Emily Left the Room

Advice from my elders

As I’ve written before, every time I start a new book, I feel as if I’m in a valley between mountains and the one in front of me looms larger than the one I’ve just peaked. Eudora Welty said, “Each book teaches me how to write it, but not the next one.” Nothing feels closer to my truth right now than those words.

I started my writing career working in the children’s book department of what was then called Harper and Row, now HarperCollins. The department was headed by the legendary Ursula Nordstrom, known in the office as UN.

She was a short, square, no-nonsense woman, a brilliant editor who could recognize talent and dig a book out of a writer before the writer even knew what stories they had to tell. As an example, Russell Hoban, the beloved author of Bedtime for Frances among many others, came to UN with a portfolio of truck drawings. He didn’t consider himself a writer, but she helped him develop those trucks into a picture book (What Does It Do and How Does It Work?) and then nurtured his talent so that he became a gifted writer for children and adults. Leonard Marcus, the acclaimed children’s book historian, compiled an anthology of Nordstrom’s letters to her authors entitled Dear Genius, which is the way she often addressed them.

All of us in the department knew that because every single person who wrote a letter on the Harper Children’s Book stationery had to put the letter in a circulating folder so that every other person in the department could read it. This practice taught me very quickly to re-read and edit before I sent anything out.

One of UN’s other unique qualities is that she was open to publishing writers who worked in her department unlike many other editors of that era. When Nina, the editor I worked for, accepted Bunk Beds, my children’s picture book based closely on life with three of my five brothers, UN called me into her office to congratulate me.

I told her I planned to publish my books under my middle name Winthrop, rather than Alsop as my father was a famous journalist at the time, and I didn’t want to “trade” on his name.

 Another editor in the office said, “Bad idea. Nobody will find you because you’ll be stuck on the bottom shelf.”

Without skipping a beat, UN said, “She’ll be fine. Her books will be slotted next to E.B White and Laura Ingalls Wilder,” both of whom she published. I went on to publish two YA novels with Harper and Row.

I think of UN now as I contemplate this next mountain. I never was lucky enough to receive one of her letters, but I learned so much from reading the ones she wrote to the writers who came in and out of the office every day from Ruth Krauss to Maurice Sendak to Shel Silverstein. I wish UN were here to help me start up the path ahead of me.

The other influence on my early writing life was naturally my father. Because he died at the age of 60, he only read the first of my novels. 

Walking Away features a grandfather not too loosely based on him and his granddaughter, Emily, who brings a wildly unpredictable friend to their farm for a visit. She tempts Emily to disobey her beloved grandfather causing a rift between them. I gave my father the first draft of the book and got back a manuscript covered with his looping scrawl. The comment that really hit home was written in a margin next to a sentence that went something like this.

Emily crossed the room, grasped the doorknob, pulled it towards her and passed into the hallway.

My father wrote: Unless Emily crawls bleeding from the room, I suggest you say, Emily left the room. We all leave a room in approximately the same way.

For years afterward, I had a note posted above my desk that read in large block letters.

EMILY LEFT THE ROOM

More than anything, that comment taught me to hit the high points when writing a story. Other lessons my journalist father taught me still resonate. Get to the point. Enter a scene as late as possible. Rely on verbs more than adverbs, nouns more than adjectives. Don’t show off with big words. Choose the simpler one. Use the active voice. Let the story tell itself.

It’s taken me a lifetime of writing to absorb these directives and every time, I start a new book, I am reminded of them.

With my father’s voice in my head and borrowing UN’s encouragement to other writers, I’ll start now.

One step.

One sentence.

One page.