Farewell to a Beloved YA Writer
Once upon a lifetime ago, I taught junior high English. Among my many challenges: trying to encourage 12- and 13-year-old students to sit still long enough to read a book. Talk about tilting at windmills. Nevertheless, author Theodore Taylor’s book, THE CAY (required reading back then) almost invariably captured their interest.
Taylor, an exemplar for today’s YA writers, died this week. Here, a few excerpts from his obituary:
ON FINDING INSPIRATION: “The writing usually began with a haunting, a real-life incident so arresting that author Theodore Taylor could not shake it from his mind. At the typewriter he used that unforgettable event as a cornerstone, the foundation of a world created on the page.”
ON CHARACTERIZATION: “The fiction that resulted rang so true that for decades young readers sent Taylor letters inquiring about his characters, most often those of his novel “The Cay”: a bigoted boy named Phillip stranded on an island during World War II with Timothy, a compassionate black man upon whom the boy’s life depends.”
ON HIS AUDIENCE: “Above all I try not to ‘write down’ to the young reader,” he once said.
ON WRITING: “I’ll get into a novel knowing something about the beginning, knowing less about the middle and knowing nothing about the end,” he told a Times reporter in 1997. “I don’t want to know anything about the end until I get there, and I hope I’ll be able to recognize the end when I get there.”
HIS LEGACY: “Even this week, as Taylor lay dying, mail arrived from young readers of that 1969 novel, a now classic work that helped set the standard for young-adult literature.”
If you haven’t yet treated yourself to anything written by Taylor, I adding THE CAY to your own list of required reading.