Susan Cooper’s Keynote from the 2007 SCBWI New York Conference

I have been reinvigorated not only by reading the tweets from the SCBWI 2011 conference, but this morning, over on Notes from the Slushpile, a recap of Sara Zarr’s keynote was posted.

If you don’t have time to read it now, bookmark it, because you should read it. I command it!

And it reminded me of when I went to NY in 2007 and heard the best, most inspiring keynote I’ve ever heard at a conference, by Susan Cooper. So I dug out my notes and am posting them. (or re-posting them for the few of you who maybe remember when I posted them the first time in one of my blog’s former lives)

Susan Cooper opened by saying that although she’s addressed librarians and teachers and bookstore groups before, this was the first time she’s ever given a talk to a group of writers— “fellow sufferers.”

She wondered why, and figured that it’s because people expect advice—advice about how to write. And that although she has experience, she’s “lost the advice.” She was asked to be specific, but said that she’s not equipped to discuss the specifics of our craft, e.g. plot structure, etc. She’s an instinctive writer. She doesn’t know how she does it, she just does it. “You can’t teach creativity, only grammar.”

She tells children to read, read, READ. That the rhythms of the prose you read as a child soak into you, go into your subconscious. When she tells the children her own rhythms are from Dickens, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible, they look horrified.

I loved it when she said she also tells them, read now, because you’ll never again have so much time for reading. (amen)

Instead of a list of tips about writing, she wanted us to look at something much more important—”the place where writers are made: the imagination.”

The nature of your imagination is what makes you a children’s writer, as opposed to a writer for adults. You need to get to know your own imagination, figure it out, because you are at the mercy of it. You need to “pay it homage.”

In her own case, her imagination was shaped by her childhood during WWII. Her parents took all the children out one night to see the sky, half of it red. They said “that’s London, burning.” She collected shrapnel. “When you have daily physical proof that someone is trying hard to kill you, it gives you a sense of Good v. Evil.” This feeds into fantasy writing, of course.

And the other big shaping of her imagination, or what she began to call “what haunts your imagination” was the fact that she married an American and moved to this country and thereafter was filled with longing for Britain. Homesickness. The yearning for something that is lost.

She asked us “Do you know your own subconscious haunting?”

You don’t get ideas like you catch fish, you don’t throw out a line and catch an idea. Ideas are born deep down. Like a compost heap. All these events and thoughts and influences cooking together inside you for years.

She talked about the clash between having work be born this way and the marketplace. “Business people need a product for which there’s a market. Editors have to answer to their Overlords. [and I think you can all imagine how much that choice of word delighted me] “Idealistic editors can be vanquished by the market, because they can’t take risks.”

But if you have a talent, your very best work won’t come that way, from thinking about the market or a product. It comes “from the haunting. Like a hawk dropping out of the sky.”

Me again: this really tied into what I’ve been thinking and feeling lately. How important, how crucial it is to keep going, keep writing. You can’t control the crazy marketplace. And it’s probably going to reject you. Probably a lot. But your attention should be fixed on listening to that “haunting.”

She reminded us that the hawk can fly away again suddenly and urged everyone to keep a notebook with them always. To jot down the Unexpected. Be ready for it.

Reread that notebook often. Listen for the What If? Her novels were born out of images she jotted down. They sit for a long time. the first time she tried to write a story to match the image that became The Dark is Rising, it didn’t work. It, or she, wasn’t ready yet. The image had to take root, be mixed with other elements in her life first.

She calls the final draft, The Smooth. I love that.

Her first novel, Over Sea, Under Stone was turned down by 23 publishers.

She said to remember that when you’re faced with “the icy challenge of the blank page” you’re not on your own, you’re not alone. All the books you’ve read, all those other writers who fed your imagination are there with you. And listen to that imagination, “it whispers, it sings softly. Don’t let the noise of the marketplace drown it out.”

And remember that when you listen and write, you are “giving back what was given to you.”
Oh, now I’m teary again.