No Map, Great Trip: A Young Writer’s Road to Page One by Paul Fleischman

About a month ago, on a trip to Cedar City, Utah for the Shakespeare festival, Jim and I stopped at a bookstore in town and I happened upon a copy of a novel for children that I had loved as a boy, Mr. Mysterious and Company by Sid Fleischman. I bought it, read it again, and being curious about Sid Fleischman looked him up at my local library and learned that he had written about 40 children’s novels (I had only read the first ten) as well as novels for adults and screenplays and a memoir called The Abracadabra Kid. I put a request in for that book and when it came in, read it. I knew that Sid Fleischman had lived in Santa Monica, the town I grew up in and was curious to learn more details about his life there. I enjoyed the autobiography but it didn’t have much about Santa Monica. But I learned that his son, Paul Fleischman, ten years older than me, had also become a children’s book author, and had also, like his father, written a memoir. I hoped his book might have more details about growing up in Santa Monica. I found Paul Fleischman’s book in our library system, requested it, and read it today when it came in. It’s a very quick read.

Paul’s book starts with him 10 years old in 1962, the year I was born. Unfortunately, his book, like his father’s doesn’t give much detail about life in Santa Monica. It looks like I was wrong about the family living in Ocean Park. There’s a photo of a business card that suggests their home address was 305 Tenth Street, on the North side of town. That means he would have attended a different elementary school and junior high from me. We would have been in the same high school, there’s only one in Santa Monica, but, of course, he was ten years ahead of me.

The book is intended as advice and encouragement for young writers, so Paul’s experiences are always framed as foundational lessons learned that informed the books he would eventually write. I haven’t read any of his books so the titles didn’t mean anything to me. Still, his experiences were fun to read. He built a short wave radio from a kit as a kid and had fun picking up radio stations from around the world. His family bought a printing press, thus the hand made business card with the home address. He and a friend rode bicycles all the way to Isla Vista and back as teenagers. He and some friends started their own satirical newspaper in high school as an alternative to the official high school paper. He played the piano as a kid, and thought for a time to be a composer. He and his friends invented their own games because they weren’t athletic enough to play the official sports with the jocks. Surprisingly, for the son of a writer and a would-be writer himself, it doesn’t sound like he was much of a reader until he picked up a copy of The Grapes of Wrath as a teenager and was hooked.

He spends a few years at Berkeley. He takes a long bike ride up to Vancouver and then a train ride across Canada. He takes a few years off from college and lives in New Hampshire, then finishes college in Albuquerque. Only as he graduates does he finally settle on writing as a career.

Throughout the book Fleischman inserts chapters where he gives straightforward advice to writers on topics such as research, whether to make an outline, brainstorming ideas, writing fiction from your own life, and so on.

It’s a quick, entertaining read. The writing encouragement is welcome. I continue to feel a familiar fondness for the Fleischman family.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.