The following are excerpts from Tuesday’s General Session by Patricia Lee Gauch.

“. . . I have come to you this morning to disturb you. To turn your apple cart upside down. To move you right square out of your middle ground. To make you say, maybe right out loud, ‘Hey! Oh-my-gosh, I never thought of that before!’ To make you pick up your pencil differently when you are about to write. I have come to disturb you. I don’t know, maybe you will even look at Bestor Square differently—maybe look at it wryly or darkly—but for sure I want you to look at story differently.

“. . . An editor, a publisher, a reader does not want to travel a route he or she has traveled before. If in picking up a manuscript or a book, the reader—professional or not—hears echoes of other books, hears footsteps of other stories, knows before turning the page what will happen next, the reader knows he has picked up the wrong book. The editor is certain he or she has picked up the wrong manuscript.

“Very simply, we readers—all of us—want to be caught off guard, fooled, messed with, surprised, yanked around. We do not want to know where the story is going. We want to climb new heights and be stunned by the depths. We want to discover Grandpa in the freezer.

“Let’s start with the obvious: We want an unexpected story. If you stop to think of the stories that you have loved, and probably not forgotten, consider how unexpected they were. How about The Rats of Nimh, where the rats turn out to have minds of their own and escape from the National Institutes of Mental Health, ready to set up their own civilization. How about The Giver, by Lois Lowry, where everything in the story is new—all the rules, all the culture, what counts and what doesn’t. How about Andrew Clements’s Things Not Seen, where the boy wakes up invisible. Really invisible. And not in some fantastical way. Or how about this year’s Newbery honor The Princess Academy by Shannon Hale, which starts out so commonly with the heroine in the mythical stone-cutting kingdom being relegated to minor positions in her family, but who is finally selected to attend the princess academy with other girls only to discover that what she and the others are learning—and often cruelly—is how to behave, when what is needed to save her village is outrageous and brave and, yes, unfeminine behavior, which she stands up to. And, of course, so many people’s favorite, Holes, where Stanley Yelnats, as a result of a case of mistaken identity, lands at the Green Camp digging holes all day long.

“The picture book Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! came totally out of the blue for me, and I adore it. My grandchildren’s favorite is The Sugar Mouse Cake, a seemingly ordinary tale illustrated by Gene Zion, except the baker’s precious pet mouse gets in a pinch and hides among the pastry mice on the Queen’s cake and nearly gets eaten. In Officer Buckle and Gloria by Peggy Rathmann, the dog turns the tables on his officer, mocking him in front of a school of children. In nonfiction, did anyone expect Jim Giblin’s Hitler? What a brilliant and unexpected idea. And there was nothing expected about the hilarious nonfiction picture book Do You Want to Be President? by Judith St. George and David Small, a satirical look at the presidency.

“Where does this stuff come from? I don’t know. Is it the result of subconscious bursts of imagination? Did the authors play “what if,” imagining wild scenarios that begin to take shape when they follow the “what if” trail? “What if” there are these rats, caged at the National Institutes of Mental Health, and what if scientists experiment on them to enhance their intelligence. But wait, what if the rats get so smart they outwit the scientists: they learn to read, they figure out the locks, and finally they escape to a new world they create. What if? Or was it something they read that set the idea in motion? I don’t know. But I know I didn’t expect any of the stories that I mentioned, and I was delighted.

“But wherever the ideas for these books come from, it may surprise you that to get into this treasured territory “the unexpected” involves more than the overall idea; it needs to be part of the total mindset of a writer, whether picture book, or middle fiction, or nonfiction, or young-adult fiction. That mindset needs to drive the beginning, to inform the choice and magnitude of scene, affect the very language, help mold the character. It needs to put the edge on humor, and certainly has to inform the plot itself. That way of looking at story needs to be pervasive.

“Maybe it needs to be a question that you as a writer ask yourself frequently: Is my story expected? Or unexpected? Are there twists, turns, surprises? Am I on too-familiar ground . . . or new, surprising ground? And how about my characters? Are they expected or unexpected? Is someone going to be taking a deep breath at the discoveries in my book or storybook because of the passion of the moment or sheer freshness of idea and surprising turn? They must, dear writers, they simply must. It must be a standard you hold up to yourself.

“Beginnings that are edgy, taunting, slightly mysterious put us on edge. Isn’t that essential? After all, reader or editor, if we are being asked to sit down and read, for example, some two hundred pages, you had better give me something I have never had. In younger books, we are going to have less time, but the need is the same. Surprise me. Tease me. Enchant me early. Believe me, I want to feel as if I have never been there before.

“What a writer is looking for is personal territory. The settings, the objects of the character’s world are not just furniture. The character can dance around them, use them, hurl epitaphs at them, honor them, or love them whether they are a dog, a rum-running boat, or bees. In the book Black Duck, Janet Lisle orchestrates the characters, sweeping up to the moment when the teen captain gives ‘a throated laugh of satisfaction.’ Now that, my friends, is a TA-DAH! totally created by the author. And because this moment is so personally selected for this book, so personally written, it reads as new life to a reader. It was and is simply unexpected.

“You’ve heard people say over and over: When you write, go to the spot where your passion is for book and character ideas; to the spot where you care in the most profound way. Not just because you know that moment better, but also because something may happen in the accumulation of moments that even you will not expect.

“If you are to write a picture book that arcs with surprise and a newness of character and story, if you are to write a middle-grade novel and give to your reader a character so fresh and new we are compelled to join him or her on a journey, if you are to write a fantasy or a young-adult book or a nonfiction biography, you hold the baton. You gauge and create the beat. You know something about the emotional energy that charges scenes. It is yours to put into the book. You are the maker.

“Know your tools. Know how far you can and must go. Accept the invitation to adventure, and expect nothing less than the unexpected. You have what it takes.”