Watering Our Lives

As a children’s book author, I love to hang around elementary schools, so last year I wandered over to Mesa Elementary, where my boys where in school once upon a time, to check out the spring science fair. I wrote down some of my favorite projects: How long can people of different ages keep their eyes open without blinking? What happens if you replace milk with water in a cake recipe? How far can a guinea pig smell? Does toast always fall butter side down? And my all-time favorite: At what temperature does a pickle explode? (Look for that one when the sequel to 7 x 9 = Trouble! comes out year after next.)

Then there’s the perennially popular experiment when a child takes four plants and over a period of weeks waters one of them with Coke, one with water, one with hydrochloric acid, and one not at all. Which plant does best? Hmmm. How about: the one that gets the water? As opposed to the one that gets the hydrochloric acid?

Lately I’ve been using this as a metaphor for my own life. For years I was watering my life with hydrochloric acid: spending time too often with toxic people in toxic environments. Thank goodness I stopped doing that! But it’s not enough to stop watering my life with acid. I also need to remember to water it with . . . water.

This means taking time to go on hikes in our stunning Rocky Mountains foothills with my friend Rowan, attending the Colorado Music Festival up at Chautauqua (this week they’re doing a series of the world’s great piano concertos – Grieg last night, Rachmaninoff tomorrow, Beethoven on Friday, Mozart on Sunday) – and going off to the Betsy-Tacy Convention with my sister, Cheryl. Now watch me grow!

What are you doing to water your life?

Home from Deep Valley

So there we were, a bus filled with middle-aged women (and their daughters, granddaughters, and nieces) and one genial gentleman who was formidably knowledgeable about the Betsy-Tacy books. We had gotten off the bus in front of the house known to Betsy-Tacy fans as Carney’s house (in real life the home of Maud Hart Lovelace’s high school chum Marion Willard). The question for the morning: could it be – if we walked around to the back of the house - was the sleeping porch from Carney’s House Party still there? And – it was!















One person walked into the door of the Carnegie Library that Betsy enters for the first time in Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown and began to weep. But I couldn't stop smiling.



















People squealed with happiness as we passed the “slough” – pronounced “sloo” – that Emily lives beside in Emily of Deep Valley. We fainted with happiness when we tasted Lady Baltimore cake at the Inn at Murmuring Lake. A hush fell over the group as we caught our first glimpse of the tree under which Mr. Ray proposed to Mrs. Ray, and the bay window where they were married.



For Betsy-Tacy fans: here are two of the questions on the trivia quiz that I got wrong:

1) How many pages were there in Cab’s edition of Ivanhoe? (Answer: 534 pages)
2) Name the actual ladies’ maids on the S. S. Columbic. (Answer: Taylor and Rosa)

And here are two of the ones I got right:

1) What two words must ten-year-olds add to their vocabulary? (Answer: “indeed” and “prefer”)
2) Tacy envlivened her envelopes to Betsy on the farm with these acronoyms. (Answer: HHAS – for Hubert Humphreys Admiration Society)


I keep a gratitude journal where every day I list five things I am grateful for. Today my list is topped with this: that I live in a world in which Maud Hart Lovelace wrote the Betsy-Tacy books. And that I spent three wonderful days with 200 other people who love them, too.

Bliss in Minnesota

First bit of bliss: My first night in Minnesota my wonderful host, Karen Nelson Hoyle (curator of the Kerlan Collection), and her husband, Bob (a native of the Twin Cities), gave me an evening tour that included a stop by F. Scott Fitzgerald's house on Summit Avenue. "Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . and one fine morning . . . "

Second bit of bliss: At the Kerlan Collection I gave a talk to a class that had come to marvel at the Collection's amazing holdings in children's literature. Since I was there to speak, they asked to see my manuscripts, and lo and behold, boxloads of manuscripts from books of mine from decades ago were wheeled out from the air-conditioned, temperature-controlled underground vaults, for inspection - and the students put on WHITE GLOVES in order to touch them. It will take a long time for my ego to return to its proper size after this.

Third bit of bliss (ongoing now): At the Betsy-Tacy Convention in Mankato, my sister and I heard a stunning keynote address by Kathleen Baxter, a long-time fan of the books, who visited many of the sites that inspired Maud Hart Lovelace's stories back when Kathy was a college student and before the heedless destruction of many of the sites in the urban renewal mania of the 1960s. To see a picture of the house on High Street! Mr. Ray's shoe store! A letter from "Carney" to Kathy! The audience of 200 leapt to our feet as one when she finished. Then the ice breaker game had us all comparing notes with other attendees to find shared answers to such questions as: "Food you most want to taste" (many, including me, chose onion sandwiches; others chose Anna's coconut cake, fudge, or even Everything Pudding), "Event you'd most like to attend" (performance of Rip Van Winkle? dinner on the S. S. Columbic? honeymoon with Joe?), favorite Cox Military Slang (I chose, "Ain't it awful, Mabel?" but some chose, "Curses, Jack Dalton!"), and "Is Bonnie blameless in the Tony affair?" (hotly debated).

The program for the convention has on it this wonderful quote from C. S. Lewis: "Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one!" Which couldn't be a better slogan for this meeting of Betsy-Tacy readers from all over North America.

Off to Minnesota

I’m heading to Minneapolis today, first to give a talk at the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota, and then to luxuriate in the joys of the Betsy-Tacy Convention in Mankato. To make the trip even more fun, my sister, Cheryl, is meeting me there.

The Kerlan Collection is one of the world’s great children’s literature research collections, containing more than 100,000 books as well as original manuscripts and art work for more than 12,000 books – including mine. I was thrilled when the Kerlan accepted the donation of my manuscripts. Having the actual handwritten drafts of my books in the Kerlan’s temperature-controlled underground vaults is as close as I may be able to come to the writer’s dream of immortality. I’ll be speaking on the topic “Writing the New School Story” at the Elmer Andersen Library on Friday at 10 a.m.

Then, on to “Deep Valley,” the locale for the dozen books in Maud Hart Lovelace’s beloved Betsy-Tacy series. The books are based on Maud’s own childhood growing up in Mankato at the turn of the last century. Of all the books I have ever loved, I love these books the most. I consider Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown to be the finest novel in the English language. The best chapter of this best-beloved book is the chapter where Betsy, an aspiring writer, makes her first visit to Deep Valley’s brand new Carnegie Library. And I’ll get to see that very library in a few more days!

Because the books are so autobiographical, fans can visit the actual sites that inspired them: Betsy’s house and Tacy’s house are both maintained as small museums by the Betsy-Tacy Society; Tib’s “chocolate-colored” house is on view as well. Several years ago, I had the most satisfying experience of my writing career when I did a book signing at Tacy’s house on a family road trip/literary pilgrimage to De Smet, South Dakota (“Little Town on the Prairie”), and Mankato.

This time I’ll be giving a talk on the Syrian-American community in Mankato in the early 20th century, as Mankato’s “Little Syria” figures prominently in two of the books: Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill and Emily of Deep Valley. Following my talk we’ll all eat baklava and pretend that we’re eating it with Betsy, Tacy, Naifi, Emily, and Mr. Jed. Bliss!

The Wisdom of Strunk and White

For my talk on craft last weekend for SCBWI, I set myself the task of rereading Strunk and White’s classic, The Elements of Style, which my editor of 29 years, Beverly Reingold, gave to me as a gift at the start of our relationship together, inscribed to me on July 1980. It struck me on this read-through how many of their confident pronouncements about writing apply to the living of our lives as well.

“Place yourself in the background” – good advice, that! “Write in a way that comes naturally” – what if we tried to LIVE in a way that comes naturally? “Do not explain too much” – an excellent suggestion to bear in mind when declining unwanted invitations and refusing burdensome obligations.

Above all, this time I was struck by Rule 14: “Use the active voice.” (Oops! That last sentence is written in the passive voice.) Too often lately I’ve been allowing myself to indulge in fantasies of all the things I would like to have happen to me: “If only one of my books would win a prize!” “If only This Particular Person would disappear!” Idle, passive wishing. What if I recast all of these passive yearnings into resolute statements in the active voice: “If only I would sit down every day this week and work for a solid hour on my new book!” Well, I can actually DO that! “If only I would take decisive steps to limit my contact with This Particular Person!” Well, I can actually do that, too.

Thank you, William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White.

Three Common Problems with Manuscripts: Endings

And the most common problem with the endings of children’s book manuscripts is . . . didacticism. At my SCBWI workshop last Saturday, people guessed the answer to be predictability, which is an excellent answer, but not the correct answer. When I rejected it, they guessed the opposite failing – lack of closure, too many story threads dangling – which is another excellent answer. But the besetting sin of children’s book endings, which has haunted us since the dawn of our profession as producers of earnest Sunday School tracts, is preachiness. Too often I see – and write? – books too obviously focused on teaching a lesson, pointing a moral.

And yet . . . as someone who has a day job as a philosophy professor, I confess to writing, and reading, not so much to find out what happens next, but to find out what it was all about: what does it mean? Why is this particular chunk of experience worth writing about? I yearn to get to the moment when the main character has her epiphany, when she finally GETS it, when some small truth about the human condition is laid bare, enabling her to take that one small step toward maturity.

So how can we deliver meaning without preaching a moral? Stories are less didactic if the child characters discover the crucial truth for themselves, rather than having it pontificated for them by an adult authority figure. Stories are less didactic if the crucial truth is not something utterly banal and obvious (here is where predictability again becomes an issue). Stories are less didactic if the crucial truth is hard won, growing naturally out of the wrenching events of the story, rather than superimposed on it conveniently at the end.

And that is the moral of this blog today!

Three Common Problems with Manuscripts: Middles

What is the most common problem with manuscript middles?
Yes, you guessed it: not enough conflict.

I think I run into this problem all the time with my manuscripts because I hate conflict so much in my real life. I just want to be happy! I want to get along with everybody! I loathe and abominate arguments, and meanness, and knock-down, drag-out fights.

So it helped me when I took a fabulous online writing course last year from writing guru Dennis Foley, called “Writing the First Novel.” I had already published 40 books at the time,
including over 20 novels, but I learned so much. I only wish I had taken the course at the beginning of my career instead of halfway through.

Dennis said: “Novels are about conflict. Life is about avoiding conflict. Understand the difference.” He also said, “Don’t write like you want to live.”

So, as I was working on my spring 2010 novel, One Square Inch, in which Cooper is faced with his mother’s mental illness, I gritted my teeth and took Dennis’s advice. First I killed off Cooper’s dad: no help for Cooper from that quarter. But he still had those wonderful, loving grandparents. . . So then I killed off his grandmother. But he still had that wonderful, loving grandfather. So then I made his grandfather be difficult: critical, crabby, cantankerous. Conflict! Conflict! I still miss the wonderful, loving grandfather sometimes, but I think the manuscript is stronger now.

Tomorrow: the most common problem with children’s book manuscript endings.