Writing is seeing

Long before she became one of the most beloved writers in America, long before the literary medals and standing ovations with children clutching dog-eared paperbacks, Kate DiCamillo was an English major at the University of Florida who thought she understood how writing worked.

She did not.

“I was 20 or 21,” she said, laughing softly at the memory. “I’m the center of the universe and you think you know.”

What shifted her understanding was not praise. It was perception.

Instructional Professor Emeritus Creed Greer, with the University Writing Program, was at the time a teaching assistant in the English department. During class, Greer prompted students to write something they had observed. When he read DiCamillo’s piece aloud to the group, he asked a simple question: What makes this good?

She waited for the answer she expected. She waited to hear that it was clever or lyrical or well-constructed. Instead, the revelation was disarming.

“It wasn’t the writing,” she said. “It was the fact that I had seen.”

That moment reframed everything. Writing, she realized, was not about being seen. It was about seeing.

In a single classroom exchange, storytelling shifted from performance to attention, from ego to empathy. And that insight, born in a liberal arts classroom, still anchors her work.

Apprenticeship in rejection

After graduating from UF in 1987, DiCamillo did not immediately become a novelist. In fact, she did not write much at all. “There was almost nine years of talking about wanting to do it and not doing it,” she admits.

The turning point came not from literary inspiration but from running. “I had no dreams of becoming a professional runner,” she said. “But I could make myself run two miles a day. So why couldn’t I make myself write two pages a day?”

Two pages. Every day.

She began drafting stories and sending them to publishers. First to The New Yorker, then to the Atlantic and then to literary quarterlies.

They came back.

Eventually, she accumulated 473 rejection letters. Rather than dismissing that period as failure, DiCamillo calls it an apprenticeship.

“You don’t think, ‘I’m going to go be a brain surgeon’ without training,” she said. “But everybody thinks, ‘Oh, I can go write a novel.’ You have to teach yourself how to do it.”

That apprenticeship was built on discipline and patience, qualities she admits she did not possess naturally.

“I’m the most impatient person in the world,” she said. “The one place I’ve learned patience is with the story.”

The work of revision

DiCamillo’s process is deliberate. She prints each draft. The first draft is single spaced. Every draft after that is double spaced. Instead of revising within a document, she retypes the manuscript from the beginning, with the previous draft beside her.

“You change one thing in a manuscript, and you think that’s changed,” she said. “But you don’t know all the places it really impacts unless you’re typing it from the beginning.”

Retyping allows for what she describes as subconscious decisions. The hands know what to adjust before the mind fully articulates it. Her method reinforces a lesson she wishes she had understood as a student. Writing, even when it is the work you are meant to do, is not easy.

“There’s one Mozart born every century,” she said, referencing the book “Art & Fear.” “Guess what? That’s not you.”

If writing were your calling, she explained, it will still be difficult. It will not emerge fully formed on the first try.

A liberal arts education

DiCamillo credits UF not simply with helping shape her craft, but with shaping her thinking. She remembers the thrill of receiving a syllabus and realizing she could use her parents’ money to buy novel after novel. She recalls reading “Why I Live at the P.O.” by Eudora Welty and feeling electrified. She encountered Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, writers who examined moral complexity without sentimentality.

In a Shakespeare class, she earned the only B of her college career. “I liked the A,” she said. “I was good at regurgitating.” But the professor said that’s not what he wanted. He said he wanted the students to think.

That insistence on independent thought, according to DiCamillo, captures the essence of a liberal arts education. Storytelling becomes an extension of that inquiry.

“It’s an inquiry into the human condition,” she said, “and into your own past. There’s always that thing of how you reveal yourself to yourself when you’re telling a story.”

Her characters are rarely villains in a simple sense. They are flawed, wounded and sometimes selfish, but never without dimension.

“There’s that saying, ‘Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a weary battle,’” she said. “If you had any idea what was going on for the person doing the thing you find objectionable, you would be moved to mercy most of the time.”

Literature allows readers to imagine the interior lives of others. She recalled a childhood book about a cobbler’s daughter who could inhabit the lives of those whose shoes she repaired.

“That’s what telling a story is,” she said. “It allows you to imagine the interior of somebody else. And that moves you toward empathy.”

Medals in the drawer

Recognition has followed DiCamillo’s work, including two Newbery Medals. The medals themselves sit in the back of the second drawer in her desk. “Once a year I’ll open it slowly,” she said, “just to see if they’re still there. And then I close the drawer and think, ‘not my business.’”

Awards, she insists, are not the job. “The job is to tell the story as well as I can,” she said. “Not to look for praise. Not to look for the A.”

There is still, she admits, a part of her that hopes she might one day be published. That small voice has never entirely disappeared. Perhaps that humility explains why her stories continue to resonate. She has never stopped asking the central question: What does it mean to be human?

“It’s an ongoing inquiry,” she said. “Into myself, into the world, into how to be your best self in a difficult world.”

Figuring out how you work

If she were to design a fiction course today, it would not focus on plot diagrams or character arcs. Instead, she would help students discover how they work.

Her friend Ann Patchett, author of “Bel Canto,” which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, carries novels in her head for years before writing them. DiCamillo does not speak of a project too much, fearing it will dissipate. Both methods are valid.

“The only wrong way to do it,” she said, “is if you feel like you’re supposed to be doing it and you’re not doing it.”

She encourages young writers to find “safe readers” — people who can tell them whether a draft is “necessary and true” without derailing their confidence. That discernment, she says, takes time.

So does the work.

Walking once while struggling with a manuscript, she stumbled across a bolt threaded with a nut. It struck her as a message. “This is how things get built,” she thought. “It’s work. It’s showing up. It’s being consistent.”

Two pages a day. Seeing instead of being seen. Thinking instead of regurgitating. Opening yourself to the interior life of someone else.

The lessons that shaped one of America’s most treasured storytellers began in classrooms at the University of Florida, where a young English major learned that writing is not magic. It is attention.

It is work. It is attention. It is showing up again and again until the story becomes clear.