The Accidental Artist
by Paul Fleischman -- School Library Journal, 3/1/1999
Adapted from the 1998 Anne Carroll Moore Lecture
Newbery Medal winner Paul Fleischman had no intention of becoming a writer. Then serendipity struck.
photograph by David Toerge
I'm a maker at heart. Growing up hearing the wonderful works of my father, Sid Fleischman, read aloud as they rolled out of the typewriter, I was exposed to books, but was not a reader and certainly had no plans to be a writer. My youth in Santa Monica, California, was spent not in the library or curled up with a book, but at the beach, on the playground, in alleys, riding my bike. I did a lot of making, in many media. Like crosstraining athletes -- baseball players who pursue gymnastics, football players who work on pliA"s -- I absorbed skills from one sphere and applied them to another. I've never taken a writing class or read a book about how to write. I thought I'd tell you about the crosstraining curriculum that brought me to this podium.
I'll begin with the day my parents drove home with our Ford Mercury crammed with type cases, a cabinet to hold them, ink, composing sticks, the heavy composing stone, and a hand printing press. Was my foresightful father looking ahead to the era of short shelf life and insuring his ability to keep his books in print? Actually, he was indulging a long-held interest in hand printing that surfaced a few years later in his book Humbug Mountain. He announced that we would all learn to print.
The press was installed on a table in the guest house, a room in the backyard that no guest was ever asked to sleep in. My father assembled the type cabinet indoors and put it in our house's all-purpose room. Immediately, we began learning a language that no one else on our block spoke. My father showed us the difference between "em quads" and "en quads" -- the plugs of lead used to separate words. The heavy, iron frame that held type in the press turned out to be called a "chase." "Furniture" wasn't couches or chairs, but the blocks of wood used to hold type in the chase. "Tray," "copper," "brass," "key," "proof" -- all suddenly acquired new meanings. Along with new words came a new skill: learning to read backwards. Holding the composing stick in your left hand, you plucked the letters and spaces out of the type case, and lined them up from right to left. After a few weeks, reading right to left felt nearly natural.
My sisters and I decided we wanted our own stationery. First, however, we had to make some choices. What style of type? What size? Name in all capitals, or caps and lower case? How much space between the name and address? I'd no idea at the time that designing a letterhead was the perfect preparation for designing a story. Both confront you with open-ended questions, the sort with myriad possible answers, none of them certifiably correct. In both cases, solutions come through brainstorming, sketching, imagining possibilities. If you can design a business card, you have a leg up on designing a novel.
And business cards I printed aplenty. I began printing stationery for my parents' friends. My fame spread through a suite of Beverly Hills shrinks; many a neurotic mailed his remittance in an envelope that had passed through my hands first. I kept up my business all through junior high school. I still have my account book. Though my profits were modest, the care with details that printing demands has served me well, in writing and elsewhere.
To help support me during my early writing years, I worked as a proofreader for a textbook publisher, making sure not only that words were spelled correctly, but checking that chapter headings were the right size, with the right spacing below, that subheads were bold and flush left and all caps. From printing, I learned as well to love the look of type on a page and to notice the purely visual side of bookmaking: the language of page breaks and trim size and design.
Back before the invention of kids' soccer leagues and homework, leisure time was in bounteous supply upon the earth. A child gazed at the weekend ahead, and It Was Good. One of my favorite grammar-schoolA±era pastimes was traveling up and down Santa Monica's alleys, looking for neat stuff. Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms; I inspected trash cans.
My sisters and I would climb on our bicycles and set off on our circuit, paying special attention to those houses -- like the stores where winning lottery tickets have been bought -- that had produced great finds in the past. What were we looking for? We didn't know. We'd know it when we found it. As I did the day I found a working camera, or a bomber pilot's maps of Germany, or -- the Hope Diamond of finds -- the black rubber gas mask. We hauled it all home, curated, traded, took apart, and consigned some to our own trash can. My mother observed us and took to burning her check stubs in the fireplace rather than throwing them away.
What does this have to do with writing? Let me tell you what I do when I've finished a book and am looking for a new idea. I get in the car, rather than on my bike. I drive to the first used bookstore on my usual circuit. Instead of going up and down alleys, I wander up and down aisles. Aisles of what? Of old books that people didn't want and have cast away. What am I looking for? I haven't the faintest idea. I'll know it when I find it. Maybe it will be a copy of Doctors on Horseback, which contained a paragraph about Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic and led to my own Path of the Pale Horse. Maybe it will be the Eric Sloane book that had a chapter on early American houses, a single sentence of which gave me the idea for The Borning Room. Maybe it will be the book that I found a few years back entitled Wallpaper: Its History, Design, and Use, a book I still haven't read but which I feel sure contains gold. Serendipity is one of the author's four food groups. In my case, it might be the most important.
More than anything else i did, making found sculptures taught me how to write. Long before I began my first book, I'd made hundreds of found sculptures. It was an unwitting education but a fine one nonetheless.
It began with daisy chains, followed by driftwood creations at the beach, then pine-needle houses, then abstract constructions. Back in my hitchhiking days, I'd look around me while waiting for a ride, collect what materials chance had put close by, take out my pocketknife, and set to work. The knife contained an awl blade. The awl to me was what fire was to Peking Man. With an awl I could make a hole in a branch, then put something through itA3another branch, a straw, a flower, a rolled-up piece of paper. Found sculpture is a hymn to connection. Opening the knife's cutting blades, I could alter my materials: cutting off twigs, shortening, whittling down. A found sculptor is forever trying to solve problems, keeping an eye on both the sum and its parts, constantly judging and revising.
Today, I go through every one of those stages when I'm writing a book. I collect materials, relying heavily on chance. I sort and discard. I envision possible shapes the book might take. The public thinks writers cut and paste freely from their families and friends, but in truth we do lots of alteringA3lopping off this trait, changing gender and age, reshaping the facts to our needs. The knife was a fine teacher here. A sculpture grows upward; paragraphs grow down. The joy in seeing them extend themselves is the same, just as the satisfaction of joining post to lintel is very like the pleasure of connecting two characters. Evaluating, revising, looking for leaning, propping up plots, checking for symmetry -- all are daily parts of writing. And in both cases, when you're finished, you've got materials you didn't end up needing - the source of many a future sculpture or book. Graven Images and Whirligig both emerged from the pile of leftovers.
I might have grown up to be a writer without the bicycle, but I would have written very different books. From the bicycle I received not technique, but content. Let me explain.
I grew up in southern California, a land of freeways, smog, crowds, concrete. Midway up the state there is an invisible line that appears on no map. Above it lies northern California: fog, ferns, redwood groves, San Francisco. Why hadn't we been born there instead, my high school friends and I wondered -- or even better, in paradise on earth: Vancouver, British Columbia. Countries, too, are subject to fads; Canada was very ""in"" at the time. Like murmuring slaves, we looked to the north and plotted our escape. In 11th grade, my friend Jeff and I were the first to make a break.
We saw a three-day weekend coming, got our parents to excuse us from school for two more days, loaded up our 10-speed bikes, and set off up Pacific Coast Highway, headed north. The first day we rode 75 miles. We were amazed by this fact, and by how little money bike travel cost. No ticket, no gasoline -- just a package of little white sugar doughnuts every few hours.
We didn't cross the line into northern California, but we did make it to the town of Goleta, where my older sister was going to college, 120 miles up the coast. After many adventures, we made it back home. Our friends heard our tale in awe. One of them presented us with a medal for heroism. But in truth, we'd only pointed the way for far more ambitious boreal expeditions.
Two summers later, four of my friends -- three girls and a guy -- put our knowledge to use. Loading their bikes into another friend's van, they crossed the line, passed San Francisco, and didn't stop until they reached Vancouver. They then got on their bikes, and in the course of the summer, pedaled the entire width of Canada, to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Those of us who'd stayed home read their ecstatic postcards and wept with envy.
I went off to college at Berkeley. After two years, I was ready for a break. The moment for my own odyssey had arrived. A friend and I headed north by bike from Santa Monica in June. In San Francisco we joined up with two more friends, and we all four followed the drinking gourd, sweating up hills and screaming down the other side, sleeping beneath redwoods, gorging on blackberries. When we crossed the Oregon border, we celebrated leaving the monstrous California hills behind by burning our California map in the campfire. We didn't realize that the hills in Oregon were just a little bit bigger than those in California. We also suffered a major reorganization. One rider turned back. Two others joined up with another group of cyclists in the campground. I continued on alone. A bike rider is an independent, self-contained creature, picking his own pace and route. I was training for the life of freelance writer.
I struggled up the coast toward Vancouver. I owe most of my first dozen books to a fact of meteorology. In the summer, the prevailing wind blows down the west coast. I was riding north, the wind was blowing south -- and blowing hard. I had to get up early in the morning to get my 50 miles or so done before the wind made riding too miserable. One day, on the Oregon coast, the shrieking wind nearly blew me over. Though it was still early, there was nothing to do but pull into a campground in defeat and disgust. Serendipity is usually farthest from your mind when it's closest to striking. I set up my tent. I was alone now and missing companionship. I saw a friendly- looking couple across the way and struck up a conversation. We ended up pooling our food for dinner and exchanging addresses before parting ways in the morning. Their address was in New Hampshire.
I made my way north to Vancouver, 1400 miles into the wind. I loaded my bike onto a train and headed east -- to what destination or why, I couldn't have told you. Something was pulling me that way. I ate peanut butter-and-banana sandwiches all the way across Canada, got off in New Brunswick, rode around the Maritime Provinces, saluted my predecessors in Halifax, then headed down the coast toward Boston, west to Amherst, then up the Connecticut Valley. Fall was coming on. I had to either get settled somewhere or fly back home. I dug out the address of my New Hampshire campground neighbors. I found their town, Henniker, New Hampshire. I found their road, Hatfield Road. I found their house. We became friends. And I decided to stay.
I dedicated Rear-View Mirrors, a book about a bike ride, to those fine friends. The house I ended up living in wasn't theirs, but a town away, at the end of a road. It had been built in 1770. Hitchhiking home from my dishwashing job at New England College, I'd walk the mile through the woods to the house, passing the path that led to the tiny family graveyard where the house's earlier occupants were buried. The predominant last name was Howlett. The first names came from the Old Testament. I felt a shiver of identification with those people. I was awaking in the same bedroom many of them had awakened in. My water came from the same creek. I used oil lamps and candles, as they had -- the house had no electricity. I had no phone. I heated with wood. No planes flew overhead. No other house was visible, no road audible. It was easy to imagine the year was 1772 rather than 1972.
I'd never lived in the country before, in the East, or in snow. That first year was a revelation and a joy. I came to look back on my life in seasonless California as a born-again looks on a life of sin. I learned the names of the trees, the flowers, the stars, and especially the birds. No Audubon Society carpool to a nature preserve was needed. When I heard a birdcall I didn't know, out the door I went. Chickadees kept me company in winter. In summer, the woods rang with the hermit thrush's lament.
What does all this have to do with writing? The Birthday Tree and The Half-a-Moon Inn, my first two books, concerned boys who took long journeys from home. Then came novels and short stories, all set in or near the colonial period, all in the northeastern states. Then two-voiced poems about birds, then bugs. None of those books would have been written had I not lived in that house. I'd have never found that house if I hadn't met those friends. I'd have never met those friends if I hadn't turned into that campground. And I wouldn't have turned into that campground if the wind had been blowing from the north. Whirligig, about the mysteries of cause and effect, is a book I was destined to write.
I still ride that same bike that I took east 26 years ago. I still carry that same knife in my backpack. I still love playing with spacing and fonts. I still get a small thrill out of indenting a paragraph. I still follow the found sculpture method of composition. I'd be the first to admit that I learned a lot about writing from my father's books -- about suspense and cadence and the byways of history and the pure pleasure to be found in words. But the ideal I aspire to when I'm making a book is not a book at all. It's a tiny, matchbox-style sliding box, made by my meticulous mother. It's made of thin cardboard, cut with precision and covered with paper she'd marbled herself. I keep it in my safe deposit box. I go to one of the bank's cubicles and take it out. It no longer holds buttons and pins, as it once did. I hold it in my hand. I admire the perfect seams. Then I lean the tip of my index finger against it and feel the gentle, perfect friction of it sliding open. Suddenly, I'm hungry to write.
