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A Finger Pointing at the Moon: Three Books that Have Changed My Writing
By Amy Alznauer
Document: Article
Introductory Paragraph: Reprinted from the most recent issue of the Illinois Chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators’ bulletin, Prairie Wind. When I was in my early 20s, I spent a summer in Oxford, England, visiting my sister. Aside from long country walks to various inns, what I remember most about that summer is dutifully trekking every morning to the public library to work on fiction exercises from the book What If? Everything came out dull and forced, and even in the solitude of my little cubicle I felt ashamed by my failures. I remember in particular trying to describe a scene in which a woman sat at a table with a coffee mug. I didn’t know or care about the woman, or the mug, or the table, and I had no idea why any of it was there or why it mattered. It never once occurred to me that I might be that woman and that my true material was right there, within and about me. Words felt like bricks, blunt and boring, and I lugged them around, trying to keep faith that in the lugging, some sort of magic would happen. It didn’t. Recently, when I read Laura Montenegro’s beautiful Q & A (published in this issue!), I thought back to that miserable summer. “The drawings come first,” Laura says, “and the words follow.” She calls the very first drawing she makes for a project the gestational image and describes it as “the spark and springboard from which all my other images will take their cue.” That’s exactly what I hadn’t yet learned as I sat in my cubicle. I now know that before anything coherent can emerge, I must have a story kernel in mind, something originating from that deep interior well, an image or question or metaphor that feels both fundamental and full of unexplored meaning. And, conversely, if I don’t lay hold of this kernel, any attempt will come out forced and be likely to fail.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33600/IRCJ.50.1.2021-2022.10
Page Numbers: 10-12
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