James Patterson Interview at Day of Dialog by SLJ

 

I am at the School Library Journal's one day online conference called Day of Dialog and the afternoon keynote is with James Patterson (bottom of the screen) and his co-author Chris Grabenstein (top right) who are having a conversation around writing and storytelling.

Patterson gave 2 really intriguing pieces of advice.

1. Writing is like a cream pie - you want to hit the readers with a cream pie and while they are distracted by that, tell them something important. As a former ad man, he says that the book cover is the cream pie. It must grab the readers so that they will actually be ready to listen to your story. 

2. You want to write a book such that when young readers are done, they ask for another book. 

In my volunteer life, I am a Commissioner for the Hawaii Public Charter School  and I have been participating with the staff on their mission and vision. A mission should be the work you are doing now (authorizing public charter schools) and the vision should be what you want to work towards in the future. I feel like Patterson very succinctly in his second piece of advice just lays out the vision for all middle school English teachers, which is to help put those kinds of books in the hands of readers such that they will also ask for another book and another, and another.

What I know for sure is that if we fail to do this, we are at risk of contributing to the number of aliterate (Beers, Kylene) teens and adults who can read, but choose not to read for pleasure. The mission, then, is to match the right book and author to the right student. It is hard, but it is not impossible if as teachers we continue to be voracious readers and have an organization system not only to share books, but to keep track of how books connect to other books (centripetal/centrifugal/ladders). If you do a great job of creating a safe space in the classroom for these individual conversations, if you as the teacher are willing to really listen to them and not just make assumptions about them as readers, if you have lots of different genres of "texts" handy and shareable, students will trust you and even if they later abandon a book, they will at least try it.