35-1 Kurtz
September/October 2006
A Passion for Research
Jane Kurtz
What a thrill it was to say to one student after another, "Back to the library! I know you can find that detail if you dig."
Dorcas Hand’s comment that much of her school’s curriculum "does not inspire joy or persistence in research" certainly spotlights my own experiences with research in school. In fact, I graduated from college without knowing how to use the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. During my agonizing, arduous climb up the mountain toward authorhood and book publication, I would sometimes sit hunched in libraries, moving my finger down those columns, whispering to myself, "Whoa. Imagine the things people have written about in magazines and journals!" Almost every itch of curiosity a writer could possibly have could be scratched by the articles catalogued in those green volumes.
When I taught writing classes at the University of North Dakota, I noticed that every time I said the word research, my students’ minds seemed to zip to The Research Paper. They didn’t recognize that research is one way (along with memory and observation) that writers ferret out vivid details—those juicy bits author John Gardner called the "life blood of fiction," also the life blood of gripping nonfiction.
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Before I visited AOS, I wondered if I could help a middle school student come to understand why I chose to read a 377-page tome, How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species (University of Chicago Press) just so I could do a revision and write the author note for a 32-page picture book, Water Hole Waiting (Greenwillow/HarperCollins)?
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Or why I read every book by or about turn-of-the-century reformer Frances Willard before placing her as a character inside my 122-page historical novel for young readers, Bicycle Madness (Holt)?
When I headed toward this 4-day author visit, I was curious to see if I, as part of a team with the librarians and teachers of AOS, could persuade students to see research that way…to feel a bit of my passion for research, the thrill a detective must feel on a hunt for clues.
Middle school students have a multitude of reasons to be squirmy, only a few of them related to school. But I was thrilled to see the passion the library staff has for research, the vision of this project, and the involvement (always and inevitably a work in progress) of the teachers and students.
Each grade level presented its own challenges as I considered how students might introduce readers to what they had unearthed, but I found myself saying some of the same things over and over. "Zoom in." "Slow down." "Pay attention to the details that interest you, because they are also likely to interest your reader." "Use the five senses." "Surprise your reader." "Follow the fiction-writer’s mantra to ‘show, not tell,’ especially in planting clues about time and place."
Every time I watched the students at work, sat with them in quick conferences, read their writing, I learned. Next time, I adjusted. I tried to use the authority that comes with being a published author to convince students to wrestle, to not be easily satisfied, to explore a bit of the mystery about how one human’s black marks on a page can reach across time, culture, and geography to make another human being laugh, cry, or shiver with terror.
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Along the way, I also tried to offer peeks into my own explorations. For students writing biography, I pointed to my easy-to-read biography, Mister Bones: Dinosaur Hunter (Simon & Schuster). [image] "Smooth Barnum Brown was a charming, dapper guy. He went climbing over rocks in a topcoat and a tie. He loved ballroom dancing, but he wasn’t dancing now. He was digging in the dirt. What was he looking for? His wife once called it rainbows, but it wasn’t in the sky." I noted that a) writers have to know a great deal before choosing where to begin, b) writers search for pithy, interesting words to capture character and set historical context, c) writers know that planting questions in a reader’s mind is a good thing.
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For students using fictional techniques to introduce events from the past, I read aloud the first sentence from The Feverbird’s Claw (Greenwillow/HarperCollins),[image] my fantasy novel with an underpinning of research into how ancient civilizations worked. "It was only because Moralin happened to turn her head at the right half-instant that she saw her death coming straight at her." Students already knew the importance of nudging readers to read on, but we spent time talking about techniques that compel page turning.
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Then we turned to the opening paragraph from my middle grade novel, The Storyteller’s Beads (Harcourt), [image] set in the 1980s when war and religious persecution drove thousands of Ethiopian Jews out of the highlands of Ethiopia. "Sahay leaped up, tangling the thread she had been so carefully smoothing. The pounding of bare feet made her stomach chew on itself with fright. That sound! It was like the terrible day of running a year ago….She pushed the thought away and stooped through the doorway of the house, still clutching the spindle from her spinning." The students and I discussed clues that show the story doesn’t take place in the U.S. in 2006. I asked if they could weave such clues into their opening paragraphs.
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Many couldn’t. Why? Their research hadn’t led them to poke into enough dark crevasses. What a thrill it was to say to one student after another, "Back to the library! I know you can find that detail if you dig." What a double thrill to see so many students who looked invested enough in what they’d already written to do just that!
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Jane Kurtz Award-winning children's book author Jane Kurtz has taught writing at the elementary, secondary, and university levels and is now a full-time writer and speaker. Her own research has ended up in historical fiction for young readers, a fantasy novel, easy readers, picture books, and articles.
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