Doug Wilhelm's Blog

Last week I shared a resilience story, of how my first book was rejected 75 times and what I learned from that. As it turned out, the story has a second half.

The original book recounted a journey I made with a portable typewriter into Muslim Asia in 1981. I had left my newspaper job at the end of the Iranian hostage crisis, hoping to find some understanding of this world that seemed about to become our country’s new global adversary. Over 10 years of working on it, and all those rejections, the book never sold. But a sense of purpose behind it never seemed, somehow, to let me go.

The best part and second half of the book took place in Peshawar, a very old crossroads city by the Khyber Pass in Pakistan’s legendary North-West Frontier. The city was home in the early 80s to the Afghan rebellion against the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan next door; after 9/11, it became clear that Peshawar was where the global extremist movement known as Al Qaeda and ISIS had been born. By then I was writing realistic novels for young adult readers; and against all apparent sense, I found myself thinking about a story. It had to do with an American teen named Luke, unwillingly brought to Peshawar in the early 80s by his history-professor father over Christmas vacation.

I did new research about the extremist movement, about the local Pashtun culture and its rich musical tradition — Luke, a big music fan, would make a connection with this — and about an ancient Buddhist civilization that had left great ruins in the Peshawar Valley. Luke’s father would have returned to Peshawar to finish a book on those ruins with a Pakistani colleague, while Luke, furious with his dad about a recent divorce and this trip, would find friends in an old-city neighborhood and be drawn dangerously into the tension over the rise of extremism. I saw the story as a way to engage young readers with another culture, through the lens of an unwilling American who at first knows nothing about it. Over time a “thriller with ideas,” as I thought of it, became a draft. Then several drafts.

Nobody wanted it. The novel was rejected by every publisher that didn’t ignore the submissions by my increasingly wearied agent. With no traditional path left, I happened on a new enterprise in Montpelier, Vermont, where I had lived for years: a tiny publisher called Rootstock that had adopted an emerging model called hybrid publishing, where the house is selective and the team is professional but the author supports the cost of publishing. Rootstock wanted my book, Street of Storytellers (named after a famed Peshawar bazaar), and I began to see the chance to produce it as a community project, with an editor, designer and mapmaker whom I had known for years and who all had world-class book-making skills.

When I was doing a lot of school author visits, I was often asked how I got started writing books, and I’d mention that my first book was rejected 75 times. Lately here I’ve been writing about stories that inspire resilience, and this was definitely one of my resilience experiences.

In January 1981, just as Ronald Reagan was about to be inaugurated, I left my job editing a weekly newspaper in New Jersey, where I grew up. I took a backpack and a portable Olivetti typewriter, which had a steel plate on the bottom so you could sit pretty much anywhere, and type — it was slim, but it was heavy — and I flew to Dubai on the Persian Gulf. From there took a soon-to-be-retired British passenger steamship, the last of its kind in the world, to the base of Pakistan. This was at the end of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-81, and my aim was to travel in Muslim Asia and talk with people. What was on their minds, and why did so many of them to be so angry with my country? I hoped that an unprogrammed, nonfiction journey story (I had made no reservations, had only a general itinerary) might, if I was lucky, produce a book with the shape of an adventure, and maybe the value of insight.

I did the best I could. After nearly a year traveling in Muslim regions, I got a job teaching English and wrote for a tourism magazine in Kathmandu, Nepal while straining to get my book off the ground. I typed and then threw out ream after ream of paper. Eventually I came back home. I moved to Vermont, got work with a cabinetmaker while giving early mornings to the book, and I did get it written, and it was rejected 75 times. I had two successive agents and came very close with some excellent people in the publishing world, but never got an offer. Overall I worked on the book for ten years, and not a word of it ever saw print.

The great late author John Gardner once wrote that every serious writer has one big first book sitting on his or her shelf that no one would publish. This one was mine, and it wasn’t a disaster, really. I learned a whole lot from the feedback I got; and to make the work possible I built a career, here in Vermont, as a freelance writer, which I’ve been doing now for over 30 years. I did 17 subsequent books that actually were published. But anyway.

Telling middle and high schoolers that my first book was rejected 75 times often prompted questions. How did you deal with that? How did you keep going? I would say, “Well, I learned something. I learned that a publisher had the power to reject my book, but they did not have the power to make me quit. Only I had that power, and I could use it — or not."

Last week I asked for your help in building a list of the most inspiring middle-school and YA novels, noting that, to me, an inspiring story is one that enters into difficulty and challenge and finds the energy we call resilience. I offered my own three nominations — Holes by Louis Sachar, Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick, and The Goats by Brock Cole — and invited yours.

Here are the titles you recommended, with your notes when you included them:

From Jolene Bullis, District Librarian, Carlisle (Iowa) Community Schools:
The Seventh Most Important Thing, by Shelley Pearsall, and Restart by Gordon Korman

“Here are a few of my favorites,” from Diana Greenleaf, Media Specialist, Windham (N.H.) Center School:
The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle, by Leslie Connor
The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise, by Dan Gemeinhart — or “any of his books — each one has made me cry, and that is hard to do.”
Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus, by Dusti Bowling
Fighting Words, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

From Janet Kanady, Library Media Specialist, Dover (Arizona) High School:
The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate. “The story of a gorilla who lives in a mall and befriends a girl.”
Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper. “The story of a girl with cerebral palsy who defies what everyone thinks about her.”
No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman. “Hilarious tale of a football player who NEVER lies.”
Schooled, also by Gordon Korman. “This one is about a young man who goes from living in a commune with his grandmother to going to a public middle school after an accident befalls Grandma.”

In this season when everyone needs a little uplift, I would like to develop and share a list of the ten most inspiring YA and middle school novels. But I could use your help.

Honestly, I don’t know enough to come up with a solid ten. Below are my own nominations; I hope you’ll offer yours. And by “inspiring” I don’t mean saccharine, built to fit a religious framework, or preachy in any sense. I think a story that can inspire is one that is honest; that faces reality without premade conclusions, that enters into difficulty and challenge and finds the energy, call it resilience, that people need and can find in frightening times like this.

Middle and high schoolers are among the most stressed and struggling of people right now. So the news tells me, as does my wife, a therapist who works with children, teens and adults; and books that are good stories, true in the deeper sense, can help us find our way through. So here my three nominations, which I hope will inspire you to offer yours:

1. Holes. On school visits I’ve often been asked what’s my favorite novel for middle schoolers, and I say this one. I’ve been consistently impressed, years after its 1998 publication, by how many kids have also read and love Holes. It’s a quirky story that vividly embraces how warped and arbitrary life can seem to a young teen like Stanley Yelnats, who’s unjustly sentenced to a dried-up detention camp where the adults are mostly either mean or evil and the work is cruel, plus possibly fatal. When Stanley escapes, we experience with him that if you take a big risk on breaking free, luck can find you. So can truth.

2. Freak the Mighty. This novel is short, sad and anything but sugary. But the tale of how big, downhearted Max and bullied, disabled Kevin find each other and together become Freak the Mighty, for just a little while, is heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time. Just as genuine inspiration (if you ask me) tends to be.

I got a thought-provoking response to last week’s post about why young-adult readers so often hate the endings of YA novels (such as The Giver, A Bridge to Terabithia and Lord of the Flies, according to a survey). I wrote that the exasperated complaint I’ve heard so many times from young readers of my books is that everything isn’t fully wrapped up at the end. My response has been that life goes on, and realistic fiction should reflect that. This generally hasn’t satisfied anyone. Or I didn’t think it had.

Pam Dean teaches at the local K-8 school in Hamburg, a town in northwest New Jersey, and I’ve come to know her on several visits to the school in recent years, where The Revealers has been on regular rotation for reading by the middle schoolers. “Life lessons are powerful, and not always pretty,” Pam emailed after reading my post. “That is what makes your books real. We need to be uncomfortable once in a while; otherwise, we do not learn from our mistakes. In all the book titles mentioned in your blog, the characters made mistakes, and, ultimately, there were heavy prices to pay.”

“What we need to do after reading these books,” she continued, “is ask ourselves, ‘What have we learned from the mistakes these characters made in their lives, that we need to be mindful of while we live our lives?’ Is that not why these books have stood the test of time? Is that not what theme is all about? We need to learn from the mistakes of others, even in books.”

I couldn’t agree more, and Pam takes the conversation to a deeper level. I’ve often wondered why, writing realistic YA fiction, I should presume to make a story that deals with tough problems when I myself have made messes and mistakes in those same problem areas. Should I be writing about bullying when I haven’t always been so kind? When I wrote about the impacts of alcoholism within families, I wondered if I was drinking too much, and how that might be affecting my son. How could I presume to write about a subject I hadn’t mastered?

What I think I realized is that good stories don’t come out of mastering the challenges in our lifes; they come out of struggling with challenges in our lives. Probably this is the case for all creative work that reaches for an audience: If we even imagine we’re sitting above the issues that inspirit our work, that work will most likely be smug, preachy, deadly ... useless.

The other day an article in the Washington Post asked, “What book has the most disappointing ending?”

“So much of how we feel about a novel depends on how the novel ends,” writes Post book critic Ron Charles. His piece veers into comedy: After an online retailer “sifted through reviews on Goodreads to identify the Books with the Most Disappointing Endings,” it found that “British writers are particularly disappointing. That hack William Shakespeare wrote the worst finale of all time. In the immortal words of Bart Simpson’s friend Milhouse: ‘How could this have happened? We started out like Romeo and Juliet, but instead it ended in tragedy.’ ... And gazillionaire writer J.K. Rowling magically takes two spots.”

And to me, here something very interesting: The ten worst-endings list also includes Lord of the Flies, Bridge to Terabithia, The Giver, and Stephanie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn. So out of ten consensus choices, five are young-adult novels — or six if you count Lord of the Flies, seven if you add Where the Red Fern Grows.

I have a theory about this, from personal experience. Young readers tend to hate my books’ endings. One called the last chapter of my novel Falling “retarded,” and many (very many) have shared their exasperation with the ending of The Revealers. I’ve had that conversation at least a hundred times.

And the way those novels end is: life goes on.

As Falling ends, ninth grader Matt knows that by keeping a dangerous secret from his girlfriend Katie, he put her at a serious risk; and though he hopes to earn back her trust, he doesn’t know if he can. At the end of The Revealers, we don’t know absolutely that Russell, Elliot and Catalina won the Creative Science Fair with their multimedia project about bullying. Kids want that certainty. Also, they ask, what happens next in their lives?

As I prepared last year to launch Street of Storytellers, I asked teachers, school librarians and bookstore people to suggest middle-school and YA novels that, like Storytellers, place an American main character in another culture or country. This is a strong way to connect American young readers with diverse cultures — plus, I’ve always liked reading novels like this.

From the recommendations that came in, I selected and read 10 novels. Here are the top nine, from my most favorite on down — with summaries of what I thought:

1. Endangered (Congo), Eliot Schrefer. No realism is spared in this gripping story of an American girl at a bonobo sanctuary that’s brutally overrun in a spasm of civil war. A
powerful narrative, vividly written, with mind-opening honesty about what two species of primates (bonobo and human) are capable of.

2. Nowhere Boy (Belgium), Katherine Marsh. A privileged American and a desperate young Syrian refugee meet in a most unexpected way — and the American’s life finds a purpose. This is a rare achievement: a novel with moral intent that’s also a strong and honest story.

3. Laugh With the Moon (Malawi), Shana Burg. A girl closed to her own grief opens up to the village world where she has to be for a summer. I loved this book.

I used to do an experiment on author visits to schools. I’d ask a group of students, How many of you have ever started reading a book that’s a story, that’s fiction, and you pretty quickly realized the writer was trying to teach you a lesson? 

Between between half to three quarters of my audience, however small or large, would raise a hand. Then I’d ask, How many of you finished reading that book? Now about one in ten kids raised a hand.

The difference was always that dramatic. No one goes to a story for message; along with entertainment, we go to a story for meaning. But that is very different.

Message is something a writer tries to slide in, and it makes for a bad and/or boring story. Even if the writer was clever enough to disguise the message, when you realize it’s there it leaves a bad taste, like you’ve been fooled or manipulated.

 Meaning is what, beyond enjoyment, we most hope to find in fiction — and it’s not something the writer can insert or disguise. Meaning can only develop inside the reader, when that one person’s emotions and experiences connect in some deepening way with the story on the page. It’s not something any novel or short story will ever make happen in every reader, because the reader is half of this relationship, and every reader is different.

I’ve noticed that writers of YA fiction like myself tend to think differently than teachers about this. On a visit to a high school, I saw the rubric that a wonderfully good teacher, whom I had known for many years, had developed to help her students write their own pieces of fiction. One of the steps was that the writer should decide what is the theme. I wondered, How many working writers even think about theme? 

I understand that educators have to help students break things down and understand, and this is important; but the creative process is usually much less directed or analytical. I think what’s regarded as theme is a dimension that grows or develops along with the work, and is noticed more after that process is complete.

A good story deals with things that are difficult, challenging, meaningful in life — and this dealing-with later looks like a theme. But really it’s just what the story, its writer and its characters, were dealing with, what brought tension and suspense and coherence to the narrative. The writer didn’t choose it, I bet, as a component part: He or she just built the story, draft by draft, from the seed of an idea where the tension was already there. 



Last week was Banned Books Week, which naturally I didn’t hear about until it was almost over. I’ve never had a book completely banned, but The Revealers did get some people trying. One cluster of parents in a rural town in the northeastern corner of Florida successfully pressed teachers in the local middle school to abandon a reading project in the middle of the book, after two parents wrote a very critical letter to the town’s newspaper that called the novel un-Christian, and focused on the word choices on a single page.

I heard about that, so I wrote a letter too. Here’s part of it:

Young adults are demanding readers. The second they think a novel is preaching at them or sugarcoating reality, most of them will put that book down. So a YA novel that’s full of an author’s ideas about how people should act, instead of how they actually do, simply won’t do young readers much good. On the page in my book where the letter writers find offensive language, the character speaking is a bully whose word choices mimic what an abusive parent has been saying to him. Many real children live in similar situations. Can I tell them exactly how to solve that problem? Is growing up today really that simple?

I don’t think so. All through their lives, our kids will have to deal with other people’s choices, including those that are hurtful or dishonest. They’ll have to find their way through the Internet age’s flood of communication, entertainment, exploitation. We need to help them learn to guide their lives wisely. There are many resources that can help. Religious books, of course, are one. I believe that honest realistic fiction is another.

What can a story like mine do for young people? It can give them an experience that respects the realities they have to sort through. It can help them see how different choices may work out in real life — and it can help them learn to empathize, to feel what another person is going through. In short, it can help them to grow up.

But to do any of this, a realistic story has to keep one basic trust: It has to be honest. It can’t pretend that people never hurt, lie, or swear. It has to keep faith with the realities of kids’ lives. That’s what I tried to do with The Revealers, which has been read by public schools, private schools, Christian schools, Catholic schools, Jewish schools and at least one Muslim school, so far without any corruption I’ve heard about. I hope that in the future, my book will be read in Callahan Middle School once again.

(P.S. — I don’t think it ever was.)

Years ago when my first “regular” YA novel was about to be published (after eight books for the Choose Your Own Adventure series), as a Christmas gift my dad gave me Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews & Rejections. I thought, What’s the message here?

I think it was: Be ready. The book world can be hard on writers. I did know that; my first book had been rejected 75 times, and by that Christmas I had collected somewhere above 115 total rejections on four books, none of which ever saw print. Still it was fun to see how reviewers old and new had trashed a truckload of actual classics: “A vulgar and barbarous drama,” Voltaire on Hamlet; “A gross trifling with every fine feeling,” the Springfield Republican on Huckleberry Finn; “An absurd story,” the Saturday Review on The Great Gatsby.

It’s helpful to bring humor to this work, especially to the business of getting out and promoting books, which I can’t believe anyone actually likes. My writer friend (and Vermont state senator) Philip Baruth once wrote a hilarious parody of the scene in Death of a Salesman where Willy Loman trudges up the stairs and lies to his wife, having completed a sales trip without making a single sale. In Phil’s version it’s a writer returning from a bookstore reading to which no one came. I asked, “Phil, did that really happen?” He nodded, ruefully. “In Brandon,” he said.

I once did a reading in Brandon, Vermont at which the only person who came was ... well, “my stalker” would be too strong, but someone who had made me very uncomfortable. She sat silently and stared as I read. And I did a reading in Montpelier, Vt. on a brilliant summer’s day where not one person came, but that time my young son and I were relieved. We didn’t want to be inside either.

But my best story comes from the St. Petersburg Book Festival in Florida. One Saturday morning there I gave a workshop, well enough attended, on how schools were working with The Revealers — and I’d been told that each author would have a designated time that afternoon, to sign books in an open-air plaza. At the table next to mine, the schedule said, would be Martina Navratilova with her just-published autobiography.