Jane Yolen
Author Jane Yolen has written more than 200 books in her 40-year career, including the Caldecott Medal-winner, “Owl Moon,” the acclaimed young adult novel, “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” and the very successful “How Do Dinosaurs?” series — and about a million other books. Yolen is renowned for never speaking down to her readers, regardless of their age, and always assuming that kids can work with levels of literary sophistication in language, plot, theme, and characterization. Adult can love a Yolen book as much as any kid and it’s this universality of respect that has given her career such a lasting buoyancy that overcomes trends in publishing.
Yolen has made promoting literacy her number one priority and she does her part by writing the best books she can and speaking with parents and educators about the issue. She began her career as a journalist and a poet and currently lives in Western Massachusetts.
SB: How much of your professional life do you spend in regard to literacy?
JY: I’m almost always talking about the importance of literacy in a child’s life and that literature begins in the cradle and if we don’t engage children in books at an early age then we won’t have any adult readers as well.
I’m always preaching to the choir. These days, people who are involved in reading literature are an endangered species, Harry Potter notwithstanding—which is a phenomenon that has nothing to do with the long run of what’s going to happen to literature. I mean, it’s a mammoth blip, but a blip nonetheless and we can’t count on Harry Potter readers to go on to be other kinds of readers.
All I can do is just write the best books I know how, but I’ve also hired a publicist to help get out the word about my books, because you can no longer count on the publicity department in a publishing company to do that. They have hundreds of books and, alas and alack, very often they are more interested in getting out the latest celebrity book. That’s where all the focus and all the money is going to, so it’s up to individual authors to do what they can to get their own books out there and if that means scheduling your own tours, if that means sending out your own materials, if that means getting a publicist, that’s what we’re all doing these days.
SB: Has the overwhelming popularity of series books resulted in a less literate product?
JY: As a child I read series books. I read Nancy Drew, I read the Bobbsey Twins. Those are comfort books, they don’t necessarily challenge you in any way, but it’s comfortable because you are revisiting old friends over and over again. Just like we watch the same television shows over and over again. We like series. We don’t want the same plot, perhaps, but what we do want is ‘Oh, I know these characters and I can count on them.’ Wizard of Oz, I can count on those characters. There will always be something interesting happening, but I also know that it will always be Dorothy or I know it will be one of her buddies. You get books like the “Spiderwyck” books or the Lemony Snicket books and you know those characters already, you do have to be reintroduced — what you’re doing is being reunited.
SB: Do you think they prepare kids to what adult fiction has to offer them?
JY: How many people are hooked on, for example, Spenser books or can’t wait on the next Jack Higgins book, because, whether it’s good literature or not and I’m not even talking about good/bad right now. What I am saying is they can count on knowing the characters and knowing the set-ups and that’s comforting. I call these bathtub books. You can read them in the bathtub and if you drop them in, it doesn’t matter because there’s always another one coming along, and that’s fine.
And you know, for an author, it’s also comforting. I have a best-selling series, “How Do Dinosaurs?” — I don’t have to, as a writer, reinvent the format because I already know it, I don’t have to reinvent the rhyme scheme, because it’s already in place, it takes away the invention, it starts me on a higher place, I don’t have to start at the very ground level, I’m building a second story.
We don’t like tough endings anymore we wanted everything wrapped up in half an hour or an hour. Children’s reading material, very often, especially the really popular ones, are, in a sense, aping television. There have to be pauses, there have to be cliffhangers, everything has to be wrapped up quickly. The nice thing that Harry Potter did was that it said wait a minute, kids have a longer attention span and it’s proven by the fact that even younger children are struggling through the Harry Potter books because they are popular. They’re reading books that are longer than they’ve ever been allowed. In fact the Harry Potter books are very episodic and have gotten more so as the movies have come out.
SB: Though they do have more and more plot threads to follow as the books go along.
JY: I’m working on a fourth book of what was supposed to have been a trilogy but suddenly has got a fourth book 20 years later and the problem when you are doing a fourth or a fifth or a sixth book is knitting up all those loose threads which you had left because you left them. You might not have planned on a fourth book, or you didn’t have room in a fourth book, and suddenly as you get further and further along, you have less and less room as an author to maneuver.
I remember a trilogy that I loved the first two books of and the third book was simply knitting up all those loose ends. There wasn’t any book there except for knitting up loose ends. That’s the danger when you’re doing these kinds of books.
There are two kinds of trilogies - there’s a trilogy like “The Lord of the Rings,” which is one big book broken into three. That’s quite sophisticated storytelling because it was always meant to be one big story. Then there are things like the Lemony Snicket books in which each book is complete and of itself and only the characters and the situation repeats. I found for myself as a reader, I was bored, because it was the same thing over and over again. I’m not sure, and clearly from it being a best seller, that kids feel that way.
My son, when he was a kid, loved the first “Black Stallion” book and asked is there anything more like this and I said that there was “The Black Stallion’s Fury” and “The Black Stallion’s Revenge” and I started giving these to him. On the third book he said to me “This is the same book.” He was right and he was eight-years-old. I thought that was pretty sophisticated. In fact, that’s what those kind of episodic series are counting on, that the kid doesn’t figure that out or they like the repetitive nature because it’s comfortable.
SB: Series books are better for the marketing departments.
JY: This is where your huge money is, it builds and builds and builds on itself. You just have to look at every publishing company and they’re all starting series of one kind or another.
SB: Movies also seem now to define how young adult books are written.
JY: I’ve had one, “The Devil’s Arithmetic.” I’ve had lots of options. My agent says “Cash the check.” I thought they did a good job, but that was Dustin Hoffman and Mimi Rogers, they did a really wonderful job as producers, it was brilliant. It wasn’t the book. They dropped characters, they put characters together, the ending was slightly different, but they managed to keep the sense of the book, the thematic underpinnings were really there. I have too many friends who had movies made of their books and they’ve just been butchered. The thing that you have to remember always as an author is that the book remains.
SB: There is a reasonable fear that the movie will overtake the memory, though — think of “The Wizard of Oz.”
JY: That’s always a problem because it has a larger audience and more people are moviegoers than they are readers, so yeah, surely that’s a fear. But it does help drive book sales, so there’s always that.
SB: Let’s say someone sees “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” then picks up the book — do you have any sense that they move onto other Jane Yolen books after?
JY: No, because it’s not a series book and it’s very different. Though I do get a lot of letters from kids asking ‘Have you written anything else about the Holocaust?’ I have to explain that I have another novel about the Holocaust, but it was originally an adult book and now is for college or high school. It’s not a book for a 12, 13 year old who’s read “The Devils Arithmetic.” I wouldn’t want them reading ”Briar Rose” until they were juniors, seniors in high school. I don’t think there’s a lot of carry through if you are not writing similar books.
The problem is that movies and books are different medium and they have to be treated that way and as an author of a book you have to let some of it go.
SB: You actually began your career as a journalist.
JY: My father was a journalist, my brother was a journalist, and I was a summer intern for the Bridgeport Sunday Herald, and then summer intern for Newsweek, and then I worked for Newsweek, Saturday Review. In college, I was head of the press board.
Then I did a lot of freelance journalism. My first first freelance piece that I sold after college was to Popular Mechanics. It was about kites, my father was an international kite champion, so I knew a lot about kites. I knew nothing about mechanics. I wrote for the Ford Times and bizarre magazines like that.
SB: What did that work add your writing?
JY: It gave me an understanding of how to research, how to take research and construct a story, but it gave me a lifelong dislike of interviewing people. The first thing that they sent me out on, I think it was just a ‘let’s get the kid’ interview at the Bridgeport Sunday Herald was to go out — and I grew up in a very middle class family — and they sent me out to some of the projects in Bridgeport to interview people on welfare.
It was a disaster. I came back and I was sobbing. I tried to write this story and I was sobbing. And I couldn’t ask the hard questions because I was so affected by the people that it was impossible for me to do the kind of job that you really need to do to be a journalist. I wouldn’t question them. They told me any kind of story they wanted to and I believed them because they were in such bad circumstances. So I made a lousy journalist but a great fantasy writer.
I really thought I was going to be a journalist for my pocket book and a poet for my soul. The funny thing is that I’m not a journalist at all and I am making money as a poet. My father, who was a journalist, said to me ‘Your poems are very nice, dear, but you can’t make a living as a poet. Nobody can.’
SB: Did journalism help you with discipline?
JY: Certainly one of the things I learned from doing journalism was whether you liked the story or you didn’t like the story, you wrote the story, you sat down and you wrote, knowing that it was going to be rewritten. I get to rewrite my own stories now. When you’re a journalist, you know that somebody else is going to be doing a lot of tinkering with your stuff. You got it down and you got it down fast, that’s what I learned.
The other thing was that I worked at a book packaging place where I learned to write captions. Caption writing is really an art. You have not word count but character count, so you can only use so many letters in a line, and that includes spaces, that includes punctuation, and I learned to write captions brilliantly and it served me, along with writing poetry, to understand that there are many ways that you can say the same thing in as compact and as compressed a fashion as possible.
SB: Learning to say things briefly is not something that a lot of people are taught.
JY: And with computers now, I think one of the things that kids are learning is to say things not briefly, that they’re just to go on and on and on and on because it’s easy, it’s a very plastic tool. You can just keep going with the thought perhaps that you’ll fix it later, but nobody ever does. The manuscripts that are coming into publishing companies are beautifully typed. Very often they are justified on the left and justified on the right and everything looks professional, but they just go on and on and on.
I was an editor for a while in the ‘90s, I had my own line of books for Harcourt Brace, and the stuff that would come in, you could tell who had learned to write on a computer, they just didn’t know when to end. They didn’t know when to end a sentence, they didn’t know when to end a paragraph, they didn’t know when to end a scene. They went on and on and on because they could just get it all down.
SB: You come up with endless material because you don’t have to change the paper.
JY: You don’t have to erase it, you don’t have to white out, you don’t have to retype the whole thing because you made a mistake.
SB: Do you think learning to be an editor is good for a writer?
JY: You learn how important an individual word is and that an individual word can be a fulcrum for an entire thought, it can balance a sentence in a wonderful way, or it can throw the whole thing out of kilter. You know that as a poet. You do not know that when you are writing massive amounts of messy prose. You say in one word what you do in four, simplify the actual word presentation with out simplifying the ideas it is presenting, compress It’s taking coal and pressing it and pressing it and pressing it until you end up with a diamond.
SB: You’re quite a genre hopper.
JY: When an idea comes to me, I’ll work on it and worry about it later where it fits. One of the reasons I’ve been able to keep writing for 40 years and be published for 40 years is that I do so many genres that if that genre dries up and no one is publishing that sort of thing any longer, I’m already onto six or seven other things. I know many very solid writers from the ‘50s and ‘60s whose genres dried up and they were never able to sell another book. It’s very sad. They weren’t genius writers, but they were good writers, solid writers.
SB: You do have an obvious fondness for sci fi and fantasy.
JY: As a kid, more fantasy than science fiction, always. I read a lot of science fiction, but I can’t write science fiction because I don’t know enough science, I think you have to not only know science, but you have to keep up scientifically if you want to write good science fiction and I don’t.
SB: Did you read a lot of mythology as a kid?
JY: When I was growing up, that was the time when, in school, there was a lot of study of myth and legend and I was very passionate about legendary material and fairy tales. A lot of my pleasure reading was that.
SB: Kid’s aren’t as versed in that realm as they once were.
JY: I think they could be interested if you introduce them to it in a way that makes it interesting. They loved “Xena” and “Hercules” on television, which was funnier if you knew the actual myths and legends, and that would have been a way for teachers or parents to reintroduce those myths and legends to them, but we didn’t take advantage of that. “Touch Magic” was all about the cultural shorthand, if you understand other people’s myths you can understand who they are, they cannot be strangers to you, you can also see how much mythological and folk stories have passed through various cultures, taking on a coloration of that culture but still being at its core the same story. How can you look at medieval art, how can you listen to balladry if you don’t have any background in some of this stuff? How can you understand “The Lord of the Rings” if you don’t know any of this? Literature, art, music, opera, ballet, a lot of this stuff is based on an understanding of the classical mythologies and the legendary materials and the folklore, so if we lose that, we really our halving ourselves as humans, we’re taking away half our cultural history.
SB: It occurs to me that, with movie versions of books, the stories are altered in the same way that myths and legends were as they were being passed down and moving from culture to culture.
JY: We do it and now we’re doing a lot of fractured fairy tales, fractured myths, but if you don’t know what they are to begin with, how do you understand when they are fractured? Are they funny because Eddie Murphy is a voice or are they funny because there’s a background there that you are missing? You’re missing half the joke, because the people who put these things together know that stuff.
SB: There has been a renaissance of oral storytelling.
JY: But we’re not hitting the Heartland, we’re not hitting the Bible belt, we’re not hitting the kinds of places where these kinds of stories could make such a difference. It’s seen as “ooooh” stuff, it’s rejected because it’s outsider. Yeah, we tell our own stories but we’re not going to listen to someone else’s story. I think as Americans we have to learn to be more open to that.
SB: It does seem that Americans splinter in a way that casts other Americans as outsiders — and in the rhetoric of myths and legends, the attitude heaped on supernatural characters in them reflect other everyday attitudes of the people telling these stories,
JY: A lot of folklore, if you look at it, is outsider/insider stories. The cultural xenophobia in the stories is pretty amazing. Beware of wolves, they’re all bad. Those guys, they’re not part of us. Beware of the ogres and the trolls, they live in their own society and we don’t like them because they are bad. It’s all right to kill wolves, it’s all right to kill trolls, it’s all right to kill ogres because they’re bad. We haven’t seen them do anything bad, you understand, but they’re bad. There’s a lot of that in folklore, so what’s going on here is not very different from what has been going on. We’re very tribal. We like our stories, we don’t like their stories, we tell stories about them to keep ourselves pure. What we do to them is right, what they do to us is wrong.
SB: The mythical quality of interaction is a popular notion today — it’s a pervasive cultural attitude that’s part of our storytelling tradition and the way we view the world,
JY: Humans are very tribal. It’s astonishing that the United States has lasted for 200 years because it is very tribal, but we’ve managed because we put the larger good in the United States over the smaller good. Look at what happened when they tried to do something similar in the USSR, it shattered. They’re trying to do it in Europe, it’s not going well. It’s astonishing that we have held together 2000. Brilliant. But if you look closely, it’s tribal. It’s not even state by state, it’s tribe by tribe, within states, within regions.
The other thing that is interesting to me about stories changing is that stories follow all kinds of routes, they follow the slave route, they follow explorers, they follow trade routes, they follow marriage routes. You might get, for example, an escaped African slave who had been brought over to America and has been taken in by a Native American tribe, becomes one of them but tells his own stories, which become part of the tribal stories. But if you say to a person of that tribe now, 100 years later, “Ah, we can track that story back to African roots’” they say “No that’s our story.’” It is and it isn’t. An enormous numbers of the stories in Celtic or English or German come out of India, you can track those stories back. Are they Indian stories or are they Irish stories? Well, they’re both. They have a pre-history, if you will, but they have become incredibly English or Irish, just as the African story has become incredibly whatever Native American tribe it has become part of. To deny it has roots elsewhere is to deny its power, how it came to be, how it crossed the miles on the mouths of somebody else and entered the ear of your tribe is a wonderful story in itself.
SB: It explains why you believe what you believe.
JY: And how we are made stronger by bringing other people’s stories into our tribe and by giving our stories to another tribe.
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