Puzzling

“How many hours a day do you write?” is one of the most frequent questions I encounter when I speak at schools. That’s a tricky one to answer when you write nonfiction. The truth is, because research is such a major part of the process of creating nonfiction, nonfiction authors may go weeks or months without writing, and yet we’re working all the time. That’s the case for me, at least. My writing months are the treasured few in a given year that follow the sometimes interminable phase of research.

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of emptying and solving our family’s wooden tray puzzles. Some were easy. Some were not. I learned as a child which ones I could do quickly and which ones were more difficult. As my puzzling skills improved—and I began to memorize the layout of each puzzle—I took the logical next step to increase the challenge and dumped all the puzzles out together and proceeded to sort the jumble of pieces into their respective frames. That was fun. It took time, but it was so satisfying to turn the chaotic pile of colored wooden shapes into familiar scenes.

I still puzzle: here's my 2012 holiday diversion.

In my teen years, I returned to puzzling, but this time they were the 500-piece cardboard variety. My father and I worked on puzzles recreationally, perhaps with a football game or TV show playing in the background. We loved the work—the incremental progress that could be measured by locking each piece into place, the strategy required to best solve a particular design, the satisfaction of placing the final piece into place.

Many years later, after I became an author, I realized I could not have found a better way to prepare my mind for a life of research and writing. Every project I undertake is a new puzzle. Each fact collected adds an element of understanding to the project. The more I collect, the clearer the picture becomes of what I am trying to create.

The Big Sort--organizing note cards before writing.

But the picture—that’s the one difference between puzzling and authoring. We know exactly what a jigsaw puzzle should look like by the image portrayed on its carton. A book is another matter. Authors start with topics and a basic knowledge of a subject, but the details and nuance that follow add a dimension of creativity to our work that eclipses the jigsaw puzzling experience.

My office--the epicenter of puzzling and writing.

I’m in the puzzling phase of a project right now. Completing the reading. Converting the facts I’ve found into notes. Drawing connections in my mind. Those interconnected steps will empower the words that begin to flow in a few more weeks. I have no doubt that my childhood passion for and practice of puzzling helped to make me the writer I am today. Patient. Persistent. A puzzler.

How many hours a day do I write? Throw in the puzzling and it’s more than a full-time job. On any given day you'll find me, metaphorically at least, spilling the pieces of the project onto the floor to see what picture emerges.

Posted by Ann Bausum

On Boys, Rainbow Looms, and Non Fiction

If you know any kids in the K-5 set, you've probably seen them making and wearing bracelets and necklaces made out of small colored rubber bands.  Like this: 

 You might notice those are two boys in the first picture. Boy participation has made this phenomenon of the moment get an extra share of attention. Articles are being written about how this craze has single handedly caused boys to do what they have never wanted to do before: arts and crafts.

Nonsense. Boys like to do crafts. They always have. And there is something that inspires them to do so more than anything, even more than brightly colored little rubber bands. And that something is interesting non fiction books for kids. 

A few months ago when I started working with five year old boys, I worried I wouldn't know how to relate to their needs and interests. But then I learned that crafting and creativity was just as palpable to them if presented in the right way.  So “arts and crafts” and “making something nice” was no longer spoken. Now we were doing “projects” and “constructing things”, “making replicas”, "figuring out how things go together." Now we were cooking with gas.

Here are a few examples of how I used nonfiction books to inspire boys to happily become serious crafters.

We read a couple of different books on jellyfish (Jellies. The Life of Jellyfish by Twig C. George, Jellyfish by Rebecca Stefoff). The books they were drawn to had detailed photographs. Luckily one of the photos was of the dangerous Australian box jellyfish, known to have killed numerous people. Intrigue, poison, possible death: perfect. So when I gave them their paper plates, paints, and streamers they spent 45 minutes trying to recreate the most accurate version of the deadly jellyfish imaginable.

Ken Robbins books have the kind of photographs that these five year old realists truly appreciate. We used his book on leaves (Autumn Leaves by Ken Robbins) to try to identify some leaves we had collected on a nature walk. Then we made, constructed, and assembled some of our own trees with branches and leaves that we could now recognize by name and shape.

Look! Look! Look! At Sculpture by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace. We talked about sculpture and looked at the many different examples this interesting book offers. Then I gave them some recycled materials and some model magic and let them make their own sculpture. Bones can be sculpture? That’s great, I never would have thought of that. But never underestimate a five year old with a good book and a project idea.

Creativity and the Common Core

This month on Interesting Nonfiction for Kids the topic has been the Common Core Curriculum.The posts have been varied and informative – an invaluable resource for educators.

Everyone has been talking about the Common Core, from my eight-grade son’s Language Arts teacher to Arne Duncan to Matt Damon. When I mentioned to my husband that for this month I had to write something about the Common Core, he had no clue to what I was talking about, though that term was thrown to us the entire Back-To-School night.

President Obama said in a July 2009 speech,
“You get to decide what comes next. You get to choose where change will take us, because the future does not belong to those who gather armies on a field of battle or bury missiles in the ground; the future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create. That is the source of power in this century. And given all that has happened in your two decades on Earth, just imagine what you can create in the years to come.”
The much-quoted portion of that speech is the line, “the future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create.” The government through Common Core is trying to address the “young people with an education” issue, but we seem to be missing half of that equation – imagination to create.

For your Friday entertainment, I’ll leave you with this wonderful TED talk by Sir Kenneth Robinson. He says all I would like to write about creativity, schools and our students, but about 1,000% better. Whether you have already seen this or not, it’s always aspirational and timely. Our challenge is to now implement creativity in the classroom.
The ideas of our students are the future.

Connecting to Nature's Rhythms

Jim Murphy's recent post connected us to the familiar and mundane aspects of our daily lives, those frustrating moments that can crush our creativity.  When we can get away from our routines and experience something different, our creativity can be inspired and renewed.

This Saturday, my husband and I traveled from our home in Missoula, MT, where the temperature was 19 degrees, through Salt Lake City, where the snow fell fast enough to delay our flight by 1 1/2 hours, through sunny LA and on to the Garden Isle of Kauai'i, where it rarely gets below 75 degrees or over 84.  Jeans are traded in for shorts and shoes for sandals.  The phone doesn't ring, and meals become simple.  The seashore calls, and the warm breeze welcomes.  Nature is up close and personal.

The natural world is both my personal beat and my professional one, so I really 'dig' this place.  I believe that when we are close to nature we are closer to our fundamental, creative selves.  On this island, residents and tourists alike are drawn to the natural rhythms of sun and sea, moon and tide.  Every evening, people flock to the sea wall on the west side of the island in hopes of seeing a great sunset.

 And when the full moon rises out of the ocean, families and neighbors gather in the park to watch as the moon spreads its silver mantle over the dancing waves.  No wonder this island is home to many artists and writers.

I don't write about Hawai'i, but I do renew my creative batteries here, not only because of the closeness of nature, but also because being here brings a shift in my daily life, and being jogged out of our routines helps nudge our creativity.  At home in Montana, summer days stretch on deep into what is black night in Hawaii, and winter days end while the tropical sun is still shining.  Here in Hawaii, the record high and low temperatures throughout the year don't vary as much as they do over a normal 24 hour span at home.  Everything is different, and the differences bring about a shift in my being.  I do work here--one of the perks of being a writer is that you can carry out your craft wherever you are--but I try to keep that to a minimum.  I want those batteries to be chock full of creative energy when I return to the deep, dark cold of winter, when writing is the one thing I can do, no matter what nature has to offer my spirit.

An Old Dog on New Tricks

I knew that my web site was outdated years ago.  What had been cool at the turn of the millennium was looking shopworn.  Furthermore the infrastructure of my site was so arcane that I had to hire someone if I wanted to add a school visit to my schedule page.

I finally pulled it together and started looking for someone to hire.  Being a nontechno type who wanted to remain so, I couldn’t imagine anything else.  I approached people I knew.  Busy.  I asked the people I knew for people they knew.  Busy.  How could this be?  It’s a bad economy. 

Then I thought of a former MFA student who came to Lesley University to learn more about writing for kids, but was already an accomplished illustrator, photographer, animator (http://bryanballinger.com/).  Bryan graciously replied that I couldn’t hire him, but that he would mentor me through the beginning steps of building a site.  Damn, it was that old “teach a man to fish” line.  I had really just wanted to go to the fish market or, better yet, ordered my meal at a seafood restaurant. 

Wait a second, I thought.  One reason I wanted the new site was so I could be more self-sufficient.  If I knew how to build the thing, maintaining it would be a snap.  Many normal people seemed to be doing it. And I’d been blogging for a few years; I knew how to insert pictures into text, would bad could it be?

Pretty bad.  Mainly because I not only had to learn this foreign language and skill set, I had to get over my resistance and fear of doing so.  Bryan opened an empty Wordpress site for me, gave me a Skype tutorial and then it was the first day of the rest of my life.  I found something I thought I could do and did it.  Hooray.  I crept along until I came up against a wall, metaphorically speaking, with no idea of how to remove it or get around it because I had no idea why it was there.  I simply Xed out of the site—for a week.  Bryan sweetly got me back on track, but sometimes the problem of asking for explanations meant not knowing enough to understand the answers.

Here we go again, I found something else I could do and in doing so, figured out that first problem.  Happiness!  Hours went by as I slowly learned why what I designed didn’t look the same once the page was in view mode or how to line three photos up across the page.  My new skills kept growing.  Rescaling picture sizes, using Skype to get tutorials, learning enough html to do sidebars, too many colors on one page are too distracting, saturated colors make print vibrate uncomfortably against a black screen, have patience, have patience.  Writing affords you many words and choices to produce a desired result.  Html—just one—so what did I do wrong?  Obsession, then another block and shutdown once more.  For two weeks.  Again and again I’d inch my way back in.

Ultimately I guess this is how we learn most things.  If they are easy for you because you have the aptitude or temperament for them, the push/pull isn’t so painful—or noticable.

Thank you Bryan, and thank you Tim John (http://boismierjohndesign.com/) who stepped in at the end to add the banners, programming, bells and whistles far beyond my pay grade.  Yes, it took an absurd amount of time to make this web site.  But maybe not so long to learn a new lesson about learning.

I proudly present to you www.susangoodmanbooks.com.

Learning How You Learn

David Schwartz’s intriguing and revealing post,  Suguaro By the Numbers. Maybe, displayed how one (his) creative mind thinks.  It generated lots of responses from the I.N.K. community of thinkers and creators.  It's a window into the mind of a life-long learner. It may well be that the most important thing any individual can learn is what their individual learning style is.  Last year I heard a speaker who had become a teacher despite severe learning disabilities.  But because she had severe learning disabilities, she knew exactly what she needed to do to learn something new and could articulate it.  I was struck by her self-knowledge and started thinking about how well I know myself in this regard. What spurred me to start dwelling on this, long before I read  David's post, was a quote at the bottom of an email.

The quote was by General Eric Shinseki, who said, “If you do not like change then you will like irrelevance even less.”   "Wow!" I thought.  Are we ever caught between the clichéd rock and a hard place!  Change is now hitting a number of established ways of being and doing—publishing, education, and social interaction.  With the new focus on the Common Core Standards, emphasizing the acquisition of skills that enable people to learn, educators are starting to recognize that learning to learn is a skill for a lifetime. Even we, who learn and create for a living, have to master new skills to adapt to change, or we become irrelevant.  It’s helpful to know about our own learning styles and how to be patient and kind to ourselves while we’re at it. Cuz it ain’t easy!

For myself,  I know that learning is a process.  Some concepts or skills I “get” right away.  That’s because they are only slightly different from what I already know.  But there are other concepts that are foreign to me and are not so quickly acquired.  I call these the “tearing-out-the-hair” challenges.  So I have learned that learning takes time, although I am very impatient with myself until I gain some proficiency.

Sometimes life hands you a catalyst where previously unrelated learning comes together in an instant “aha” moment.  Years ago, when I was just starting as a writer, I had worked on a couple of books with a friend and neighbor—another young mother like me.  One day she called me up and said, “Vicki, we both like to cook.  Why don’t we write a cookbook for kids?”  I replied, “Let me think about it.” (An excellent phrase to have on the tip of one’s tongue.)  I hung up the phone and started walking towards the window in my living room with an internal monologue
going on in my head that I remember to this day, forty years later: “I don’t want to write a cookbook for kids.  I want to write science for kids.”  At that moment the title “Science Experiments You Can Eat” popped into my head.  I had an instant vision of the work.  I knew enough about cooking and enough about science to immediately sit down and write an outline right off the top of my head.  As it turned out, I wrote that book by myself and it was published in 1972, revised in 1994 and is still very much in print.  (I’d LOVE to revise it again but, with the crisis in publishing, HarperCollins is not offering me a deal.)

But most of the time, before I write something, I’m not tapping into a deep reservoir of prior knowledge.  I have to learn about it. So I treat my brain like the computer it is. First I gather as many sources as I can—mostly books from the library. This is what I call the data-feeding or “gozinta” stage.  At some point, and this could be weeks later, I get inklings of the “gozoutas.”   I figure out the BIG idea behind the book, which gives me a direction for further research when I begin the purposeful research that uncovers the information I use to decorate the concepts behind the topic.

When I’m coming from a dead start, without absolutely no prior knowledge, like teaching myself how to make videos having never held a camcorder, I might peruse the manual to find out how to turn the thing on.  But I’m too impatient to stay with the manual very long.  I’m an experiential learner; I can’t wait to start using this new tool, knowing full well that I’m going to make mistakes.  So I intrepidly plunge right in.  My very first video featured my grandchildren from two different families doing a science activity together from one of my books.  These kids live far apart and see each other once a year.  That evening, I proudly showed their parents my rough footage to the delight of all.  Automatically, I rewound the tape after the screening, not thinking that the tape was in the camera.  The next time I used the camera, I erased all that precious footage.  An unforgiving  error!  But, one-trial learning.  I NEVER did that again.

I am not a scholar.  My impatient nature is not suited to dwelling on difficult texts.  So I start by attacking many books on the same subject until some author grabs me enough for more close reading.  I quit when I tire and, at the beginning, my attention span can be quite short.  But I’m persistent; so I keep at it.  I regard tough reading and writing like knitting.  I pick it up and do a little, time after time, until I get there.

I don’t like to learn under pressure.  I give myself deadlines with plenty of time and start to work right away.  I usually finish early.   I also give my brain deadlines to come up with solutions to knotty problems where the answer is not obvious.  Then, I forget about it. Amazingly, my brain does its thing and at some point, when I least expect it, the solution to the problem I gave it comes to me.  I have no idea how it happens, I just know how to make it work.

Sorta like learning how to use all this +_)(*&^%$#@! newfangled technology.  

Five Finger Frustration

What is the sound of one hand typing? 

Plunk, plunk…plunk……………plunk…oops, backspace.

What is the sound of two hands typing?

In my case, it’s been:  Ouch!  Ouch!  Ouch! Then, after a while, a retreat downstairs to the couch.

About six weeks ago, I had a bad car accident and broke all the bones in my left forearm and carpel (I guess I now have my own version of carpel tunnel syndrome). I feel lucky I wasn’t hurt more severely and that I’m right handed.  Two operations and several casts later, I’m slowly on the mend.

So how has this affected my writing?  Well, I’m glad I could confine what little writing I did in the early days to email.  Back then, painkillers and only one useful hand made the keyboard feel like a wilderness to be conquered. I am a touch typist and have found that using one hunt-and-peck forefinger means a lot more hunting and less pecking than I imagined. My fingers know the keys much better than my visual memory does.  It doesn’t help that my emotional attachment to a decade-old keyboard means many of the letter symbols have worn off the keys.

Yes, I know that I can just compose longhand, the way I used to hammer out all my articles when I first started my career as a magazine writer.  But technology changed a long time ago.  I made the switch and my brain has too.  I am so used to my hands being able to keep up with my thoughts that I’m no longer trained to hold the upcoming words --long phrases or a word picture--in my mind for that length of time.  Tap, tap, tapping of the forefinger creates the same problem.  

Dragon, the voice recognition software?  Thought about it, bought it, returned it unwrapped.  Maybe it would have been a godsend for email.  But, for me, there are essential components to thoughtful writing it just wouldn’t satisfy.  The process isn’t all that different, but dictation feels distracting, moor less, as if the words I really want, their order and the meaning I want to make of them could just float away. When typing, words and ideas go from the mind through the hands, then via the eyes back to the brain to continue the process.  Mind, hands, eyes—three parts, each with its own job to do, which includes freeing the others to do theirs.

I know Steven Hawking has managed just fine using a different system.  And, he’s hardly the only one.  If my injury had been worse or permanent, I would work to rewire my creative circuitry.  Seems a little daunting, though.  So, even though I’ve given serious thought to a book I’m gearing up to refashion, something tells me it will stay on simmer until my cast comes off.

Mind Games

A week ago our six month old puppy, Page, decided that 4 AM was the perfect time to go outside and play. After an appropriate amount of grumbling on my part, I got up and let her out into the backyard. On the way downstairs, I noticed a large heart-shaped pillow, bright red and covered with lots of smaller white hearts. It was our sixteen year old son's Valentine's Day "card" to his Mom from last year.*
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I stood on the back porch as Page dashed around madly making giant figure eights. She's a Beagle mix, golden haired with white spots, but has very, very long legs. She looked like a miniture greyhound as she sprinted around and around and around. Then I thought about that red heart pillow. Our son is a person of giant emotions -- frequaently loud in all ways (our neighbors are wonderfully tolerant when he plays electric guitar), always hugging friends hello and goodbye, compressing more words per second in his rap songs then can be imagined, never settling for a simple story line or answer in his songs when something complex, contradictory and dark is demanding to be heard. There is wonderful freedom in his approach to life and art -- often reckless (he says what he feels in the moment and doesn't look back or forward), but just as often making a moving and thoughtful emotional comment that has real impact. *
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Of course, we also want to have all of that rich emotion in our nonfiction writing, though we operate in a world of rules -- space limitations, monitored by a series of gatekeepers (from editors, to reviewers, to teachers, librarians and parents) between our books and our readers, plus our need and drive to be as accuarate as possible. This isn't a complaint about the system we work in; but it's a reality that can sometimes make us hesitate when we're writing and sometimes/usually leads us to question what our inner soul is telling us to say: If I say it this way, it will be much more passionate or active or whatever, but will it be as accurate or clear?*
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I know some writers who go with the flow, put down on paper whatever their head is telling them, and either leave it to their editors to make suggestions for revisions or go back later themselves. I envy them. Unfortunately, I am a compulsive self-editor. I think over, question, revise and re-revise every phrase, every sentence, every paragraph as I write them. Then I rework the section and question it all over again. And my earliest books reflected this labor. Over the years I've come up with little gimmicks to maintain a more spontaneous feeling. Nothing genius, mind you. Just ways to stay relaxed in my head. For instance, when I write, I tell myself that I should imagine I'm talking to one reader who happens to be sitting across the desk from me, which means writing in a conversational, informal way. If I feel a section is sounding too much like a freshman college lecture, I stop and do something else (wash dishes, water plants, take Page out) and come back later, hopefully with a fresh eye and approach. And I always read over a manuscript several times with a slightly different mode of attack. I'll make believe I'm the nastiest editor alive and write all sorts of challenging comments and suggestions in the margins; I'll read it with a young reader in mind who might not be familiar with the subject; and I'll just read it start to finish in one shot to be sure it flows along smoothly, noting whenever something (an odd phrasing, an overly long sentence, etc.) makes me stop reading. *
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These are just little tricks -- mind games really -- and sometimes they work. Just as watching Page doing crazy laps in the dark night for ten or twenty minutes can free up the brain and get it ready for another day's work. I hope you all have a wonderful Valentine's Day and that (if you work) your thoughts and words are passionate, free flowing, and exactly what you want to say.

Where Does He Get His Ideas?

Like so many New Yorker subscribers, I am always months behind. They pile up week by week, screaming their silent rebuke. Sometimes I hide them in a corner; rarely, I become defiant and throw them out without a glance of what I might miss. Keeping up with this magazine is the best (only?) reason I can think of for commuting to a job on the subway instead of just carrying my coffee upstairs in my pjs.

I’m glad the November 14, 2011 issue didn’t end up unseen and in the recycling. Yesterday I read an article by John McPhee, one of the greatest nonfiction writers around. In “Progression,” he discussed the evolution of many of his ideas, when he lets his subject matter dictate the structure of his piece, and the few times (just two in a very full career) he chose a structure and searched for a subject to fit it.

Many of us here have written about such matters already, but I find the topic endlessly fascinating. I thought I might pluck a few points from the article that could hopefully spur some conversation in the comments section from my fellow bloggers and some of our readers.

1. McPhee said he once listed all the pieces he had written in decades and realized that 90 percent of them were related to subjects he had been interested in before he went to college.

Is that true for you? I’m not sure it is for me. I really liked biology, but I’d never have predicted I would write so much about science. Is that because I was a young girl at a time when females considered other types of careers? Or is it that I didn’t understand then that there is a poetry in pure science that is as lyric as Shakespeare's?

2. McPhee said that his readers aren’t shy with suggestions, then noted these ideas are often closer to the readers’ passions than his own. Yet he did end up using two of their proposals.

Anybody here ever turn an suggested idea from a reader or a kid into a book?

3. McPhee mentioned that “new pieces can shoot up from other pieces, pursuing connections that run through the ground like rhizomes.”

I bet so many of us have written books or articles this way. I’ve already talked about one of mine in an earlier post (http://inkrethink.blogspot.com/2011/02/on-and-on-and-on.html). Have you met a minor character while researching one story who demanded a book of his or her own? Or turned an idea on its ear for another go-round?

4. And finally, what about McPhee’s ultimately successful attempt to tame a potentially disastrous idea: trying to find the right subject to fit within a pre-set structure. His result turned out to be the classic Encounters with the Archdruid.

Anybody else give this a try?

Focus

I'm been thinking lately a lot about FOCUS. It's my New Year's Resolution. I try to come up with one word that says it all to me. One word because then maybe, just maybe, I'll remember what it is. Once in a while it's a phrase. But it has to speak to me and usually somewhere around December 30 it just comes. Last year it was ENJOY (as in, life can bring you hard times, so you really should enjoy the good ones!). The year before it was INTENTION (as in, be truly present for every moment). Each year I don't give up the one from the year before because, theoretically, anyway, I should have figured out over the course of the year how to follow that resolution, and so each year I'm adding on to the ones from the years before. This is the goal, anyway.

So this year's resolution and goal is FOCUS. As in--keep your eye, your heart, your mind on what you have set out to do. Be a bird charting your own course, not a bird who is buffeted this way and that by this breeze, or that change in the wind. Sometimes when I say it to myself I add Hocus Pocus. Focus Hocus Pocus. Because it sure is going to take some real kind of magic to focus, isn't it?!

Focusing in 2012 is not so easy.  There are so many distractions, both external and internal. I know this is true for writers and other artists. I know it's true for teachers and librarians as well. We have so many demands on our attention and our time. We have way too much input from media and social media and supervisors and guidelines and trends and children and parents and readers and it's just so hard to....

That's my arm, by the way. It's a temporary tattoo my friend Rebecca gave me because she knows my resolution. She gave me two. I might have to order some more. Because this is going to take a lot of reminding, and some real Intention. I have a huge nonfiction book to research and write, another one to finish, and a novel that is calling me and demanding I pay attention to it (and I want to!). I have a new book coming out in August, which will mean a lot of external input threatening my focus. Before that I have to update my web site. And then there's life. 

As I write this I know that every single person who is reading this feels the same way. The particulars may be different, but the problems (and I imagine the occasional moments of panic) are the same. 

I'm writing this on Friday morning, and was inspired to write it right now because of an article I read in the New York Times. Did you see it? The story about a cell phone disrupting the last, beautiful, very quiet measures of Mahler's Symphony No. 9? 

Can you imagine? The man was sitting in the first row, and his cell phone went off--the marimba alarm tone. When you read the article, you'll learn that it was a new phone, an Iphone, that his company had given him, and he had silenced it, but he didn't know that his alarm was set. (Yes, your alarm goes off even if you've silenced your phone. I know this from napping. If you do it on purpose, it's a good thing.) 

There are a few things that I like about this story. One is that the conductor, Alan Gilbert, stopped the performance. That sound was disrupting his focus, the focus of his musicians, and, of course, the focus of the audience. We were in London in 2005 at a performance of The History Boys, and the same thing happened. Front row. Awful noise. A crucial scene. Third time. One of the actors, Richard Griffiths (a large and scary man at this particular moment), furiously stopped the scene and said, "I can't compete with these electronic devices." He ordered the man to leave and we all applauded. He then started the scene again, he said, for the second and last time. It was a memorable play and a memorable experience. I imagine the Mahler the other night was, too. I don't think Mr. Gilbert yelled, but he did stop the performance and ask that the phone be turned off. He respected the need for focus, and for the purity of art. 

According to the article the man whose phone it was felt just awful and didn't sleep for two nights.  Venom was spewed at him all over the internet. According to the Times he was a 20-year subscriber to the New York Philharmonic, and has often been irked by noises in Avery Fisher hall--coughs, people who clap at the wrong time, and cell phones.  "It was just awful to have any role in something...so disturbing and disrespectful," he told the Times. When someone from the Philharmonic called him the next day (having figured out who he was) and asked him politely not to do it again, he agreed, of course, and asked if he could apologize to Mr. Gilbert. They talked by phone and the conductor said to him, "I'm really sorry you had to go through this" and accepted his apology. Don't you love it? 

But what I also love is what Patron X (as he is called) said. He said that this underscored (pun intended?) "the very enduring and important bond between the audience and the performers. If it's disturbed in any significant way, it just shows how precious the whole union is." 

So I read that this morning and I thought--same here. If we let cell phones and other "electronic devices" get between us and our focus on our art--whether we are writing, reading, researching, or teaching, then we are violating a sacred bond. 

Fewer words, more pictures? An infographic

Greetings, I.N.K. readers! Please help me with a little experiment…do you prefer version 1 or 2?

Version 1

We often use words, words, words, (and only words) to express what’s on our mind (or should that be minds?) Words are fab BUT words plus pictures combined are a great way to share ideas!

TIPS:

Doodle your ideas

Use maps + timelines

Write on a photo

Make a diagram

Create a comic

Add clip art

Etcetera…!

Resources:

Blah Blah Blah: What to Do When Words Don’t Work by Dan Roam
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D.

I just finished the above two books which is why I’m thinking about this topic (a recurring interest). Also, I’ve really enjoyed looking at Karen Romano Young’s Humanimal Doodles. Anyway, here is the other contender (click to enlarge):

Version 2

Brain clip art is from Clipart ETC, courtesy of FCIT at the University of South Florida.
More on infographics from Kathy Schrock’s site.
Written and drawn in Adobe Illustrator

So…? If you’re anything like me, Version 2 is much more fun but more importantly is more memorable. Not everyone will agree (which is fine, too). One of the insights of the Blah Blah/100 Things books is that humans evolved over millions of years to take in information visually to a large degree, and we limit ourselves unnecessarily if we communicate with words alone. If we bury people in too many words, we may confuse and/or bore them. Many other research-based conclusions about how people perceive, learn, and recall information are mentioned in these books.

I’ve been wanting to make an infographic for a long time; please feel free to repost it, print it out, or otherwise share it (without changing it please.) Enjoy!

@Loreen Leedy

my web site

Field Trips, Parties, and Where do I Get my Ideas?

In response to Roz Schanzer’s hilarious post “Writing Right, Right?” about Rules for Writing, Jim Murphy commented, “You have to have some fun writing if you expect me to still be awake when I get to the conclusion.” That reminds me of a funny story.

Most of the books I do with Sandra Jordan begin with a field trip. But not all field trips turn into books. A few years ago Sandra and I had what we thought was a great idea. We set off for the Museum of Modern Art to do some research. After two hours there, we went back to my apartment, sat down, and promptly fell asleep. Later we realized if our great idea put us to sleep, what would it do to our readers?

Where do you get your ideas? That’s the question I’ve been asked hundreds of times for the last thirty years. Some of my ideas seem quite interesting when I come up with them, often in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. But in the light of day (is that a cliché, Roz?) in the midst of researching, I get so bored I end up eating lunch at 9:30 in the morning or writing frantic e mails to my daughters about nothing.

Here are some of my favorite field trips that did work out:

1. A drive out to Storm King Sculpture Park resulted in our book “The Sculptor’s Eye.”


2. On a visit to the National Gallery in Washington DC, Sandra and I stood transfixed in front of Jackson Pollock’s painting Lavender Mist and featured it in “Action Jackson.”


3. A trip to the Isamu Noguchi Foundation in Long Island City to see his stage sets for dances by Martha Graham sparked our interest in doing a book on collaboration that resulted in “Ballet for Martha.”

Going to a party doesn’t constitute a field trip but it may inspire an idea. I once met the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude at a cocktail party and she and I struck up a conversation about …no not art…but her Issey Miake dress. She was so charming that when Sandra and I decided to do a book about the Christos, I knew we would enjoy interviewing them.

Although I usually don’t get ideas for books at parties, social events seem to produce a multitude of suggestions by well meaning friends. It usually begins like this: “I’ve got an amazing story that would make a great book for kids. If I had the time, I would write it myself.” Here are some recent offerings:

A children’s book about the Bhagavad Gita from my friend Maxine who’s a Buddhist.

A story about Lucy’s schnauzer Morgan, who recently ran away and went missing for 19 hours.

Stanley’s grandson’s 9th birthday party at Busch Stadium.

And so on…

Occasionally, I’ve felt compelled to explain that I write nonfiction about the arts. This pronouncement is sometimes followed by blank looks, which prompt me to discourse on the dearth of arts education in the schools and the fact that perception in the arts encourages abstract thinking skills and inspires creativity. More blank looks. Perhaps I’m preaching to the wrong audience, which is why I’ve vowed to avoid parties (except on Halloween) this month, and stay home and write (and have fun doing it).

Insanely Great*

Credit: Darren Rovell on WhoSay

I am writing this post on an iMac. It’s a beautiful machine, sleek and imposing, with a magnificent 27-inch screen that is a work of art even when the power is off. But when the power is on, well, that’s when the magic happens. I can make movies and book trailers, take and edit photos, listen to and even create music, make video phone calls, and hopefully write a decent blog post, all without leaving my desk.

Yes, I am a Macophile, one of the legions of fans of Apple Inc. and all of its products who seem to be taking the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs on Wednesday even more personally than the rest of the world. I wasn’t always such a devotee. For a long time, I straddled the PC and Mac camps, but I finally jumped in with both feet a few years ago, chucking my PC desktop and my lame MP3 player that for some reason displayed words only in Danish and embracing the iMac, iPod, and iPad. (I’m eagerly anticipating my first iPhone, too, as soon as my Verizon Android contract is up next summer.) I love this streamlining of my digital life almost as much as I love my streamlined iStuff.

Apple is that rare company whose products deserve the highest marks for both form and function. And Steve Jobs was the rare CEO whose vision always took the needs of his end users into consideration. He built a network of Apple stores that offer training and face-to-face technical support to anyone who can get to them, essentially providing a kick-ass IT department for those of us who are self-employed. Of course, it’s a bit maddening for the budget-conscious that a visit to the Genius Bar requires a stroll past all the new and improved products that Apple has to offer, but who can fault Jobs for being a brilliant marketer?

It’s also noteworthy that Jobs was always known for his groundbreaking ideas, rather than his net worth. Although his success certainly would have earned him the title of business magnate—the Wikipedia entry for the term has a photograph of Bill Gates—his public image was as more of an iconoclast than a tycoon. It’s fitting, then, that yesterday while thousands of people in the Occupy Wall Street protests leveled criticism at corporate greed, hundreds of others laid tributes to Jobs in front of the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue some six miles away. We’ve all learned so much from Steve Jobs. Perhaps the other “captains of industry” should do the same.

*"Insanely Great": Steve Jobs' description for the Macintosh computer

THE SHAPE OF THINGS

Dresses! Evening gowns! Shoes! Accessories! What does fashion have to do with YA nonfiction? Read on, my lovelies. For, like Stephen Colbert’s segment, The Word, it all comes together in the end. Hint: think the shape of things.

Toward the end of summer I was deep into a new book project. My interviews were transcribed and the chapters pretty close to a final draft. Follow-up questions were written in red. The photographs were cued to match the text. I could see what was missing and knew how to get it. That’s what I would call a fine month’s work.

This all came together in a lovely rented home in Columbia County, New York, where I had nothing more to do but write, eat delicious food, write, drink chilled wine, write, and watch magnificent sunsets. No TV. Infrequent Internet. We were miles away from newspapers, bills, and arguments over the debt ceiling. Writing does have its perks.

But, and there’s always an anxious “but” with writers. My “but” was I couldn’t find a shape to my book. It was a burlap bag of information. Where’s the beginning, how does it end, and when does that ubiquitous arc we know and love show its beautiful arabesque? My editor, agent, and writer-friends told me not to worry, “It will come, just keep working.” I agreed that it would happen, but when? I wanted to see it now. No, not now, yesterday. And so I returned home to the city, home to all-of-the-above mentioned annoyances that keep creativity from a fevered pitch.

Meanwhile, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Alexander McQueen show, Savage Beauty, was winding down. It had been on view for months, and to tell the truth, I had little interest in visiting a crowded fashion show. As the lines at the museum grew longer and longer, the hype louder and louder, I panicked. Am I missing one of the biggest shows in the history of the Met? Then again, do I really want to schlep all the way uptown and stand in line for hours to see clothes? I can do that just as well at Bergdorf’s. Friends whose taste I respect insisted, “It’s not fashion, it’s art!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Really.” Finally, societal pressure got the better of me, and two days before the show closed I gave up my BEST writing hours to see fashion – I mean art.

By 9:30 the lines stretched from the second floor, around the halls, down the staircase, out the door, down the grand steps, around the block and into Central Park. But members could go right in. Although I’m a curmudgeon when it comes to viewing art en masse, I took advantage of my membership and went in. Savage Beauty was fascinating – stunning. I learned that Alexander McQueen began a new collection with a concept, and that he laid his work out on a storyboard. Hmmm. Writers do that. The concepts were based on nature, history, cultures, poetry, Darwin, primitivism, and “the dark side of life.” Writers work with these ideas, too. Instead of expressing these themes in writing or painting, he used ostensibly incompatible materials and the female shape. There was a McQueen quote that particularly resonated with me: “People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don’t see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality.”

If you missed the show, as I almost did, here’s a link: http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/about/

All in all this was a most pleasant morning. Now the time had come to return home and face my own kind of shape, one that did not include feathers, aluminum, velvets, and tulle. Deep into the bowels of the subway, onto the C train, I sat staring into nothingness the way New Yorkers do when riding in a crowded, drab tunnel.

All of a sudden, and for no reason, I stood up and said, “I’ve got it! I know the shape of my book.” [No one even looked up, which is a good thing about New York subway riders.] Everything came together: the opening paragraph, the ending, chapter order, and even that pesky little arc. It was all there, oozing from my brain, filling my eyes with images, tingling my soon-to-be typing fingertips. How did this happen?

Visiting Alexander McQueen’s exquisite dark side somehow sparked my own creative juices in a fresh way. Intangible, enchanted flashes of recognition, often by way of osmosis, somehow inspire other artists, writers, and poets. How? Perhaps my science-writing colleagues have a theory? That’s why Alvin Ailey would arrive at rehearsals with piles of art books instructing his dancers to find a shape that best portrays the reasons behind their steps in a ballet. That’s why Uta Hagen would send budding actors to the zoo to watch an animal that best reflects their roles in a play. Art seems to be one big blob, connected, disconnected, transformed into individual ideas. [Note to the Department of Education: this is one reason why you cannot eliminate music, art, and creative writing classes. The loss is greater than the cost.]

I arrived at my stop, raced up the stairs, my head still bursting with new ideas. A quick stop at the corner stand for strawberries and bananas – head in clouds – uneven sidewalk – trip – fall – crack a rib. Writing can be painful but that’s the subject for another blog. My body was in bad shape – but not my book. And that’s the shape of things.

Happy New Year, 5772,

Susan

Author-in-Residence: A Dream Assignment

I have had a great gig this year: author-in-residence at the Michael J. Perkins School in South Boston, a small elementary school set right in the middle of Old Colony Housing Project. Old Colony is being renovated and I was hired to work with the Perkins kids on a blog about being in the middle of a construction zone. I described more about the situation in last October's post.

As the end of the school year approaches, it's natural to look back and access the experience. Having done school visits for many years, I have always been in awe of classroom teachers. Now, I bow down to them. To see what they do every day, day after day, is amazing. To see the pressure to fulfill a state's curriculum--teach X from October 12 to November 3rd and then segue to unit Y on the 4th. To understand more fully how my coming to the classroom with extras means extra resources and richness but extra work squeezing to fit everything in, however worthy it all is.

But some great things happened this year, from K to 5. Some of the highlights:

When the kindergarteners read Mike Mulligan and his Steam Engine, they wondered what the workers on the site had named their machines. They were amazed--maybe a little horrified--when they realized those excavators and dump trucks were just called "it" or "they." That's when the Name That Crane campaign was born--the two kindergarten classes each nominated names, ran campaigns and voted for the name to call the huge crane that lifted the steel (they also learned the democratic process in the bargain, which made the See How They Run author very happy). Voting Day was very exciting, take a look.


Here are the kindergarteners at the naming ceremony--with the Big Giraffe, the newly dubbed 400-ton crane in the background. (A fine name, but I was personally rooting for Mr. Lifty! That's democracy for ya--besides I didn't get a vote.)


For National Poetry Month, one first grade class experimented with acrostic poems, which use the letters in a topic word to begin each line. Then all the lines of the poem relate to this topic. Given what was going on outside their class window, they used the word, CONSTRUCT. This poem above was one of my favorites.
One second grade class is collaborating on a book about the day in the life of a construction worker and what these men and women must do to stay safe. For one week, they spent an hour a day observing the construction site and writing down what they saw.

Then they did interviews; two workers came to their classroom to answer their questions about safety. The kids got to touch and try on the equipment so they could really understand what they were going to write about. In other words, these young kids were learning to research exactly the way we professionals do.



The fifth grade teacher asked me to come in to talk to her class to kick off their nonfiction book writing unit. While I was there I mentioned that I've found that when I'm really interested in my subject, I find that my book turns out better. So this intrepid teacher decided to abandon the "everybody writes about a person in history or an animal" assignment and let the kids pick. Pretty brave for a school where the kids have computer class once a week and no school library, really.

But the next time I came back, the kids were running with it. Give kids a choice and what do they come up with? Books about cancer, profiles of each of the ingredients in pizza, why tears are salty, the history of video games, snakes that swallow their prey whole, New Jersey's role in the Revolutionary war, and a profile of a favorite teacher--among others. Oh, and the Big Bang Theory.

Today I'm going in to show them about dummying up a book. The teacher says it's tough, it's a bit chaotic, but the kids are running with it and have never been so excited about a project. Isn't it the way it should be? Aren't they lucky? Aren't I?

Can't wait for the publishing party.

For anyone who is interested: www.michaeljperkinsschool.blogspot.com