When did you decide to become a writer, and what steps did you take from there?

When I got out of graduate school and was for the first time writing on my own with nobody telling me to, not part of an assignment, I was getting no grade. So I was a writer. What I was not was a published writer, and yes, it was discouraging. Some folks tend to think that in situations like that you need a thick skin and you don’t really feel the pain of it. But that’s not really the case. At least, it wasn’t for me. It was very painful. Every time I got a rejection slip, I wanted to put my head in the oven. But you keep plodding along, and you discover that in a couple of days, the sun continues to rise every morning. And you put your manuscript in a new mailing, and you put on the postage, and you send it out to one more place. If you try every place with your first book and that doesn’t work, you write a second book. That’s how it went for the better part of fifteen or twenty years.

During that time, after you had been trained as a writer and yet before you were published, where did you find your inspiration? Where did you find the reasons to keep sending those manuscripts out?

I guess it’s because it’s what I wanted to do. I would take a little issue with the phrase “being trained as a writer.” You certainly can go to writer’s workshops and take writing courses and even major in writing in some schools, but I don’t know that if you end up becoming a successful writer that it will have been the result of training so much as simply working at it yourself. Writing, writing, writing. That’s what I was doing for all those years and I think I understood that once I got out of school, there wasn’t a fiction factory waiting for me. There was no place to employ a writer; you had to do it on your own. So it was a very private and lonely dream that I was pursuing. I had decided back in high school that I wanted to be a writer, and that’s what I was trying to do, albeit with a little common sense. I did have a job to put potatoes on the table. I did my writing in the cracks: lunch hours, after work, weekends, and so forth. I just kept chasing this thing that I wanted to do.

A Lonely Dream (2:54)

Do you have a regular process for writing and revision and has that changed from those first four [unpublished] novels?

In some ways it has. Remember back in those early unpublished days, I was very methodical and slow and careful and precious and calculating about every word that I wrote, as if I wanted it to be perfect, the way I used to try to play basketball. As I moved on, I discovered that writing isn’t something that one is perfect at. You just do the best you can, as honestly as possible, and put yourself on the page. That’s not always a matter of calculation. It’s a matter of abandon, of letting yourself go. So I began to write faster, less preciously. I think that I was one change. I also learned that I should write primarily what I care about and not have any publication aims or objectives in mind. I needed to do my own thing, and let the market success and commercialism take care of itself. I was moving, during those frustrating years, in a direction that landed me where I am now.

I read that that is advice you give to students often, to write what they care about. How do they turn what they care about into something that looks like a story to other people?

More than anything else, I repeat three words: write, write, write. Again, it’s not so much a matter of training and instruction as it is doing, execution, practice. Michael Jordan did not get to be a great foul shooter by reading books and attending seminars on how to make fould shots. He got that way by standing at a foul line and shooting five hundred balls a day at the basket. That’s how you do it, and why should it be any different for a writer? So, more than anything else, the degree of proficiency that someone will eventually achieve in writing will be a direct result of the hours and days and months and years that they put in writing. That’s how you learn the craft. That also goes along with a lot of reading. Writing and reading are the two most important ingredients in developing yourself as a writer. Beyond that, you can go to the library and find all kinds of great essays by Stephen King and everyone else, on how to develop character and realistic dialogue and the importance of creating tension. There’s no point in writing a book if it’s so boring the reader isn’t going to want to turn the page. There are a lot of other issues, but they all begin with writing and reading.

Write Write Write (3:46)

Do you have any favorite books that you read over and over again that help you as you are writing?

I just reached for a copy of a book. Before I begin writing each morning, I will just read one page. This happens to be called Walking on Alligators by Susan Shaughnessey. It’s a book for writers about writing. I find it helpful and inspiring and It reminds me of certain things. By the time I get to the end of it, I’m ready to go back again and start reading it just one page a day again kind of like how you come to the last window washed at the end of the empire State Building, you’re ready to start again at the bottom. I do that as a daily routine.

Do you ever experience writer’s block?

Writer’s block exists in a lot of cases because we fear [writing] and we run from it, and shy away from it. Why do we writers give ourselves this excuse not to work? We say, “Oh, I have writer’s block. I can’t work.” Well, teachers don’t wake up in the morning and say, “Oh, I have teacher’s block. I can’t go to work.” Lawyers don’t say, “Oh, I have lawyer’s block. I can’t go to court.” Everybody would laugh if they used that as an excuse, and yet everyone seems to recognize, “Oh my goodness! The poor writer! He has writer’s block and can’t work.” Maybe occasionally there’s something to it, but I’m guessing that eighty percent of the time you’re just being a big baby about it. Sure there’s plenty of times when I don’t feel like writing. You can’t just wait for inspiration to hit you from heaven. Somebody once said that writing is about ninety percent perspiration and ten percent inspiration. Writing tends to be hard work, at least for me. I treat it as I would going to a job. You sit down in your desk and you just get started.

Sometimes, when the words don’t seem to want to come, and I’m tempted to feel afflicted with this thing called writers block, then I might go and talk to my wife Eileen, who is also a writer, and tell her that I’ve hit a snag, and we’ll talk about it. More often than not, when I walk away from her office, I’m un-snagged and I’m ready to start again. When I used to have a pool table, I might go down and spend fifteen minutes playing a game of pool with myself. Sometimes I might pick out a few favorite poems with words and lines and rhythms that I love, and read it aloud to myself. Sometimes as a kind of mental calisthenics, that warms me up. That’s how I deal with it.

Books and Blocks (3:41)

In Eggs, eggs themselves appear several times in the novel. When writing that, did you first settle on the metaphor or the theme, and how did that develop as you were moving through and writing the novel?

Believe it or not, it began to develop about a dozen years ago, when I wrote a book that at the time, I called something else. I sent it to the editor, and the editor had quite a few problems with it. The editor sent it back to me, as editors always do, but this time the accompanying letter with suggestions for revisions was fourteen single-spaced pages! So I tried to be professional about it and began working my way through the suggestions. I was about a month into that, and getting bogged down and exasperated with it all, and losing more and more confidence in the whole project. I decided to put it aside for a week and try something else, and see how it goes, and if it goes well, I’ll just continue on with the new thing. And that’s what happened. The new thing turned out to be Wringer, and this other thing just fell by the wayside. It got forgotten until about ten years later, Eileen asked me about that old manuscript that I never completely revised. I couldn’t even remember the title. I found it at the bottom of a stack in a closet. Took it out. Eileen thought it was fine. It ended up being published by Little Brown and come out under a different title, as you know, Eggs.

I didn’t initially intend for the eggs motif to be so prominent, but it did begin with an eggy kind of idea. I had gone to quite a few Easter egg hunts at the local park when I was a kid, where they would leave Easter eggs in the grass at the bottom of a hill and all us little kids would race down the hill to find the Easter eggs. It had always been in my mind to write a book someday that had something to do with an Easter egg hunt. It was simply the personal appeal of that particular memory. I’m not sure all the instances of eggs in the book was intentional. Madeleine L’Engle once said, “Often the story knows more than the writer.” I think this might be a case in point.

I also might mention, since you brought up Eggs, that the story has been dramatized by a playwright, Y. York, and will make its world premiere as a stage play at People’s Light & Theater in suburban Philadelphia in spring of 2009.

Eggs Everywhere (3:32)

Additional Jerry Spinelli Resources:

Jerry Spinelli Author Page

Scholastic: Jerry Spinelli Biography

KidReads: Jerry Spinelli

iSEEK Education Jerry Spinelli Resources

Interview Date: September 23, 2008

Interviewer: Rachel Loeper

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