FINDING HER ROOTS
By Sharon Miller Cinrich

When it came time to write, [Park] relied on a combination of creativity and solid research to breathe life into the ideas that had been rolling around in her head for decades. "I definitely chose the path of fiction based on the lack of resources about Korean history," she says. "It was a conscious decision. Although I love nonfiction too, I chose fiction because I knew I'd have to fill in the gaps myself."

[Linda Sue] Park, 42, [winner of the Newbery Award for A SINGLE SHARD credits her love of reading as a child growing up in suburban Chicago and her consumption of thousands of grade-school novels for her success as a novelist. "Reading definitely motivated me toward the genre," she says. "I read so many that the pace and structure of a middle-grade novel is kind of hard-wired. It's built in and it's what comes out when I tell the story."

She advocates that aspiring writers read as much as possible. "It's really the best possible advice I could give any writer--read," says Park, who still follows her own advice as much as she can. "Whether it's a wondrous story or a hilarious passage of dialogue or a beautiful sentence ... every bit of reading I do helps my own writing. The rhythm of language and the way words combine to communicate more than their dictionary meanings infuse the serious reader's mind and emerge transformed when the reader sits down to write."

"It's really not until the story is finished and being worked on that I'm thinking about how other people will see it," she says.

"That's the wonderful thing about historical fiction," she says. "It explores the question of what it is to be human. What is it that makes a 12th-century Korean boy similar to a 21st-century American boy? Although the cultural context may be very different, they definitely have things in common. Part of what makes it interesting for me is to explore or guess what that might be."

To compensate for the unfamiliar setting and ancient time period, Park worked through her first three books using the third person past tense, a very traditional way to tell a story. "Both for me as a writer and as a reader, the settings were so unusual, so unfamiliar, that it seemed enough to have to deal with," she says. "I wasn't going to throw in flashy points of view or unusual structure."

What, then, made A Single Shard stand out from the others? Although the Newbery Award came as a welcome surprise, Park admits feeling something special about A Single Shard during the writing process. "Once I had the basic bones of the story figured out, it wrote relatively easily. I almost couldn't write fast enough to get the story out. It came out whole, like a seamless story. And I think that is reflected in the reading." And while the calendar in the book-publishing business is often characterized as slow moving, Park's editor at Houghton Mifflin read her manuscript and offered her a contract within 24 hours, another indication that there was something exceptional about this piece of work.

Superstition says the third time's a charm, but Park credits the great learning experiences she had with the first two novels as priming her for A Single Shard, and adds that like the others, this one was percolating for a while.

Park had to think out her story on paper. “Everybook has its challenges,” she says. “But this one had 37 revisions.”