After delighting and entertaining a packed house at Clowes Hall, Lois Lowry met with a much smaller group of Butler students for a personal Q & A.
Many MFA students are interested in the world of publishing, and the beloved children’s writer began with a warning: “a writer worrying about publishing is like a centipede worrying about his legs until he can’t walk,” she said. She did humor the students with stories of censorship and her biggest surprises in the publishing world. Her biggest personal change has been technology. Her first novel was written in 1976 on a typewriter. She kept all of her manuscripts in an old refrigerator to protect against fire. “Now, they are in the cloud,” she joked. The Giver was the first book she wrote on a computer (though later she learned it was not actually a computer, but a word processor).
Of course modern technology has it’s advantages with editing, but Lowry admits it also makes it so easy to make changes, it’s hard for a writer to stop. “You have to know when to quit. You’ll always think you can do something better,” she said.
She spoke extensively about her audience, usually young children. She told the MFA students the same lesson she tells young writers when she visits elementary school classrooms, “The important characters are the ones who make choices. Stories are about choices.”
Although Lowry said her favorite novel is usually the one she has just written, there is one particular passage she dearly loves from Rabble Starky, published in 1986. The main character is listening to a story and forming images in her mind but is aware that everyone else is making a different, unique picture of their own. Lowry says, “I think that’s so true. Each reader reads a book which is different than the book I saw when I wrote it. It’s a wonderful creative partnership. Reader and Writer together create these books.”