Learning how to be an elephant

“It kinda feels like being an elephant in a room full of elephants, speaking on the topic of how to be an elephant…. I’m not sure what I know about being an elephant.”

This is how John Green (author of Looking for Alaska) started his speech about writing at the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Conference.

In other words, I just spent 4 intensive days learning how to be a better elephant. It was a whirlwind of inspiration, brilliant advice, and Aha! moments. Also, I got a hard-to-take, but fantastically perceptive and mind-opening critique, had jealousy occasionally nibbling my feet like a hungry fish, and, at the end of it all, had the desperate and undeniable need for beer and french fries. As with any good children’s story, it held obstacles, moments of mystery, thrills, doubts, and, most importantly, left us with the eternal ray of hope.

In my mind, the whole conference can be distilled down to 2 moments. One happened on Sunday, just before my manuscript consultation with Jennifer Hunt, the senior editor at Little, Brown (she’s awesome, by the way). A half hour before the critique, I climbed out of the cave that is the conference and into the sunshine in order calm the writhing monsters in my belly. So much for harmless butterflies.

I sat, feeling the sun beam down on my face, breathing deep. I let myself grab onto that tiny, twinkling idea that this meeting could completely change my life. Then, I put that idea down, next to all of the infinite other possible outcomes of the consultation.

I’d always thought of these critiques as the end point of the path. I’d write and I’d write and I’d write, chugging down the tracks, then I’d step out of the train, look around and either see the creepy hotel from The Shining or a glittering, pearlescent paradise with a free spa and endless dark chocolates on my pillow. And if the critique was disappointing, if I’d just stepped into The Shining after all, then it felt like I’d lost this enormous opportunity. I’d have to get out my Fodors Guide and start all over.

This time, though, I realized that this consultation was jut one moment of possibility along my path. It was neither an ending or a beginning, but merely a bright moment of hope among other moments. Perhaps a little cafe, instead of the hotel of destiny.

That changed everything about the experience for me and I sat there in the sun enjoying a perfect moment. I sipped my coffee, listened to shouts from the pool, and savored that hopeful ache I have to get my book out into the world. It is that yearning that makes me a writer, not the outcome of a critique or a submission. The yearning to translate the visions in my head onto paper, to share my stories with the world, to affect kid’s childhoods and adolescences the way great books affected mine.

The second moment, one I tried unsuccessfully to capture on my broken camera, came on friday. After a long day of talks and workshops and meeting new people, we all came back downstairs for the final speech of the day. And there in the lobby was ice cream. Not just any ice cream, but chocolate covered, Cherry Garcia ice cream bars. 1000 grateful, joyous people gobbled up ice cream and the energy, chatter, and excitement rushed back into the room. It seemed to me, that this was exactly what the conference was about. A thousand adults, who somehow never outgrew their childhood, all together to share the pleasures and wonderful gifts that our extended immaturity gives us. A unique ability to fully enjoy ice cream, stories, and silly pictures.

Well, I meant to blog about Arthur Levine‘s brilliant critique advice, Ellen Wittlinger‘s moving speech, and meeting Tamora Pierce and maybe I will later, but for now I’ll just try my hand at new form of short poetry I learned from Linda Sue Parks. A Sijo, kind of the Korean equivalent to a haiku.

We don’t talk commas, parenthesis, dangling whatevers.
We share beating hearts, cold shivers, fear down in our bellies.
And now there’s a new flap to my ears and a spring in my trunk.