Two decades ago, Kate DiCamillo worked as a Picker in a book warehouse. It was her job to find books, pile them into a push cart, and move them to the ground floor in an elevator. She woke up at 4.30 am every day and wrote two pages before her shift began at 7.30 am.
Every day, her co-worker—who she named Bob (who also wanted to be a writer but didn’t write)—would ask her how much she wrote. “Two pages,” she’d reply. “Do you think Dickens wrote two pages a day?” he’d ask again. “I don’t know how many pages Dickens wrote a day,” she’d say. “Yeah, well let me tell you something, you’re no Dickens. So what’s Plan B, babe? What’s Plan B for when the writing doesn’t work out?”
Did you, dear reader, write a Dickensian book in a day? Did you do something life-changing in a day? Neither did Kate.
Bob’s question was a part of what drove her to write two pages every day. She went on to become a published author. She was awarded the prestigious Newbery Medal twice for The Tale of Despereaux (2003) and Flora and Ulysses (2013). Today, Kate DiCamillo (50) is the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in the United States for 2014-’15.
Everything big starts with something small and something new.
Did you find a new way to arrange your books in your school bag? Did you eat your breakfast quicker than usual? It could be more significant. Did you discover something about your friend that you didn’t know earlier? Did you learn something new in school? It could be massive. Did you win an award? Did you stand up to a bully? It could be epic. Did you just read the best book that was ever written? Did you start a national movement?
Every day, we wake up and we do the things that we always do. A small and simple way to inject every day with a breath of fresh air is this: start something new. When you do, you learn something along the way. Make a list of all the possible things that you could learn today. Pick one and do it. Today you could learn to cook a dish, or learn a fact, or learn how to hold a bat better, or learn a dance step, or learn to solve a Mathematics problem. The possibilities are endless. All it takes is one small step to start.
This applies to life, and to writing as well. “The process of writing can be magical—there are times when you step out of an upper-floor window and you just walk across thin air, and it’s absolute and utter happiness,” said Neil Gaiman, an acclaimed writer of children’s books who is also known to doleout well-worded, practical advice. “Mostly, it’s a process of putting one word after another,” he continued.
This is all there is to it. If you want to write one page of text, break it up into four or six paragraphs. Decide the flow of ideas that you want to convey with these paragraphs. Flesh out your text accordingly. If you want to write a story, remember that it should begin, progress, and end on one page.
Remain focused on what you’re writing. Keep your landline off the hook, your mobile phone on silent, mute chat notifications on your computer, and close the tab on your browser with Facebook open on it. Start writing and keep at it until you’ve finished. Did you know that Gautama Buddha enlightened us about this centuries ago? “There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth... not going all the way, and not starting.”
Don’t be daunted by the end result. It’s unlikely that you will wind up with a Shakespearean first draft. It’s uncommon for a first draft to win the Booker Prize. It takes several rounds of revisions to make your text readable, funny, interesting, and that much closer to perfect. However, there is one thing that is common to every prize-winning book—they all begin with a single sentence.
If you’ve written the first paragraph of a first draft today, continue writing it tomorrow and the day after that. What happens when you finish what you set out to do? You become a writer.
Are you excited enough to put your pen to paper or to type that first line? Make this your activity for today: write 200 words about the nicest thing that happened to you this week, and send it to us. Go ahead. Start something new.
Writers’ Workshop 101 is a new initiative by the Book Lovers’ Program for Schools. For more details about the workshop, contact us at karthika.blps@gmail.com
