“I write for the story. It dictates how it wants to be told, what will happen. The trick is to listen. The rest […] will follow naturally.” —Sherri L. Smith
On Wednesday, February 4, Sherri L. Smith will teach “Drama in the Details: A Day in the Life in Historical Fiction.” In this class, students will learn how to bring historical fiction to life through the small details of everyday living. Through a series of writing exercises and discussions, students will examine historical worldbuilding, dialogue, pitfalls and assumptions, how to research details, and more!
Sherri L. Smith is the author award-winning fiction and nonfiction books for young people, including the 2021 Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Golden Kite Award winner The Blossom and the Firefly and the California Book Awards Gold Medalist Flygirl. Her novels appear on multiple state reading lists and have been named Amelia Bloomer, Junior Library Guild, Children’s Book Council, and American Library Association Best Books for Young People selections. She also writes comics, including Wonder Woman, Bart Simpson Comics, and James Cameron’s Avatar. Sherri holds certificates in the Art of Archetypal Fairy Tale Analysis, Enchantivism, and Applied Mythology. She currently teaches at Hamline University. Her latest nonfiction book with Elizabeth Wein is American Wings: Chicago’s Pioneering Aviators and the Race for Equality in the Sky (Putnam). Her graphic novel Pearl (Graphix/Scholastic), with art by Christine Norrie, received five-starred reviews. Her upcoming novel, Candace, the Universe, and Everything, brings together three generations of Black girls in a story about friendship, wormholes, and interdimensional magpies. Learn more at www.sherrilsmith.com.
Here’s what Sherri had to share with us:
Who are your earliest influences? What people and books made you a writer?
My mother made me a writer because she taught me how to read. From there it was a steady diet of E.B. White, fairy tales, folklore, mythology, Lloyd Alexander, horse books, comic books, mystery novels, and basically anything I could get my eyes on. I used to read the backs of tissue boxes when that’s all that was around. As I got older, Virginia Woolf knocked my socks off in high school, as did Stephen King. I read a ton of science fiction and fantasy growing up. So there is no one source I would say is a major influence. Just the idea of telling stories. That was it. The way we create a new unreality to believe in just by reading or writing the right words in the right sequence. That’s magic.
What writing challenges have you faced? What have these challenges taught you about your process?
Somedays it’s really hard to put your butt in the seat and your eyes on the page. Somedays the world is too loud to hear your stories. I struggled a few years back, during COVID, when everything was changing all of the time. What I’ve learned from that is the old tortoise’s lesson: slow and steady wins the race. Pacing myself, making room for the work, reading to feed myself, all of those are important in keeping the pen to paper and doing your best.
From your perspective, what’s the most rewarding part about being a writer?
There are a lot of great things about being a writer, but the two that stand out are an inner reward and an outer one. The inner reward is when you are in the flow and the story is just happening. For all intents and purposes, it’s real and it’s now. That feels great. The outer reward is when a reader adds their own experience to the mix and comes back transformed. When they reach out and tell you that they were touched or felt seen because of something I wrote? That’s magic all over again.
Who do you write for?
I know people are often told to have a specific writer in mind. I mostly write for young people, so I do make some craft considerations based on this. But the truth is, first and foremost, I write for the story. It dictates how it wants to be told, what will happen. The trick is to listen. The rest—the audience, the revisions—will follow naturally.
What do you hope writers will learn from your course?
Writing history can feel like a burden of responsibility. You want to get it right, and unfortunately that can sometimes mean making it dry and textbook-ish. Or, conversely, some folks gallop through it and make it as contemporary as possible, which loses the reader because it doesn’t feel true. I hope that writers come away from my class with a better grasp on how to balance fact and fiction, how to breathe life into the past and make it relevant for today while also illuminating what our forebears experienced. We are part of one big, long-lived human family. If we can remember that, maybe we’ll do okay moving forward.
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Thanks, Sherri!
Click here to learn more about Sherri’s upcoming class.
