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player ready...The idea was right there, for anyone to take.
Emily Jenkins, the writer of books for children and young adults who goes by E. Lockhart, explained the creative writing process to a room of about 100 Stevenson High School students on Feb. 9. As part of her presentation, she tossed out a few ideas for plot-design and character-creation. She set up this scene for her students: a kid working in a grocery store, that is secretly a front for a drug cartel, on Mars.
“This’ll be a great book,” Jenkins said in the middle of the idea. “But I’ll never write it.”
The alien, money-laundering supermarket was one of the dozens of ideas that dozens of visiting professional creators tossed out to students during Odyssey 2016, Stevenson’s bi-annual festival of arts of all kinds. Dancers, musicians, cake-bakers, Internet business owners, chalk-drawing makers and more — many of them Stevenson alumni — came to Lincolnshire Feb. 9 and 10 for an event that took the place of regular classes.
For Jonathan Skogmo — class of 2001, now a mogul of viral videos — Odyssey was a little homecoming and a little vindication.
“When I was a student, I wasn’t really that good,” Skogmo told a crowd of more than 50 students at his presentation on the digital media landscape. “I may not work hard at school, but I worked hard at my business.”
And for Skogmo, the homecoming tour was just as much a business trip as anything. The 50-something students in front of him became a focus group on the constantly changing tastes of his target audience.
“I’m really interested in what you guys want,” he said.
In the front entrance of the west building, chalk-drawing maker Shaun Hays said he was really interested in what students saw. Using techniques that involve perspective and pigment, he drew a collage of the six departments of Stevenson’s art division that, when the viewer stood right on the spot he marked on the floor with tape, could look like a three-dimensional pitfall.
“It’s trickery,” Hays said. “My brain can see all sides of things.”
And he encouraged passersby to photograph his creation, as he made it, from the designated spot. He said that he meant for his untitled work to be recorded by mobile-phone cameras — because he could show how a camera does lie.
“How you trick the camera is the real trade secret,” he said.
Some artists in the 3D field use exact measurements, angle calculations and other aspects of mathematics in their work, but Hays said he is dyslexic and goes strictly by sight and feel.
“If I try adding math into this, it gets all messed up in a number of different ways,” Hays said.
Jenkins told her audience that her stories were, essentially, messed-up conglomerations of events from her own life.
“I’m writing an emotional truth, in a fictional story,” Jenkins said. “I told them all in one big story, because they all just kind of blur together. That’s how you write fiction.”
Writing fiction means inventing colorful characters and settings, she said, but it also means revising some of the color out of the final product.
After finishing a first draft, Jenkins said she will typically look at it again, remove whole characters and plot lines, add a new angle — and then send it off to her editor, for more reworking.
“When I say ‘revise,’ I do not mean ‘spell check,'” Jenkins told her crowd. “You don’t have to make it awesome right away.”
But she left the kids with an idea, and invited any of them to turn it into something awesome. After setting up the hero in the interplanetary, gangster supermarket, Jenkins talked about examples of somewhat similar ideas in books that other authors have already written.
She told the audience to not worry about inventing something wholly original, and to draw inspiration instead from the artists who came before them.
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“It’s bad to plagiarize,” Jenkins said, “but it’s OK to steal. Everybody steals ideas from what’s already been done.”
And she left that idea there, for her room of potential artists.
Twitter: @RonnieAtPioneer