Beth Kephart: The Book of Words

Perhaps some of you know that UNDERCOVER, my first book for young adults, has an aspiring teen poet at its heart—a narrator named Elisa who tosses off love notes for boys who have their hearts set on others. Elisa pretends to shrug her shoulders at it all, pretends that her outsiderliness doesn't much matter, but in truth, it's not all that fun hanging on the social margins. I know that because I was a bit like Elisa in high school. I gave advice. I listened. I wrote. But others had the spotlight.

Elisa is saved, in UNDERCOVER, by an honors English teacher named Dr. Charmin, who guesses at what Elisa is going through and begins to help her after school. One of the gifts that Dr. Charmin gives Elisa is a blank journal, to be fleshed out, she explains, as a book of words. Elisa is to collect the words that interest her, keep them in her book. She's to use them to define herself, to grow and to emerge.

Many of those who have read UNDERCOVER write to me about this book of words and ask whether I myself have kept one. The answer is yes. I started mine just after college, and it sits right here, and there's hardly a book I read today that doesn't somehow send me to it with a new word, or a new use of a word. I try the new words out when I can—sometimes in conversation, sometimes in a poem, sometimes in a story—and even if they don't always make a natural fit, even if I edit some of them out later, this book of words is essential to me—contains a partial history of my own development as a writer.

Have any of you ever kept a book of words?

Beth Kephart
Author of Undercover
www.beth-kephart.blogspot.com
Interviews with Beth: Em's Bookshelf and Newsvine