Author: Alex Steele

Hey, this is part of a series on writers who kicked down a metaphorical door with their writing. Like Marie Curie with science and Little Richard with music…

There’s a story I like about a kid riding the subway to visit his mother who’s in prison. It’s a children’s picture book called Milo Imagines the World, written by Matt de la Peña (illustrated by Christian Robinson).

That’s right. It’s a children’s picture book.

Who told de la Peña that he could write a picture book about a kid going to visit his mother in prison? Yes, I know picture books can be sophisticated and layered and a bit dark. But still…

It’s brilliant storytelling. During the subway ride, Milo (the boy) draws pictures of the people he sees and imagines what their lives are like. For example, he sees a smartly dressed boy and imagines he lives a fancy life, but his perceptions are shaken when he sees this boy at the prison, also visiting his mom. Milo realizes first impressions may not be so accurate.

This is what de la Peña does. He writes books about kids who aren’t typically represented in children’s literature. At a conference, a teacher told him her school doesn’t carry his books, good as they are, because their students aren’t like his characters, and de la Peña asked how many wizards attend their school.

Another of de la Peña’s picture books, Last Stop on Market Street (a Newbery medal winner, also illustrated by Robinson), is about a kid riding the bus with his grandmother to help her work in a soup kitchen in a rough part of town, and the kid learns to see beauty in even the most scarred of environments.

De la Peña’s picture book Love, more tone poem than story (illustrated by Loren Long), has a page spread where we see a kid hiding under the piano—the dad looking disheveled, the mom crying, a glass of liquor in sight. The publisher wanted to cut this image, but de la Peña insisted it stay.

De la Peña also writes YA novels, like Ball Don’t Lie, about a foster kid walking the mean streets of LA. Here he is…

I almost forgot to tell you about Sticky… How he keeps his raisin-brown hair cropped close. Faded up on the sides with some fancy-ass clippers he snatched from Macy’s. How he’s long and thin like somebody’s stick figure sketch, scissored off lined paper and Scotch-taped to a basketball court.

The words in de la Peña’s books vibrate with the personality of the people we’re meeting.

Matt used to teach at Gotham and was good enough to be a guest at our last Children’s Book Conference. And, man, he’s a champion to kids everywhere, many of them seeing themselves in a book for the first time.  

Alex Steele,

Gotham President

This past weekend was the Gotham Writers Nonfiction Conference. I just love a meeting of the minds, which this certainly was.

In the panel Tricky Topics, Jerald Walker said, “There’s a level of discomfort that you have to transcend if your work is going to be as valuable as you want it to be.” Melissa Petro followed with, “I first think: No one can ever know this. The second I hear myself articulate this, I know that is a story I must share.”

In the panel Platform Building, Elissa Bassist said, “When something is not fun and excruciating then it’s time to quit. And that took me 15 years of therapy to learn.”

The featured author Maggie Smith (the memoirist, not actress) who wrote a memoir about her divorce said, “I let go of the idea that I needed to be the good guy.”

Next up is our Children’s Books Conference, coming your way September 2024.

A few weeks ago, Gotham teacher Susan Breen and I attended the Emirates Festival of Literature in Dubai. Susan led a novel writing boot camp, and she’s as good on that side of the world as on this side.

I did two presentations: 7 Keys to Writing Excellence and The Writer’s Mind. (That’s me in the pic.) My 7 Keys were Awareness, Senses, Scenes, Selectivity, Run Free, Revise, and Stick to It. The Writer’s Mind—soon to be a Gotham course—shows you how to use your mind in surprising ways to make your writing deeper and richer and to make the process a bit easier.

Hey, I will be doing a free one-hour presentation on The Writer’s Mind at the P&T Knitwear bookstore in NYC, Saturday March 23, 2 pm ET. You can RSVP here, but there’s usually room if you just want to show up. I’d be thrilled to see some of you there.

Anyway, the Emirates Festival was quite the mind-blowing meeting of minds. At one point, I was having breakfast in the hotel hosting the event. Alone at my table, I was reading Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz, who was sitting a few tables away, and I was occasionally texting on my iPhone, which was co-created by Anthony Fadell, who was sitting a few tables away in another direction.

I let these two gentlemen have their breakfast in peace, but I did spend time watching presentations and chatting with various participants, such as Francis J. Kong, a thought leader in the business world, and the abstract artist Fatma Lootah. My mind was whirling much of the time.

So, yes, get out there and meet with other minds. Maybe even in a Gotham class, of which there are many coming up.

Alex Steele

Gotham President

Hey, this is part of a series on writers who kicked down a metaphorical door with their writing. Like Marie Curie with science and Little Richard with music…

Tom Wolfe was a newspaper reporter with a hankering to liven up nonfiction writing, then considered the sober sibling to freewheeling fiction. In 1962, Wolfe got hired to write for Esquire on the hot rod culture in Southern California. He hung out in the milieu, did his usual expert reporting, but couldn’t find his way into writing the article.

The day before the deadline, the editor told Wolfe to just send his notes and he’d find someone to forge them into something usable. Wolfe stayed up all night, pouring out his notes, ignoring all conventions of journalistic writing. Like this:

Dick Dale, rigged out in Byronic silk shirt and blue cashmere V-neck sweater and wraparound sunglasses, singer’s mufti U.S.A., has one cord with a starter button, while a bouffant nymphet from Newport, named Sherma, Sherma of the Capri pants, has the other one.

The editor liked what he saw and published the piece pretty much as is, with the title: “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” Readers loved it. 

From there, Wolfe went hot-rodding through nonfiction, penning intensely researched nonfiction books and articles (“Radical Chic,” The Right Stuff, etc.) that leaped to life with high-octane prose that gave readers a wildly entertaining time. From The Right Stuff:

Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot… coming over the intercom… with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless!—it’s reassuring)… the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because ‘it might get a little choppy’…

Wolfe (and some cohorts) invented the so-called New Journalism, where nonfiction grabbed the license to use the literary pizazz of fiction, their work influencing such current nonfiction writers as Isabel Wilkerson and David Grann.

Wolfe dressed like a dandy, with white bespoke suits, and he loved poking sacred cows, as well as overusing exclamation marks!!!!!!!

In 1987, he topped his own derring-do by writing a novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, that was like a piece of journalism turned into a rushing subway train rife with greed, vanity, racism, and the race for status in New York City. I remember riding the subway around that time and about a third of the people in any given car were reading the book—reading what was happening right around us.

It seemed Wolfe was having a grand time with his attire and writing, but he found them both exhausting. Kicking doors down isn’t easy. Nor should it be.