Three Common Problems with Manuscripts: Beginnings

I had lovely time giving my workshop “Write It Right” for SCBWI in Colorado Springs yesterday. The organizers had considered canceling, as enrollments were slow, but we decided to go ahead, anyway, and enrollments came pouring in at the last minute, proof that – well, proof of something about the power of hope.

In preparing for my session, I thought back to a conversation I had last month when I was flying out to teach a weeklong workshop on children’s book writing at Brigham Young University. Another faculty member and I sat together on the plane from Provo from Denver; as we were chatting, she asked me, “What do you think will be the most common problem with the first chapters we’ll be seeing this week?” I thought for a minute: “Too much back story.” She said, “Yes!”

It’s a common mistake, in the first chapter of a novel, to take the dutiful approach and conscientiously bring in all kinds of carefully thought-out information about our characters and their situation: their physical appearance, their likes and dislikes, flashbacks to earlier incidents, the whole history of what brought our protagonist to this crucial moment of time when the story begins. Most of this is not needed. It can be skipped altogether, or worked in a little bit at a time, or (at the very least) deferred to chapter two, once the reader is engaged and eager to learn more.

With the correct answer about problematic beginnings to my credit, Alane then asked me to predict the most common problem with middles and endings. What do you think we decided?

Idea versus Execution

I’m giving a talk on craft tomorrow for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) in Colorado Springs, called “Write It Right.” I’ve promised to focus on all the details of the wonderful craft of writing, from establishing point of view, to handling dialogue, to putting the commas in the right places. (I love every little tiny rule for where the commas go!)

But it occurred to me after I signed up to give the talk that while craft is extremely important, it isn’t ALL important. All the craft in the world for executing a book idea won’t redeem a mediocre idea in the first place - a ho-hum, done-ten-thousands-of-times before idea. I know. I’ve written (and published) books with some pretty generic, familiar premises, and I’ve also written (and published) books with much more original and fresh premises. I won’t say here which books of mine I think fall into each category (I don’t want to hurt the feelings of the poor books in the first category), but I can say that the books in the second category garnered stronger reviews and sales.

My writer friend Leslie O’Kane and I hit on the following analogy that is helpful here. In the Olympics, gymnasts receive two scores for their routines: one is a score for execution (how well was it done?), but the other is a score for the difficulty and challenge of the routine itself. Even flawless marks for execution will not win a medal if the routine itself isn’t worthy of those efforts.

Now I’m trying to make sure that my new book ideas are worthy of as many marks as possible. Brilliant idea first, then flawless insertion of commas. That is my plan!

A Blog I Like: The Longstockings

The Longstockings are a group of eight children’s book authors – Jenny Han, Siobhan Vivian, Coe Booth, Lisa Greenwald, Caroline Hickey, Kathryne B Alfred, Lisa Graff, and Daphne Grab - who write about their books, other people’s books, favorite places to write, timely and fascinating news from the children’s book world, and more, in a blog “for the love of Pippi (and all things children’s books).” When I visit their site, I feel as if I’ve been invited in to spend time with this warm community of children’s book friends.

I first checked out The Longstockings because I was interested in member Lisa Graff, who has a double life as an editor at my publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and as an author of wonderful middle-grade fiction, including her debut novel, The Thing About Georgie. The thing about Georgie is that he’s a dwarf, nervous about the impending arrival of a new baby brother who will likely be taller than he is very soon: it’s a funny and touching book, starring a character who is both extremely unusual and extremely easy to identify with.

The Longstockings blog also has links to tons of other blogs by children’s book authors, editors, and librarians, so it’s a one-stop way to catch up on blogginess everywhere.

Yay for all things Pippi!

Write a Poem Every Wednesday

I attended a wonderful poetry retreat this past January led by poet Molly Fisk and also joined one of her supportive and stimulating online poetry boot camps. Now every Wednesday I wake up and write a poem and email it to my poetry buddy, fellow children’s book writer Clara Gillow Clark. I write about everything from the satisfaction of eating an entire ten-page bag of spice drop candies, to my experiences at Weight Watchers (which I joined after eating that ten-pound page of candies), to my love affair with e-mail, to my son’s junior prom night.

Here’s my poem for this Wednesday:


Waiting for a Book Idea


It will either be haunting and evocative
and maybe take place somewhere else
and long ago, or it will be a hilarious
chapter book, preferably the first
in a successful series, maybe about
a girl, or maybe about a boy, or
maybe about a girl and a boy.
It would be good if they had a pet.
If haunting and evocative, I’ve
always thought “The Day Before April”
is a good title. Though the other day
I heard a little boy say that there
are “hundreds of Emilys” in his class
at school, and “Hundreds of Emilys”
is a good title, too. I could write
a book about the lost continent
of Atlantis, or about the school
for orphan girls that Vivaldi ran
in Venice, or about sixth-grade boys
who have their own pretty awful rock
band. The pet could be a goldfish.
Or a rabbit. Or a dog missing a leg.

I sit and wait. I sit and wait.

The Four Pillars of Happiness

I figured out a few years ago that there are four things in this world that are all that I need to turn any ordinary day into a day of complete and perfect joy. I call them my four pillars of happiness. My four pillars of happiness are:

1) writing
2) reading
3) walking
4) friends

The beauty of my four pillars are that I can have each one every single day. All I have to do is pick up my pen, open a book, step outside my door for a stroll, or call, email, or visit a friend. They don’t cost money. They don’t require luck or good fortune. They are 100 percent reliable. They can be savored one by one, or they can be combined: I can walk with a friend, or share a book or manuscript-in-progress with a friend, or get together to write with a friend. I can read something that will inspire me to write; I can write something about what I have read.

Writing! Reading! Walking! Friends!

These are my four pillars of happiness. What are yours?

Vive la France!

One of the most fun things that can happen to an author is when our books are translated into foreign languages. I love being able to admire You’re a Brave Man, Julius Zimmerman in its Japanese version, which opens from (what we would call) back to front and reads vertically rather than horizontally. The only way I can be sure that it is my book is that the copyright page is fortunately printed in English. It always seems amazing to me that I am the author of a book I can’t even read.

It was a special treat for me when Makeovers by Marcia was translated into French, as I studied French for many years in high school and college. One of our wonderful Philosophy Department graduate students, Amandine Catala, who hails from Belgium, found me a copy of the French edition of Marcia at a little bookstore in Paris. While I can’t speak French, or write in French, or understand spoken French, I can still read it, at least a little bit. So I can read tidbits of Marcia in her French version: Marcia Vous Maquille. It all sounds so much more dramatic in French. Now, when Marcia gains three “kilos” over the summer, when she weighs herself in despair, the text reads “Catastrophe!”

Last week I got an email, all in French, that told me that Marcia Vous Maquille “est sélectionné pour le Prix Chronos de littérature 2010” – it’s been short-listed for an award in France. Here’s the link to their website :

http://www.prix-chronos.org/auteurs/auteurs/auteurs_ill_trad.htm


Maybe I’ll win, and they’ll fly me to Paris! Well, it’s fun to dream, anyway.

A New Way to Think about Creativity

A friend sent me a link to this wonderful 19-minute talk on creativity by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86x-u-tz0MA

In it, Gilbert talks about the creative pressure on her to reproduce the success of Eat, Pray, Love, as friends keep asking her whether she is falling apart from the stress of wondering if the greatest moment of her creative life is behind her. Gilbert responds by asking why artists seem to face this kind of anxiety, when chemical engineers, for example, do not: “Why are we supposed to be afraid of the work we were placed on this earth to do?”
According to Gilbert, we need to return to the ancient view of creativity as the gift of a godlike spirit, or daemon, rather than the post-Renaissance view of creativity as located completely within the lone individual. If we think of creativity as coming from “some distant and unknowable source for distant and unknowable reasons,” we can accept that our creative accomplishments are not entirely up to us. Our task is only to show up for our part of the job; the creative daemon has to show up for his part of the job, as well. We can’t know if the gods will be with us as we do our dance – but, Gilbert tells, us, “Do your dance anyhow.”

Have you done your dance today?