Splinters

I make my living writing about a moody third grader. Third grade for me was all about reading Ramona and winning spelling bees and drawing with Magic Markers. But say fifth grade, and I start to itch.

Before I was a writer, I was a reader. I ate up Grimms’
fairy tales and Nancy Drew. I was the kid who’d sneak-read the book tucked inside my math text or hidden under the
dinner table.

I so loved to read that I couldn’t be bothered to write.

In grade school, my mother did my writing for me. It started innocently enough, in an effort to save time, I suspect. It was easier for her to suggest what to write and have me dutifully copy it down than to navigate the mysteries of the writing process.

As a fifth grader, I used words like philosophical and serendipity and didn’t know their meanings. I won prizes, medals, ribbons that weren’t mine. I landed my own column in the school paper. I even got my picture taken with my congressman, for an essay I didn’t write.

Until.

Enter Ms. Englert, who took over when my teacher left to have a baby. She read to us. Where the Wild Things Are. Beowulf. E. E. Cummings, all mudluscious and puddle-wonderful. She wanted us to write — but not at home. In class.

I couldn’t write a word. Not without my mother.

I broke into hives. I started to stutter. I asked for hall passes, hid in the nurse’s office, and memorized all 206 bones in George the Skeleton.

Finally, the day came when I was denied a hall pass and was forced to sit in class and write a poem about spring. It was gloomy weather, raining. I stared at the rain-spattered window, trying not to throw up or run for the refuge of the nurse’s office. Finally, I jotted down a few lines about the April rain. I turned my paper in, sure that I’d fail. Certain that I was not a writer and never would be.

Ms. Englert announced to the class that one poem stood out as a fine example of concrete poetry. It couldn’t be mine — I’d never heard of concrete poetry.

She posted it on the bulletin board. My poem. My poem, not my mother’s. I had unconsciously set down words in the shape of a raindrop.

On a rainy day in fifth grade I discovered writing. A school assignment, the most ordinary of things, had just done something extraordinary. I discovered writing as mysterious; other; deep and unexpected.

I went on to fill Harriet-the-Spy notebooks with scribblings. For the school paper, I wrote the first story that was actually mine, about a pencil sharpener.

My first editor, Richard Jackson, says, “Many a children’s book is clearly the working out of some childhood splinter, the sensation of which is still sharp.”

Passing off my mother’s stories as my own is the splinter, the thorn, the still-sharp needle that makes me a writer.

Megan McDonald’s latest book is Judy Moody Goes to College (Candlewick).