Pen Women's Column
"The Whirlwind Life of a Woman Writer: Lisa Yee"
BY NANCY ALPERT MOWER
What many women have dreamed, Lisa Yee has done: gotten paid for eating chocolate. Add inventor, associate director of a creative think tank, writer and producer at Walt Disney World, and co-owner of a strategic creative company, and you still haven’t gotten to the heart of Yee’s life and successes—her writing.
Yee has written her own newspaper column, television and radio commercials, menus, jingles for waffles, and television specials for Disney. She is most famous for her award-winning books for children and young adults, which appeal to readers of all ages due to her sense of humor and amusing and somewhat quirky characters. Millicent Min, Girl Genius won the prestigious Sid Fleischman Humor Award. The delightful protagonist is an eleven-year-old junior in high school.
The National League of American Pen Women, Honolulu Branch, invited Yee to be the Keynote Speaker at its 2010 Biennial Writers’ Conference, held at Punahou School in Honolulu, on April 9–10, 2010. Yee gave the keynote address “Write from the Heart” and led two master workshops entitled “REVision, ReVision, Revision.” Yee has published six novels and currently over 900,000 copies of those novels are in print. She has won many literary awards, including the Chinese American Librarian Association Best Book of the Year for Youth, an American Library Association Notable Book, Washington Post Book of the Week, and NPR Best Summer Read. In addition, Hawai‘i’s children nominated Yee for the Nene Book Award.
Although she loved books as a child—the smell, the soft feel of old ones—Yee grew up planning to be a lawyer. Sometime before college graduation, though, she gathered courage to tell her parents that law was not her career of choice. Instead she wanted to write. She braced for her parents’ disappointment, only to be astonished by her mother saying she’d never wanted Lisa to be a lawyer.
Yee sent her first novel to Arthur Levine, editor of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. He rejected it but wrote back saying he’d like to see her next novel. That was Millicent Min, Girl Genius, and Levine has been her editor ever since.
Her whirlwind life as wife, mother, and author includes more than sixty presentations a year, including school visits and conferences. She also appears on quiz shows, and she’s currently working on five different books. So she values time at home with her husband, son, and daughter. She usually writes between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., and when traveling, she writes at airports and between conference activities. She told the women in the conference audience not to do laundry if the children were asleep or the family was out. “It can wait. Use that time for writing.” When you do laundry, she said, “Wash everything in cold water so you won’t have to sort”—saving more time for writing.
After bathing her young children at night, she put them to bed in clothes they’d wear to school the next day. “My family means everything to me,” she said, “and I find ways to make it work with my writing life.”
In her keynote address, she mentioned that working mothers often feel guilty about not devoting enough time to their families. Men don’t. She said, “You never hear a man say, ‘I feel guilty because I’m going to watch football.’”
She began her workshops by asking us to list five things we might find in a child’s room then to write about the room from various viewpoints. She gave hints for revising. “Change the font and margins, then cut 20% of your draft. “If it doesn’t move your story forward, leave it out.” She told us to save what we cut because we might be able to use it in another book.
Our final revision was to describe the room from the viewpoint of a parent whose child has died. When she asked which revision we liked best, most chose this last one. Yee had convinced us of the importance of being emotionally involved in our writing.
Lisa Yee is exciting, enthusiastic, and encouraging. When an intermediate school attendees said, “I want to be a writer when I grow up,” Yee replied, “You already are a writer. You don’t have to wait until you grow up.”
Pen Honolulu feels very fortunate that a woman and writer as delightful as Lisa Yee accepted our invitation to keynote our recent conference.
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NANCY ALPERT MOWER
Mower is a former Instructor of Writing and Literature in the English Department of the University of Hawai‘i and former director of the Conference on Literature and Hawai'i's Children. She has published seven books for children, articles, essays, poetry, and short stories for children and adults.