Lois Lowry

By Lisa Rogers

Children always ask writers how they get their ideas for stories, and itÕs a good question: theyÕre wanting to know whether they might be able to write stories of their own someday.

       Newbery Medal-winning author Lois Lowry shared the genesis of what has become a trilogyÑThe Giver, Gathering Blue, and the newly-published MessengerÑwith a packed audience in the Wakelin Room of the Wellesley Free Library on Saturday, May 22. The visit was sponsored by the Wellesley Booksmith.

       ÒThereÕs always a period of time when IÕve finished a book and I havenÕt started on the next book,Ó Lowry said, when she canÕt imagine how she will have another idea. ÒThen always an idea appears.Ó

       Lowry can pinpoint the events leading up to her decision to take on the theme of memory. It was 1992, and her parents were living in a Virginia nursing home. Every six weeks, Lowry would fly to Virginia from her Beacon Hill home. Her mother, blind, unable to walk, and failing, had a sharp memory. Instead of wanting to catch up with LowryÕs news, she wanted to revisit her own memories and tell stories, as if she wanted to make sure they were not lost with her death. One of the stories she retold that day was one Lowry recounted in her first novel, Silent Boy. It was 1912, and her grandmother was cutting her motherÕs hair, on the steps of their home. Suddenly, they heard a loud sound, and as LowryÕs mother unexpectedly turned her head, her grandmother snipped her ear with the shears. The sound turned out to be LowryÕs grandfather chugging home with their first automobile. But that happy memory turned out to lead to other, tragic memories, including the early death of LowryÕs older sister.                        

       During the same visit, Lowry visited her father, who was physically hale but losing his memory. As they looked over a photo album, her father asked her to identify a young woman.  The woman was LowryÕs oldest sister. He asked ÒWhat happened to her?Ó and when Lowry said that she had died, it was as if he were learning of the death, with all of the shock and accompanying grief, for the first time.

       On her way home, Lowry thought, ÒWhat if I could give my mother a shot and she wouldnÕt have to remember my sisterÕs death? By the time I got home I had the idea to write about a community which had found a way to manipulate and control memory.Ó

       Children also want to know how a writer approaches the writing process. Lowry first creates a character and decides whether it is a boy or a girl. She finds it easier to write about girls, but also knows what boysÕ lives are like: she had two sons and has three grandsons. Next, she chooses an age for the character. She likes the tween age of 12 because it is a time of transition; children have acquired some maturity but still have a realm of possibilities in their future. The name comes next, and Lowry says the character himself tells her his name.

       Each book begins with an introduction to the main character, along with the sense that something is Òslightly askew,Ó something that sets up the problem that makes up the book.

       Unlike authors such as J.K. Rowling, who plans her books out completely before writing them, Lowry creates the plot as she goes along, moving toward the resolution of the unease generated in the first few sentences.        

       Lowry purposely let The Giver end inconclusively, saying that Òit just felt right.Ó She wasnÕt planning for a sequel. But the book, she says, Òtook on a life beyond that which I anticipated.Ó With the Newbery award, The Giver acquired an adult audience. Readers also challenged the book, and it remains the 14th most challenged book in the U.S. Even the FBI got in touch with Lowry.

       ÒKids were unsatisfied with the ambiguous ending,Ó she says. Eventually, ÒI began to imagine a community in the future that had regressed.Ó This time, a girl would be the main character. And as she approached the ending of Gathering Blue, she decided to make a connection with Jonas of The Giver. HeÕs not referred to by name, although that was how the manuscript originally read. Instead, Lowry limited the connection to a description of JonasÕ blue eyes.

       Seven years later, she decided to write a third book that would connect the main characters of the two previous novels, and that became Messenger. ÒI feel this book concludes the trilogy,Ó Lowry says.

       Jonathan, a Hardy fifth-grader, told Lowry that his teacher, Susan Bright Belanger, wanted to know whether there was any significance to the covers of these three books. Publishers usually create the cover without consulting with the author, but this was not the case with The Giver, Gathering Blue, or Messenger. Each was created from a photograph taken by the author, who, like her father, had been a professional photographer. The photograph on the dust jacked of The Giver is of an artist she knew; that of the girl on Gathering Blue was the daughter of the Swedish consul to the United States, whose family had hired her to do a portrait; and the boy on MessengerÕs jacket is a boy from Maine. Initially, she had asked the boy to bring a puppy so they could be photographed together, but the puppy was too large to fit into his jacket, as she had described in the book. Lowry went back and edited her description of the puppy to fit the one she photographed, but the publisher chose to use only the photograph of the boy. LowryÕs website includes the photo she had hoped to use.

       Lowry works every day in an office in her home, with a goal of writing 10 pages each day, and rewrites as she proceeds with the book. She prints out her work and reads it aloud, then makes more revisions. Lowry has written 31 books since 1977, when she wrote A Summer to Die, a fictionalized version of her family life and sisterÕs death, and she currently is working on a sequel to Gooney Bird Greene, which was published in 2002 and is about a second grader who likes to tell incredible stories.