Carolyn MacCullough Writes
For the Teenager Inside of Her

Drawing The Ocean
(Roaring Brook Press, 2006)
by Carolyn MacCullough
ISBN-13: 9781596430921
Buy this book
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When Carolyn MacCullough was a kid, she wanted to be a writer – and a veterinarian, ballerina, pilot, and princess in a tower. After earning a BA in Theatre from Grinnell College, though, she set her sights on an acting career and headed for the bright lights of Broadway. Acceptance into the New School’s creative writing program drastically altered MacCullough’s course; now she’s the award-winning author of a trio of young adult novels, all published by Roaring Brook Press.

Her most recent, Drawing The Ocean (2006), is the poignant tale of teenaged Sadie’s struggle to fit in at a new school after the death of her twin brother, Ollie, who appears to her often. Like Falling Through Darkness (2005) and Stealing Henry (2005) before it, the novel is an elegant showcase for MacCullough’s lean, detail-rich writing, which Kirkus Reviews has dubbed “visually evocative” and “finely crafted fiction – plainspoken, lyrical and sad.”

“I write for the teenager inside me—or rather the teenager I wish I could have been,” MacCullough says of her prose. “Someone who was smarter and braver and willing to take more risks than I ever did while in high school.”

AUTHORLINK: So how does one go from acting to writing for young people?

MacCULLOUGH: Well, the stage fright part really did in my acting career! Actually, I was auditioning for a solid year in New York without much luck. Somewhere during that same year, I applied to the MFA program at the New School. And of course, ‘when it rains it pours’ came true in this case. I got the lead in a one-act play (um . . . a little ways off Broadway, but still, I was pretty excited) where I got to cry a lot over some bad date and eat apple turnovers. But then I also got my acceptance letter from the New School. And the play and the program started in the same week. So I thought about it for a little while; eating apple turnovers or reading the literature I loved best and trying to write some of it. The latter won out and I’ve never been sorry.

AUTHORLINK: You earned your MFA in Creative Writing for Children. Has that experience made you a better writer? How?

MacCULLOUGH: It turned me into a much more critical reader, especially of my own work, which in turn made me a better editor of my own work.

MacCULLOUGH: I was fortunate enough to have Deborah Brodie as my teacher. At the time she was working at Penguin Putnam but sometime in my last semester, she became the executive editor at Roaring Brook Press. And she really believed in my thesis project from the start. That thesis project became my first novel which I sent to her after graduation and which she accepted.

MacCULLOUGH: I think it was the structure of the story—she always compared it to a kaleidoscope because it shifts between present and past so frequently. I sent it to her shortly after I finished the program, crossed my fingers, and tried to deal with the very real possibility that she wouldn’t want it. But then she called me on the phone to tell me that they wanted to buy the book and honestly, I was so excited that I felt sick. I had to put my head down for a minute because I was dizzy. It was an incredible feeling.

MacCULLOUGH: A lot, a lot, a lot of revising!! I’m one of those writers who gets an idea, starts writing it and then halfway through characters change genders, they become murderers and poets and liars before the story morphs into what it was meant to be all along. For example, Drawing the Ocean started out with a very unreliable narrator who may or may not have been a pyromaniac, haunted by the ghost of her twin brother who she definitely thinks is real. By the time I finished the novel, the narrator is very reliable and fire doesn’t figure into the book at all! Luckily, I like revision—it’s my favorite part of the writing process when you have the bones of the story in place and then comes the finer brushwork.

AUTHORLINK: What's your creative process? Do story ideas come to you fast and furiously? How do you know which ideas warrant further action? And what is that action? Outline? Mental percolation while you walk the dog? Set fingers free on the keyboard? How long do your books take to write, start to finish?

MacCULLOUGH: I tend to think of characters first before plot. Long before I have a firm plot in my head, I can hear the character. Then I tend to put a character in certain situations just to see what he/she will do. If an idea is strong enough, it won’t let me go. It won’t let me sleep, even! And yes, I find I spend a lot of time pre-writing—which means taking walks, baking brownies, just sitting and staring off into space, trying to get the words right before letting them come out. As for how long my books take to write—hmmm, well that depends entirely on the deadline! I find that I work better under pressure—way better.

AUTHORLINK: With all apologies to John Denver, in Drawing The Ocean you fill up our senses from art-loving Sadie’s very first words: “The sky on this side of the country looks different, less gauzy, and I wonder if I can get it down on canvas or if it will elude me the way the copper-blue of the California skies did for so long. I’m not ready to try for color yet, so I leaf through my sketchbook until I come to a blank page. I take a breath, run my fingers down the smooth white space before making the first charcoal marks.” That incredible sensory detail – any tips for finding it, using it, making it work?

MacCULLOUGH: I teach creative writing and I tell my students that they need to always think about how to phrase things in a way that is totally unexpected, but somehow will feel right to the reader. (At this point, they usually look at me and sarcastically mutter, “oh, sure, we’ll just wave our magic writing wands and accomplish this”). So then I tell them to keep their eyes open at all times. Take a walk and notice what’s happening all around you. Start jotting things down in a journal. Pretty soon, you’ll find that little things catch at your attention all the time. The way a plastic bag has woven itself into the front wheel of a bicycle and is making a “rrrrp” noise as the wind blows; the curved line of an old lady’s back as she bends down to pick up a scrap of paper. These little details/descriptions are key because they pull your reader into the story that much more.

MacCULLOUGH: Sure, he was some work. I always thought of him in terms of movement—to me, he was so energetic when he was alive, so after death I always pictured him moving or alighting in places that would have been hard to reach while alive.

AUTHORLINK: What has surprised or thrilled you most about your road to author-hood? What has been most challenging?

MacCULLOUGH: That writing doesn’t get any easier! That always surprises me, although it shouldn’t by now—I don’t know why I expect it to. Every book that I write feels like the hardest book I’ve ever written. The biggest challenge for me is to constantly try and write in the freshest way possible and to create characters who are not extensions of me, but who are separate beings who do things and say things that I (in most cases) wouldn’t do or say. But if that’s the greatest challenge, that’s also the most exciting part of writing—when I can bend words and make a character and a situation come fully to life. That’s pretty thrilling.

Learn more about Carolyn MacCullough and her books at www.carolynmaccullough.com.