Why we write for kids

If I had a nickel for every time someone said, “Why don’t you write for adults?” I’d have—well, probably just a latte from Starbucks, but still. It’s one of those comments, along with, “I would write a kid’s book, if I had the time,” that makes me a little nuts. (My friend Pamela Jane had the best answer for the second one when a real estate mogul said that to her at a party. She looked at him and responded, “I’d put together a multi-million dollar real estate deal if I had the time.")

So why do we write for kids and not adults? It might be easier for the outside world to understand why people write fiction for kids, but non-fiction? Why do we go through all the research, learn about our topic front and back, inside and out, and then write it as a picture book for preschool through second-graders, or as a middle grade book, or as a YA? We’d make more money, almost certainly, if we wrote it for adults. Get bigger advances, sell more copies. In some circles, we’d have more cache. (Though most of us learn, early on, those are not the circles we want to run in.) It’s just as much work—if not more—to write it for kids. As has been famously said (first, it seems, by Henry David Thoreau), it’s harder to write it short. (Also true for blogs, as I'm finding out.) And harder to write it simpler. So why do we do it? First, it's a great challenge. And that's huge. I am never, ever bored in my job!

But also, here's the truth: books matter more to kids. O.K. before I go on, I have to say, some of my best friends are grown-ups. Some of my best friends (and best husbands) even write for grown-ups. There’s nothing wrong with writing for grown-ups.

But a book can change a kid’s life. A book can hit a kid in the solar plexus and never let go.

I remember the day I first discovered I could learn from books. And that changed my life.

For some reason in my school, Muhlenberg Elementary, in Allentown, PA, we weren’t allowed to check out books from the library until first grade. Maybe that was a good idea--we had to wait a whole year, and the anticipation was intoxicating. Then one day, we walked into the library—I can still see the beautiful wooden shelves, smell that old-book, old-paper, new-book, new-paper library smell. (I was back there for a school visit a few years ago and the library smells the same!) For some reason, maybe it was because it was straight ahead, I walked over to the non-fiction section and I pulled this book off the shelf.


I walked home, book in hand, and asked my mother to read it to me. Up until that point, the books my mother read to me were all fiction: The Little House, a book about twins who didn't want to look the same any more (oh, how I wanted a twin sister!), and my favorite, the eponymous, Debbie and Her Nap, which my mother bought and read to me for pure propaganda purposes, which did not work. Though though I am a heckuva good napper now.

But on that day when I was six, as my mother read What is a Butterfly to me on my bed (I honestly remember this moment--my back was up against the wall, my legs too short to reach the other side of the bed), I discovered that a book could teach me things, a book could help me understand how the world works, a book could make me smart. It was my own personal (excuse me) metamorphosis. I returned What is a Butterfly and came back home with What is a Frog? then What is a Tree? and there was a whole series! I was hooked--on non-fiction. I didn't stop reading fiction, I kept it in the mix, but I gobbled up non-fiction. And as soon as I was old enough, I turned to biographies--and they became my new love. I found that for me the best way into a subject was through people, through a person's story, a person's life. This also came from my mother, an inveterate people watcher. Hence my love for writing biography now. But it all started with What is a Butterfly.

And years later, in a pure coincidence, an editor asked me to do a book about metamorphosis. I wrote From Caterpillar to Butterfly, and as I wrote it, in the months just after my mother died, it was as if she was right beside me again, reading me my first non-fiction book, the one that opened up the world for me.

Preparing for this blog I asked friends and family to tell me some stories about how a book changed their life, or a kid's life. Here are some of their answers. I hope readers of I.N.K. and other I.N.K. bloggers will also contribute.

Elvira Woodruff, author of many wonderful children's books based on historical events, started reading the Landmark Edition Biographies when she was ten or eleven and "Reading about how these people transformed their lives gave me encouragement and hope that I could change my own life. Those biographies were inspiring in a way that today's reality tv could never be. Rather than just a snapshot of a moment these biographies gave you an entire life to reflect on and I do believe my outlook on life was changed for the better because of them."

Another friend, a librarian and an author, brought home Jean Fritz's books for her daughter who hated history and social studies. Corrie was hooked, and she is now an enthusiastic middle school social studies teacher!

We as authors, and as people who put books into kids’ hands, can be real instruments of change. A book can help to change the world, one child or one class at a time. Marfe Ferguson Delano's new book, Earth in the Hot Seat will change kids' lives and will help change the world, I have no doubt. It grew out of kids and adults doing things to help save the world, and the book is generating more action. She tells me that when she talks about the book with kids, it gets the ball rolling, and then the kids pick it up and run with it, thinking of new ways to help the planet. Of course there have been surprises. One boy said that electronic books are really much greener than the paper-and-ink variety, and asked what she thought about trees being cut down to make paper for her books. It got Marfe thinking, and I'm sure that boy, or one like him, will effect change (whether we old fogies like it or not.)

Here's a, perhaps, cautionary tale: One day my older son, who was an avid reader, picked up a used book by John Holt called How Schools Fail. It was written for adults, obviously, but it spoke to him in a very big way. He was in fourth grade. Therein ensued years of discussions, arguments, and campaigns, which ended in Aaron finally convincing us to let him homeschool for high school. I have the gray hairs to prove it. (Though I know now it was the right thing for him.) And, thankfully, another book, Computers and the Human Mind, also grabbed him around the same time, and set him off on a course that ended up in a job in software engineering right after college. He's still an avid reader, though, mostly, I will say, on the screen, and would definitely advocate for books on screens, like that other boy. (But that's another blog.)

Books matter to kids. Books can change a kid's life. So that's why I write for kids. That and, frankly, that it's fun.

Please share your stories--how did a non-fiction book change your life, or the life of a child you know?

Cronette on the Road

So. The season for visiting schools is coming to an end: an appropriate time to be coming home to read Jan Greenburg's artful notes on aging. Grateful and thrilled I continue to be, getting to gallivant around the country, talking to kids about the virtues of studying history ["Any nation is a COMBI-nation of all of the stories of all of the people who've lived in the land down the years..."] and answering their questions. How old am I? 57 Never before been so old in my entire life. My favorite book? Different ones for different reasons. GEORGE WASHINGTON because I'm a sissypants who's too often given up too easily so I admire someone who persevered no matter what. GHOSTS OF THE CIVIL WAR because it was the most difficult and "No, it's not some Casper-deal that's going to rot your brain & give you nightmares. It's more like old Scrooge seeing the 'shades' of the departed going about their business back in the living past."

Man oh man oh man, drawing pictures for kids, making them laugh, meeting librarians and classroom teachers, rattling off factoids, reinforcing those teachers' messages - this is the best part of my job. But golly, the falling into hotel beds at the end of the day, pooped flat. Being shamed by the computer savvy of 3rd graders. I reckon that I'm not exactly a crone yet - maybe a cronette. An analog cronette in a digital world. Still, on a cloudy day, or when I find myself using terms such as 'reckon,' I can see my old coot self limping down the road.

It seems that reinventing, re-imagining one's mode of working is becoming less optional & dreamy as I cast about for new ways of telling old stories. (But that's the cool thing about biography: People never get sick of reading about people, right?) As editors scramble for the perfect project with which money can be seduced from the puckered pockets of the people. (Still, life and recessions are short. Art is long, right? Right.) As one's mortality becomes less and less a fairy tale. (Yup.)

It's all pretty galvanizing, come to think of it. Only a sissypants would be lollygagging when the great work of one's life remains to be done. Think of all we've done, preparing for it. Think what we need to know and set about learning it. Think what George Washington would do.

Writing, Creativity and Aging

Here is a question that comes up every now and then in my writers workshops with adults. How does aging affect your writing, especially your ability to connect with kids? I usually answer jokingly. “ Who me? Age?” or something to that effect.
Recently, when I was invited to be on a panel, sponsored by Washington University Medical School, entitled “In the Words of the Artist: The Influence of Age on Creativity and Expression,” I was forced to give this subject more thought. I mentioned to my daughter that I actually had agreed to participate on such a panel, and she remarked, “Perhaps you’ve decided finally to act your age.” It occurs to me that our children expect us to age gracefully, to age with dignity. What popped into my head was a line from Dylan Thomas’ poem “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.” “Rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Well, forget the rage. I prefer to age creatively.
In preparation for the panel, I began to consider how my writing had changed over the years. I began my first novel for young readers when I was thirty-five. It was motivated by the challenges of raising three daughters. I wrote every day, five days a week, while they were in school, and the books focused on domestic issues, having to do with peer pressure, illness in the family, or sibling rivalry. Editors called this genre “the problem novel.”
But when the girls grew up and went off to college, those teenage stories didn’t interest me as much anymore. I knew I had to stretch my brain in a new direction.
Letting go of that stage in my life was difficult for several reasons. I no longer had a prescribed schedule to my days. And I needed to find a new subject. My husband and I began to travel more, and through the places we went and the people we met, my world view changed, broadened. Working on a novel, I used to immerse myself in the characters, the voice, and the rhythm of language. I had to stay in the room. But when I started my first book on contemporary art, The Painter’s Eye,” with Sandra Jordan, I found myself visiting artists’ studios, museum exhibitions, and art educators all over the country. In other words, I definitely left the room!!
What I found as we wrote books about artists Chuck Close, Louise Bourgeois, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude was that their most ambitious artworks were done past the age of sixty. The architect Frank Gehry’s iconic museum in Bilbao, Spain opened just before his seventieth birthday. What drives them, I think, is the need to be remembered, to get it better, to do one more great work. Their art-making stimulates and challenges them. Problem solving energizes them. They’re not stepping aside.
Several weeks ago there was an intriguing article in the New York Times, entitled “The Artful Codger,” which talked about aging writers and the fact that improvements in health care allow us to work longer and more productively. “Shakespeare didn’t have Blue Cross,” the writer quipped. Writers, such as Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Philip Roth, have written novels full of ardor and energy way into their seventies. According to the article, “late style” tends to be provocative, energetic. Instead of rocking their way to old age, these authors write of “romantic yearnings” and “memories of the flesh.” As for me, I’m still in my “middle style.” I’ll wait until I’m much older to start writing my “late style” lusty novel. In answer to my students’ questions about relating to young readers as I grow older, I can say that my grandchildren supply me with endless material. In fact my next two books are geared toward younger children, inspired by Alexander, age 9, and Coco, age 6. And as I age, I’m celebrating my creativity, instead of worrying about losing it.

Bringing The World Home

In 1981, when I was fresh out of college, I joined the Peace Corps. My decision to sign up was certainly motivated by a desire to do something worthwhile, and the altruism of the job appealed to me.

But the other major reason I went was entirely selfish: I wanted to go because I was curious. I knew that many people in the world did not live as I did. I had a comfortable home, the security of abundant food, easy access to medical care, and a family with enough resources to provide a safety net should I ever – literally or figuratively – stumble and fall.

I did not, however, have the foggiest idea how people in poorer parts of the world did live.

And so, I went to live and teach in Nepal.

Altruism might be the best reason to join the Peace Corps, but I don’t think curiosity is necessarily the worst. Curiosity implies at least a certain openness to new ideas. (I don’t think it’s possible to be truly curious if your mind is already completely made up.)

And since part of the Peace Corps mission is to bring a greater understanding and tolerance of the world back home to America, I think my curiosity served me well.

On the surface, of course, life in my rural Nepali village was very different than my life had been back home. The village lacked electricity; the homes had no running water; kids went barefoot to school; moms cooked the family’s dinner over an open fire in the middle of the kitchen floor.

But beneath the surface, I found that much about life in my Nepali village was exactly like my life had been at home. Parents worked hard to feed their families. Kids studied and played with friends. And everyone gathered to relax at the end of the day.

By the time I left, I knew that the woman I saw hauling water home from the community water tap in a copper jug, had many of the same values and goals that I did.

Today we live in a much more global society than ever before. And it’s crucial that we help our kids learn about other cultures. It’s only through learning about other cultures that we can begin to develop tolerance for our differences, and look past them to seek common ground.

That’s why I write books about other countries. I’ve written about water around the world, about families, and about peace. My latest title with National Geographic, ONE WORLD, ONE DAY, is about school kids around the world. The book shows how their lives may be a little bit different. But more importantly, it shows how their lives are a lot alike.

Interview

What if, rather than composing an original blog, an author simply took the text of a recent (this morning) on-line interview — the interviewer's questions and their answers — and posted them? One might suspect this blogger of being lazy. Or (full disclosure) of being way behind schedule on a few projects.

That being said, however, I thought this particular interview might be of interest. It's interesting to me, of course, because it's all about me. There might be one or two other people out there who also find it fascinating for this reason. But probably not. The other reason that it might be of interest is that the questions come from a magazine in Korea — Mom & Enfant — and the cultural and language differences have resulted in questions that are sometimes charmingly disingenuous. They are, in many ways, more like the quetions that kids ask during school visits that those that come from people in the U.S. who write about children's books. I hope the folks at Mom & Enfant do not mind me posting this. If so, I apologize.

What is the most important thing when you make a picture book?

The idea. If it’s a good one, the text and art seem to come together in a natural way (not necessarily easily, but in a way that seems to make sense as it happens).

Where do you get the idea and inspiration for your works?
From your childhood, life, family, friends?

I used to get many of my ideas from questions my own children asked. But now even my youngest child (he’s almost 11) is getting a little old to ask some of the really simple questions that used to lead to book concepts. So my wife (and co-author) Robin Page have become sounding boards for each other – we frequently bounce book ideas back and forth, and in the process sometimes hit upon something we both like. Ideas also come from books, films about nature, and just looking around.

I think you enjoy painting animals. Why? Why crocodile?

Illustrations of animals seem to have more energy than illustrations of many other subjects. I also find that the distortions and inaccuracies that always creep into my pictures have the effect of giving the animals a bit of personality. Those same distortions would probably make an illustration of a human downright creepy. And, of course, animals are frequent subjects because kids are fascinated by them. Animals can be used to introduce lots of concepts other than biology – geological time scales, the qualities of different habitats, the relationship between size, strength and weight, and so on. Crocodiles are a favorite subject because their wrinkled skin and the well-defined seams where different parts of their bodies meet lend themselves well to translation into cut-paper. Insects and fish are also good subjects.


What kind of influence do you want to give people? What kind of feeling and emotion do you expect to give people?

Ideally a reader would look at the world from a slightly different perspective — and maybe look a little more closely — and experience a greater appreciation of the complexity and beauty of nature. It’s easy to take something absolutely extraordinary – a tree, say – for granted, because it’s so familiar.


I think all of you works are precious. But please choose the best. What is the reason?

I guess I’d choose ‘Life on Earth’, because it was the most difficult book to write. I wasn’t sure if I could explain the Theory of Evolution to a seven-year-old, but I think that perhaps I succeeded. And, as you know, there is a lot of controversy in this country about teaching evolution to children, which is a real shame. So I hope that this book helped a few children see past the politics to the clarity and elegance of Darwin’s ideas.


Did you enjoy reading a picture book during your childhood? Which one was your favorite? Why?

I read lots of picture books – mostly fiction. There were not that many non-fiction picture books around when I was a child. My favorite – it was illustrated, but not really a picture book – was “All About Strange Beasts of the Past” by Roy Chapman Andrews. It was about his search for fossils in Mongolia in the 1930s.

What kind of a boy were you? Did you enjoy painting? How about your family? Were they interested in painting?

I was a bookish boy, but I enjoyed sports. I had a microscope, a chemistry set, and kept lots of bugs, frogs, turtles, etc. that I captured in nearby fields and ponds. My father was a scientist – a physicist – but he painted as a hobby.


Did your parents have an influence on your job and painting?

My Father encouraged my interest in science and art.


If not, which environment and education make what you are?

I attended design school in college and have worked for many years as a graphic designer. I’m sure this helped me become an illustrator.

What activities do you think could help to improve children’s creativity and imagination?

Reading, being read to, travel, reading, going to museums, reading, watching some of the amazing films about nature that are now available (e.g., David Attenborough’s BBC films on the ocean, birds, mammals, etc.). Being listened to and taken seriously by adults when a child asks a question. Looking up the answer with a child if you don’t know it. Reading and being read to. And providing simple tools like a magnifying glass or butterfly net will often lead to an exploration of some aspect of the natural world.

What did you do when you were a kid?

Read a lot, drew pictures, explored the fields and woods around my house, played basketball, thought about girls, made dangerous concoctions with my chemistry set.


What kind of book do you think is a good picture book? What kind of illustration is the best? Why?

A good picture book has words that wouldn’t work without the pictures and (usually) pictures that wouldn’t work without the words. They don’t restate each other, but each adds something essential. A good picture book respects the intelligence of the child and doesn’t try to preach or teach an overt moral lesson.

There is no ‘best’ illustration. Illustration that is an honest expression of the way an artist sees the world will have a truth and power that children intuitively recognize.

There are various cultures all over the world. What do you think the reason lots of people from foreign countries like your works regardless of culture difference?

I think a child’s interest in nature and animals is universal. I’d speculate (without any real scientific data to support my speculation) that it’s part of our shared cultural memory. For most of human history an awareness of animals – as food, danger, or as a source of information about weather, water, and so on – was essential to our survival as a species.

In the world, there are so many countries, so many customs. Did you recognize the characteristics and differences of illustration and picture books each country? What kind of difference did you recognize?

I do see some differences in, for instance, Asian illustration and European illustration. Artists are naturally influenced by and refer to the visual arts traditions and popular culture of the places they live. But one can’t apply this sort of generalization to an individual illustrator. There might be an American illustrator who references Japanese prints and a Korean illustrator who is influenced by American comic books.


What do you think is the characteristic of picture book or illustration of USA?

Children's book illustration is amazingly diverse, so I don't think I can characterize US illustration in any overall way. The US is also a very young country and doesn’t have the centuries of art heritage that an illustrator working in China or Italy might refer to.

What kind of efforts have you made to read children’s mind and understand their world?

I don’t try to read children’s minds. I do try to keep in perspective their language skills and what I imagine is their general knowledge of the world, so I don’t write text that is too difficult for them to understand. I’m referring here to vocabulary, grammar, and metaphors or comparisons rather than concepts. I think even young children can grasp most of the ideas I’m writing about in as easily as an adult – they just need them explained in words they understand and in a context they can relate to. Other than that, I write about things that I find interesting myself. If I’m truly interested, I think that comes through in a book’s word’s and images.

Librarians Rule

Guest-posting for me today is Dorcas Hand, Library Goddess, aka Director of Libraries, at Annunciation Orthodox School in Houston, Texas. More information about the innovative "History as Story" program she describes is in her article "Adolescent Literacies: Reading, Writing, Thinking," Knowledge Quest (AASL), October, 2006.


I’m so honored to be asked to contribute a piece to this effort. I am fascinated by the literary nonfiction you all write, and can only hope one day to join your number as a writer. Kathleen asked me to write about our experiences together this past January. Kathleen visited the Annunciation Orthodox School in Houston for four intense days of assemblies and master classes focused around the writing of nonfiction.

Six years ago, I began a program for 4th-8th grade students called History as Story. I had several goals: an in-depth research project embedded in the regular curriculum; a writing project based on the research that required the students to take the facts and make them more than an encyclopedia recitation. They need to turn the facts back into a story. And I wanted to move beyond the “talking heads” author assembly programs to allow the students to interact with an author long enough to make the visit more memorable. Master classes by a prominent author assist the students to understand how to write, in this case, how to write a story that uses only the facts. I recently heard Geraldine Brooks, who described how she follows the facts as far as they go, and then fills in the gaps. These students certainly aren’t to her stage of understanding, but the concept helped them accomplish the task.

My first guest author was Susan Bartoletti Campbell, followed by Jane Kurtz, William Durbin, Phil Hoose, Jennifer Armstrong, and this year Kathleen Krull. Inevitably, the authors tell the students some of the same things like “Show, don’t tell,” and use your five senses to take us there. But the students experience the project in sequential years with different authors, different books as models, different topics and somewhat different assignments. When I look back to samples saved from the first year, I see broad improvement in both actual writing, and in understanding of how to use the technique of story to improve understanding of facts.

Fourth graders write travel journals as if they are visiting the country they have been researching. They must use details from the research like weather, famous places, language, money, clothing.

Fifth grade write biographical essays and journal entries as if they were famous explorers from history, ranging from Vasco da Gama to Sally Ride.

Sixth graders study Ancient History, and their topics for this project have been things like “Slavery in the Roman Empire,” or this year Cleopatra and Moses. The opening paragraph works to take a reader to the time and place, including details of life at the time. It is not possible to borrow sentences from an encyclopedia. And it is not possible to write the paragraph without any understanding of the topic.

Seventh graders write Biographies in Context, a 6-month research and writing effort where they work to understand the effect important (but not necessarily famous) from early American history had on their times as well as the effect the times had on them. The opening paragraph is written as a factual story to bring the person to life in some way; the rest of the paper is much more traditional.

Eighth graders research an American artist or athlete of the early 20th century – Ella Fitzgerald, Jesse Owens, Babe Ruth. They write a short piece that aims to bring to life a seminal day or time in the person’s youth, a point of decision or awakening to talent. Again, they must add to the basic biographical information details about life at the time and place where the incident takes place.

Exciting as this is for me, the librarian, it is also exciting for the teachers and the authors. The teachers appreciate that many of the kids achieve a deeper understanding of their topic through this writing process. The authors appreciate the opportunity to work with kids who are trying to do what you authors do professionally.

I choose authors that I think will have some credibility with the kids, meaning some of their books are of wide interest. Kathleen’s short biographies were really great for the teachers to use as they prepared for the visit. The visit included assemblies where Kathleen could introduce herself and her work, describing where and how she writes. Then there are the master classes, where she, 1-2 teachers and I worked with about 35 students at a time to begin their writing. They had completed the research before her arrival, but not begun the writing. It is very exciting to see what they do develop in a single hour.

Yes, the students are well prepared. But this project would not have nearly the life it has without the visiting authors. The variety in their books and in their personalities models for the students that writers are regular people just like them, except for the BIC trick. That would be “Butt In Chair,” Jane Yolen's wonderful acronym I learned from Kathleen. I’ve since seen the video where Jane Yolen explains the concept. Knowing that all of you have as much challenge practicing BIC as I do, I continue to be thankful that you all persist in the practice of BIC, modeling for the students the need for persistence in pursuit of excellent writing of nonfiction or any other form.

School Visits Redux

On Wednesday May 6th, Vicki Cobb posted an interesting, insightful entry about making a living, which, thank god, includes school visits. But I thought I might spin off of Vicki’s post to mention a few more school visit advantages.

1. Isn’t it great to get OUT OF THE HOUSE?!? I love my profession, but it’s a solitary one. I love writing, but on bad days I wonder how I got into the position where I am, in essence, spending my life doing term papers (albeit very good ones). Going on school visits is still working, but you get to talk to people.

2. As I say when asked, a writer’s ideas come from everywhere. I always add that some of my ideas have been inspired by school visits. Four, in fact. Two original ideas that each led to companion books as offshoots.

For the first, I was looking for a way to make part of my presentation about my book Ultimate Field Trip One: Adventures in the Amazon Rain Forest more interactive. So instead of just showing images of the animals we saw in the jungle and telling kids about them, I started explaining about adaptations and having the kids tell me the different ways these creatures had adapted to their environment. They really seemed to really enjoy it. The result?

Sneed Collard on Lists

Our friend Sneed Collard has a new novel out called Double Eagle. It's a mystery/adventure with some juicy Civil War history thrown in. He's one very busy, prolific kind of guy. Back in March 2008, he wrote a blog for us about the kind of nonfiction that has become his trademark. Here he elaborates on his approach to mastering "list" books.





“List” books—those which basically include collections of items—are very popular, and appear in almost all subject matters from history to biography to science. My first list book, Animal Dads (illustrated by Steve Jenkins), did so well that I immediately bent my mind to other subjects that might fit into the list format.



The question here, though, is how does one create these books?As always, the first step is research. Go learn everything you can about a subject. For a book like Teeth (illustrated by Phyllis V. Saroff), for instance, I’ll start with some animal encyclopedias, then grab some comprehensive books on different animals groups, then dive into scientific journals, which often have the most interesting facts about animals. I don’t try to write anything immediately, just let all this information percolate through my brain.



My second step is to make a list. What’s important is that I’m not listing specific animals at this point. Instead, I am asking myself “How many different ways do (fill in subject) function? For teeth, do they grind? Do they munch? How many can an animal have? What do teeth do for an animal besides eating? I write all of these things down in one column. Then, in the column next to it, I begin filling in species or examples that fit the bill. Usually, I end up with several examples that satisfy any one requirement. This is nice since it allows a greater overall variety of subjects.



Once I’ve got my list, then I work on my main text. I try to group common elements in my list together. For Teeth, these groups include teeth types, numbers, display uses, unusual teeth (such as tusks), and so forth. This is probably the most critical stage of the project, because I have to make the writing come alive, using both halves of my brain. The text not only has to flow, it has to have surprises in sentence structure and word choice. For instance…Teeth slice.Teeth stab.Teeth crack.And they grind, mash, and munch.Teeth can be very different.Or all the same.Teeth can be small.Or very large.Tusks are teeth.So are fangs.Antlers and horns are not teeth—but you probably knew that already.And so forth. Really, what I’m creating here is a poem, hopefully with a voice that draws in the reader.



Now doing this can take some work. I’ll bet I went through twenty versions of Animal Dads before I hit just the right style and voice I was looking for. When you’ve got it, though, you’ll know.So far, I’ve published about eight list-type books, but the list approach isn’t just for professional writers. Once Animal Dads came out, schools I visited began presenting me with all kinds of their own list books that students had created. Taking a topic—almost any topic—and writing a list book proves a great way to get kids interested in a subject and in writing. A typical list book has about twenty entries—just about the size of a typical classroom. By giving one aspect of a subject to each student, teachers offer them a bite he or she can handle without being overwhelmed. Then, when the kids put their book together (often creating art at the same time), they can all learn together in a way that is fun and fascinating.

Making a Living

With one exception that lasted about a year, I have not held a real job since 1969. I am not rich but I have managed to financially support myself and my two sons as a single mother and put a few dollars away for a rainy day (which is now). Needless to say, I have had a number of white knuckle months, wondering if I should throw in the towel on my free-lance lifestyle. I read want ads and reassured myself that I was qualified for a number of different kinds of jobs including teaching and public relations, but then I would decide to just hang in there one more day. And the money gods always came through. Over the years my income has had its ups and downs but has been reasonably steady. However, its nature has changed. Early in my career most of my income came from writing and I did very little public speaking. In the last fifteen years, more than half of my income came from speaking engagements, with advance money and royalties making up the other half. There were a few very good years in there when I could relax—the money just came, mostly from a very busy lecture business. The increasing importance of paid speaking engagements compared to paid writing may be echoing what has happened to artists in the music business. Years ago, musicians gave concerts to sell albums. Today, in the era of 99-cent downloads from I-Tunes, concerts have become the big money makers for recording artists and their recorded songs have become the necessary credentials to be in the concert business. People seem to want live contact with artists even if it is from a bird's eye view high in stadium seats. In the olden days, when I visited schools, kids were very familiar with my books. Lately, schools use contact with authors to motivate and initiate students' interest in books. The recent economic downturn has made huge inroads into my lucrative lecture business and has me dusting off my financial survival skills, which you may find useful.

My focus has always been on getting work rather than cutting costs. (How much can we cut, anyhow, working from home?) Go to conventions and meetings. Join professional organizations. Network, network, network. Collect business cards and make notes. I carry a little spiral-bound notebook and tiny stapler. Then I staple people’s cards into the notebook with notes for follow-up. Listen to what people are looking for. Gone are the days when publishers asked writers for ideas and books were sold over lunch. (There are no more free lunches.) Recognize that samples of your work may just be calling cards. Publishers are looking for suppliers of product, not just product itself. Don’t let rejection affect your personal self-worth. It’s all about the marketplace and publishers are now doing their own share of sweating. Timing is a key factor over which one has little control. If someone offers you work that is not your usual thing, learn to say, "Let me think about it." Never reject something out of hand. Remember, a learning experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. My marching orders for taking on a job:
1. You might learn something
2. It might lead someplace
3. It pays well.
If a job fulfills two out of three of these criteria, take it, including work that pays nothing (like writing a blog).

Don’t be afraid to invest in yourself. This could mean acquiring new skills that could eventually be marketable. In this downturn, I have learned how to be a videographer and I am set up to do videoconferencing. Neither has yet given me a ROI (return on investment) but I am hopeful. Investing in yourself may also mean spending some money on a website, advertising and promotion.

Follow the money. The economic stimulus package has funding for teachers’ professional development and for literacy under Title I. Grant money pays for school visits. Do some research and provide it to your market.

Do something every day that could potentially lead to work. This means sitting and thinking every day, “What CAN I do?” It allows you to be proactive, keeps hope alive and anxiety at bay. I keep a list of all my breads cast upon the waters. Currently I have sixteen active items on my list.

It also helps to have a solvent spouse and to be collecting social security.

THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: Part One

Back in 1809, a parson named Mason Locke Weems wanted to teach kids to tell the truth, which he did.....by making up a big fat lie. You already know the story, and plenty of children believe it to this very day. It's the one about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and then admitting that "I can't tell a lie, Pa...I did cut it with my hatchet." Then dear little George's dad gave him a great big hug for telling the truth, and he grew up to be so honest that he was elected president.

Hmmmm. The obvious unintended consequences of such stories-with-a-moral (and there are plenty) are that the minute kids find out they're false, they either lose respect for the grown-up who tells the tale or they learn that certain lies must be OK. On a personal level, here's another unintended consequence. When my elementary school teacher told us this "true" story, we thought it was totally lame, that George Washington was a Little Goody Two-Shoe, and that we never wanted to hear about George's corny self ever again.

On general principle, I'm in favor of telling the unvarnished truth to kids (and not because of Parson Weems either). For example, if "bad" things were done in the past, we'd profit more by learning from history's mistakes than by covering them up. Besides, the truth is so much more interesting than the cover-ups. But what's most important is that rewriting history leads to unintended consequences even when the authors' intentions are good.

Are things any better today? Enormously--but only up to a point. As we speak, all sorts of books, TV, and movies for young kids are still skirting the truth. Sometimes inaccuracies have wormed their way into the media because the authors didn't do their homework. But many twisted tales were planned on purpose in an effort to do some good. What's that supposed to mean? Read on.

Let's fast forward to the time between 1940 and the mid 1960's, when women and minorities regularly got short shrift in children's media. Elementary school students learned to read by slogging through textbooks such as Fun with Dick and Jane, which aimed to set a good example by starring an exemplary perfect white family: Father was the Provider in his suit and hat. Mother was the Happy Homemaker wearing an apron and holding a mop. And their perfectly behaved children, Dick, Jane, and Sally, frolicked on the lawn with their dog, Spot.

At the same time, kids' cowboy movies and radio shows starred white cowboy heroes as the Good Guys. But the Indians were practically all Bad Guys except for The Lone Ranger's sidekick, Tonto, who could barely speak English and liked to say "Ugh." Women were pious weaklings who cried into their hankies and had to be rescued by white Good Guys. And most black people fit into about 4 simple stereotypes; they had menial jobs, were great tap dancers, were Mammies on plantations, or were the butt of jokes. Hispanics and Asians were barely part of the picture during peacetime, but prejudice against all minorities was unrepentant.

Enter the unintended consequences. Surely millions of kids who didn't live like Dick and Jane's perfect white family felt somehow deficient and people who did live like Dick and Jane felt righteous if not downright superior. As time went by, members of minorities got mad--who can blame them? And by the way, everyone thought schoolbooks were the most boring things on the planet.

So to set things straight, publishers thought up a new approach. Around 1975, all the big textbook publishers started sending out guidelines for the stories and pictures in their books. I know this because I illustrated literally hundreds of these books in my hungry days and I still have their guidelines. In the usual effort to do some good, they required us to show all minorities (an equal number on every page) as heroic, brilliant leaders who did everything right. But any characters who played the part of fools, bad guys, cripples, or inferiors had to be white males. I am NOT making this up!

In one series of stories I illustrated, I had to show a stupid white male who fell asleep on his job of cutting a long strip of marshmallow goop flowing out of a tube into bite-sized pieces. But while this poor dummy was sleeping, the goop grew into a marshmallow the size of a house....and was discovered by his smart female boss (get it?) when she was up on the roof fixing a leak and saw it hidden in the alley. Then there was one tale about a brave young girl who raced over an icy mountain during a storm to deliver an urgent message to a black king, and another tale about a stupid white king who was outsmarted by his youngest daughter. In yet another story, a single mother and her daughter were remodeling their house and convinced 6 kids (3 girls, 3 boys of all races) to paint their fence, but the kids accidentally used glue instead of paint and got stuck. I drew one girl whose back was stuck to the fence from the tips of her braids all the way down to her feet. Whadaya know--the art had to be redone. My art director wrote "Girl too passive. Do not show females in passive roles." A fellow artist was told to draw a very muscular woman in a crowd who was a head taller than the wimpy white male standing next to her. His next story had to picture a white male secretary in an apron trying to cook. The untended consequence was that a whole generation of little readers must have thought all white males were idiots.

Doh. I know these readers and so do you. But popular opinion to the contrary, white males are not the sole source of evil and stupidity in the world. Kindly remember that there are good and bad and smart and dumb people in every ethnic group regardless of gender. You'd never know it, though, because the next wave of messing with the truth for the "greater good" was to make stories for kids Politically Correct. This effort is still part of the picture today and has plenty of unintended consequences, which I hope to address in my next blog.

And by the way, have any of these rules or unintended consequences ever affected any of you?

I.N.K. News

I.N.K. News for May

Kathleen Krull and Gretchen Woelfle are appearing at An Evening of Authors and Artists at The New Children's Museum in San Diego on Friday, May 15, 6-9 p.m. This is a fundraiser for Rolling Readers, a non-profit literacy organization that sponsors Read Aloud and Book Giveaway programs. Food, music, art auctions and book sales are planned.



Vicki Cobb will be speaking at the Oakland Zoo for the "Science is Alive" Bay Area Association of Children's Librarians Institute on May 8. She was also featured at the recent Monmouth University Spring Symposium.


From Deborah Heiligman:


Charles and Emma gets a lovely review in the May 10 New York Times Children's Book issue. The headline is The Darwins' Prenup.


Susan Goodman writes the monthly "Green Hour" feature for National Wildlife's magazine, Your Big Backyard. It has been chosen as a finalist in the Pre-K Department/Column category of the Association of Educational Publishers' Distinguished Achievement Awards. Winners will be announced in June.



Barbara Kerley's latest book, ONE WORLD, ONE DAY, debuts this month. The National Geographic title, illustrated with beautiful photographs, depicts a day in the life of school kids around the world.

http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/product/705/4992/703.html


Cheryl Harness is going to be signing books, including her new Harry Book, her comic book bio of President Truman (125th birthday on the 8th of May!) at the American History Museum bookstore at the Smithsonian, Washington, DC, from 1 to 3 PM, Saturday, May 9. And, thanks to Booktenders Secret Garden in Doylestown, PA, I'll be talking to school children thereabouts, May 11-15.

Dorothy Patent recently completed a resident fellowship at the Cody Institute for Western American Studies in Cody, WY, where she carried out research for a book on the relationship between Indians and horses. The book will be published by Clarion Books in Fall, 2010.



From Rosalyn Schanzer.

In April I got to do a fun little interview about my book What Darwin Saw on BlogTalkRadio. Anyone who has the latest edition of Flash can listen in by clicking here:
http://www.rosalynschanzer.com/BioPage.html . Scroll down to the bottom of the page where it says “Click to hear BlogTalkRadio's interview with Rosalyn Schanzer” and voila!


Susanna Reich will be welcoming visitors at the PEN American Center booth at BEA on Friday, May 29. Stop by to talk about PEN and nonfiction for kids!

Team Effort

During a recent school visit to the Bronx Early College Academy in the Bronx, NY, a sixth-grade boy asked me if I “make” the covers for my own books. I sometimes find the photographs, I told him, but then a designer and a whole bunch of other people work to make the covers look the way they do.

I’m returning to that class on Tuesday to give a PowerPoint presentation on how a book is made. Like this post I’m calling it “Team Effort,” because despite all the glory that authors get, it takes several football teams’ worth of people to make a book. I asked Marty Ittner, who’s designed four of my books for National Geographic, to help me put together a list of all the stages a book goes through from idea to bound volume. Looking at that list is awe-inspiring and not a little bit humbling.

Sometimes the process does start with the author, if she is the one who has the initial idea. Occasionally, though, a wise editor will plant the seed. The idea for Bull’s-Eye, my photobiography of Annie Oakley, came from National Geographic Editor in Chief Nancy Feresten, while Jennifer Emmett at National Geographic initially suggested that I think about a book on the Olympics. That prompt led to two books, Swifter, Higher, Stronger and Freeze Frame.

After the idea comes the research. Although I once hired a research assistant to do some on-the-spot digging in California, I usually do my own content research as well as my own photo research. But even then I depend on scores of librarians and archivists to point me in the right direction, as well as experts in the field I’m writing about. If the subjects of the book are still alive, I try to interview them and people associated with them, too.

Once the research is done I start writing. I’m pretty self-directed, but I occasionally consult with my editor and bounce ideas off one or two trusted friends. Months or even years later, when the manuscript is done, it seems that hoards of people descend upon it to make it a book. The editor and sometimes her colleagues read it and ask for changes; the designer comes up with an overall look and then painstakingly lays out the pages; the photo editor helps find and/or obtain photos; the mapmaker creates the maps; the copyeditor checks the style and grammar; the design director consults on the design; the manufacturing people settle on a printer, buy the paper, and arrange for a prepress house to process the images.

When I and everyone at the publisher finally sign off on the designed pages of the book, the files with all the supporting artwork and fonts are sent to the printer. From there a whole other set of people take over, monitoring machines that burn the plates, ink the paper, stitch the pages together, make the cover, and trim and bind the finished book. Along the way people have scoured over proofs and done press checks to make sure the pages look like they’re supposed to. But the process of birthing a book doesn’t end with the binding. After that comes the shipping, the warehousing, the marketing and promotion, the order processing, and the bookselling. Instead of a few football teams, it’s looking like it actually takes a small city to make one book.

Even so, when all is said and done I still feel like it’s “my” book. But I wouldn’t be surprised or upset if some of those other people feel the same way.