Question #1: How did you become a writer?
When I’m asked this question, I usually ask the questioner if he would like to hear my first published work. If he looks at all interested I proceed to recite:
Pat, pat, pat.
There is the rat.
Where is the cat?
Pat, pat, pat.
This piece appeared in the Shanghai American School newspaper in the fall of 1939. Right beside it was a letter from my teacher, Miss Essie Shields, that began: “The second graders’ work is not up to our usual standards this week . . .” ensuring that my first published work would be forever linked to my first critical review.
Hardly anything has survived of my childhood writing. I can’t remember that there was very much to begin with. I was a reader, not a writer. I do have one letter that I wrote the same year as “Pat Pat Pat.” My parents went to China as Presbyterian missionaries in 1923. The war between China and Japan began in 1937, and in 1939 my mother and we five children spent the year in Shanghai, while my father went back to our hometown of Huai’an, which was under Japanese occupation. The trip was determined to be too dangerous for family travel, as it required the crossing and re-crossing of battle lines and bandit country. Even though we were never sure that mail would get through when he was “up country,” we would write to him. Once, trying to be very grown-up, I thought I’d imitate the way my mother often closed her letters, which was “Lovingly, Mary.” My older brother and sister saw my letter and hooted. Not ever having been a strong speller, I’d signed it: “Lovely, Katherine,” a misspelling I was often reminded of through the years. But somehow, despite the chaotic times, my letter reached my father and, amazing as it seems to me, he kept it. When I found it and reread it years later, I was pleased to see that although at school I was imitating my hated Dick and Jane primers, when I wrote to my father, whose love I trusted, I could write pretty well for a second grader.
The truth is that, even though I was a very early reader (which made me hate the school texts, which bore no resemblance in my mind to real books), no one thought I had the makings of a writer, including me. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be a missionary or a movie star when I grew up.
My writing life almost didn’t happen. During my last year at the Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, Virginia, one of my favorite professors stopped me in the hall and said she’d just been reading my exam and it made her wonder if I’d ever thought of becoming a writer. Now, I, the lifelong reader, the summa cum laude graduate in English literature, knew what great writing was, so how could Dr. Little imagine, on the basis of an essay on an exam, that I should be a writer? “No,” I said primly, I had no intention of being a writer because “I wouldn’t want to add another mediocre writer to the world.”
“Maybe,” Dr. Little said, “that’s what God is calling you to be.”
It was hard for me to imagine that God needed a lot more mediocre writers in the world, so I didn’t become a writer or a movie star, I became a missionary. It took me a long time to understand what Sara Little was really saying, and it was this: There are no guarantees of success, much less of quality. If you don’t dare to be a mediocre writer, you’ll never be a writer at all.
In the end, it was Sara Little who set me firmly on the journey. She recommended me for the scholarship at Union Seminary, where I met John Paterson, a young Presbyterian pastor from Buffalo, New York. I married him the following summer, and didn’t return to my life as a missionary. So then she suggested to the Board of Christian Education that I be asked to write a book on the Christian faith for fifth and sixth graders.
I began to write Who Am I? at about the time our first son, John Jr., was born, and it was published in 1966 after Lin had arrived and David was born. I realized that I loved to write and that I wasn’t going back to teaching with three tiny ones around, so I began to write in earnest. I needed something in those days that wasn’t, by the end of the day, eaten up, torn up, or dirtied up. I needed something to keep my mind from turning into mush. And so I began to write in what snatches of time I could find when all three children were safely asleep and my minister husband was off visiting the sick and comforting the dying. My desk was the dining room table that had to be cleaned off before we could use it for any other purpose. That I didn’t always perform this task in time is proven by childish scribblings on pages of the first draft of The Sign of the Chrysanthemum.
I didn’t start with a novel. I didn’t know where to start. I tried poetry, essays, short stories, none of which anyone wanted to buy. A woman in the Takoma Park church knew I was trying to write. She asked if I’d like to go with her to a writing course being offered through the county adult education program. I was thrilled with the idea. Mom’s night out! We took the general writing course and then, when a course in writing for children was offered, we took that as well.
I got two valuable lessons from those courses. The first was that to be a writer you have to write. I have always been a student who does her homework, and I was embarrassed to go to a weekly class unprepared. So I was writing, sometimes in five-minute snatches of time, but writing something almost every day. Even after I no longer had the framework of the class, I knew that I needed to keep working in a disciplined fashion or I’d never finish anything. The second lesson I learned seems to contradict the first—it is that I did not again want to be a part of a writing group. I don’t like to share early drafts for several people to read and comment on. Other writers I know and admire swear by their writers’ groups, but I learned fairly early on that I am not that kind of writer. I’m a very private person. I need to do my work with no one reading over my shoulder or a group of people discussing it, even a supportive group.
Seven years elapsed between the publication of Who Am I? and the publication of The Sign of the Chrysanthemum—seven years during which I was writing regularly and trying to sell what I had written. I sold one short story to a tiny magazine that ceased publication the month after it printed my story. I also sold one poem, but the magazine that paid ten dollars for it died before the poem was ever published.
I decided that since I was writing a story or a poem almost every week I would try to write, instead, a chapter every week, so that by the end of the year, I’d have a book, and even if no one ever published it, it would be something substantial that I had accomplished.
Question #2: Where do you get your ideas?
Some of my writer friends have so many ideas, they’ll never live long enough to turn them all into books. I look at them with a certain envy, for when I finish a book I say, “Well, that was a great career while it lasted,” because I am sure I’ll never have an idea worthy of another book. But by now I’ve written a lot of books, so I must have gotten those ideas from somewhere, and that somewhere is most often from my own life. Another lesson I’ve learned along the way is that there are no truly original ideas. There are no truly original plots. As the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes said three thousand or so years ago: “There is no new thing under the sun.” Except you. Except me. Every individual is new and unique, so we may be stuck with the same old plots, but because a new person is telling the story, bringing his or her singular life to bear on the story, it is fresh and new. So the only excuse I have for daring to write is that no one else in the world would be able to tell the stories that only I can tell. And an aside to those of you wishing to write—that is your excuse as well. The raw material for our unique stories is our unique lives and perspective on life.
I have a note card that has lived for years in my desk drawer. The card has three panel illustrations. At the top lies a zonked- out whale with X’s where its eyes should be. Below is the same beached whale with its eyes popped wide open in amazement as a voice coming from its mouth declares: “Incredible as it seems—” The sentence is completed by a person emerging from between the jaws of the beast: “—my life is based on a true story.” This book contains true stories of my life that I want to share with people I care about, a lot of whom are readers of my books. Sometimes a reader, often a friend, when hearing me tell an old story, will recognize in the story the seed of one of my books that I myself hadn’t realized. That’s one of the great things about having readers. They often know more than the writer.
This book is not a memoir. I swore never to write one. My memory is not good enough to turn these stories into a coherent narrative. Besides, I can’t believe the people I love would want to be minor characters in the story of my life. I’ve gotten permission from my husband and children to tell tales on them, but I’m hesitant to impose on others. So there will be many important people in my life that will not appear as characters in these stories. You know who you are. If you’re relieved, good; if you’re disappointed, I apologize.
Question #3: “How does it feel to be famous?”
The questioner is young and earnest and has just confided that although she doesn’t know what she wants to be, she knows she wants to be famous. I don’t really know how to answer her question. How does it feel to be famous?
And then I remember things that happened after Bridge to Terabithia won the Newbery Medal. I would be invited somewhere to speak and there would be a lovely dinner at which I was the honored guest. The people on either side of me at the table would say something gracious and congratulatory and then they would turn to the person on the other side and never speak to me again for the whole meal. There were a few times when the person in charge made it clear that she’d hired me for the weekend and expected to get her money’s worth, by gum.
I’d come home and whine to my long-suffering husband. “I’m a human being,” I’d say, “why can’t they just treat me like a human being.”
And then I remembered Anita. When I was in Chandler Junior High in Richmond, Virginia, all of us new kids were put in the same homeroom. It was a wonderful thing because we could make friends with each other, we didn’t have to try to cope with already cemented cliques that populated the rest of the school. I made several good friends that year, but there was one new girl that we were all shy around. The reason we were shy around Anita was because she was famous. She was the youngest member of the Carter sisters. Her mother, Maybelle, had been part of the legendary country music group the Carter Family. Her older sister June went on to marry Johnny Cash. At the time, her mother, two older sisters, and Anita sang regularly on the radio, and in concerts all over the South. We didn’t make friends with her because we didn’t know what to say to someone we considered famous.
Because she had moved around the country a lot, Anita needed catching up in a couple of subjects and for some reason I was asked to tutor her. To my amazement she was so shy that even one on one, she barely spoke above a whisper. Yet that summer I went to a concert at the stadium, and on stage, Anita was transformed. The huge crowd loved her and she obviously loved performing for them.
“If it is hard for me at forty-five to deal with the little bit of fame that I have, how must it have been for Anita?” I wondered. So I wrote Come Sing, Jimmy Jo about James, a shy boy who becomes a star. If you want to know what Katherine Paterson is really like, you should read that book. Like James, and perhaps Anita, I’m a shy show-off—a very private person who loves to perform.
When my friend Nancy Graff read this section on feeling famous she said, “Oh, c’mon, Katherine, you know you get a kick out of being famous.” We both laughed. I mean, I was thrilled to be introduced to the empress of Japan and hear her say, “Katherine Paterson? Who wrote Bridge to Terabithia?” Sometimes I can’t believe my own life. I find myself standing on a stage or sitting at a table with writers I have known and admired for many years—really famous people—and think: “This is me here with these amazing people.” I want to give myself the proverbial pinch to make sure I’m awake.
But that doesn’t mean I feel famous. Famous is not an emotion like love or hate or jealousy or fear—feelings with which I am well acquainted. You can’t feel it, but you can learn over the years to sit back and enjoy the perks.
Autographing grandson Decker Paterson’s book at the Library of Congress ceremony 2010.
When The Master Puppeteer won the National Book Award in 1977, all my friends in the Washington area rejoiced with me. The following year, Bridge to Terabithia won the Newbery Medal and they threw another big party. Fortunately, I moved in 1979 and they didn’t have to give me yet another party when The Great Gilly Hopkins won the National Book Award and was the Newbery Honor book. By this time I was afraid I wouldn’t have a single writer friend left. I was Biblical Job in reverse: “Why me, God? Why me?” And the answer seemed to be: Now people will listen to what you say, so you’d better say something worth listening to. When Jacob Have I Loved won a Newbery two years later, I tried to remember that. I also learned that my friends were among the most gracious people in the world.
My special friend in Takoma Park, Maryland, was Gene Namovicz. Gene was an established writer when I first met her, but not long after we became friends, my second novel was published, then the next four that all won national prizes. Gene stood by me in my triumphs, just as she would through my troubles, and always with a wonderful sense of humor.
Soon after the first Newbery, I was scheduled to give a speech that I knew had to be a good one, since it seemed to me that almost every important writer and critic on both sides of the Atlantic was going to be in the audience. We were on vacation at Lake George, so I sent the speech to Gene for her comments and revised accordingly. But I was still anxious. I called her and told her she’d just have to pray for me, as I was afraid I was going to fall apart. Gene, a devout Roman Catholic, promised she’d pray, but told me to calm down. It would be fine, and it was. I called her to tell her it had gone all right and thanked her for her prayers.
“If I’d known how efficacious Roman Catholic prayers were,” I said, jokingly, “I might have converted long ago.”
“Well, I did pray,” she said, “and He said, ‘Katherine who?’”
When I moved to Vermont, Gene got in touch with Grace Greene, a friend I had made soon after moving, and told her that as long as I was in Maryland and even in Virginia, she had been able to keep me humble, but Vermont was just too far away, so she was turning the job over to Grace. I wondered if Grace had taken her assignment too much to heart when she told me this story. A small group of us gather periodically to do pastel painting and the night of January 5, 2010, I was missing. Grace had gotten an invitation, so she knew that I was in Washington being presented as the new National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, but when the others asked where I was, Grace said: “She’s in Washington being made a national embarrassment.” When she realized what she had said, she tried to correct herself. “Oh, no, I mean natural embarrassment.” Gene would have loved that very Freudian slip.
Since real friends like mine are more precious than awards, I know I am truly blessed, and gratitude, unlike fame, is something you can actually feel.