‘How hard can that be?’: Author shares writing tips with Divine Mercy Academy students in Monroeville

You may remember Career Day at school, when someone would begin rambling on about his or her profession, and you pretty much zoned out after a few minutes.

Alan St. Jean seemed to start down that path when speaking to students at Divine Mercy Academy in Monroeville.

“Boom. I’m an author,” he announced with formal intonation, before shifting to self-effacing irony: “I know. I can see how you’re impressed.”

He proceeded to entertain and enlighten fourth- and fifth-graders with a combination of laugh-inducing life experiences and plenty of pointers about how to write a good story, with plenty of illustrative slides and even a couple of music videos added to the mix.

St. Jean’s Jan. 31 presentation was part of Divine Mercy’s celebration of Catholic Schools Week, and the theme of the day of his visit was vocations.

The author of books for young people, including the award-winning “Aidan of Oren” fantasy trilogy, made it clear that writing was far from his first vocational choice.

“Sophomore year: That’s the age when I started thinking, what do I want to be when I grow up? I didn’t know. So I asked my dad one day. He was reading the newspaper. Remember the newspaper?” he asked, with a nod toward an audience member in that particular field.

“I said, ‘Dad, what should I be when I grow up?’ He didn’t even put down the paper. He just said, ‘Be a doctor.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘They make a lot of money.’”

But an experience involving, let’s just say, nausea while dissecting a frog in biology class scotched Dad’s plans.

“Should I be a doctor? No.”

Plan B: Be a professional baseball player. Yeah, right.

Plan C: Attend Ohio State University, earn a degree in business administration and then work in business. There’s the ticket.

But something always was in the back of his mind:

“I’ll be an author. How hard can that be?”

It’s about time

Well, he first had the notion of writing a book when he was in third grade. Then whole decades passed.

“I was sitting in the kitchen. A winter storm was really bad. It was blowing outside. I thought, I still haven’t written my book. I was 40 years old. I’m almost dead,” he joked. “I wanna write a book!”

St. Jean managed to persevere, developing a tale involving a dragon and sundry imaginative characters, until he decided to seek opinions on his work.

“So I printed off a few copies. I gave them to the neighbor kids. Guess what? They loved it,” he said. “Then I made more copies and gave them to some of the parents. Guess what? One of the parents said, ‘Mr. St. Jean, you should get that published.’ I said, ‘OK.’

“So I made seven copies. I sent them to New York City. Guess what? They loved it. And then the publishers gave the book to the editors. Guess what?”

The editors burst the proverbial bubble with feedback such as:

“Your story doesn’t have any conflict.”

“The character doesn’t develop.”

“There’s no plot.”

“Mr. St. Jean, I’m trying to tell you: Your story’s boring.”

He ended up rewriting the story four times before it was ready to be published, but with the editors providing a caveat,

“It’s good, but not great.”

St. Jean decided to give it one more go, coming up with a subplot based on a dream:

“A boy went down to a river, and he saw a creature. And the creature said, ‘What do you see when you look at me?’ And the boy, being a typical boy, said, ‘Uh, dude, you’re kinda ugly.’ And the creature said, ‘So shall it be.’

“When the boy went to get a drink in the river, he saw his reflection. Now, what did he look like? He looked like the creature.”

The moral:

“It’s about judging. We don’t judge.”

The Writing Olympics

And so “Aidan of Oren: The Journey Begins” came out in 2004, followed by “Aidan of Oren: The Elf Princess,” “Aidan of Oren: Valley of the Dragons” and, as a prequel to the trilogy, “The Chronicles of Oren.”

With the appearance of the first “Aidan,” his publisher suggested he start visiting schools to talk about the book, and that evolved into him conducting programs such as the Writing Olympics, which give students opportunities for authorship.

“I would go into a classroom and say, ‘OK, guys. Who’s the character? What goes wrong? What’s the setting? How do we fix it?’” St. Jean said.

Many of the resulting efforts have impressed him considerably, notably a story about a caveman named Ooga-Looga. St. Jean adapted it for a self-produced music video, in which Ooga-Looga outsmarts a dinosaur — yes, there’s a 70-million-year discrepancy, but what the heck — to provide plenty to eat for his family.

After screening the video, he showed another from a different point of view: Mrs. Ooga-Looga, worrying about her husband taking on a tyrannosaurus.

“He wasn’t just out there fighting dinosaurs for himself. He was risking everything for somebody else. That’s the heart of the story,” St. Jean said. “When we write stories together, the stories that win are the stories that touch the heart. Conflict and resolution are good, but when a character goes the extra mile, when we see heart in a story, that’s what makes it.”

“Ooga-Looga,” as it turns out, also made it to print as the first volume in his Young Authors Collection, derived from the work of his students to demonstrate:

“Their ideas can be turned into a book. How fun is that?”

For more information, visit www.alanstjean.com.