Hope in the Mail Read online

  Also by Wendelin Van Draanen

  How I Survived Being a Girl

  Flipped

  Swear to Howdy

  Runaway

  Confessions of a Serial Kisser

  The Running Dream

  The Secret Life of Lincoln Jones

  Wild Bird

  Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief • Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man • Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy • Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf • Sammy Keyes and the Curse of Moustache Mary • Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy • Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyes • Sammy Keyes and the Art of Deception • Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen • Sammy Keyes and the Dead Giveaway • Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things • Sammy Keyes and the Cold Hard Cash • Sammy Keyes and the Wedding Crasher • Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls • Sammy Keyes and the Power of Justice Jack • Sammy Keyes and the Showdown in Sin City • Sammy Keyes and the Killer Cruise • Sammy Keyes and the Kiss Goodbye

  Shredderman: Secret Identity • Shredderman: Attack of the Tagger • Shredderman: Meet the Gecko • Shredderman: Enemy Spy

  The Gecko & Sticky: Villain’s Lair • The Gecko & Sticky: The Greatest Power • The Gecko & Sticky: Sinister Substitute • The Gecko & Sticky: The Power Potion

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Text copyright © 2020 by Wendelin Van Draanen Parsons

  Cover art used under license from Shutterstock

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! GetUnderlined.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781984894663 (trade) — ISBN 9781984894670 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781984894687

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Wendelin Van Draanen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  I: Your Vault

  Chapter 1: Writers’ Gold

  Chapter 2: Out of the Ashes

  Chapter 3: Putting Hope in the Mail

  Chapter 4: Today Could Be the Day

  Chapter 5: Defining Moments

  Chapter 6: Patching Bullet Holes

  Chapter 7: Shifting Gears

  II: Writing

  Chapter 8: Finding Your Voice

  Chapter 9: Fundamentals

  Chapter 10: The Characters Around You

  Chapter 11: Growing Pains

  Chapter 12: Knock-Knock

  Chapter 13: Backstory

  Chapter 14: Trees and Rocks

  Chapter 15: Villains

  Chapter 16: Setting

  Chapter 17: Pet Pigs and Other Distractions

  Chapter 18: Beginning with the Ending

  Chapter 19: The Infamous Sagging Middle

  Chapter 20: Theme

  Chapter 21: Hidden Architecture

  Chapter 22: Dialogue

  Chapter 23: Writing Chops

  III: Being a Writer

  Chapter 24: Becoming a Finisher

  Chapter 25: Revision as Archenemy

  Chapter 26: Revise, Rinse, Repeat

  Chapter 27: Writer’s Block

  Chapter 28: A Little About Research

  IV: Special Cases

  Chapter 29: Mysteries

  Chapter 30: A Series Is Born

  Chapter 31: World-Building

  Chapter 32: Chapter Books

  Chapter 33: Sequels

  V: Seeds and Sprouts

  Chapter 34: Origin Stories

  Chapter 35: Boy Scout vs. Hoodlum

  Chapter 36: Flipped

  Chapter 37: Breakfast in Birmingham

  Chapter 38: Swear to Howdy

  Chapter 39: Starting Line

  Chapter 40: The Running Dream

  Chapter 41: Memory Camp

  Chapter 42: The Secret Life of Lincoln Jones

  Chapter 43: Bridge Out

  Chapter 44: Wild Bird

  VI: A Peek Behind the Curtain

  Chapter 45: Because You Asked

  Chapter 46: Publishing Limbo

  Chapter 47: The Day I Met My Editor

  Chapter 48: The Sequel About a Sequel

  Chapter 49: First Arrival

  Chapter 50: Editors

  Chapter 51: Agents

  Chapter 52: Copy Editors

  Chapter 53: Book Covers and Illustrations

  Chapter 54: Basic Finance

  Chapter 55: Traditional Publishing vs. Self-Publishing

  VII: Final Thoughts

  Chapter 56: Dodging Death

  Chapter 57: Be the Oxygen

  Acknowledgments

  Wendelin’s Works Referenced in This Book

  About the Author

  Becoming a writer was nowhere near my top ten career choices. I wasn’t one of those people who dreamed about penning the great American novel. Language arts was never my favorite subject in school. It bugged me, actually, because no matter how hard I worked at it, I couldn’t seem to break the essay-writing code. My papers were invariably returned with little red marks all over them—edits, corrections, and questions that resulted in the dreaded “Redo” or, worse, B+.

  The overachiever in me did not like the nebulous aspects of writing. The subjective assessment of it. She liked math. Where two plus two was always four, the square root of nine was always three, and the Pythagorean theorem was not built on shifting sands.

  I was also not a journal keeper. I grew up with brothers and quickly learned that committing my thoughts and feelings and secrets to paper was a dangerous enterprise. Definitely not worth the risk.

  And yet here I am, with over thirty books published and an unshakable belief that writing saved my life.

  Or, at least, saved me from a life of bitterness and despair. When my path took some dark turns, it was writing that helped me sort out what I thought and felt and wanted. It helped me find empathy. It made me dig deep into the why of people’s behaviors, and drove home the healing power of forgiveness. Writing gave me a new lease on life, and, perhaps most important, it helped me see past my own troubles to the needs of others.

  Writing also taught me that everyone has a story. And it’s our collective story—yours, mine, our neighbors’ both close and far—that helps us navigate life. Our stories—our histories—can give new perspectives that assist us in seeing things more broadly or clearly. Hearing how others have endured or triumphed can give us the courage to slog forward through hard times or nagging doubts.

  I’ve been speaking to audiences large and small, young and adult, for over twenty years now. Ostensibly I’m there to talk a
bout my books or reading and writing, but my true mission is to inspire the audience to fight for their own dreams. When I’m addressing a gym full of students, I want them to come away feeling uplifted and ready to take on the world. Because the bottom line is, it’s not my book or what I’ve gone through that matters most to them. What matters most to them is what they’re going through. What their hopes and dreams are. Nothing adults say or preach or teach can hold a candle to what’s going on in their lives right now.

  It wasn’t always, but speaking to a gym full of students is now easy for me. I make myself remember what it was like to be their age, to sit on a hard bench for an hour listening to an adult drone on about something that didn’t matter to me. I promise myself never to be that adult, then try to present them with a talk that’s lively and funny and substantive. It doesn’t take long for the audience to figure out that I get them, and that I care. My favorite comments from kids include “I loved the parts where you were airborne!” (in reference to the way I leap around) and (the one I hear most often) “You should do stand-up!” But they’ve also taken away the core message: Dream big, work hard, don’t give up.

  Speaking to adults is not as easy for me. A sea of stony faces is much tougher to engage than bleachers full of squirmy kids. Confession: It took me quite a while to quit shaking in front of educators. After all, what authority did I have to speak to a banquet hall of language arts teachers and librarians when my background was in math and science? I hadn’t read all the classics. I hadn’t spent my life analyzing literature. Why was I at the podium? These were people who lived and breathed literature, people who bled red ink and had no problem spilling it all over my school assignments!

  I felt like an impostor. But over time I came to realize that adults have many of the same longings and dreams for themselves that they had when they were sitting on a hard bench in a gym somewhere years ago—they’ve just learned to tuck them away behind the responsibilities of adulthood. A reminder that it’s still okay to dream and to pursue our dreams is something we all need to hear. And when I was able to get past my own insecurities and actually engage, I found the audiences to be kind. Supportive. Encouraging. And (amazingly) they would come up to me afterward and suggest the stand-up thing too. Turns out, language arts teachers aren’t a scary bunch after all. They’re people with stories and pain and a need to laugh just like…well, everyone.

  I’ve been asked by many people to collect the anecdotes and insights that I’ve shared with audiences during my twenty years of public speaking; to write them down.

  So this is my story—not the boring autobiographical stuff, but the parts that pertain to writing and finding silver linings. The parts that I hope will make you want to follow whatever path you choose with guts and determination.

  So come on. Let’s get airborne.

  Write what you know. It’s a good adage, and a manageable place to start. Many first novels are based on the author’s experiences, so take a look at what treasures are already stored in your vault.

  Before I was published (but after I had finally begun letting on to family that I was trying to be), an uncle of mine asked me how I thought I could possibly be a writer. “You’re too young to be a writer. You need more experiences.”

  Gee, thanks. And yes, seeds of doubt can quickly grow into weeds in your garden of worthiness.

  But here’s the reality: No matter how young you are, you have experiences. You have knowledge. You have feelings and observations and thoughts that are worthy of exploration. You can arrive at conclusions that will broaden the thinking of others, or just paint a picture of life from your perspective. It’s often the small stories with universal messages that touch us most deeply. We’re all humans, trying to find a way forward, longing for the place where we feel at home.

  My first published novel, How I Survived Being a Girl, was described as “Seinfeld for kids.” What the reviewer meant was that it was a story about nothing, as the sitcom was famously called “a show about nothing.”

  Having your book be considered to be about nothing could be deflating, but I took it as a huge compliment. I loved Seinfeld. And saying that it was a show about nothing was as true as saying that it was a show about everything. Seinfeld was about both. It captured the human experience with humor and heart-zinging authenticity. It was a show about people living small lives in small apartments in a big city. No special effects, no outrageous sets. Just little glimpses into the lives of people muddling along.

  All of us have that—a story about nothing that’s actually about everything. No matter how ordinary your environment may seem to you, if your story can capture the human experience within it, others will relate.

  Don’t discount how extraordinary capturing the ordinary can be. And how difficult. You probably haven’t viewed it this way, but if you’re in school—as a student or as an educator—you are surrounded by writers’ gold. How a school works, the voices of the kids and the administrators, the rules and limitations, the curriculum and expectations…it’s all second nature to you. It’s workaday stuff, part of the grind.

  But let’s turn that around. You have the background and details to write about a school environment naturally. The sights, the sounds, the smells, the mechanics of school life will flow from your fingertips. It’s easy for you! Do you know how many authors—especially kid-lit authors—would love to know what you know? Maybe they were in school once, but that was probably a long time ago. Things in education have changed. To get it right, they have to work at it, and work hard.

  Likewise, if you have a job—no matter how boring or ordinary you think it is—the way it works, the conversations in the employees’ lunchroom, how your associates relate to each other and the boss…it’s all gold.

  If you’re a dog walker, a babysitter, a dishwasher, a law clerk, a trash collector…it’s all gold.

  And if you’re in a rough situation right now—turbulent home life, a bad neighborhood, even unemployed—turn it around. What you’re going through is hard and dark and frightening, but it’s also writers’ gold. Take notes. Document your experience any way you can. There are seemingly mundane details about your everyday life that will give a natural authenticity to your writing.

  It’s all gold.

  So pay new attention to the ordinary around you. Find the story inside it. And find the human connection, because the best stories are the ones that touch our hearts. Love, longing, triumph…these can be small and personal, yet they’re universal desires. You don’t have to save the world. Just save your character. And at the heart of that character is you.

  So no matter what your situation is or how young you are, you have enough to paint a story with words, to make others hear you, see you, feel you.

  Take a closer look at what you already know.

  What’s inside your heart?

  What’s inside your vault?

  It’s a really good place to start.

  What turns a person into a writer?

  Sometimes the unexpected. I came to it from a place of anger and pain. Horrible stuff happened to my family when I was in college. An arsonist burned down our business—an industrial facility my immigrant parents had spent twenty years building—and then my father passed away unexpectedly six months later. We were devastated emotionally and financially, and our faith in justice was shaken to the core. I’d jolt awake in the middle of the night relieved to have escaped a nightmare, only to realize, Oh, wait, no. That’s my life.

  Unable to go back to sleep, I started writing. Scrawling, really, about how unfair the world was, how it was so wrong that such bad things could happen to good people, how small and helpless and lost I felt to be in the middle of this disaster, how the Big Bads—the people who had destroyed the business—were out there, free from any consequence of their actions.

  I wouldn’t classify what I did as journaling. It was more slashing a
t the paper. I was alternately furious and heartbroken, or maybe both at once. I felt raw and deeply wounded, and the facts, my thoughts, my emotions poured out, oozed out, bled out. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.

  And it didn’t change a thing.

  The Big Bads were still at large, no one came back to life, and there was still ash where dreams had once stood.

  I started fantasizing about payback. Payback may be a bad idea, but the cornered, wounded animal doesn’t care. The cornered animal is desperate and primed to strike back.

  Fortunately, the weapon handy during my middle-of-the-night jolts into reality was a pen.

  Fortunately, I discovered that I could kill off my bad guys on paper.

  And unexpectedly, this led me to the world of fiction, where you don’t have to stick to what really happened, where you can change the names of your bad guys a little, change the way things turn out a lot, and dole out payback that would land you behind bars if you tried it in real life. Torture, justice, murder…it was all available from the tip of a pen, no jail time required.

  So, no. I didn’t start writing with literary aspirations.

  I started writing because I needed to kill off some bad guys.