We tell stories — sitting around a kitchen table, on street corners, while driving along at high speeds.
Patricia McCormick, a journalist and best-selling author of three novels for teens, is serious about story-telling. She writes, she said, "to give voice to the experience of those who have been silenced."

McCormick held a writing workshop and spoke twice yesterday at the Berne-Knox-Westerlo secondary school and conducted a workshop with teens, parents, and teachers Tuesday at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Altamont.
"Parents are legitimately concerned about what their children are reading and listening to and bringing into their homes," she said. McCormick, a mother of two, said of a parent’s role, "You want to keep your kids young as long as possible."
"I hope all the books are compassionate," she said of her novels, adding that she tries to create characters that are life-like, none of them blameless or without flaws or problems.
"We tend to kind of rush to judgment," she said. "Everybody’s flawed. Everybody has problems," she said.

McCormick, who tackles difficult subject material — self-destructive behavior, prostitution, abandonment, alcoholism, and drug-use — writes compassionately about her subjects.

Tough subjects

In her first novel, Cut, the protagonist, Callie, whose brother has asthma attacks and whose mother fears for her children, blames herself for many of her family’s problems and cuts herself.
She is remitted to a "residential treatment facility" — Sea Pines — with girls who are battling anorexia, bulimia, obesity, and self-mutilation. While at Sea Pines — which the girls receiving treatment refer to as "Sick Minds" — she is kept from "sharps." Without a means to cut herself, Callie finds ways around the center’s rules; she takes an aluminum pie plate from the cafeteria, snapping it in two pieces to form a jagged edge.
"I take my hands away a minute and wipe my wrist on my shirt; the blood pauses, then leaks out again. I go back to gripping my wrist and trying to ignore the throbbing and the pinpricks of sweat on my lip and forehead, then I look down and see blood seeping out between my fingers," she says.
Callie, who narrates the story, is silent throughout, never speaking out in group sessions, with her peers, her family, or workers at the facility. "I want something, but I can’t put a name to it," she says.
Prior to writing Cut, McCormick said she hadn’t visited juvenile treatment centers. She said she had been warned that, if she did too much research, "it would sound like a magazine article."
After writing the book, she visited some centers and spoke with young people afflicted by self-mutilation who had read her book. She found their response was different from what she’d imagined. "I thought they would say: ‘Who are you to tell our story"’" she said. Instead, McCormick said, those who had cut themselves thought she had represented their experience well and truthfully.
McCormick said she gets her inspiration for her novels from news stories and magazine articles. She chooses difficult subject material, she said, because of her background as a journalist. She said of the two disparate writing forms: "Journalism is all about objectivity, and novels are all about subjectivity."

Her topics, she said, make some parents wary, and she takes that very seriously. She said she tries to write in a way that is not too graphic or glamorous.

Heartbreaking

Sold, written in free verse, was one of five finalists for the 2006 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

To do research for Sold, about a 13-year-old girl sold into prostitution by her gambling-addicted father, McCormick traveled to Nepal and India.

Spending a month there, she spoke with families who thought they were sending their daughters off to work or to be married and have not seen their children since. She also visited brothels and spoke with young women dying from AIDS.
While doing research, she kept a journal. "I’d write things down in my notebook and think, ‘I can use that,’" she said. Once stepping back from her work, McCormick realized the experiences of those she interviewed were heartbreaking.
Returning to the United States, she couldn’t eat or sleep for months, she said. "The only way to get out of that funk was to write," she said.
While growing up, she wrote "very bad plays and stories," which her peers graciously performed.
Her family, she said, discouraged her from a career in writing because they were afraid she would become another "starving artist."
She went into politics, then journalism school. Writing for a small newspaper in New Brunswick, she said, she was able to "conquer the fear of the blank page."

Explaining someone’s pain
Now, she wakes in the morning, which are "sacred" to her, and begins writing. In the morning, McCormick said, she thinks her creative powers are at their peak, and she wonders if this is because she is coming out of a dream-like state and hasn’t yet put up her defenses.
"If I don’t write in the morning, I probably won’t write that day," she said, adding that many distractions may keep her from writing, such as keeping up with chores. Her children, 17 and 23, read every draft she writes. Her daughter, she said, is especially helpful and "gives great advice."
McCormick said she "really loves to do school visits." She said she enjoys hearing from teens who read her novels. Writing, she said, is a solitary act. Getting out and speaking at schools, she said, is "really fun" but "also hard."

Normally, she said, she is at home, often writing in her pajamas. When she returns from speaking at a school, she said, she’s very tired.
For her next novel, McCormick is writing about a 15-year-old girl whose brother is killed in the war in Iraq, which she called "another heavy subject."
"I promised myself I’d do a comedy," she said, but then she felt she needed to tell the story. Over 3,000 American soldiers have died in the war, many of them 18-, 19-, and 20-year olds, who have siblings, she said. Stories have been told of the wives who lose their husbands and children who have lost parents, she said.
The teenage experience hasn’t been told, which, she said, is "typical." "We tend to marginalize them," she said of adolescents.
McCormick has been interviewing families — "a process that is required." To write their story, she said, she felt she needed to listen to their stories "to get their blessing."
"There’s a big difference," McCormick said, "between writing something because of its social value and writing to explain someone’s pain."