Armstrong Brings Patterns
in History to Life for Kids

The American Story
by Jennifer Armstrong
(Knopf)
ISBN 0375812563
Buy this book
via Amazon.com.

This was the challenge presented to Jennifer Armstrong by her publisher. As the prolific and award-winning author of more than 50 books for young people—spanning fiction, nonfiction, picture books, easy readers and chapter books— naturally, Armstrong accepted.

The result is The American Story (Knopf), a 368-page opus for ages 5 and up that hits bookstore shelves this month. Beautifully written and with delightful illustrations by Roger Roth, the book not only illuminates the high points of the American saga, but "create[s] larger stories by linking events and episodes over time, so that readers can begin to see some patterns in our history," Armstrong writes in its introduction.

The author is a veteran of the true-life thriller. Her Shipwreck At The Bottom Of The World (Crown, 1998), a detail-rich account of Ernest Shackleton's harrowing 1914 Antarctic expedition, won the prestigious Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction in 1999, as well as the Boston Globe Horn Book Honor. Her historical novels Steal Away (Orchard, 1992), The Dreams Of Mairhe Mehan (Knopf, 1996) and its sequel Mary Mehan Awake (Knopf, 1997) have also earned coveted accolades.

Though it is no doubt true for all of her history-related works, Armstrong writes in The American Story that she hopes she "makes history more vivid, more alive, than you remembered." Here's how she does it…

ARMSTRONG: Simon Boughton (who since moved on to become the publisher at Roaring Brook) proposed the project to me in 1998, I believe, and I was still revising some of the stories last year, so I guess you could say it took seven years to write. I was captivated by the idea the moment he proposed it to me. I remember going to church suppers as a kid, and piling my plate with fried chicken and baked beans and jello salad and macaroni and cheese. This book was like that—an irresistible smorgasbord of stories.

AUTHORLINK: How did you even begin? What criteria did you use to distill all of American history into 100 tales? How did you research each tale?

ARMSTRONG: I began by brainstorming all the stories I could think of off the top of my head. I then put them into chronological order, and took a look at the gaps and the clogs—six stories from 1778? Impossible! No stories for the 1820's? Find something! I had the task of distilling major events into single, delectable stories, and filling in chronological gaps with stories I thought were too often neglected.

I filtered my list for theme, ethnicity, and geographical location, trying as much as possible to make a fair representation of people, ideas, and places. It's a big country, and although our history is not very long it's incredibly various. As I wrote I began to see connections between stories, and in some cases I deliberately chose stories because of their connections to other stories in the collection, in an attempt to weave themes and ideas through time.

I think of the research for each story as something of a commando raid—get me the three most important books on this, and if that's not possible the three that you can give me fast! I read on average three books for each story, and of course I read many comprehensive histories (Howard Zinn's, for example) to gain perspective on epochs and movements. The narrow focus required for each story was only possible when I also had a long view of how the story fit into the larger history.

No doubt people will find some stories conspicuous by their absence, and some ethnic groups or geographical locations are under-represented. You'll find quite a lot of stories set in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, but these are and always have been our population centers— that's where the people were! It only seems natural that these were the setting for so many of our national stories.

"The stories in our history are
dramatic and moving,
and theyare about people
with passions to follow . . . "
—Armstrong

ARMSTRONG: But it isn't dry! How could you call the first Iditarod sled race to carry diphtheria vaccine to remote Alaskan villages dry? Or Neil Armstrong's first step onto the moon? Or Sojourner Truth's electrifying speech to the first women's rights convention? The stories in our history are dramatic and moving, and they are about people with passions to follow or puzzles to solve.

People think history is dry because they haven't been given stories. But that's what history is—it's stories about things that happened sometime before today to people we won't have a chance to meet in any other way. If you take out the narrative momentum and the characters, you'll kill the story and it will be a lifeless thing. Keep the human touch and the forward velocity and you cannot fail to capture an audience.

AUTHORLINK: You write both fiction and nonfiction—do you prefer one over the other? Is one easier to write than the other? Seems fiction gives you a certain freedom, yet nonfiction gives you the security of a pre-determined story.

ARMSTRONG: Lately I have preferred nonfiction—I take it as a challenge to turn what too many people think is dry raw data into a delightful reading experience. I also love puzzles—crossword puzzles, anagrams, anything where I have to figure out how things fit together to make sense—and I think of writing nonfiction as a puzzle-solving process. I take a big awkward pile of stuff and make an elegant shape with it. What do I do with this clumsy bit sticking out here and not fitting nicely?

With fiction you simply don't make up things that don't fit (or at least I don't) so you don't have to figure out how to make it work in spite of the gawky thing that slightly smells and doesn't stand up straight, but has to be invited to the party anyway. Does that make sense? Yes, you do have to be selective with the information you include, but often there are inconvenient facts that are simply too important to ignore, and you have to make the narrative work as a drama in spite of it.

AUTHORLINK: Then there's historical fiction, sort of a blend of fiction and nonfiction. What's the key to writing compelling—and, in your case, award-winning—historical fiction?

ARMSTRONG: I think the key to writing compelling historical fiction is being able to include all the things that the historians don't bother to mention—the flies, the peaches, the new clothes for the very first time, the way the horses breathe after drawing a wagon up a long hill, the way lye soap stings. I think we read fiction for the experience of living in a different life for a space of time. If the texture of that life isn't there, it feels lifeless.

One of the things I do while writing historical fiction is try to create a complete sensory replica of the scene in my imagination: what do I see, what do I smell, where is the light coming from, what mechanical or animal sounds do I hear, what am I stepping on, how fast can I move through this space, what will my response be if it's very cold or very hot out, how clean are my hands? The answers to these questions may not literally appear in the fiction, but they will inform it. They are what allow me to inhabit the world of the story

" I don't remember ever not
wanting to write books, so every
step I ever took was to pursue
that dream."
—Armstrong

ARMSTRONG: Part of my family mythology is that one day in first grade Jennifer came home from school and declared her intention to become an author. I don't remember ever not wanting to write books, so every step I ever took was to pursue that dream. It's like asking what steps I took to become 45 years old. It's just what I did without thinking there was an alternative.

AUTHORLINK: What was your first published book? How did it come to be published? How long did it take to find a publisher for it?

ARMSTRONG: My first published book was a paperback teen romance called Private Eyes. I'm sure it was awful, but then I wasn't far beyond my own teen years when I wrote it. I'd been working in NYC just after college for a book packager, and when I quit the job to move upstate and be "An Author" I wrote for the paperback romance line the company packaged. I then began writing Sweet Valley High books on a regular basis. What a great apprenticeship it was! My entry into full-time writing was swift and smooth. I was supporting myself as a writer by the time I was 26.

AUTHORLINK: Does a children's author's career have a momentum—one book deal leads to another? And is it typical to place books with a variety of publishers, or do you stick with one house for awhile then move on?

ARMSTRONG: When I began my career I had no idea what a career might look like, so I did a little bit of everything. I was very prolific and wrote book after book—there was no way for a single publisher to deal with everything I wrote, so I ended up with books all over the place. I'd say I had momentum—momentum born of fear of going broke—that kept me moving forward at a furious clip.

Recently I realized that I was no longer 25 years old and that I had enough books in print to take a deep breath and slow down a little. When I say I was supporting myself as a writer by 26, it was by writing, on average, ten books a year.

AUTHORLINK: That's amazingly prolific—how do you organize your time?

ARMSTRONG: I have no self-discipline. For most of my adult life I have never had to have a "real job" because I was able to write quickly enough to have a tremendous output. Facility and fluency mean that when I do sit down to write it doesn't involve a lot of nail biting and rewriting. I sit down and write what I want to write and get back to the pool, or the garden, or the bridge game, or whatever.

I don't mean that to sound arrogant. It's a kind of trick, like juggling. It looks hard until you learn how to do it, and then it's easy. Yes, in addition to facility and fluency I also have style and intellect, so the things that I write quickly have a lot of substance. Oh, this does sound amazingly conceited, but it simply is the case. So organizing my time is a fairly natural process.

Writing nonfiction means I do a lot of research, which mainly means reading lots of books. I like reading books. This has never seemed to me to be a "work" task that requires organizing. Things I don't like to do—balancing the checkbook, cleaning behind the refrigerator—I simply do not do, so I don't have to organize my time to accomplish the things I want to do. I only do the things I want to do.

I suspect a lot of people spend their time on things they think they're supposed to do, but in truth really don't have to, and then find they don't have time for the things they enjoy. For me, writing books is one of the many things I do that brings me joy. Self-discipline usually means forcing yourself to do something you wouldn't otherwise do, else why would you need the discipline?

Now, someone will object and say that he or she has to do X, Y or Z in order to pay the bills. Well, did you incur those bills? Were those things you wanted? The house, the car, the kids' braces, whatever? If so, why do you object to paying for them? If you didn't want to pay for them, it would have been better not to incur the debt and turn yourself into a drudge. When people know what they want, and why they want it (and what they don't want and why), work becomes a pleasure and there is no real difficulty making it happen.

ARMSTRONG: I'm not so sure about this inspiration thing while in the process of working on a book. It always feels more methodical than that. On a book like this I accumulate a lot of facts, create a sort of gestalt in my imagination, and then let 'er rip. By that I mean that I accumulate enough information (and with history this is a very cumulative process from one project to another) so that I can inhabit the world of the story I want to tell. Then all I have to do is describe it as if I'm living it.

For other projects, inspiration is usually something I have met along the road. My wanderings (both literal and figurative) have taken me to a lot of places, and I have encountered many story ideas in the process. These ideas then take up residence in my imagination and sooner or later I take them out and see what's what.

AUTHORLINK: You've won many awards. Do you feel the pressure of writing another award-winning title each time you embark on a new project?

ARMSTRONG: I wouldn't call it pressure. The awards are always a surprise and a delight, like finding a four-leaf clover when you trip and fall on the lawn while you're thinking about something else. Every time I cross the lawn I don't say to myself, gosh, I hope I don't fall down, but if I do I hope I find a four-leaf clover. If you sit down on the lawn with the express intent of finding a four-leaf clover you can never find one. Once a book is finished and I can take an objective look at it I might say to myself, hmm, that looks like a possible four-leaf clover patch. By the way, the number of books I have published that haven't won awards exceeds the number of books I've published that have, so odds are that when I write a book it won't win anything. Best not to think about it, really.

AUTHORLINK: What's the best part of being a children's author? The worst?

ARMSTRONG: Best part is the privilege of being the author of a child's first favorite book. The worst part is ignorance of the general public about what being a children's book author means. How many times have I said, "No, I don't start with a moral and write a story to fit!"? AAAAGGGGHHHHH!

AUTHORLINK: What advice would you give aspiring children's authors?

ARMSTRONG: Don't try to figure out what children want to read. Just write what you like. Either there is a market for it or there isn't, but trying to chase a trend will not lead you to happiness.