THE ZENA SUTHERLAND LECTURE

Writer vs. Author

by Linda Sue Park

Writer vs. Author. This dichotomy is one I deal with on a daily basis, sometimes
on a minute-by-minute basis. I grew up in the age before social networking, so
typing out words on a keyboard has long been a private activity for me. Even if the
finished product was something I intended to share, there would be a time lag, of
hours or days or even longer, between
composition and dissemination. That
has changed, of coursethese days the
lapse between writing something and
sharing it has been reduced in many
cases to mere secondsand Ill be getting back to this shortly.
When Im working on an extended
piece of writing, it feels like Im in a
cave: its dark and quiet and just big
enough for me and my thoughts. (This
being a metaphorical cave, it is free
from bats and insects and frightening odors.) Many writers meet with a
critique group or critique partners who
exchange works-in-progress, a chapter
at a time or some such. While acknowledging that this process seems to be
valuable for a vast number of writers,
the idea makes my stomach clench. I

do have a couple of people who read

for me, but I work for long stretches of
time, sometimes a year or more, without showing anyone anything.
As a corollary, I dont talk about my
work-in-progress. Some writers find it
helpful to talk out their stories, to share
their excitement and enthusiasm. For
me, talking about a story dilutes those
emotions. I want the excitement and
enthusiasm on the page; I dont want
that energy to have any other outlet. I
also dont know if the story is going to
be any good until I reach the end, so
how can I ask anyone else to read it?
For years I never told either my agent
or my editor what I was working on.
Dinah Stevenson at Clarion Books, who
has worked with me on most of my
titles, knows nothing about my projects

Linda Sue Park is the best-selling author of childrens books including the
Newbery Medalwinning A Single Shard (Clarion). Her article is adapted from
the 2013 Zena Sutherland Lecture, which she delivered on May 3, 2013, at the
Chicago Public Library.

November/December 2013 The Horn Book Magazine 17

for months at a time, until I send her

likelihood save the black-rubber-anda submission with a cover letter that
dog-collar-clad dominatrix character
almost always starts out, Surprise!
for another story.
Working in this way helps me deal
with the what was I thinking!??
NYWAY, AFTER MANY long
phenomenon. Ill write somethinga
months in the cave, making decisions
scene or a chapter or a characterthat
like these, I finally stick my hand out,
I know is absolutely brilliantonly
gingerly, tentatively, and someone prises
to realize, when the dazzling light of
the manuscript from my fingers. Usumy genius dims, that not only is it not
ally that person is author Marsha Haybrilliant, its actually cringe-makingly
les, who has been my first reader for
awful. Keeping the work to myself
many years now. Author Julia Durango
enables me to experience most of those
also reads for me on occasion. I conmoments in private.
sider and incorporate
And it eliminates
their comments, and
A
S A KID VORACIOUSLY
entirely the second
then the manuscript
READING MY WAY THROUGH
is ready to show the
double-cringe of a
THE LIBRARY, I CARED VERY
editor.
reader having to tell
Once the story is
me about the awfulLITTLE ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
out of the cave, but
ness.
When writers are
before its actually
asked, Who do you write for? the
published, I have all kinds of audiences
to consider. My first readers, and then
answer is often, I write for myself.
the editor. And the folks in sales and
I confess that Ive never understood
marketing and publicity. Then come the
this answer. If youre really writing for
yourself, then just keep a journalits a
ARCs, and with them, the reviewers. I
lot easier.
love reading the reviews of my books.
I could understand the response, I
Even the bad ones. Honest I do. Theyre
write for myself first, because of course
another step toward getting ready for
all writers are our own first readers. Ive
when its not just my manuscript but I
always thought of this as writing for
myself who will have to leave the cave.
Because it turns out that the cave
the story. If, for example, I decide that
opens directly ontonot just the
the story I want to tell is best served
world, but the cyber-universe! And to
by a bouncy, rhyming structure, the
chances are good that it will end up
my everlasting astonishment and dismay, the denizens of the cyber-universe
being a picture book. If my protagoare very interested in The Author.
nist is going to be ten or eleven years
Ive had difficulty adapting to this
old, which most of them are, then Im
reality. As a kid voraciously reading my
probably writing a middle-grade. If
way through the Park Forest Public
Im writing a middle-grade, I will in all

18 The Horn Book Magazine November/December 2013

Library, I cared very little about The

Author. In fact, I only really took note
of an authors name if I loved the book
and wanted to search for another of his
or her titles. I didnt need or want to
know about the authors life.
When I was young, I had the feeling
that a book didnt exist until I picked it
up and opened it. It had been written
just for me. It existed in a tiny, perfect,
luminous bubblejust me and the
book; it had no previous history otherwise. And thats still how I want to feel,
both about the books I read and those
that I write.
The readers awareness of The Author
means that the book has a life outside the
bubble. That acknowledgment lodges the
book firmly in time and space. I want
stories to be timeless, and to exist on a
plane removed from our earthly sphere.
Im not talking about content, which of
course should be fully evocative when
it comes to setting. Im talking about
the experience of readingabout being
inside that bubble.
As a newly published author, I felt

this so strongly that it influenced my

decisions on jacket-flap copy. For my
first book, Seesaw Girl, there is a brief
bio on the back jacket flap. But for my
next two books, The Kite Fighters and A
Single Shard, if you locate a first-edition
copy of those books, you will see that
the back flaps have review quotes for
previous booksand in accordance
with my wishes, no bio.
I was grateful that Dinah Stevenson
honored this request. However, for
my fourth book, When My Name Was
Keoko, she gently insisted on a bio.
And a photo. I acquiesced with what
I hope was good grace, as Dinah is
almost always right about these kinds of
things. But I still dont look at the backflap bios of the books I read until after I
finish them.
These days it can sometimes seem as
if the response to a book is determined
not by the quality of the story and the
writing but by the authors popularity
on Twitter or Facebook. Some authors
have embraced this new paradigm.
They post early and often, tweet back to

November/December 2013 The Horn Book Magazine 19

their followers, pin photos of themselves

and their pets and their coffee mugs.
They spend a great deal of time building
communities in the virtual world, which
in turn can result in building an audience for their books.
My own attitude toward online
activity has swung wildly between
extremes. Sometimes I feel like either a
curmudgeon or a virago, grumbling or
shriekingWhy does it seem like its
never about the book anymore? Other
times I feel resigned: the world is moving on, and Id better move with it; if
not, Ill get cast aside or trampled on.
On those days I will tweet and respond
to a Facebook message or two.
Most of the time, though, I feel

quite bewildered. Everything changes

so quickly! Just when I got my website
figured out, blogs became the thing. So
I started blogging. Blogs were followed
in rapid succession by Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, and as I
type these words, Im sure Im already
behind on the latest platform.
Im trying to evolve as a citizen of a
universe that now includes cyberspace.
Over the years, I have had several conversations about this with a number of
wise people in the childrens book world.
They made the point that, for some
readers, a connection with the author is
a way into a book. Who was I to say that
this was the wrong way? If knowing
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someone to open one of my books,

shouldnt I be willing to sacrifice these
kinds of harmless details on the altar of
Reading?
I have tried to adopt this point of
view, but at heart I remain resistant. I
want my stories to outlive me. If I do
my work well, the goal is for the books
to be around long after Im gone. So
what happens when Im no longer here
to tweet? Shouldnt the story stand on
its own for readers without access to
The Author?

MY FIRST BOOK was published

in 1999, which to me doesnt feel like

very long ago, but its both factually
and metaphorically accurate to say
that it came out in the last century.
In the decade-plus that has passed
since then, reality television and social
networking have come to dominate the
cultural landscape. As a consequence,
Ive observed that access to the author
has morphed from rare privilege to
for many young readersstandard
expectation.
When, as adults and educators, we
encourage students to write to the
authors, friend them on Facebook,
research their bios on Wikipedia, follow
them on Twitter, Im sure its true
that, for many readers, we are enriching
their experience of the book. But my
fear is that we are also sending the message that the book in itself is somehow
insufficient.
And that is a message that I am truly
uncomfortable with. Does the fact that
we know so little about Shakespeare

diminish the appeal of his work? Not to

me. Not to my Generation-Y daughter,
who at age fifteen pronounced Othello
her favorite read of the year. The notion
that a story should stand on its own is
hardly a new one. In The Well-Wrought
Urn, Cleanth Brooks pleaded for consideration of the text shorn of authorial
intent and biographyin 1947, almost
sixty years B.F. (Before Facebook), and
he had no idea what was coming.
Or maybe he did

I HOPE FERVENTLY that Im not

coming across as a Luddite on an

anti-technology rampage. I love the
internet for many reasons. Research,
for one, which could be a whole talk in
itself. Skype, for another. Using Skype
has enabled me to present to dozens of
schools that cannot afford my in-person
visits, which are usually booked by
wealthy private schools.
Last week on a flight I saw a moving
example of the benefits of the new technology. I live in Rochester, New York,
which is home to the National Technical
Institute for the Deaf. On the plane, I
noticed that the two young men seated
next to me were signing. And then they
both hunched over their phones, texting
and tweeting madly. It occurred to me
that for the deaf community, the cyberworld is a level playing field.
Im also happy to concede that for
certain kinds of reading experiences,
technology has been a boon. For example, I would far rather follow breaking
news on the New York Times website
than listen to the talking heads on the

November/December 2013 The Horn Book Magazine 21

twenty-four-hour news channels, with

their endless repetitive vamping that
keeps Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
gainfully employed.

OW WILL THE VARIOUS media

of our age affect storytelling? Im
assuming that most of you are, like me,
People of the Book; that, like me, youre
greatly invested in story as written
text. The preeminence of books in our
lives is a direct result of a technological
advance: the printing press. Without
this means of efficient and economical
reproduction, the story in written form
would never have attained its dominion
over our imaginations.
The wide availability of the printed

text, and of stories in that form, may

seem both venerable and ineluctable
from where we sit. But what I think of
as the Printed Text Era is about the
width of an eyelash on the timeline of
human existence.
When I realized this in the course
of preparing this talk, a question then
struck me rather forcibly. Is there anything about story in written form thats
inherent to human nature?
Spoken language and, by extension,
oral storytelling are logical to me in a
biological and evolutionary sense. Its
true that other animals communicate
using vocalization, but humans capability for both memory and transmission
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us apart. Visual storytelling makes the

later. I plead with them to make a habit
same kind of sense to me. As creatures
of pausing and thinking and maybe
we have always been sight-centric;
evengasp!rewriting before they hit
send or tweet or post.
compared to other species, our senses
of smell and hearing are pitiful, and we
Theres no doubt in my mind that
started painting on cave walls a relatively
by the time they finish high school,
short time after becoming bipedal. Art
young people in the U.S. today and in
that is visually representational seems to
many other parts of the world will have
be part of our hard wiring.
read and written more words than their
Spoken language, oral storytelling,
grandparents did in their entire lifetimes.
and a predilection for images would
Quantity does not equal quality
appear to be encoded in our DNA.
the nature of reading and writing in the
But when you think about it, written
virtual world, its ease and spontaneity
language is almost
and sheer velocity,
grotesquely unnatural.
seems, to many of us,
S
POKEN LANGUAGE APPEARS
A squiggle represents
less and less compatTO BE ENCODED IN OUR
a sound which when
ible with reason and
DNA. WRITTEN LANGUAGE
put together with
thoughtfulness and
other squiggle-sounds
contemplation.
IS GROTESQUELY UNNATURAL.
makes a shape that
In a 2010 op-ed
represents an object
article for the New
in the physical world without any
York Times, author Nicholas Carr wrote:
pretense of replicating the shape of
The pages of a book shield us from the
that object, yet causes us to conjure its
distractions that bombard us during most
image in our heads by means of decodof our waking hours. As an informational
ing those squiggle-shapesThis is a
medium, the book focuses our attention,
jaw-droppingly complicated process,
encouraging the kind of immersion in a
story or an argument that promotes deep
truly remarkable in its sophistication.
comprehension and deep learning.
Especially when you consider once again
the brevity of the existence of written
When we read from the screen of
text relative to our own existence.
a multifunctional computing device,

HEN I VISIT SCHOOLS, I tell the

students that because so much communication these days takes place online,
they are going to have to be better
readers and writers than any generation before them. I give them examples
of how a thoughtless Facebook post
can come back to haunt a person years

whether its a PC, a smartphone, a Kindle,

or an iPad, we sacrifice that singlemindedness. Our attention is scattered by all
the distractions and interruptions that
pour through our computers and digital
networks. The result, a raft of psychological and neurological studies show, is
cursory reading, weak comprehension
and shallow learning.

That same year, Carr published a

November/December 2013 The Horn Book Magazine 23

book called The Shallows: What the

Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. In the
three years since then, social-media use
has exploded: Facebook users alone, at
over one billion and counting, would
now constitute the third-largest country on the planet. If what Carr wrote
in 2010 was true then, its even more
true now.

THE SPEED with which

people have adapted to

cyber communication is
to me nothing short of
breathtaking. Billions of
people all over the world
have thoroughly integrated
the internet and now
smartphones and tablets
into their lives. How many
of us start to feel panicky
or at least uneasy when we cant find
our cell phones, or even when the battery gets lowalmost as if part of our
body were missing? While I sympathize
with Carrs viewpoint, Ive found my
own thoughts taking a slightly different
tack. To me, the logical explanation for
the rapid and complete integration of
todays technology is that there must be
something natural about it, in terms
of our psychological and physiological
evolution.
Could it be that the absorption of text
in these media is so often supported by
visual imagerythe trillions of photos,
graphics, videosthe creation and utilization of which, as the cave paintings
show, seem to be instinctive for humans?
And in the absence of such imagery,

as with tweets or text messages, does

the relative brevity of the writing and
reading involved in these communiqus
dovetail with the amount of that complicated decoding our brains actually
want to do?
When I talked to a friend about this
recentlyDr. Kathryn James, curator of
Early Modern Books and Manuscripts
at Yale Universitys Beinecke Library, who spends
her days pleasantly buried
in parchment and vellum
she said, Ive got one word
for you: Clarissa.
Chances are good that
if you understood that
reference, you were an
English major who suffered through a course on
the eighteenth-century
British novel. And if youve never
heard of Samuel Richardsons Clarissa,
that is exactly the point. The novel was
published in 1748 and was a bestselling sensation in its day. It came
in at a nice round one million words,
most of themby the authors own
admissionunconcerned with plot
or character but rather with moral
sentiments. I would wager that the
majority of todays readers would find
it almost impossible to get through the
book.
Movies have also changed the nature
of storytelling; what we consider a
good story nowadays has been heavily and unavoidably influenced by the
cinema. Instead of a million words
of moral sentiments, today we prefer

24 The Horn Book Magazine November/December 2013

event and character, and in particular

writing is often appalling; what matters
the goal-driven protagonist. I supis the sense of community.
pose we could have a chicken-or-egg
HAT COMMUNITY includes The
argument about whether the goal-driven
Author: The generation raised on tweets
protagonist was originally a product of
and texts and a constant barrage of
the novel or of cinema, but over the last
screen images has the expectation of
century movies have reached a far wider
access to The Author, which I talked
audience than novels and are therefore
about earlier. But what do these new
at least responsible for popularizing the
paradigms mean to me as a Writer?
concept.
I have no desire to compose my
Whether were talking about the
novels in 140-character increments, or
greater reach to audiences afforded
with 140 other peopleis that the way
by the printing press or by cinema,
were headed? Could
theres no doubt that
it be that we are all
technology has had an
I
HAVE NO DESIRE TO
witnessing the demise
overwhelming influCOMPOSE NOVELS IN
of the novel and other
ence on shaping story.
140-CHARACTER INCREMENTS, forms of longer writThe question of how
ten narrative?
todays technology will
OR WITH 140 OTHER PEOPLE.
Of course, its not
shape story is being
a prediction that I
answered not in the
myself wish to come true. To give me
near or distant future, but at this very
hope, I tried to think of a way that the
moment.
tortured process of decoding a lengthy
In a desperate search for the positive,
text into image and story has some kind
I grasped at the idea of community. We
of intrinsic appeal to human nature.
Homo sapiens are social creatures and,
After a lot of thought, I was greatly
strange as it may seem to some of us, a
relieved to discover that I believe it
person alone in a room with nothing
doesbecause of the importance of
but a palm-sized piece of plastic and
memory to us as individuals, as a culture,
some wiring can be part of a vital and
and as a species. A long memory is both
active community. Collaborative work,
an evolutionary advantage and a rarity
the creation of a story by more than
among the creatures on this planet.
one person, is an area that has already
Reading a lengthy narrative is one way to
seen a great deal of growth. It will not
keep those memory neurons firing over
surprise me if the crowd-sourced story
an extended period of time. When you
soon becomes a popular commercial
read a novel, you have to follow the plot,
product. Already, fanfiction sites provisualize the setting, and keep track of the
duce hundreds of crowd-sourced stories
characters and their motivationsand
every day. It doesnt seem to matter to
you have to do all of that by decoding
the participants that the quality of the

26 The Horn Book Magazine November/December 2013

the shape-squiggles. Memory

is at work on several levels:
remembering the elements of
the story; recalling our own
experiences and emotions that
resonate with those in the story;
and of course the decoding act
itself requires heroic work from
our memory cells.
Then theres the feedback
loop. After weve read a story,
it comes back to us at random delightful moments. One of my favorite childhood reads was a book called Roosevelt
Grady, by Louisa R. Shotwell. Theres a
scene in which young Roosevelt helps
his mother shuck corn for dinner. He
liked to pull off the long green jackets
and then go after every bit of silk and
grub it out. Forty-plus years after I first
read that sentence, its still with me, and
I think of Roosevelt every time I shuck
corn. He made me love grubbing out
the corn silk on every ear. How many
tweets or texts are todays young readers
likely to remember in forty years?
So heres where I am with this now:
the forms of communication and
storytelling so prevalent in cyberspace
these days have attained such rapid
ubiquity because they do indeed
appeal to our basic natures. Their
assets include visual stimulation and
shorter periods of having to use our
brains higher functions.
Seen in this light, sustained reading
could possibly be considered antiinstinctual and if this is the case, fear
for its continued influence is justified.
But what if reading is framed instead

as evolutionary? That the

ephemeral image plus a
quick hit of written text
is regressive, whereas
engagement with the
written word in its longer
forms is crucial to our
development as humans?
Its definitely selfserving to come to this
conclusion, because it
means that I can just keep on writing
novels as I always have, without regard
to the effect the new technology is
having on my readers. But its nice to
rationalize it as a noble contribution in
the evolutionary struggle. And theres
a delicious irony in being able to say,
Put down that smartphone and pick
up a book, because if you dont, were
all going to end up Neanderthals.
And never doubt that there are young
people out there who continue to value
books as much as we do. A few years ago,
an eleven-year-old boy named Daniel
stood in a long line in the hot sun, waiting for me to sign his copy of A Single
Shard. When his turn came, he said,
Iwas keeping track of how many times
I read this book so I could tell you, but I
lost count after about sixty-two.
Daniel is an inspiration to me each
time I sit down to write: I try to make
every single sentence worth reading
at least sixty-two times. And hes also
why I feel so fortunate to be writing
for young people. You never again love
a book the way you do when youre a
child. How many adult authors, no
matter how vaunted or popular, have

November/December 2013 The Horn Book Magazine 27

crowded not with people buying books,

but simply standing and reading, the
children usually sitting on the floor.
I had never before seen such a vivid
demonstration of the human hunger for
booksand this, in a country with just
about the highest per-capita internet
use in the world.
We might think it is our standard of
living that the rest of the world admires
and envies, and Im sure this is true. But
beyond that veneer of consumer goods
and luxuries, what people truly desire is
access to the knowledge
and information that
THE ABILITY TO READ
might ultimately lead
AND ACCESS INFORMATION
to a better lifethe
D LIKE to conclude
collected wisdom of the
ISNT JUST A POWER
this talk with a few
ages found only in one
remarks about librarITS A SUPERPOWER.
place: a well-stocked
ies. I learned about the
library.
importance of libraries
To the teachers and librarians and
during a publishers tour to Korea ten
everyone on the frontlines of bringing
years ago. Koreans are proud that a book
literature to young people: I know you
set in Korea, written by a Korean Ameriprobably have days when your work
can, won an important literary award in
seems humdrum, or unappreciated, or
the U.S., so I was interviewed dozens of
embattled, and I hope on those days you
times. And one question that I was asked
will take a few moments to reflect with
repeatedly never failed to startle me.
pride on the importance of the work
You talk about how much you read as
you do. For it is indeed of enormous
a child, people would say. Were your
importancethe job of safeguarding
parents wealthy, to be able to buy you so
and sharing the worlds wisdom.
many books?
All of you are engaged in the vital
I began to ask questions myself, and
task of providing the next generation
I learned that while Korean universities
with the tools they will need to save the
have libraries, the school library and
world. The ability to read and access
the public library barely existed there.
information isnt just a powerits a
So Koreans used (and continue to use)
superpower. Which means that you
bookstores as nonlending libraries.
arent just heroesyoure superheroes.
Every store I went to was so crowded
Ibelieve that with all my heart. n
you had to squeeze through the aisles

fans who have read their books that

many times?!
Daniels copy of the book was battered
and creased and worn-out and very, very
beautiful. My guess is that he would not
have read the story sixty-plus times on
an iPad, because he would have gone on
to the next newest thing to tap or swipe.
The book as an object has value that goes
beyond sentimental preference, because
instead of being located on a continuum
where the newest and latest have priority,
the story in a book exists in that timeless bubble I spoke of
earlier.

28 The Horn Book Magazine November/December 2013

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