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| From
the January/February 2006 issue of The Horn Book Magazine The Writer’s
Page
Around 1982, however, Atheneum invited me to write a mystery series. I was afraid I’d be confined to formula writing, and would have to conjure up a dead body for each book. But Jean Karl, my editor, said, “Do whatever you like.” I planned my series around a hotel in a small Indiana town, and each book begins, “The Bessledorf Hotel was at 600 Bessledorf Street between the bus depot and the funeral parlor. Officer Feeney said that some folks came into town on one side of the hotel and exited on the other.” The stories, a mixture of humor and mystery, are centered on Bernie Magruder and his zany family, who run the hotel, with Bernie’s loquacious father intoning such homilies as, “So let’s not go off half-cocked with our heads in our hands, but keep our wits about us and our muzzles loaded.” I submitted a new book every few years, and the series was eventually renamed the Bernie Magruder mystery books. My first Alice book, The Agony of Alice, was written as a one-and-only. I just wanted to write about a motherless girl looking for a role model who finds it not in the most beautiful teacher at school, the one she had hoped to get, but in the homeliest. Then the letters began to come in from readers wanting more, and reviewers said things like, “Alice’s fans will await her further adventures.” But it was several years before I decided on a series. I wanted Alice to be older in every book so the reader could see her grow and change. Jean was enthusiastic, but a bookseller warned against it. “You’ll lose your readership base,” she said, “and librarians won’t know where to shelve the books.” I figured that if it was a choice between losing my readership base or losing my mind over a perpetual sixth-grade sitcom, I’d risk the readers, and began writing one book a year, three books for every year of Alice’s life. I owe a great deal to my readers who use the Alice website to point out mistakes, suggest new titles, and urge new plot twists. They ask such personal questions as “Is it normal to have hair growing under only one armpit?” or “Dear Mrs. Naylor: Is it true that you don’t have legs?” Evidently not even my assurance that I was hiking in Glacier National Park last summer dispels their worry that I may one day be too old to write and they will never know whether Alice marries Patrick, Liz remains a virgin, Lester finishes grad school. . . . If it wasn’t that I also deal with prejudice, injustice, gay issues, religion, human sexuality, and other aspects of living, I’d think I was writing a soap opera. But I, too, worried about letting my readers down should I die prematurely, and so, with eight more books to go, I have actually already written the last one, and it sits in a fireproof box in my office with a letter to our sons saying, Send this on to Atheneum before you do another thing! When Michelle Poploff of Delacorte asked if I would start a new series for middle-grade readers, I said I would do it only if I could think of some universal theme. Then as I waited for a gym to fill up while speaking at a school, I heard one teacher yell to his class, “If you don’t quiet down, I’m going to seat you boy-girl-boy-girl.” Instantly a hush fell over the gym. I knew then that I’d found my theme, and began writing the boys-versus-girls books, The Boys Start the War, The Girls Get Even, etc. The series focuses on a houseful of boys (the Hatfords) in West Virginia, who attempt to drive out a houseful of girls (the Malloys) who have temporarily taken over the home of their best friends, away for a year. There are twelve books in all, one for each of those exuberant months, and guess who’s saddest when the girls move back to Ohio? One of the most difficult things about writing a series in which there are many characters is consistency. The Alice books take the protagonist from eight years of age to eighteen, and the final book leapfrogs through the years eighteen to sixty. As in any life, characters move in and out, new ones are added, and how could an author remember all this stuff — Pamela’s birthday, Ben’s car, Lester’s girlfriends, the dentist’s name, the living room furniture? Letters arrived weekly, delightedly pointing out mistakes: “In The Agony of Alice, Elizabeth has pierced ears, but in the next book she doesn’t,” they tell me. Characters go from blond to brunette, and Alice herself has three different birth dates. The mistakes were rapidly escalating, and though they seemed to increase the books’ popularity — readers take such pleasure in discovering mistakes! — they were a copyeditor’s nightmare. Then my new editor at Atheneum, Caitlyn Dlouhy, who took over the series after the very sad death of Jean Karl, came up with a solution: they would hire someone to carefully reread all the Alice books and compile a bible. It would be divided into categories and subcategories, complete with index and page numbers. It would list all of Alice’s friends, teachers, personality traits, physical descriptions, education, boyfriends, gifts received, and embarrassments, and then do the same for every major character. I never start a new book without this bible by my side, even though the first six pages of the ninety-one-page volume are titled “series inconsistencies.” A more serious problem in writing a series where the protagonist matures and changes is that the author tends to see each book as part of a continuum rather than a separate story. Most lives do not revolve around huge events that change our course but rather a series of smaller experiences that accrue meaning over time. Yet each Alice book deserves its own beginning, middle, and end. After Shiloh was written, I vowed it would never become a series. I did not want to go into a bookstore and see Shiloh at the Beach and Shiloh Goes to the Moon. But readers’ letters haunted me. Their rage against Judd Travers was palpable: “Have Marty’s dad buy a gun and shoot Judd through the eye or the brain.” “Have his truck roll off a cliff and burn him up.” I didn’t want to leave them with all that rage. I wanted children to understand that there are reasons why people behave as they do. And after I started Shiloh Season to help explain Judd, I knew there would have to be one final book to convince Marty, as well as readers, that Judd would never again hurt his pet. And the way to do this would be to have Judd risk his own life to save the dog. Saving Shiloh completed the trilogy. I’m currently working on only two series
— eight more books of the Alice series and a six-part The joy comes from hearing from kids who are hooked — from their pleading, cajoling, even threatening letters, begging for more than one book per year. (“If you just finished the manuscript, why can’t we buy it now?”) But there are too many single books clamoring for my attention, tugging at my clothes, whining in my ear. And it’s always the child who robs you of sleep whom you will tend to next.
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never cared much for series books. The Bobbsey Twins and their toy
shop or Nancy Drew and her hidden staircase could never compete
with Huck and Jim on a raft.
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