has the grim-reaper humour
that’s part of life in emergency rooms, newsrooms (Do newsrooms
still exist?), and amongst first responders. That’s the short end of
a long list. 

After WWII, many Jewish comedians took the spotlight on stage and
screen. Supporting that statement and your observation about comedy
and trauma is this from the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum:
https://www.ushmm.org/online-calendar/event/VEFBSTAYCONHUMOR0820

You can’t do comedy in an empty room. It takes community or, better,
communities. 

Simon wouldn’t have made it through without his family and friends.
Could you talk (Fine, type.) about growing his community?
  

    
You know, it was such a treat for me to give a young character a
great, supportive family. Children's literature is full of orphans,
and I've orphaned my share.  It's a structural thing -- as a parent
you'd get between your kid and their Big Destiny as if pushing them
off the train tracks.  So if you want your child protagonist to, I
don't know, overthrow the government, mom and dad have got to go.  

But the school shooting Simon has been through is not something his
parents could protect him from (and not something I can protect my
kids from, either). So I was free to give Simon great parents:
Isobel, a black-humored funeral director, and Martin, a warm-hearted
musician and Catholic deacon.  They are also traumatized, but they
are clearly there for their kid and have done everything they could
to get him help.  

But seventh graders need more than just their parents, so I also
gave Simon friends.  Agate is his best friend, and one of my
absolute favorite characters in all of my own work.  I don't put
real people into my writing -- but that said, Agate is a lot like my
younger kid, Eleanor: autistic, authentic, unapologetically awesome.
She just gives her heart to Simon like she's got more than one. 
He's scared and traumatized, but who can resist that?  

(Agate was the great surprise of the book. She was meant to be a
minor character, so much so that I gave her the name of my
daughter's cat as a placeholder. But she turned up "like a penny
landing on its edge" and stole every scene I wrote her into.)

Simon's other friend is Kevin, who is just a low-key nice guy. He's
there to be steady and mostly normal because there was enough drama
in the book already.  

(Artistically: Have you ever tried to develop a character arc for a
low-key nice guy?  HARD!)


 
  

    <scribbled by seanan Mon 26 Aug 24 04:05>
  

    
Let’s hear about that parenthetical observation. 

It had me grasping for pertinent paper people. There’s Alice
Oseman’s Nick Nelson, the steady nice fellow in her HEARTSTOPPER
series. Kevin, Nick… Not many simply decent characters come to mind
—- not ones with proper arcs and enough dimensionality to have
readers connecting with and believing in them. Maybe that is, in
part or whole, because writing them is, as you typed it, HARD!

There’s one Kevin conversation in my offsite storage, which I could
retrieve, if that would be helpful, but as you’ve posted both
question and full-caps note, shall we bounce the pair around Inkwell
and find out what spills? 
  

    
Developing an arc for Kevin was hard, truly -- it's probably the
plot problem which my editor and I talked through the most.  

Most protagonists -- or my protagonists, anyway -- seem to have a
deep wound or want, and stories are about attempts to heal that
wound, usually first in a misguided way, and then in a more true
way.  Healing that wound, or satisfying that want, is the stuff an
arc is made of.  

But at first it seemed to me that Kevin didn't want anything.  It
took me several drafts to discover that Kev is a
go-along-to-get-along sort of fellow, someone whose version of being
a nice guy is to pretend not to want anything, even to himself.  He
doesn't rock the boat.  

This is not great for Kevin, but it ends up hurting Simon too, when
Kevin falls silent and still and not-boat-rocking at just the time
when Simon needs his friend's support.  (They get over it.)  

Kevin's arc became about him discovering that he's meant to have
desires of his own and make some choices related to them.  The
choice he ultimately makes -- to throw in his lot faking the alien
message -- is a little doofy, but it felt triumphant that he made it
at all.  Or at least it did to me.  
  

    
I too am trying to think of some nice steady simply decent
characters now ... the Sam Gamgees of the world.  It's hard to come
up with any.  In my own body of work I think of two, both of whom I
killed off in the middle act -- I guess one way to make an arc is to
end it with a splat?  
  

    
And then there’s having your nice secondary character changed by
outside forces, prove not to be so very nice, shift back and forth
between good and evil or friend and traitor, or… but who doesn’t
love a resounding splat?  

There is a wholeness to your secondary characters. There are many
works, in many genres, where secondary and tertiary characters are
paper people, if they are given the grace of two dimensions. 

Agate and Simon’s relationship sang from the start (or before the
start, depending on when “start” begins) The different richness of
Kevin and Kevin/Simon made the “hiccoughy” parts worth labor: in
themselves, and for the story and readers.

You mentioned your editor, and we will — I hope, at some time in our
fortnight here — explore the subject of story-underway editors and
readers: having them, and being one, and that engagement with
works-in-progress… and maybe (bookmarking these, in case) some of
the reasons it’s healthy to have multiple readers, how reading
another writer’s work as it progresses, regresses, resets, detours,
and paves new roads can stretch and strengthen one’s abilities and
work, and how to be a good reader of your own and other people’s
work. 

From the perspective of a book doula, I know the inner… athleticism,
state changes … it takes to get wholly inside another person’s
world, their book-aims and perspectives, and their characters’
skins: to stand in the unfinished atlas of their growing world. Like
midwives catching babies, when the work isn’t happening _right now_,
I’m aware of the depth, weight, and meaning of that trust. 

From a writer’s end, it is no small thing — maybe an opposite of
“small” — turning to another person (or people) to talk through ways
of getting gears unstuck, characters out of (or into) messes, or
otherwise helping with the work. 

And that’s the question, born of all of that, born in turn by your
mention of your editor and finding Kevin’s arc: How do you know whom
to trust not only with your growing work, but also with being an
active part of growing your work? 

Secondary or replacement question, if this is beneficial: What are
some effects (personal or written) of having that/those
outside/insider input and view(s)? 

There are loads of slashes and ands in this. Please take them as
liberties. This is an open meadow, not a fenced-in field. 
  

    
Yay!

SIMON SORT OF SAYS is a wonderful book. Disarmingly funny but then
at times deeper than I was prepared to go. Although every time it
went deep I was glad, in retrospect, to have been dragged there
against my will. I learned a lot about myself.

This discussion so far has been really great. I will admit right up
front to being a BIG Seánan fan. It was particularly fun to watch on
social media as Seánan and Erin traipsed around Mongolia a few
years.
  

    
ago.
  

    
Thank you, Peter. I believe this thread exists because of you. May
you be more than glad that you suggested it. 

You should see the off-social-media photos of Erin from that trip,
which took place almost ten years ago. I wonder what those children
are like now. It would be worth another bout of giardia to spend
time with the people they’ve become. (Erin might disagree: not about
the people, but the bout.)

There’s one with a golden eagle (Oh, dear. There’s a print of that
waiting and waiting for me to pick it up and send it to Canada.)
that’s particularly charming. Or charmed: Erin by the eagle; the
eagle by the delighted writer whose arm has become a perch. 

Outer Mongolia might work its way into the conversation. We have a
fortnight. Although it will have passed fast in hindsight, we’re on
the Hill of Now. From that perspective, there’s space galore to
explore. 
  

    <scribbled by jonl Tue 27 Aug 24 14:36>
  

    
Interrupting the conversation briefly to post administrivia:

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This conversation will last for at least two weeks, through August
9. Thanks for joining us!
  

    
Thanks, Jon!  Hello Peter!  

Yes, it probably is worth pointing out, for anyone dropping into
this public conversation, that our host Seánan and I go way back ...
not just 10 years, to that that trip to Mongolia, where I was
researching my fifth novel STAND ON THE SKY, but much farther.  

They (Seánan) were the book doula for my second novel, SORROW'S
KNOT, which had the difficult labour characteristic of second
novels.  I can remember working out a certain plot puzzle by text
while they sent me pictures of the stormy english seas. I think they
could even tell us some stories about how the sale of my first
novel, PLAIN KATE, looked from the outside ... is that right,
Seánan?  My memory has become fuzzy in what feels like the depths of
time.  
  

    
This leads to Seánan's question about how writers find and benefit
from readers and editors...  

To me, it seems miraculous that someone else can take my rough work,
open it up, and find just the right spot to touch and say, here,
this is where it's not working, just here.  I think this is a
separate gift than the gift of writing, and I don't think I have it
myself.   In fact, it's probably more than one gift: I've known
people who could find the raw spots but just made them more raw when
they poked at them.   

I am always amazed and deeply grateful when I find someone who can
do this.  I think all writers need editors.  It's so difficult for a
writer to overcome "the curse of knowledge" and see what's really on
the page, and what's still just in their brain.  

WHen I talk to kids, I explain the unhelpful quirk of the brain
known as the curse of knowledge with a demonstration:  break into
pairs, and one of you tap the beats of a well-known tune, like
Twinkle Little Star, out so that your partner can identify it. The
tappers, who can hear the melody in their heads, almost always think
this is going to be easy.  The listeners, who can't hear the melody,
almost always find it impossible.  So too with writing: the chasm
between I as the scribbler with the story in my head can hear,
versus what you as the reader can hear, can be huge.

Readers and editors are the absolute best tool for bridging that
chasm.   

It's been my good fortune to work with several first-rate folks,
from very early readers to talented book doulas like Seánan to
big-name editors at big-name houses.   

SIMON SORT OF SAYS was edited by Rachel Stark (they/them) at Disney
Hyperion.  The book was pretty solid and polished by the time it got
to them (this book had a long journey before it got sold to a
publisher) but we still did big work.  For instance, if the book
seems like one book, and half book about "what the heck happened to
this kid" and a half book about "are they really going to fake a
message from outer space," then it's because Rachel found that
broken spot and helped me heal it.  
  

    
Hi Erin, and thanks for doing this! My wife, who teaches 5th grade,
notes that this book is recommended for ages 10 and up and is thus
being marketed essentially as a children's book, for her grade
level.  She wonders if you had been pressured at all to write it for
young adults instead of for children, given the subject matter, and
if so how you dealt with that to make it the children's book that it
really is.
  

    
I have a slew of Kately things, but they will wait (some bookmarked;
some remembered; some, now dawdling in the green room, from the
WELL) until after the voids within David’s wife’s wonderings have
been filled.

David, from me, as a sometime teaching artist, kudos and respects to
your wife for being a teacher, a transformer of lives. Fifth grade
is a magnificent challenge. May she have more than the support she
needs and appreciation she deserves. 

The thread is yours, Erin. 
  

    
Loving this, loved the book and it meant a lot to me as a
(grand)parent raising a non binary trans kid with autism. I so love
that I can hand them a book that they can relate to. (Thankfully, no
shooting to relate to tho!) 
  

    
I don't have a copy : the blurb only covers the first half of the
book-and-half-a-book.

Is the second half-book a follow-on? Who decided to include it (the
editor's cutting point) rather than a separate book?
  

    
>She wonders if you had been pressured at all to write it for
young adults instead of for children, given the subject matter, and
if so how you dealt with that to make it the children's book that it
really is.

Not really.  

That may be in part due to how the book came to be: I wrote it out
and did several rounds of revision before I sold it, so it always
had the characters you see now, at the age they are now -- just
entering seventh grade.  This alone puts is firmly in the
middle-grade category, which is usually defined as readers 8 - 12 or
10 - 14 or something like that.  (The idea that the age of the
protagonist dictates the age of the reader to which a book is
marketed is darn silly, but firmly entrenched.  I have many thoughts
but that's tangential to your question.)

I do fairly regularly see cautions from adults who are recommending
books to children that this is too heavy for young readers -- that
it's one of those books to read alongside your kids, or to screen
first, or consider for the older end of the range.  

That's not something I generally hear from kids, though. Consider:
most of our kids learn the lockdown song in kindergarten. This is
not going to be the book that upsets them by revealing the shocking
fact that school shootings are a regular part of American life.  

They already know that.  

This is a book not about a shooting but about healing afterward.
Readers hear about the actual shooting mostly as  half a page of
Simon talking to his friend in a chapter entitled "in which Kevin
googles alpacas."  

As Chesterton said once, fairy tales don't tell children that
dragons exist.  Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy
tales tell children that dragons can be beaten.  
  

    
Erin, thank you for agreeing to do this. I absolutely adored the
book. I've read others of yours and I am a fan, but this one just
knocked me out. I so respected the very slow reveal of the nature of
Simon's trauma and actually only wish it hadn't been in the book
jacket copy which was quoted above, so the reader could discover it
at the same time that Simon's friends did. But it's foolish of me to
start with my quibble because really it was a book I could not put
down and what more can a reader ask for