On Going Back into a Revision (again and again and again and again and again)

One of the items on my to-do list this week seems pretty straightforward:

Read rough draft of BLANK. 

(Side note: BLANK is not the actual title of this manuscript, but I have a thing about not talking too specifically about books while I am still hip deep in the weeds with them. Also, this particular project doesn't have a settled upon title at the moment. It's morphed around a lot over the years. Recently, I thought I'd hit upon the perfect title before realizing there was a new YA book out with the same one. Ah well. BLANK it is.)

I don't know if you caught the phrase "over the years." 

I say this with a mixture of embarrassment and defiance: BLANK is a book that I have been writing and rewriting since 2002. I'm not exactly sure how many distinct versions of it there are. It morphs around too, subtly changing and expanding and evolving, so that now it's a much bigger production than I ever dared dream it could be when I first started writing it. 

Nova Ren Suma has this great blog series called The Book of My Heart. In the intro she writes about why her own book Imaginary Girls "holds a distinct and special place" in her heart, and she invites other authors to write about their special books.  

If I ever get my book BLANK right--(whatever right means--I'll know it when I see it--so far I have not seen it)--I will send my response to Nova and ask if she will use it in her series. 

BLANK is without question the book of my heart.  

Every couple of years I write a version, and I share it with my long suffering critique partner Donna, and she gives me a lovely peptalk. 

Rinse. 

Repeat. 

She's learned, you see. The first time, many versions earlier, when I told her I was thinking about going back in, she asked the obvious question: "Why?" 

I stammered for a bit. At that point I hadn't even begun to articulate my obsession. 

Now I've come to the understanding that I have to write this book. It's my story and I'm the only one who can tell it.

Each time I pick it back up, I am refreshed and excited. This is IT, I tell myself. This is the one. And each time I finish, I'm a raw wound, a burned out shell of my former self, vowing never again. If THIS isn't the one, screw it. Forget it. Forget them, those stupid pretend people. 

Until lo and behold, almost like clockwork, those people wake and rise and whisper, and I am compelled to open up the manuscript and try again. 

I thought I was the only one who did this kind of thing--wrote a book over and over--until I came upon an author's note at the back of a novel: 

I have wanted to write about [this] for a very long time. I actually attempted it several times. First while in college, then again right after. I'd almost given up, but a few years ago--after I'd published three novels and really should've known what I was doing -- I threw myself at the legend one more time. And failed again.

The author is Maggie Stiefvater. The book that she's describing is The Scorpio Races, which is pretty much in my top ten favorite books of all time. 

I like to revisit that book. And I like to revisit Maggie Stiefvater's description of the angsty but ultimately successful behind-the-scenes process.  

It's what I've done just now, as I am about to tackle my to-do: 

Read rough draft of BLANK.

I think you may be able to guess what the next item is on the list...

Begin writing. Again. 

(Just one stack of the many many versions.)

The Book Tour Road Part 2: In Which I Drink Mark Zuckerberg's Smoothies, Discover a Glorious Mountain Retreat, and Channel My Italian Grandmother

My son and I have had some weird parallel and intersecting life-moments over the past few years.

While I was slogging angstily through my book submission process, he was going through his college application process. (side note: HIS process was not as angsty or long, although at the time, he disagreed with me-- a handful of months vs. my...um...15+ years. Come ON.)

We snagged our acceptances during the same month. Then he went off to school and I embarked on my debut book year.

A few weeks ago our lives intersected again. He landed his dream internship at Facebook around the same time I was invited on Simon & Schuster's group author tour through California. Last stop: Menlo Park, the home of Facebook.

There was a little bit of finagling behind the scenes to work it out, but the other authors on the tour, Suzanne Young, Sarah Ockler, and C.J. Flood (and our awesome driver Dolores) were as eager to see Facebook as I was. Sarah's new book #Scandal is about social media-- (Main character Lucy agrees to go to the prom with her best friend's boyfriend and it blows up in her face in a big way all over Facebook.)--so she was über excited to sneak a peek behind the FB curtain.

I hadn't seen my son much lately (only two days home between college and before he took off for CA), so I was über excited to see him, but trying to keep my loopy mom persona tamped down so as not to humiliate him on the job.

Facebook was something else. I don't even know how to describe it. Disney World for adult computer fanatics? Utopian Under the Dome community? From the parking lot, the place looks like a normal set of office buildings, but then you step through to the Other Side and you're sauntering down an outdoor main street, with restaurants and shops and people kneeling on the sidewalk marking it up with colored chalk.

There's a movie screen. And a smoothie shop. The smoothies and the food are there for the taking.

We took.

Suzanne and C.J. check out the snack items in the company store. 

Look! Free toothbrushes already minted up with toothpaste in the restrooms!

My son enjoyed giving us a tour. Mostly, this consisted of pointing out the various food options at Facebook. He typically chooses the BBQ but consented to eat at the Ramadan buffet with us because there were vegetarian selections. Casually, he mentioned where Mark Zuckerberg's office was--ahead, behind a wall of glass. "Sometimes he's sitting in there," he said.

And he WAS! Mark Zuckerberg. Just sitting there, in his hoodie, looking like...Mark Zuckerberg!

We were not allowed to take his picture, I am sorry to say. My son was adamant about that, but in case we didn't get the point, there was a helpful sign taped over Mark's head on the glass window that said: "Please Do Not Take Pictures of the Animals."

We took other pictures though.

I kept hugging my son at odd moments. I just couldn't help myself. He looked so joyful and at home under the bright blue San Francisco sky. When it was time to leave, I almost couldn't bear it.

But the Summer Lovin' crew had another cool event scheduled for the afternoon.

Next stop: Djerassi, a retreat for artists and writers, where our friend and fellow Young Adult writer Nova Ren Suma, was leading a writing retreat for the week. The Djerassi landscape is something else too. On the top of a mountain (a perilous, windy drive that Dolores bravely navigated). Through a redwood forest. Over grasslands. With views of the Pacific Ocean in the distance. I have never seen anything like it and now have found a new goal in life: to go BACK THERE somehow and be a resident writer.

Our group talking with Nova's group at Djerassi

Nova was gracious to let us jump into her critique time and the writers on the retreat seemed to like picking our brains about the writing and publication process. I was sitting there in wonderment that my head contained one of the brains that people wanted to pick. That I'd just seen my beloved son. That I was on the top of a mountain somewhere in California. That I was on a freaking BOOK TOUR.

That night we did our last book signing event at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park. My son came with his friend and I just kept looking at him in the audience, fighting the urge to jump out of my seat like a loon and go hug him. 

It occurs to me now as I write this that I may be more like my Italian grandmother than I ever realized. She was an amazing cook and housekeeper (who took housekeeping to new levels) 

She was also a hugger. Whenever I'd go visit her, we'd be sitting and chatting (about various methods of making spaghetti sauce or cleaning house) and suddenly she'd hop out of her chair and hug me. 

I thought it was sweet. But kinda weird. 

Now, I totally get it. 

     

Ah, the Joy of Playing around with a Messy First Draft

I used to hate revising. In school I wrote papers the night before. Revising, in my mind, meant looking over the spelling before turning a paper in. In college when I took creative writing workshops, I still didn't understand revision. I'd write my stories in a burst (typically, the night before).

There'd be talk in class about what could be done to make a story better. "In the revision, you could try this," the professor would suggest. "Or you might think about this." I'd nod and take notes, but I never bothered to try any of those suggestions. To me, the story was done. I was bored with it and ready to move on. Maybe I'd apply what I learned to the next story I had to write.

I didn't truly understand revision until I heard a talk about it at a writer's conference. The speaker, a guy named Andy Gutelle, pointed out that many beginning writers struggle with revision. They have their finished draft in front of them, and they start from page one and edit along, tightening up passages or cutting a few things, fixing punctuation and typos. But this isn't really revision, he said.

Revision begins by looking at the entire novel at once. It asks big questions like:

What is this story about?
Who is your main character and what does she want?
Do all of your scenes contribute to the arc of the story? Does each one develop your main character and/or move the plot along?

He suggested revising in layers. Read through the book asking the big questions and then read through it again, zeroing in at the scene level, and finally at the smaller sentence by sentence level.

I had never thought about revision in this way. I was used to writing short stories, where I could hold the entire picture of the narrative arc in my head at once. Scene, scene, scene. Character, conflict, realization.

I had never done that with a novel. It's too big! But it made sense. Writing a first draft is often an exercise in discovering what it is you are writing about in the first place. Your initial idea can change a little or a lot. Characters that seemed important disappear. New characters emerge. Strands and subplots fade away. Revelations plop in out of nowhere.

Starting from the beginning and zeroing in on grammar errors is not going to help you get your novel into shape. To do that, you have to see what you actually have on the page (as opposed to the initial vision of the book that you hold in your head).

It's not a pleasant experience to read your first draft through for the first time. The fear going into it is that it's going to be a horrible, unfixable mess. What ends up happening, I'm happy to tell you, is that it IS kind of a mess, but it is fixable.

If it makes you feel any better, other writers go through this too:

"All writing," says Jane Yolen, "is about the gap--no that chasm--between the expectation and final product. Expect it, sidestep it, move on."

How do you DO revision, though? How do you take a big thing like a novel and see it for what it is--all the characters and strands and scenes and meanderings?

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird describes printing out every page of a draft and spreading it all over her apartment.

Other writers write out their scenes on index cards.

(this is from YA author Nova Ren Suma--working on a draft at a writer's retreat)

They create elaborate maps.

(Check out Laurie Halse Anderson's revision road map. If you want to know more about Laurie's revision process, see her blog on her website Mad Woman in the Forest) 

They write on their walls.

(This is a wall in William Faulkner's house. Yes. Even Faulkner's novels did not spring from his head fully formed.)

Revising is like doing a puzzle. With your first draft complete, you've got most of the pieces out of the box and spread out on the table. You turn them over, examine what you have and think about how they might fit together. You chuck out the pieces that don't seem to belong to this puzzle. You assemble and realize which pieces are missing.

Uh oh. A character disappears? I'll rewrite the scenes at the beginning and take her out. A sub plot begins on page 100? Let's see if I can work that in earlier.

This can be fun or painstaking, angsty or exciting, depending on how you look at it. It takes time and work to put together a puzzle. Also, unfortunately, they don't come already assembled.

This is the truth about the work that is involved in writing a novel. It takes time. It takes logical thinking. It takes leaps of faith.

I heard David Wiesner speak at a conference this summer. He's an author/illustrator who's known for his award winning picture books Tuesday, Flostam, and Art & Max. He told us about his latest book, tracing the steps he went through from idea to development to revision. It was fascinating.

One day, he said, a very cool idea popped into his head. It was an image of a tiny spaceship landing in a child's sandbox. He immediately drew the picture and began to storyboard out the story arc. He showed us the sample and it seemed pretty good to me, but Wiesner said it wasn't right.

He drew the story out again, beginning with the spaceship in the sandbox. Still not right. And again. Again. He put the failed manuscript away. He wrote another book. He came back to it. Each time starting with the spaceship in the sandbox. That was the originating idea and he couldn't let it go. But for whatever reason, it just didn't work.

He quit on it again. He wrote other things. During a break he watched his cat not play with his toys. He wondered what a cat would do if he found a tiny spaceship. He drew out another story board. That story, after multiple revisions, became Mr. Wuffles. 

Check it out. It's clever and hilarious. It came to be because David Wiesner did not give up on his story. He let go of the original idea and took a leap of faith.

His parting words: Don't just think about an idea. Do the work.

PS. Anyone who would like my notes from Andy Gutelle's revision talk, email me at jodycasella (@) yahoo (.) com

5-Star Summer Reads

Looking for a few good YA books to read this summer?

Here's my list (at the moment) of the top 2013 YA releases in no particular order:

The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr

I am a big fan of Zarr and always eager to pick up her latest book. The characters in this one depart a bit from her usual, focusing on a teen concert pianist from a wealthy, high achieving family (Zarr's other books feature kids growing up firmly in the working class world.) Lucy realizes that she's privileged--it's one of the many issues she's grappling with. The main source of angst, though, is her ambivalence about her talent. Nearly a year ago, she walked away from her promising piano career.

The pressure from her family (and from herself) grew to be too much. She hasn't touched a piano since, but her friendship with her brother's new piano teacher has her questioning her decision to quit and pushing her to figure out if there is a way to make music a part of her life again.

This book has a couple of strange plot strands--the relationship with the piano teacher is the big one, but all of the characters are so fully realized and the story itself pushes and spreads in a variety of directions that feels like life unfolding in the real world. What Zarr has to say about living a creative life--when you are amazingly good at what you do--is thought-provoking and inspirational.

17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma

This is one of those novels that takes a big risk. The language is lyrical and metaphorical. The subject matter is potentially lurid (kidnapped teen girls). And the narrative is almost completely internal. Oh, there were so many ways that this book could go wrong!

My big pet peeve with literary novels is that those beautifully crafted metaphors draw attention to themselves and pull readers out of the story. (When I'm noticing what a lovely simile you just used, I forget what's going on in the narrative.) And very few writers are able to depict difficult subject matter without slipping over the line into soap-opera-y drama.

Add the whole internal stream-of-consciousness angle, and honestly, I didn't think Nova Ren Suma could pull this one off.

But, let me just say WOW. This book pulls you in from page one and keeps you turning pages with the mesmerizing hypnotic voice of girl who suddenly believes that she is seeing the ghosts of missing girls.

Look for 17 & Gone on the short list for the Printz Award this year...

Dear Bird's Advice for Sad Poets by Evan Roskos

It rarely happens to me anymore, but once in a while I read a book and forget that I am a writer. The part of me that is constantly editing and analyzing shuts up and I simply fall into the story. I don't know why this happens with some books and not others. I wish I did! But I think it comes down to the voice--something about it resonates and pulls me in.

The voice in Dr. Bird's belongs to an anxious, sensitive, battered soul of a boy named James Whitman. James carries Walt Whitman's poems around with him. He hugs trees and contemplates grass blades. He talks to a bird therapist in his head. He worries about his sister Jorie who has been kicked out of school and out of the house by their %&^*# parents. There's a mystery at the core of the book: WHY did Jorie get kicked out? But really this book is about James trying to cope with the crappy aspects of life.

Here's something that a lot of adults seem to forget about being a kid: it sucks. So much of your life is out of your control and you're seeing for the first time the unfairness, the flaws in the adults who rule the world (and you). There is no magic answer to how you figure things out--how you grow up--of course, but I get the feeling at the end of this book that James will be all right.


Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell

This love story blows all other teen romances away. The main characters are complex and flawed. Eleanor is a little overweight and weird and bullied. She's hurting, just treading water to survive in her dysfunctional family. Park is quirky and quiet. He stands out in their gritty midwestern town because he's half Korean.

The two don't have a love at first sight moment, instead, their relationship slowly, almost painfully, unfolds. They don't even hold hands until at least a third of the way through--but that moment is more charged than all of the ridiculously over the top teen Harlequins put together.

Oh, it's also set in the 80's, which will make teens today feel like they're reading historical fiction, I suppose. For adults of a certain age, uh, ahem, me, it will feel like time travel.

Haunted at Seventeen

Nova Ren Suma’s new novel, 17 & Gone, came out last week on March 21, and to mark the release of this story about a 17-year-old girl haunted by the missing, she’s asked some authors she knows to join her in answering this question: What haunted you at seventeen? (click here to see the series.) Full disclosure--Nova Ren Suma does not know me and therefore did not ask me to write a post, but I was so inspired by this writing series that I could not resist posting my own.

So...

What haunted me at 17?

When I was seventeen I punched a girl in the face.

Even now, many many years later, I can see her expression, her wide eyes, her mouth falling open, and her hands flying up in surprise. "You hit me," she said. "I can't believe you did that."

I couldn't believe it either. We were stuck in a traffic jam, a pushing surge of bodies that had just been let out of a school assembly. Our little encounter had probably been witnessed by twenty people. Some of them called out "Whoa!" They laughed with glee or maybe it was discomfort. It's not every day that you see a girl lash out in what can only be called rage.

I managed to elbow through the crowd, my hand still stinging, my heart pounding, tears streaming down my face. I could hear the girl screeching behind me. "She hit me. Can you believe she hit me?"

It was the last month of my senior year, a year that was a majorly crappy year in a long string of majorly crappy years.

But still, I had never punched anyone in the face before.

This was me at seventeen, a bizarre blend of opposites:

• quiet, almost pathologically shy, when I wasn't manic and gushing and gossiping and flirting
• studious and conscientious and hardworking when I wasn't falling asleep in class
• a nerdy preppy Catholic school girl in my polyester uniform (green skirt, pastel color collared blouse) when I wasn't waiting tables in a different polyester uniform (brown jumper, orangey striped jersey) 
• A daydreamer who read constantly and wrote stories and locked myself in my room when I wasn't sneaking out of my house in the middle of the night to roam around with friends
• College bound and driven and ambitious when I wasn't obsessing over a boy who dropped out of high school
• A dutiful rule-follower when I wasn't writing essays for other students if they would buy my lunch 

Why did I hit the girl?

The easiest explanation is to say it had to do with a boy, but it was more than that. A she said/she said kind of thing that spiraled out of control. A former best friend who was a Queen Bee. A group of desperate insecure girls competing for her attention. It happened at the beginning of my senior year. My group of friends took sides. And I ended up on one side, alone. It turned into a cliched bullying thing. Thank God there was no social media back then. I can't imagine how unbearable it would've been to have the gossip and mockery and threats coming at me on Facebook, et al. It was hard enough to bear it in real time when I was walking down the school hallway.

But I slogged through it. What else can you do? I counted down the days to the end of the year when I could run away from all of them. It helped that they were in none of my classes. I could orchestrate my schedule to rarely bump into those girls.

Until the day we had an assembly.

They sat behind me in a row. They kicked my chair. They whispered and laughed and joked. When we spilled out of the auditorium they bunched up right behind me. One of the girls poked me in the back. I was crying and she was mimicking me. I wasn't thinking anything at all when I spun around with my fist clenched.

I could've gotten suspended for fighting. Nobody turned me in. (Again: thank you social media for not existing!) The bullying didn't stop, but there were only a few weeks left of school. I was halfway out the door and stepping into the next stage of my life.

I went to a college 1250 miles away.

It doesn't torment me anymore. Really. It happened so long ago. I don't blame the girls. They struggled with their own demons. They grappled with their own inconsistencies in their personalities. They were doing what many of us girls were doing at age seventeen, just trying to slog through it and praying the tide wouldn't turn on them.

It is still hard to make sense of it though. How cruel we can be to each other. How stupid.

But I'm glad it happened. I'm a writer who writes stories for teenagers and this kind of thing is fuel for me, even though I've never written this particular story before. It brings me back to a place of frustration and anger and humiliation. But it also reminds me what I'm made of. What my limits are. That I can defend myself if I have to. And when I can't, I can run away--not from something, but to something infinitely better and of my own making.

(Not one of my good days. Age 17)

Turning Points

One of my favorite writer blogs is Nova Ren Suma’s distraction no. 99. Every month lately, she’s been posing a question—what scares you, what inspires you, what’s your turning point—and invites a dozen or so people to weigh in. I’m not sure how she’s managed to befriend such a large varied group of cool writers but I bow down to her networking prowess. Full disclosure: I’m not a member of the varied cool group—I suspect that this is because Nova, although I refer to her by her first name, does not technically know me. Still that hasn’t stopped me from answering her questions for myself. For example, a few months ago I wrote about what scared me after reading a bunch of creepy responses on Nova’s blog. (here was the creepiest of those.) And this month I’ve been mulling over my turning point as a writer after reading this and this.

Apparently I am like a lot of Nova’s guest bloggers in that I’ve had more than one turning point. You can’t do this (by which I mean, write with little external acknowledgement or reward) without experiencing several decent turning points along the way in your alternating exhilarating and soul-crushing Writer’s Journey.

I’m picturing a yellow-brick road type of thing, with my ruby-slipper-clad foot starting out in the swirly center the way Dorothy’s did. In my case it was Me, age seven, probably not long after I learned how to read, writing a story called “You Are Cute” which answered that age-old question: Who is cute? My mother was my first reader and she gushed over the story. I think she even said the words that every writer longs to hear: “You are such a good writer,” and she passed my little story on to others (my relatives) who were equally effusive. That was my first turning point and I have to say it was a lovely way to start on what would turn out to be an extremely long, windy, exhilarating, and soul-crushing yellow brick road.

When I was in school, writing wasn’t really taught, unless you count how to draft dry book reports or how to answer questions in COMPLETE SENTENCES ONLY after skimming passages on Australopithecines or the Middle Ages or Henry Hudson. Creative writing—stories, poems, or plays—was rarely assigned, unless it was for extra credit. I loved those rare times, because I always got the extra credit. Plus, once in a while I got a nice gushy “you’re such a good writer,” from a teacher. (Side note: writing, including creative writing, IS taught in school now, at every grade level, and while that seems like a positive development, I sometimes wonder about it. When I was working with fourth graders during an extensive and demanding portfolio-writing year, I saw kids crushed after their stories and poems were picked to pieces. Teachers scrawled stuff like “Work on your dialogue” and “Let’s be more specific with that character” on papers. I remembered my seven-year-old self, so proud of my dippy You Are Cute story. What if a teacher had gotten her hands on that with a red pen?) The beginning writer’s ego is such a fragile, eggshell-encased little thing. I see it as a crucial turning point that I received nothing but praise in those formative years.

I needed that praise, because my next turning point happened in college when I signed up for my first official writing class. The students in those classes took it as their mission to rip apart each other’s stories and poems (and egos.) It was great vicious fun. Making it through somewhat unscathed is a point of pride. It didn’t hurt that I won a few awards for writing along the way either. More turning points. One, that’s kind of funny: Senior year I won the award for the best poem. I sat next to the guy who won the award for best story (fun fact: I had a crush on him. He was soooo creative. Sigh) and we opened our envelopes together and grinned like idiots the rest of the awards ceremony because the prize was a HUNDRED dollars. Which is a lot of money when you’re in college. (sad fact: it’s still a lot of money. Sigh.)

There’s a long stretch of yellow road here where I pretty much stopped writing. I was teaching instead. And then I was raising kids and cleaning my house and making meals and volunteering to chaperon field trips and sitting on contentious school boards. The creative part of myself, I thought, died. But every once in a while it would slip out like an aggravated ghost. This happened when I made my son an elaborate paper mache' model of a Viking ship complete with fifty toothpick oars. Or when I organized my daughter’s 8^th birthday party around a Harry Potter theme and concocted butter beer refreshments and designed an interactive potions lesson and orchestrated a game of quidditch in the backyard. (The party guests ran around on broomsticks while I pelted them with bludgers, er, water balloons.) I won’t go into the story of the time I made a Sputnik cake for my son’s birthday. Let’s just say it was AWESOME.

It’s possible I was losing my mind.

Which leads me to a very important turning point. Somewhere between Vikings and butter beer, I wrote a story and I got it published and I used the money to go to a writing retreat. I must give a shout out here to the Highlights Foundation for the phenomenal retreats and workshops and conferences they put on. The one I attended was called Room to Create, and for someone like me—a busy stressed out mom with a buried battered writer soul—it was like winning a trip to an all-inclusive spa resort. Every day, nothing to do but write. Or read. Or chat with other writers. Or eat gourmet catered food. In an idyllic setting in the woods. I started the week unable to say out loud that I was a writer. I went home and told everyone I knew. And most importantly, I actually started writing again.

But the truth is, it was only a hobby.

Until four years ago when my husband was transferred and our family moved from one state to another and I decided against the advice of pretty much everyone not to renew my teaching license. Teaching had been my fall back career forever, the safety cushion, the Practical Responsible Adult Thing To Do, and I just let it go. It was one of the hardest decisions I ever made and yet, the moment I made it, the moment I said it to someone, probably my husband, hardworking bread-winning supportive fellow that he is, I felt lighter, better, like what I was doing was right.

If you’ve followed this blog at all, you know that for the last four years I have been on the verge with my writing—plugging along, following my dream, skipping and/or trudging down the last remnants of the freaking yellow brick road I’ve been on since second grade, about to cross over into the emerald green city, otherwise known as Published Book Land. Apparently there are more remnants to go. But I’m assuming there are more turning points, too. And like the ones that came before, these will be just enough to lift me up and give me the push I need to make it there.

What Scares Me

I’ve been following this very cool blog by Nova Ren Suma, the author of the gripping and beautifully written novel, Imaginary Girls. Lately Nova’s been inviting other writers to guest blog on particular topics. In October she posted a series called "What Scares You" where writers described their favorite scary books/movies. I wasn’t asked to guest blog by Nova (sigh) but reading all those posts got me thinking about what books have scared me over the years.

You can’t talk about scary books without mentioning Stephen King. The first “adult” book I ever read (back in seventh grade) was The Shining. It scared the crud out of me. I also really likedThe Stand and It. But I think King’s scariest book is Pet Sematary.

When I read it I wasn’t a parent yet but the idea still chilled me to the bones. The premise of the novel is a young doctor and his family move to a small town in Maine. Life is looking swell for them—nice house, sweet little boy, precious little girl, a cat…The only downside is the very busy road in front of the house where monster trucks zoom by. One of those trucks kills the pet cat and the little girl is devastated. The doctor finds out there’s a pet cemetery, the remnants of an old Indian burial ground nearby. Supposedly if you bury a pet there it will come back. It may not come back quite right, warns the elderly neighbor across the street, and it’s probably not a good idea to mess with the dead, but of course the doctor, concerned about his daughter’s grief decides to bury the cat up there anyway. And it does come back. Not quite right—so not quite right that the daughter is horrified by the sight and smell of it. Life goes on for a while and those trucks keep rushing by the house and one day the little boy gets killed. Well, you just know what the father is going to do.

What’s scary about this book, I think, is not the gruesome gotcha stuff but the impulse most of us can relate to: What parent wouldn’t want to bring his dead child back if there was a way?

King has some interesting things to say about what scares people in his book Danse Macabre. Many of the examples are out of date now—stuff from the 1950’s and 60’s that King grew up on—but his ideas are thought-provoking. One, that in a good horror story there is usually something psychologically terrifying behind the obviously scary premise. Take The Exorcist. Pretty darn horrifying novel/film about demon possession, but King says that what’s really at the core of it is every parent’s fear that her teenager will spin out of control. I recently watched the movie What Lies Beneath, a ghost story about a dead girl haunting a woman. It’s a creepy movie with lots of scary moments, but I think what’s truly scary is the woman’s floundering state of mind. Her only child’s gone off to college and she’s not quite sure what to do with her time. When the ghost starts coming around, other people, including her husband, are patronizing, thinking the woman’s just lonely and bored. There’s a common theme in horror that the person being haunted is simply losing her mind. And what is scarier than thinking that you might be going crazy?

Something that interests me as a writer is how horror writers build suspense. King says that the scariest stuff is the unknown. He uses the example of the heroine in a creepy house where everyone knows the Scary Thing is behind a door at the top of the stairs. The entire book/movie is really the suggestion of whatever that Thing is and the plot is the character walking up those stairs and getting closer and closer to that door. Many writers are good at the building up of tension part, but where they usually fail (and King admits it’s where HE fails too) is when the hero has to finally open the door and show the audience what’s inside. There’s nearly always a letdown. It’s a zombie or it’s a vampire or it’s a giant spider, etc.

Whatever it is, it rarely lives up to what we imagined.

So tell me, faithful readers, what scares YOU?