“I didn’t think he’d really come when I wrote to him,” said third-grader Henry Wilmont of his invitation to Gregory Maguire, author of about 30 children’s books and the best-selling novel Wicked, on which the Broadway musical of the same name is based. For his letter-to-an-author assignment in language arts, Henry invited the Concord author to come and speak to his class. “I’m so happy that he did come,” said Henry. “It’s cool.” The third- and fourth-grade classes, teachers, and administrators who heard Maguire speak at Volunteers Hall on Thurday, March 19, agreed. “Varied” is the word Maguire uses to best describe his work, and he said it applies to his own character as well. During his talk, he took the audience back and forth from the “serious and philosophical to the insane and goofy.”

Will Thompson speaks with Wicked author Gregory Maguire at a presentation he gave in Volunteers Hall of the library for third- and fourth-graders from the elementary school. (Photos by Lisa Aciukewicz)

“What I love to do is go around the country and talk to children about writing,” said Maguire. “I can talk loud, I can talk fast, and I’m a good liar.” He assured the group he wasn’t “lying” when he said that third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders are by far the best audience. Unlike annoyingly excitable first graders or aloof, nose-in-the-air grownups, he said, they have brains that have actually begun to function.

Maguire described his visit to an elementary school in Hollywood to talk to one of those “annoyingly excitable” first grades about a day in the life of a writer. When he entered the classroom, a girl in a big pink bow was at the front of the class, leading her peers in the exciting exercise of forming capital letters, the existence of which the class had just discovered. When Maguire told the class that he had come to talk to them about writing, pink bow retorted, “We know all about writing. See!” And she proudly showed him her capital letter writing. But, of course, Maguire had come to talk about real writing, writing stories.

His day as a writer, Maguire said, begins with waking up, getting up, going to the bathroom, taking off his pajamas (“Ooooooo!” from the audience). He goes into his study and turns on the computer. “I stare at my story. I stare at my story. Then my brain starts to wake up and soon my imagination is doing calisthenics.” Maguire said he usually writes about five pages of a story in the morning. In the afternoon he edits.

Aaron Hawksley, Greer Jarvis, Pilar Vellante, and Elizabeth Phillippe respond to one of Gregory Maguire’s outlandish tales.

“Who knows the definition of editing?” asked Maguire. The question was greeted by a sea of eager hands (proving the author’s earlier point about brains actually beginning to function). With lots of audience participation, Maguire established three steps to editing. Step one is to fix grammar, spelling, and punctuation so someone can read and understand your draft. Pointing out that it’s difficult to use the dictionary to find out how to spell something if you don’t know how to spell it, Maguire condoned the “time-honored way” of asking someone how to spell a word you don’t know. He pointed out that from his observation, “All over this great country fourth-grade boys are allergic to punctuation.” Periods are important, he said; they give readers a chance to catch their breath.

Step two is to see if the whole thing makes sense. Even if everything is spelled and punctuated perfectly, there could be problems. “I read every word aloud, with my pencil in my hand. My ear is smarter than my eye.” Maguire led the audience in a choral rendering of this mantra and had them repeat it at later points in his talk. Musing about how it is that the ear is so much smarter than the eye, he concluded that it’s because “ears stick out in the world, whereas eyes are sunk in.”

Step three: “I give my work to a friend.” Maguire ran through a scenario in which a friend points out to him that no one was having a birthday in chapter 19 of the story and yet the monster is blowing out candles on a cake. The only character in the chapter is the 99-year-old grandmother, but if it were her birthday, there would be so many candles the monster would catch on fire. These are story inconsistencies that only a friend can spot, he said. By giving your story to a friend, “good ideas grow even stronger,” added Maguire, flexing his muscles.

Getting back to that first-grader with the pink bow, Maguire said that when he asked her class what was the one thing they had learned about being a writer (holding on to his ears), the girl in the pink bow popped up and yelled out, “Waking up.”

“And it is,” said Maguire, surprising the audience after its murmurs of smug laughter at pink bow’s expense. He went on, “It’s peeling the dead skin off your eyes.” (This rated a nine on the gross-o-meter.) He told the students that he doesn’t like the idea of seeing writers as celebrities. Everyone is a writer, he said; everyone will use writing to solve problems in life.

Maguire said he started writing even before the third grade. His first story was a short, tragic tale entitled “Timothy the Cat” about his childhood nemesis, who attacked his ankles every morning and wouldn’t let go. The author had Timothy dead at the end of the three-sentence story, and in actuality the cat was dead two weeks later. Maguire said he remembers thinking, “I think I like writing stories.”

Drawing on a large sheet of paper, Maguire recreated his very early story,“The Hotel Bomb,” in order to explain that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In this case the beginning is a little house where Bob lives and some miles away, a 50-story hotel where his wife is staying. Maguire pointed out that every story has to have a problem and the earlier you get to it, the better. In this case the problem is a letter informing Bob that a bomb is about to explode and kill his wife. Between the beginning and the solution is “the big mess,” and here Bob survives such things as an earthquake and World War II bombers on his way to the hotel. He learns from the desk clerk that his wife is on the 50th floor, and, of course, the elevator isn’t working. When he arrives, panting, he finds his wife sitting on the bed reading a magazine and chewing gum. She says she thought the ticking sound was an electric mouse under the bed. Bob dives under the bed, picks up the bomb and hurls it out the window. The end.

To prove that he “wasn’t lying,” Maguire showed a number of slides of his young self writing and of his early stories and illustrations, all of which he organized and kept. Maguire talked about these products of his youth with affectionate humor. Using the slides as illustrations, he offered ideas about how to get started on a story. One idea is to cut out different characters and play with them, see how they interact and what problems arise. Maguire likes to put people in danger (it makes things more interesting), but “I like to save them in the nick of time.” While the common advice is to write about what you know, Maguire suggests writing about what you don’t know. His early stories such as “Episode in Rome,” “Grecian Nightmare,” and “Some Rise by Sin” show he followed his own advice. If your own story is starting to bore you, turn the page and have something more exciting happen. “So when John and Margaret are declaring their love to each other under a willow tree for the third time, put them in a circus as trapeze artists.”

In a question-and-answer period, a student asked what book had been the most difficult to write. “Wicked,” Maguire replied without hesitation, adding that it was an “eight-times-bigger idea” than any other of his books. He said he had always been intrigued with the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. He liked her; he was scared of her. “Her chin was like a shoe horn, but of all the characters, she was the only one who told the truth.” She became one of the main characters in his book, which he wrote in five months during 1992 and which has sold five million copies and been translated into other languages.

Asked if he had expected Maguire to be as funny as he was, Henry Wilmont immediately replied, “Yes.” His reading of Five Alien Elves, which prompted his invitation to Maguire, had obviously prepared him for the author’s truthful humor.