PIEDMONT LAUREATE    

Coming up next week, Raleigh will be hosting its annual festival celebrating the arts: Artsplosure.  What an exciting weekend for all who love the arts to come out and get inspired. 

Pablo Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist.  The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”  As a children’s book author, former classroom teacher, and the parent of a creative little girl (who regularly produces such surprisingly imaginative pieces like this “cuckoo clock”), I am convinced that children are some of the most uninhibited and wildly creative people.

Let’s take a look at what children can teach us about how to be more creative in our daily and artistic lives.

For a child, everything is new.  Childhood is nothing if not the time in life where our brains are filled with vast amounts of new knowledge and experiences.  This is enormously stimulating for young people. Have you ever noticed that many famous artists, musicians, and writers produce their best work early in their careers?  Even Einstein was only 26 years old when he proposed his Special Theory of Relativity (immortalized in the formula E = mc²).  While one might think experience would increase the success of our artistic and imaginative products, the sad truth is creative output generally declines with age.  Before you get too depressed consider the role of new experiences and information for helping you get back to that childlike exuberance for your art.  Age does not steal our ingenuity.  We do by falling back on worn out ideas.  Embrace newness to stimulate your creativity.

Children learn by playing.  Whether making up games on the playground, inventing new worlds in the backyard, and disappearing into their imaginations through toys, drawings, and books, children learn best through unstructured play.  They discover so much more through hands-on activities and exploration rather than lectures and structured work.  The innovative 3M company encourages researchers to take a daily “bootlegging hour,” a time each day to pursue individual interests, take walks, play pinball, and do activities that other companies might view as unproductive.  Google has a similar initiative called Innovative Time-Off.  Take time to play, work with your hands, daydream, and explore activities that might not at first seem like they’ll further your art.  Children do things because they are fun, plain and simple.  Find ways to have fun.

Children are less self-critical.  My five-year old daughter thinks every drawing she does is a masterpiece.  Hey, they are!  She is effortlessly productive in her creativity.  When I taught 4^th and 5^th grades, I noticed kids at this age suddenly feel self-conscious about their drawings and writing.  Something happens in our brain development around this age that starts cutting on certain censors and inhibitions.  But to be artistically productive, we have to find a way around these negative voices in our heads.  Don’t let fear of embarrassment stifle your creativity.  Don’t quit a project because of self-doubt.  Take risks with your art.  Be willing to be silly and uninhibited.  The world is full of critics.  Ignore them.

Children are more intuitive.  We live in a world where massive amounts of data and information are available.  Logic and fact reign supreme.  This can overwhelm our decisions.  My daughter however has never met a fairy, but she believes in them completely.  Children accept magic as part of the world.  They follow their own intuitive rules.  Kids operate on the gut-level.  When you can get away from artistic decisions based on market research and facts about what the public supposedly wants, you’ll discover your best ideas are inside you.  Trust your artistic instincts.  You are your own best judge of what is a good idea to pursue.

Children are comfortable with ambiguity.  Hand an adult a stick and ask them what it is.  They’ll say a stick.  Give a stick to a child and they might say it’s a wand, a tent pole, a pirate’s sword, a dragon bone, or a million other creative responses.  When Picasso picked up a pair of bicycle handles, he saw a bull’s horns.  Paul McCartney dreamed one night about scrambled eggs and created the song “Yesterday.”  While uncertainty makes most of us uncomfortable, ambiguity can be a rich source of creativity.  Ask open-ended questions like “what if…?”  Ponder to your nightly dreams.  Look at the world with curiosity.  When you can see beyond what something is, you’ll discover the unexpected possibilities in the ordinary.

Children cultivate broad interests.  When I ask my daughter what she wants to be when she grows up, she’ll say an artist, a dancer, a teacher, and a scientist.  All of them, and often more.  As we get older, we tend to cultivate certain narrow interests.  We begin to say, “I’m not good at that.”  We put our talents and pursuits in smaller and smaller categories.  But children are fascinated by a wide range of topics.  Dinosaurs.  Soccer.  Trains.  Outer space.  Cooking.  Painting.  Animals.   They are interested in lots of things.  Kids are also quick to say, “I can do that.”  As adults, we shouldn’t limit ourselves.  Have a broad-range of interests (especially new interests, remember?) and you’ll have a bigger tool box for creative ideas.  And a variety of interests allows for more cross-pollination of ideas across topics.

Whatever our creative pursuits—whether in the arts, our jobs, our hobbies, our lives—we have a lot to learn from children.  I hope these six suggestions will help you get back in touch with your inner child, your most imaginative and most wildly creative self.

Come out to Raleigh’s Artsplosure festival next week for some inspiration and fun.  I hope you’ll join me over at the Kidsplosure stage on Sunday, May 19 at 1 pm where I’ll be sharing about my books and what has inspired my creative life.

How often do you hear people say, “All the good ideas out there are already taken.”? Or “There aren’t any original ideas left!” 

Nonsense!  Ideas aren’t like natural resources or consumable goods.  They don’t run out.  There are an infinite number of new ideas left to be discovered.  It simply takes a bit of imagination to put these new ideas together.  And when I say put ideas together, that’s exactly what is at the heart of the most wildly original creations: putting unexpected ideas together.

Mr. Reeses, for example.  He takes chocolate.  He takes peanut butter.  Two ingredients we haven’t eaten together (at least not back in the 1920s).  Presto!  Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.  Original and incredibly delicious idea!

What about E.B. White looking at that spider web up in the corner of his barn one day and imagining writing in it?  Spiders and writing don’t seem to go together.  But joined together in White’s imagination and Charlotte’s Web is born.

In my novel The Prince Who Fell from the Sky, I took the trope of the feral child being raised by an animal (a bear named Casseomae in my story’s case) and set them a post-apocalyptic wilderness.  This particular combination of ideas was something I hadn’t read before.  The elements of animal characters and post-apocalyptic worlds were both deeply fascinating to me.  Why not put them together in one story?

When we take two things that aren’t normally associated with one another and put them together, we get something new.  See why new ideas can never run out?

Let me break it down a bit more.  You’ve got all this stuff in your head.  Background knowledge, as they say.  Those subjects you learned in school.  All those experiences you’ve had.  Every book you read and fascinating things you encountered.  These all make up the “compost heap” of your imagination.  Some of it breaks down in your memory banks only to be forgotten.  Much of it synthesizes with other memories, ideas, and information to become rich soil for growing ideas.

Then one day, you encounter something new.  Maybe you see some funny bumper sticker while driving in your car.  Maybe you’re wandering around a flea market and spot an intriguing gizmo.  Maybe you’re watching the news or reading a magazine or listening to your child talking to her friend.  Your brain suddenly latches on some new information and makes a wild and crazy connection to something in the “compost heap” of your imagination.  The light bulb goes off.  An original idea is born!

This is the heart of inspiration.  So look at the world with curiosity.  The potential catalyst for inspiration is all around us.  Simply find the unexpected connection between something new you encounter and something already percolating in your imagination.  I feel certain a creative, wildly original idea will emerge.

I wasn’t one of those writers who grew up knowing this was what I wanted to do.  As a kid, I was a ravenous reader.  I devoured books.  I re-read my favorites until the covers came loose and pages with the best scenes fell out. 

I also made up my own stories.  They were mostly rip offs of Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and John Christopher’s Tripods series.  After seeing the original Red Dawn movie (Patrick Swayze in all his kick-Commie-butt cheesiness), my best bud Mike Dixon and I wrote our own version, set in the swamps of Dawson’s Creek where we grew up with all our friends as the heroes.  I would write a chapter in our spiral notebook, pass it off to him on the bus, and he’d write the next chapter that night.  It was far from original, but like with so many other art forms, you learn a ton through imitation.

I eventually went to UNC-Chapel Hill to study Art History and Elementary Education, somehow getting through four years without taking any creative writing classes.  Sad, I know.  Again, I had no aspirations at that time of being an author.  But I did love making up stories.  My daydreams always seemed to bring me into extraordinary worlds full of exciting adventures and quirky characters.  My imagination was primed in that geeky way for fantastical storytelling.

After graduating and beginning to teach 4^th and 5^th graders, I had my students read my favorite childhood novels.  I was reminded in the classroom just how serious young readers are about great books.  I saw first-hand just how engrossed, excited, and downright obsessed kids become when they get that amazing novel in their hands.  I wanted to create a story that would have that same sort of impact on my students.  I wanted to write the book that my younger self would have stayed up late into the night devouring.

While this experience in the classroom began to light that fire in me to write, there were three books in particular that took writing from a pastime to an ambitious dream.  None of these three books were ones I read as a child.  They were ones I discovered as an adult, as a teacher and a passionate lover of children’s literature.  When I read these, I realized that they were as powerful and complex as any books written for adults.  I wanted to do something that great.  Time (and readers) will tell whether I have even come close in my own novels.  But the following three books were the ones I read that made me absolutely with complete abandon want to be a writer.

The Giver by Lois Lowry — Set in a utopia where all pain and suffering has been shielded from the citizens through a policy of “Sameness,” young Jonas begins training as the Receiver of Memory with a man called the Giver.  Through memories of the pre-Sameness world (our world), Jonas learns what true happiness and true suffering is.  For young readers who tend to see the world in more black-or-white terms, the discovery that pain is necessary for joy can be shocking.

Holes by Louis Sachar — Equal parts Kafka and Crime and Punishment, Holes tells the story of Stanley Yelnats who is accused of a crime he didn’t commit and sent off to Camp Green Lake, which has no lake, nothing green, and is in no way camp.  Stanley and the other convicts are forced to dig a hole, five feet wide and five feet deep, every day in the blistering hot desert.  The plot twists and turns masterfully from present day to flashbacks of Stanley’s cursed great-great-grandfather and his connection to the outlaw Kissin’ Kate.  As the various storylines come together, it makes for an unforgettable catharsis and a reflection on how much we suffer due to the sins of others.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman — The most original and philosophical fantasy epic I’ve ever read.  Even if the story wasn’t a white-knuckle adventure with armored bears and arctic witches, Pullman would go down in history for his unique world-building where characters have their souls physically manifest in the form of animals (called daemons), the mysterious Dust that seems to represent the role sin plays in our humanity, and the golden alethiometer, a truth-telling symbol reader (which is endless fun for readers to ponder long after they’ve finished the novel).  The philosophical quandaries the novel presents perfectly illustrate how great authors provide questions not answers.

These novels all flabbergasted me when I read them.  They set my imagination ablaze.  And they made me want to write novels for young readers that would challenge the way they saw the world.  I continue to want to write something as wildly original and memorable as these three modern classics of children’s literature.

What books for young readers made this kind of lasting impression on you (either as a kid or as an adult)?  Please share titles and authors in the comment section below.  I look forward to learning your favorites. 

Last summer, just a few weeks before my daughter was starting kindergarten, we watched the Disney classic The Jungle Book.  (Yes, I know the Rudyard Kipling story is much better.  We’ll read it together soon, I promise!)  She was loving the movie.  Laughing as the feral boy Mowgli and the bear Baloo ham it up through the forest.  Dancing along to the music.  Watching wide-eyed whenever the tiger Shere Khan came on-screen.

About halfway through, she said, “Pause it!  Is Baloo taking the boy away?”

“Sure,” I said.  “Mowgli’s human.  He’s got to go back to his people.”

 “I don’t want him to leave the jungle,” she said.

I managed to convince her to keep watching, promising that Mowgli would be happy in the end.  The movie drew to a close.  Mowgli was love struck over a girl from the village and followed her away.   Baloo and Baheera sang their way off into the sunset, happy they’d gotten their boy to his true home. 

My daughter bawled her eyes out through the whole “happy” ending.  “Why couldn’t he just stay with the animals forever?” she wept.

It struck me that The Jungle Book is a lot like going off to kindergarten.  The time comes when every little wild child has to leave the jungle and head off to get civilized.  While my daughter was completely oblivious to why the story had stirred up these emotions, I’m convinced this is what was going on deep inside.

Stories are experienced by children on many different levels.  They love the excitement of the plot and the captivating settings.  They grow to love the characters, sympathizing with their plights and admiring their pluck.  Young readers can often verbalize how they enjoy these aspects of a story.  But great stories speak to children in deeper psychological and emotional ways as well.  Ways that young people aren’t even aware.

Kids love when Peter Pan battles Captain Hook.  But are they aware of the contrasting fantasy and fear of the eternally-young boy and the villain who is reminded of his own mortality by the ticking clock inside the alligator?  Probably not.   Do young readers consider how orphans—from Cinderella to Harry Potter—find more enduring surrogate families in a husband-prince or schoolmates at Hogwarts?  Nay. 

The symbolism affects readers on an unconscious level.  Wilbur the pig eventually overcomes his urges to gluttonously devour anything put in his mouth when he hides Charlotte’s egg sac on his tongue to bring her children back to the barnyard; a reflection of how we all learn to overcome the urges of the id for the heroism of listening to the superego.  And the brutal competitiveness of being a teenager is perfectly illustrated in (but hardly ever consciously noticed by readers of) the gladiator bloodsport The Hunger Games.  The transitions, fears, and longings of childhood are represented in a thousand different stories in a thousand different metaphors.

Young readers might not recognize the metaphors, but they feel it.  Oh, how they feel it!  Part of them knows this isn’t just happening to Katniss or Peter or Mowgli.  This is happening to them.  It happens to all of us.  It’s the grand drama of growing up and finding our place in the world.

Writers of children’s literature must often wonder, “Will my readers even get this?  Am I doing something too complex for children?”  The answer arrives in the way young readers respond to the best of children’s books.  When they cheer.  When they cry.  The way they devour certain books again and again.  Young readers get it.  They are enriched by it.  The way they see the world is forever altered.  They just might not realize it yet.

It’s hard to believe that one of the giants of children’s literature, Maurice Sendak author of Where the Wild Things Are, ever had doubts about his path as a writer.  However I recently discovered in the wonderful book Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom that Sendak feared his writing was “narrow” and that he was an “atom’s worth of talent” when compared to the likes of Tolstoy and Melville.

Ms. Nordstrom — herself a giant of children’s literature as the legendary editor for E.B. White and Shel Silverstein, as well as Sendak and many others — wrote back: “You may not be Tolstoy, but Tolstoy wasn’t Sendak, either.”

We each have our own unique way of telling stories.  As much as I admire C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, I could never have created Narnia or Hogwarts.  But certainly neither of them would have created the mythical America of my Clockwork Dark books.  The Nine Pound Hammer and its sequels grew from my passions for Southern folklore, magical adventures, old-time country and blues music, and gunslinger Westerns.  My novel The Prince Who Fell from the Sky was the book only I could write because of my particular blend of interests in post-apocalyptic wildernesses, talking animals, Native American creation myth, and characters who grow to love one another despite the barriers of language and beliefs.

One of the most helpful exercises for discovering your own unique storytelling voice I learned from the writer Ray Bradbury.  In an essay, he shared how at one point early in his career, he came up with a list of interesting sounding titles.  The Ravine.  The Town Clock.  The Carnival.  And so on.  Years  later, Bradbury came upon the forgotten list and was surprised to discover how many of his novels, such as Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine, corresponded to titles on those lists.  He hadn’t done it intentionally.  He hadn’t written the novels based off the lists of titles.  His stories grew from his singular imagination.  As Bradbury said, it was as if the list of titles had been “hidden under the trapdoor on the top of [his] skull.”  They were ideas that captivated his imagination and were lurking about under that trapdoor just waiting for him to let them out.

Discover what captivates your imagination and turn those ideas into stories.

In writing workshops, I call these our Magnetic Nouns — the people, places, and things that we are drawn to uncontrollably like a magnet.  I make lists of words that fascinate me.  I look for ways to bring these provocative ideas into my stories, in particular in unexpected combinations, such as talking animals and post-apocalyptic wildernesses.

When you discover your own vast treasure hordes of unique Magnetic Nouns, when you bring in your personal passions and varied interests, you can use them to create the stories that only you could possibly write.  Not the story that Leo Tolstoy or Maurice Sendak would write.  But the stories that are each our own.

I grew up in that swampiest corner of our state, Dawson’s Creek down in Pamlico County.  I guarantee if you’ve been to Dawson’s Creek, North Carolina, you were lost.   

When people who have been lost in Dawson’s Creek learn that I grew up there, they often give me a certain look…the concerned look.  The honest truth is we often feel sorry for kids who grow up in places like that, places that are starkly rural, counties with only one stoplight and no performing arts centers or Trader Joe’s, places with more dilapidated tobacco barns than people, places that seem so far from… everywhere.

But growing up down there I had access to the most wondrous places in the world.  As a child, I ran with packs of wolves.  I crashed an airplane into the Sahara.  I was lost in the jungle with only the screams of monkeys.  And once –this is true—I went through a magic doorway.  Really!  I followed a group of brothers and sisters as they pushed their way through a wardrobe full of fur coats, only to step foot in the snow of an enchanted forest, an enchanted forest where it was always winter—always winter but never Christmas. 

What a childhood!  What places I went.   What people I met.

How did that happen to a boy from Dawson’s Creek, North Carolina?  I read books.  And I mean lots of books.   On the bus ride home.  As I brushed my teeth.  While I waited for my mom to cut the eel off my fishing line.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a boy reading under the covers with a flashlight in Pamlico County or inner-city Durham.  Books can transport you.  Books can transform you.

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis: “Once children have read of enchanted forests, all forests will forever be enchanted.” 

I’m not sure how I was transformed when Peter Hatcher’s little brother Fudge ate his turtle.  And I can’t say exactly how I was changed when I wept at the realization that Charlotte was going to die.  But I was transformed by them nonetheless.  I never again saw the world in the same way.

The reality is that we grow up – most of us anyway— and make the painful discovery that no matter how many times you open your closet door, you won’t actually see the snowy woods of Narnia.  But if we have had books in our hands as children, if we have had our imaginations set ablaze in great, raging bonfires by stories, then there will always be glowing embers of wonder and enchantment burning inside us.