The Doll in the Garden by Mary Downing Hahn

If I'd paid more attention to the craft of outlining back in elementary school, I might be a faster writer, but, on the other hand, if I knew everything that was going to happen in a story, I might be too bored to write it down.

Therefore, I spend a lot of time revising and thinking things out. More typically, I start with a character or a situation and only a vague idea of what's going to happen. If I have a plot firmly in mind when I begin, the writing goes fairly quickly. Since Sara appeared in 1979, I've written an average of one book a year. The Sara Summer took me a year to write, another year to find a publisher, and yet another year of revisions before Clarion accepted it. That's how long it took me to get serious about writing. Unfortunately, I didn't have the courage or the confidence to send anything there.īy the time my first novel was published, I was 41 years old. In college, I wrote poetry and short stories and dreamed of being published in The New Yorker. Although I never finished Small Town Life, it marked the start of a lifelong interest in writing. Unlike her shy, self conscious creator, however, Susan was a leader who lived the life I wanted to live - my ideal self, in other words. Small Town Life was about a girl named Susan, as tall and skinny and freckle faced as I was. Consequently, at the age of thirteen, I began my first book. Although I wasn't sure I was smart enough, I decided to write and illustrate children's books when I grew up. I wanted to show how people felt, what they thought, what they said. When I was in junior high school, I developed an interest in more complex stories. My stories were usually about orphans who ran away and had the sort of exciting adventures I would have enjoyed if my mother hadn't always interfered.

Instead of telling them in words, I told them in pictures. All those facts - who cared what the principal products of Chile were? To me, writing reports was almost as boring as math.ĭespite my dislike of writing, I loved to make up stories. Requirements such as outlines, perfect penmanship, and following directions killed my interest in putting words on paper. I loved to read and draw but I hated writing reports. In elementary school, I was known as the class artist. In the summer, we went on day long expeditions into forbidden territory - the woods on the other side of the train tracks, the creek that wound its way through College Park, and the experimental farm run by the University of Maryland. We spent hours outdoors playing 'Kick the Can' and 'Mother, May I' as well as cowboy and outlaw games that usually ended in quarrels about who shot whom. I grew up in a small shingled house down at the end of Guilford Road in College Park, Maryland.

The Doll in the Garden by Mary Downing Hahn