The Nuances of Oral History

This post is by Tanya Lee Stone. She couldn't log in today so I'm posting it for her.

I recently had a long conversation with an old friend of mine from high school. A few things came up that I was surprised to hear. “I don’t remember it that way at all,” I said. She laughed. “Boy, for a writer, your memory is terrible,” she said.

The events we were talking about were things we lived through together, experienced deeply, and yet came away with different recollections. There were even details she recalled that I did not at all, and vice versa. As I am once again immersed in a project that relies heavily on oral histories, I began to look at my materials from a different angle. Many “what if” questions presented.

What if a subject is being interviewed too long after an event occurred? How does interviewing someone too soon impact the retelling? What about a subject’s mood on the day of an interview? Did they get enough sleep? Are they cranky? Is there more than one person involved? Do their stories mesh?

Of course, I have always factored these questions in when evaluating primary source materials, but somehow coming face to face with the flaws in my own memory has given me new insights into how I am feeling about the whole notion of history this morning.

I always tell kids that the best any writer can do is to be as responsible and accurate as humanly possible—but—and I stress this, human beings are imperfect. Therefore, all history is imperfect. Our job as nonfiction writers, reporters, journalists, is to do everything within our reach to get the best version of the truth straight that we can. Sometimes this means being perfectly up front with the reader. I did this in Almost Astronauts. There was a critical piece of information in that story, and the way the information came to me was just as important as the information itself. What to do? I incorporated the information about the source into the narrative and then I explained to the reader under exactly what circumstances I was given this information so that they could form their own opinions about it. Full disclosure. For me, that’s the way to go.

Stories will vary on any given memory of an experience when dealing with oral histories. This is natural. If you have seven different people involved with a historical event, you may be told seven slightly different versions of that event. Some details may not mesh. But common truths will emerge.

In the book I’m working on now, Courage Has No Color, there is one anecdote that has been told three times by the same subject. Even with one interviewee, some small details change from telling to telling. But what is most important to me is that the emotional truth of what happened to him stays the same. And that’s what I am always on the lookout for—the emotional truth of the story.

Digital books: Will form affect content?

In last month’s post I sought to summarize many of the issues authors and illustrators face when putting their work into digital form. One goal for many of us is to bring new life to our out-of-print (OP) titles. It’s a costly and logistically-complex undertaking to have a book reprinted (cardboard boxes filling the garage comes to mind.) But an ebook? Seems much more feasible. Choosing which format and ebookstore to focus on is harder than it might seem at first. As a picture book creator, the need for full-bleed images eliminates some contenders such as the Amazon Kindle.

 Let’s start with the easiest format, Adobe PDF. The good news is the original picture book can be made into a PDF that looks basically the same, even including double-page spreads. To the left is a screen shot of test PDF I made the other day of The Shocking Truth about Energy (which is in print, just to clarify.) The front jacket and an “about the author page” were added to the beginning. My understanding is that Follett Library Services is selling PDFs of trade children’s books…more info about that plus how the PDF was made is here.

The bad news is that PDFs like this must be viewed on a fairly big screen on a desktop computer or the reader would have to do a lot of scrolling and zooming. It would be better if each page could be viewed singly, but as you can see with the lightning bolt image, the spreads in this book are often continuous and won’t work as single pages. This issue affects most of my books, where some images fit on single pages and some run across both. Who knew this would ever be an issue?

And what if people want to buy the ebook for a tablet ereader such as the iPad or NOOKcolor?

You could fit two pages in this rectangle, but they would have to be tall and narrow, which is not the shape of most picture book pages. Getting back to one of my OP titles, here is a photo of the printed version of Tracks in the Sand, which tells the life-cycle story of sea turtles:

The spreads are a lot wider than the tablet screen. One solution is to letterbox the artwork:

If desired, the text could be placed in the non-image area (which doesn't have to be black.) You could try zooming in and trimming the long ends off:

I like this much better, but it would have to work for all the spreads in the book because the page size should stay the same throughout the digital version. One reason this book is more adaptable to a tablet-size ebook is that it has a fairly simple layout without a lot of text. Many of my other books have artwork that couldn’t be cropped at all and/or have text all over the page, such as There’s a Frog in My Throat.

So, should I give up double-page spreads? And busy layouts? It’s something to think about, anyway. The term of art for this general idea is to “future-proof” your content.

Last but not least, if anyone would like to hear an interview with me on the weekly children’s literature podcast Brain Burps about Books about a variety of related issues, please check out Eeeek! Ebooks! You can listen right on this page, or there’s a link to download the podcast.

Beautiful Back Matter

As children’s book writers we know that we are not writing only for children. We are also writing for the “gatekeepers”—the parents, teachers and librarians who help to put the right books in children’s hands. This is true less if we write for older kids. I think books for YA readers often, though not always, bypass the gatekeepers. But I would venture to say that with nonfiction we are almost always writing for more than one audience, as it is rare—not unheard of—but rare, that a teen will pick up a nonfiction book on his or her own.

In any case, this business of writing for multiple audiences is nowhere more important and challenging than in writing the back matter for nonfiction picture books. Especially, I think, picture book biographies. Because of the limited number of words, and the level, a picture book biography has to leave out all kinds of information not only about the person’s life but also about the world around that person. Often the writer has a lot she wanted to say and didn't.

So when we write back matter we seek to fill in some of the holes, to answer questions that kids might have. And also just to tell more because, as others have written about here on I.N.K., we research picture books about as much as any other book, and then do the hard work of paring down. It hurts to let go of so much good stuff!

Enter BACK MATTER.

I love back matter. Love reading it. I'm a nerd that way. (O.K., in other ways, too.)

Some picture book biographies are written at a second or third-grade level but then the back matter is written at a fourth or fifth grade level. This is because kids use them for reports—and although the main part of the book gives the story, the timeline or the author’s note gives them more—specific dates, or background information. Often, though, back matter is written for adults so that they have more information to share with their students and children.

Take, for example, Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave by Laban Carrick Hill, illustrated by Bryan Collier. Hill's text is simple, beautiful: a poem. It is a paean to this wonderful artist. Young readers know all they need to know from Hill's poem. But there are no dates or place names in the main text. It's not that we miss these facts in the text at all, in this case, but I can imagine a child, perhaps an older child, asking questions. Hill wonderfully uses the back matter to give us, the grown-ups, as much of a picture of Dave's life as he can. The back matter is so rich and complements the front of the book so beautifully that we come away feeling as though we have read a much longer book.

Back matter also shows how you did your research—which is almost always for the gatekeepers. It gives an idea of where the reader can go if he wants to learn more. Usually that’s called a Bibliography, or Selected Sources. (Selected because we use so many sources—both books, articles, and web sites, you might need a whole other book—or really, really small type—to list them all.) When you say For Further Reading instead of Selected Sources or Bibliography, that means these books are (or should be) appropriate for kids. Some picture book biographies have both—Selected Sources and For Further reading, or designate which books are good for which ages. I like back matter that has both.

We authors live (not a typo) to put in the back matter the stuff from the Cutting Room Floor. Often an editor (or even sometimes the author herself, or a critiquer) will pull things out for flow, level, or space. But fortunately you can put at least some of those juicy tidbits in the back. If you’re lucky, your illustrator will put some of the stuff you had to leave out into the art. Look at, for example. A River of Words by Jennifer Bryant, illustrated by Melissa Sweet. There is so much in the art! I don't know if these are things that Jen left out, or things that Melissa found out on her own, but the bits of poems and other details in the art greatly deepen the book. And Jen and Melissa also give great back matter: A timeline of William Carlos Williams’ life, an Author’s Note and an Illustrator’s Note (which I adore!) and a For Further Reading.

In M.T. Anderson’s Handel Who Knew What he Liked, a book I love, Tobin includes a discography of Handel’s music. Roxanne Orgill's biography of Ella Fitzgerald, Skit-Scat Raggedy Cat (illustrated by Sean Qualls) also includes a "Listening" section, which I love. I also like in Roxanne's back matter that she includes documentaries a DVD of a concert of Ella's as well as two web sites. (I love this book, too. I also love Ella.)

I love fun stories about the writing of the book, and notes about the author’s and illustrator's personal connection to the subject or person.

Some back matter seeks to extend the experience of reading the book, by having readers go back and look at math in the art, such as in Blockhead by Joseph D'Agnese, others have activities for kids to do on their own or with help.

I like back matter that shows the biographical subject in context of his or her world. I love how in Thank You, Sarah: The Woman Who Saved Thanksgiving Laurie Halse Anderson, tells us, in her very deep back matter, what else was going on in America in 1863. (She calls this section Vintage America, 1863.)

As you might have guessed, I'm looking at back matter for a reason. I have a picture book biography of a mathematician coming out in 2012 and while the artist is doing the sketches, I'm pulling together back matter. I'm looking at many books, including the ones I've mentioned here. (I have, on purpose, not included other I.N.K. authors only because I'm trying expand the coverage here. Trust me, I have a pile of I.N.K.er's books right next to me!)

Dear Gatekeepers: Would you please suggest other books that have back matter I shouldn't miss? And also please tell me: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SEE IN BACK MATTER? Also what level would you like it to be: the same as the text in the book, slightly older, much older, or a mix? As always if you don't want to comment here, feel free to email me through my web site, or my name at gmail.

Now, I'm going back to The Cutting Room Floor.

On and On and On

I’m still thinking about Barbara Kerley’s post from February 10, Done. She was writing about being dum-diddly-um-dum done with her latest book, but I’ve been thinking about certain books where I never really felt finished. For example…

The first children’s book I sold was Unseen Rainbows, Silent Songs. It was born out of the trippy desire to let kids know that parallel universes exist all around us. Other animals on Earth have very different senses, so on some level, we co-exist but on very different planets. We think we know the world, but we only really know our world. There are others dancing around us we’ll never see or touch or hear.

That book definitely had my best title, perhaps the best idea, but not my best writing. I worked so hard, and it showed. Every sentence was beautifully, lyrically crafted. Damn, Susan, give the kids a rest. Eventually I cut out a good part of the fancy language and then the editor who acquired it cut out more. The occasional times when I pick up and read a page, I’m cutting it still.

I’m also writing it still.

About a year from now, I have a book coming out called It’s a Dog’s Life. Its working title was The Secret Life of Dogs, which pretty much tells you what it’s about. In hopefully humorous (not at all lyric) fashion, it reveals just that. And part of that secret life is…yep, what they can hear that we can’t hear, the very different view they see when they look at the same thing we do, smells we have no whiff of that rule their world.

There are certain ideas that resonate with you. So you see their echoes in different places and different forms—and write about them.

Who knows, in 2016…

Why I/We/You Continue to Write for Kids

As a big birthday fast approaches, the gulf between young peoples’ experiences and mine has widened considerably. And yet I continue to write for kids. I went from teaching high school English to photojournalism to writing and photographing children’s books. Through the years my students’ dialogue about the great themes in literature, poetry, art – ergo life – lived inside my heart and echoed in my ears. My young cousins were often about, arguing over who would recite their latest poem first, practically jumping over one another to talk about some crazy adventure. Those reverberations were a vital part of my work. The students are long grown up, and my cousins are adults with adult dispositions. Have the voices of our current generation changed? Are their issues different from mine? I think they probably are. But I’m not sure.

I dodge the “voice” problem somewhat by writing from the perspective of the person I’m interviewing. It’s not in my voice but the young person’s voice. But my books are not 100% participants’ voices. Some parts, like choosing the subject, is me, and that’s what I question. So the choice of narrative and presentation begs the questions to us all, “Are we still asking interesting, relevant questions? Are we still cool?”

A perk writing for children is that we are generous with one another. I asked a few experienced writers and illustrators to contribute their thoughts to this subject. I made it a point not to ask INK contributors because I hope you will add your thoughts in the comment section.

The first person to respond was Andrea Davis Pinkney. She said, “We all know the cliché that says, ‘real life is stranger than fiction.’ Well – when writing for children ‘real’ can also be funny, ironic, sad, thought provoking, and cool. This is why I write non-fiction and historical fiction for children. ‘Real’ can let a child see the world in a whole new way. ‘Real’ can change a young reader’s thinking about people, history, scientific facts, love, laws, wars, protests, rites of passage, family. ‘Real’ can show kids what’s real about themselves.”

Yes!

Ellen Levine added her sharp activist’s eye, saying, “because even with all the world's madness, their eyes and hearts are still open. They understand the seriousness of injustice and also enjoy silliness with resounding laughter. Yes there are bullies and yes, dystopian fantasies are riding high now, but I'm banking on that combo of serious and silly.“

Oh yes!

When Elizabeth Levy, and Bruce Coville were about to take off for a school visit in Egypt, I asked Liz to email me her thoughts, assuming she’d have plenty of time during long plane rides. “Oh, and ask Bruce, too.” But they got caught up in a revolution, not exactly a great time to ask a favor. I’m just happy they are home, safe and sound, to continue writing for kids. [Liz recently wrote about their experiences and posted it on her Website. Bruce has been posting on Facebook.]

Then I called Vera B. Williams, who said, “I’ve been thinking about that lately, too. Let’s talk about it over lunch.” A few days later at Co Ba, a Vietnamese restaurant, half way between her apartment and mine, we ate our way through the topic. Vera ordered Pho Bo and I had Banh Mi Bo. We topped it off with yummy homemade banana coconut muffins and Vietnamese coffee. What began as “just email me a few lines,” became part of a two-and-a-half hour conversation.

Vera got right to the point, “Well, why do you write for kids? I want to hear your thoughts first.”

Hmmm, I was hoping to get everyone else to talk about this so I wouldn’t have to. I write nonfiction for kids because they want to know truths. As a child, I must have paid attention to my family’s outrage when they discussed fundamental inequalities, especially during the civil rights movement. Their comments didn’t jive with watered-down textbook lessons I read in school. I wanted to know what was real, not the propaganda poppycock being fed to us in class. There had to be a better way to provide real information, even conflicting information.

Vera says, “My books come from a close connection from my own childhood. Even as a child I felt I was an advocate for children, that children weren’t treated rightly. My ambition was to be seen as a ‘knowing child,’ and to represent those children who were articulate and those who needed a voice. What’s in my books continues to interest me – working class families who were not portrayed when I started to do books. Writing for children is complicated. You’re not only writing for the children but the people who read to them. I feel it’s a duty to explain aspects of the world.”

Writing “aspects of the world” is something we all seem to have in common as children’s authors.

Vera continues, “I drew and painted and I wrote poems all my life. But I had more education as an artist. The question that comes to me is, have I used up my inspiration? Have I used up my own childhood’s voice? Cause that’s what’s in my books. And the answer is, ‘I’m not sure.’ What does Paul say?”

Paul Zelinsky had emailed me the following thoughts and I read them to Vera: “What I like to do best is to work with pictures and words to tell a story. And there is no better place to do that than in a children's book. I think everyone responds to stories in pretty much the same way, but you'll never take in a story with as much intensity or as great a belief as when you're young. I remember, in my childhood of reading, how wonderful the worlds felt that spread out before me; and the thought that my own work might have that same effect on other people, early in their lives, is an amazing one.”

Vera again, “What Paul said hits home. I can express three longtime things that I love: stories, the graphic designs in the shapes of letters, and pictures. To be seen and heard as you really are? I’m less certain that I have the voices of children right.”

When I talk with Vera I can hear the voice of a child, albeit an extremely profound and precocious child. As for me … oh hell, I write for kids! Birthdays be damned!

Done

I’m done. I’m done. Or in moments of giddiness, to paraphrase Pooh, dum-diddly-um-dum done. Only this time, I mean it.

You’d think you could only be “done” once, right? But I have found over the years that you get done with a book—the same book—many times before it’s really done—and it’s important to acknowledge (and, whenever possible, celebrate and take strength from) each one of those “dones”:

There’s huge-relief done when you finish the first draft. You’ve managed to choose a viable topic, get your editor and agent on board, wade through the research, cull the nugget of a story, and then build and build until there really is a story—a real story with a beginning, middle and end. The story has a beating heart. It still needs work, and lots of it, but it is its own self: cohesive, coherent, ready and able to withstand all the intervention to come.

Huge-relief done is major. It deserves a three-day weekend, dinner out, multiple emails with multiple exclamation points. It merits a movie with popcorn and no skimping on the butter—because think about what you’ve accomplished. You’ve taken a sentence, sometimes even just a phrase or word, and turned it into the equivalent of a living, breathing organism. You did it. You’re done.

Only, of course, you’re not done. Not done at all. (And this is a lesson most writers I know have had to learn from painful experience: no matter how shiny your first draft is, you are nowhere near being done with the book.)

Still, it’s important to mark the occasion with a suitable level of relief (huge) and excitement (immense), because until that first draft is done, you are never completely sure that your idea will work. So yay, it does. And that is great.

The next stage is nod-in-satisfaction done (which quickly morphs—but more on that in a minute) when you take the first draft through your critique group, sometimes more than once, filtering through their comments to pull out the useful ones—the ones the meld with your own vision for the book—and apply them to the manuscript.

Again, more reason to celebrate: you’ve taken your little draft through the first round of criticism and addressed your critics’ concerns to your satisfaction. A satisfied nod is certainly in order, after all that. (And maybe, another three-day weekend.)

But nod-in-satisfaction done quickly morphs into holding-your-breath done, because now it’s time to send it to your editor. And no matter how well you’ve pleased yourself and your critique group, from a practical/business/real-world standpoint, your editor is truly the one you must please. You hold your breath because you hope that s/he will like it, and also because you know that even if your editor does like it, you are not done. Not even close. And so you hold your breath, waiting to hear just how much is still left to do.

I always like this stage of a book because at least for this part I’ve got company for the hard slog. I have emailed my editor and said, ‘I’m stuck. Help me.’ And she does. Then there are the other times that she says, ‘Yes, this is a problem but I know you’ll figure it out.’ But she says it with such kindness and conviction that I can half-convince myself she is right.

So you work and work and work, and pretty soon you are sorta-almost-if-you-are-a-flexible-thinker done. Because once you and your editor have created a draft that is strong enough to send to the illustrator, to send to the copy editor, to present to the book designer who will lay the text down on the pages of the book, you really are sort of done except when you need to tinker and tweak to make it all come together.

Which leads to you being fingers-crossed done, which is when your editor sends the text plus illustrations to the fact checker, to make sure everything is accurate. And the fact checker always finds something, sometimes a lot of things (ack!), but fingers crossed they are not huge things and you can fix them relatively easily.

And then…after inevitably a few more stray this-and-that’s, you are dum-diddly-um-dum done. This deserves way more than a three-day weekend. It deserves, if you can swing it, a real vacation where you don’t even look at your computer except to locate the nearest ice cream parlor or to find out when the toy museum/art gallery/ski rental place/whatever-floats-your-boat opens.

In a matter of days or weeks, you’ll be working on a new book. But for a little while, at least, it’s good to enjoy being done.

Choices

When I read in the most recent Consumer Reports magazine that grocery stores carry 14 different kinds of Tostitos chips alone, not to mention other brands of corn chips, potato chips, taro chips, pita chips, and so on, it got me into thinking about choices. We Americans seem to relish having as many choices as possible when buying everything from pain killers to computers. And we especially like choices when it comes to our reading material. Just look at the variety of magazines at your local chain bookstore, and the plethora of book categories on the groaning shelves. We want to read the kinds of books that appeal to us as individuals. The husband of a children's YA fiction writer I know never reads fiction, including what his wife writes. My brother's shelves are loaded with the science fiction he used to read and the mysteries he's now into, while my husband has a generous collection of cookbooks and other food related books, as well as a smattering of volumes about Broadway and Hollywood. Me? I prefer nature books and select fiction authors.

Yet how many of you have, as I have more than once, observed the following scene:
An adult with a child in a bookstore is going through one bunch of titles as the child is eagerly thumbing through just one book. The adult chooses a totally different one to buy, pointing at the one in the child's hands and saying, "That's too young (or, too old) for you." Or, "This one looks more interesting."

And why is it that we expect school children all to read the same assigned books most of the time? Sometimes they are expected to choose books and write book reports, but often even those choices are restricted--I've been shocked to hear from some teachers that children in their school are not allowed to write reports on nonfiction books! But what if a child is one like I was, who wanted to know about the real world, not some writer's imaginary world?

A friend recently told me about his grandson, who didn't see the point of reading at first. But once he got into it, he plunged in enthusiastically and, at the age of 9, insisted on getting a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records, which he proceeded to devour the way his friends might do with a Harry Potter volume.

Let's all keep our educational focus on helping children become enthusiastic readers because they gain pleasure from the activity, especially during the early school years. Let them read as much for pleasure as possible; they will also learn in the process, either learn the tricks of story telling in fiction or the facts of what fascinates them in the real world. And the more they read, whether it's about fairies or tigers or motorcycles, the better readers they will become, which has to be the first goal of education.

Obsessive Compulsive Writing Disorder

I was thinking about poetry the other day, though not in a particularly pleasant way. I was recalling my first day in English 101 and how I argued (long and somewhat loudly) with the assistant professor over the interpretation of a poem. Made for a very interesting start to a very long year, to say the least.
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To put myself in a better mood, I shifted my thinking to love poems. Well, it is the season, isn't it? I remember doing research on ancient flood stories and coming across what is supposed to be the first love poem, written some four thousand years ago in a region of southern Mesopotamia known as Sumer. The poem has the oh, so romantic title of Istanbul #2461 and the opening verse as translated by Samuel Noah Kramer goes:
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"Bridegroom, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet,
Lion, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet."
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According to Kramer, the poem was recited annually by the brides of King Shu-Sin, a kind of Valentine's Day wish long before there was even a St. Valentine. The poem raises all sorts of interesting and complicated questions about the Sumerian civilization, the standing and treatment of women in that culture, and of the powerful Shu-Sin, especially after reading this line from the second verse: "Lion, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber"). But I also enjoyed the poems straightforward simplicity and easy flow. It has a way of drawing the reader along in a seductive way, something I'm sure Shu-Sin happily approved of year after year.
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Not many people know that I began my writing career as a poet way, way back when I was twelve. And, yes, I wrote love poems. I did them for classmates who wanted to impress a girl and I "charged" one Lionel train car per work (guaranteeing that the poem was original, but not that it would win over the girl's heart). I went on to write serious poems in high school and was reasonably good at immitating the styles of a number of famous poets, male and female, though I gave up writing poetry in college when I realized that an aweful lot of poets committed suicide. Writing poetry can be very intense.
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Still, it's hard to completely give up the habits I developed over those years while writing and reworking and sweating over every line, every word, every change of beat. I still go through a similar process today when I do my nonfiction books. I see my text as a kind of flowing piece of music where the sound of every word matters and where a hiccup in a sentence distracts me and drives me crazy. I can't tell you how many times I've made a simple change on, say, p. 55, then gone back to reread the text from the start to make sure the alteration fits in seamlessly. It's an annoying obsession, driven by the fear that a clunky section, a single repetition, unclear thought -- whatever! -- will jar a reader enough to pull them out of the text. It's absolutely impossible to win this sort of mind game/torture, but it's a habit I just can't break. As painful as this is, hopefully it makes the writing a little bit better.
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Since I began this with a love poem, I'll end it with one as well. I wrote this for my wife, Alison, several years ago using those refrigerator magnets made up of individual letters, brief combinations of letters, and a few complete words. It's called Sweet Dreams and was meant to be fun, though our fifteen-year-old son, Ben, was very serious when he said it needed a stronger ending. The last line is his and I think it is perfect.
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My feet sigh,
My blood screams,
My shadow weeps,
Thinking of you --
and chocolate.
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Happy Valentine's Day everyone.

Commemorating Lives Lost, Fifty Years Later

Years ago, when I was looking for visuals for my second book, Winning Ways: A Photohistory of American Women in Sports, I came across a Library of Congress photograph of a woman joyfully sculling on the Charles River in the 1920s. I didn’t use the photo in my book, but the confident strength of the sculler stayed with me because she seemed to transcend time. She looked like a contemporary female athlete, not like someone living decades before Title IX opened up opportunities for women in sports. I filed away her name for future reference: Maribel Vinson.

Close to 10 years later, when I was working on Freeze Frame, my book about the Winter Olympics, I came across Maribel again in connection with one of the most tragic events in sports history. On February 15, 1961, a Sabena Airlines flight carrying the entire U.S. figure skating team to the World Championships in Prague crashed, killing all 72 people aboard and one on the ground. Among those who perished were the reigning U.S. women’s singles champion, Laurence Owen, her sister, the reigning pairs skater Maribel Owen, and their mother and coach, Maribel Vinson Owen.

I was stunned. I didn’t necessarily expect the sculler from the 1920s to still be alive some 80 years later, but it seemed wrong that her story had come to such a heartbreaking end. I did some research and learned that Maribel had built a distinguished career in sports since being photographed on the Charles River. She won nine U.S. ladies figure skating titles in the 1920s and ‘30s, setting a record that has yet to be broken, though Michelle Kwan tied it in 2005. Maribel also won six U.S. pairs skating titles. She competed at three Winter Olympics, taking the bronze medal in ladies singles in 1932. (Norway’s Sonja Henie had a lock on the gold from 1928 through 1936.) While she was still skating, Maribel, a Radcliffe graduate, became the first female sportswriter at The New York Times. She returned to skating in the 1950s, coaching American Tenley Albright to the gold at the 1956 Olympic Games and shepherding her daughters’ emerging careers.

American figure skaters had won gold medals in both men’s and women’s singles at the 1960 Winter Games and in the aftermath, champions Carol Heiss and David Jenkins both had retired. So the athletes on the Sabena flight that February were up-and-comers, eager to prove themselves on a world stage. Their loss set U.S. figure skating back a generation, but it accelerated the career of 12-year-old Peggy Fleming, whose coach, Bill Kipp, also died on the flight. Fleming suddenly was America’s best hope. She would come close to medaling at the 1964 Winter Games—she placed sixth—and in 1968, she would win the first U.S. gold medal in figure skating since 1960.

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Sabena crash. On Thursday, February 17, the skating community will commemorate the tragedy with a one-night-only special event. The event will include a program with a who’s who of skating royalty to be broadcast from New York City to more than 500 movie theaters nationwide, along with the world premiere of the film RISE, about the Sabena crash and its legacy. Proceeds from the evening will be used to further the mission of U.S. Figure Skating’s Memorial Fund, which was established soon after the crash as a living legacy of those who lost their lives. The fund has supported thousands of skaters at every level, including some who have gone on to compete at the Olympics. For more about RISE and to find a theater near you that is taking part in the event, click here.

Science (fiction)

I’ve taken Vicki Cobb’s post (yesterday, 2.2.11) to heart, especially the part about true blogging being short, frequent, and relatively unstructured. OK, once a month doesn’t really qualify me for the ‘frequent’ part. And she didn’t actually say that blogs should be unstructured. I’m choosing to interpret her comments that way because it justifies a bit of rambling, which is what I intend to do today. I can only hope that it will be resonant rambling — alliteration is a start, no?

I’ve noticed that we nonfiction writers tend, in writing about our writing, to come across as a bit defensive (I’m talking big-picture now, not about Vicki’s post). It’s understandable, given the world’s apparent fictional bias. But it sometimes feels like we’re telling people that broccoli, as well as being good for them, tastes really great.

Now I’m going to do something quite unscientific. I’m going generalize about the way children perceive fiction and nonfiction writing based on nothing more than my observations of one child — my own youngest son Jamie (12). Adult writers, editors, and reviewers normally draw a clean, sharp line between fiction and nonfiction. And that distinction can be more than casual, as James Frey can attest. This makes sense. Am I reading something factual? Something supported by evidence, data, or witnesses? Or did what I’m reading spring from someone’s imagination? It’s an important question.

At the same time, I’ve noticed that to young readers (or at least my young reader), the distinction, while recognized, doesn’t seem quite as important. Last year my wife and son and I finished a six-month roadtrip-cum-homeschooling adventure. Along the way, we listened to many, many audio books — 700 hours worth, by my estimate.

We listened to classic literature: Lord of the Flies, The Old Man and the Sea, Huckleberry Finn — whoa — there’s a worthy tangent (I did say ‘ramble’). Of course I understand the discomfort caused by the language in that last book. At times, it was impossible not to wince while listening. And I understand that in a classroom the book would have to be presented within a cultural and historical framework. But it’s a remarkable book. Jamie, 11 at the time, had no problem understanding the historical context or the author’s satirical indictment of slavery. Changing the language to make it less offensive to 21st century ears — or the suggestion I read somewhere that the book not be introduced to students until college — is patronizing and underestimates the intelligence of middle-school — not to mention high-school — readers.

Where was I? We listened to classic literature, fantasy (Phillip Pullman, Garth Nix, Jonathan Stroud, Lois Lowry, R.R. Tolkien), science fiction, and, yes, nonfiction. For a long time I’ve thought that science fiction (and cyberpunk, it’s more recent close cousin) are under-appreciated as a sort of gateway genre to harder stuff — real nonfiction science books.

In fantasy writing, magic can be used to explain things that would never happen in the real world. Science fiction, on the other hand, follows certain rules. Even very improbable events may not be impossible, at least in the world created by the author, because they are based on extrapolations of actual scientific concepts. We listened to Isaac Asimov (I, Robot), Orson Scott Card (the Ender books), Arthur C. Clarke (2001), Carl Sagan (Contact), Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451), and Suzanne Collins (the Hunger Games trilogy). We listened to Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age) and William Gibson (Pattern Recognition).

When we listened to Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us or Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything — probably Jamie’s favorite book of the entire trip — he seemed to see it as a natural and graceful segue from science fiction, not an abrupt change or as something is an entirely different category. At the same time, he was not at all confused about what was actual science and what was speculative.

What does this all mean? I’m not sure. Except that maybe our readers aren’t as preoccupied with categorizing our writing as those of us writing it.

Writing that Resonates

There’s a lot of writing going on out there in the blogosphere and it’s changing the way people write. Most of it is inconsequential—a lot of noise. But some if it is important, indeed profound. These authors are writing to be heard. They are thinking about their readers and writing so that readers want to “follow” them. Without gatekeepers, like editors, publishers and critics, these writers are finding ways to resonate with their audience. Of course, we children’s nonfiction authors know how to do this. Many of us have even had to educate our gatekeepers. Our readers are never out of our minds. Here’s what we’ve learned from the school of hard knocks: When you don’t have a captive audience you must become captivating.

First you have to get the reader’s attention, then you have to keep it. Easier said than done. The devil is always in the details and I’m not sure that it ever gets any easier. But recently I’ve discovered that Twitter and Twitter Chats can sharpen communication skills.. The strength of Twitter is its 140-character limit. In effect, it’s good training for writing powerful advertising copy. A good tweet spurs the reader into action—to retweet (send it on to others) or to visit a link where the tweet’s subject is spelled out in depth. There’s a website that is pulling “pearls of wisdom” from Tweetchats and they will soon be publishing them as books. Here’s an example of profound tweets from a leadership chat about “vision.”

Our blog, is not really a blog. What we write here is more like op-ed opinion columns. A true blogger writes short and often. One of the best is Seth Godin who writes about marketing but is a very successful self-published guru whose program on the future of publishing in NYC was sold out within hours of its announcement. In order to be successful, new posts have to come frequently and have to resonate with readers. Often, people who have a “viral” success with a video on You Tube can’t do much with it because it is truly a “flash in the pan.” Only people with singular intellects can sustain high quality writing while blogging day after day, year after year.

How does one become a writer who resonates? First, you have to speak the language of your audience. Most children’s book authors write for the child they were. They don’t focus-group children. When I was ten, I recall listening to an adult telling me, in a very patronizing manner, how life was when he was a kid. I remember thinking that he wasn’t remembering childhood correctly. At that moment I vowed to myself that I would never forget what it was like to be a child. I had a sense of myself as a person, one who had a lot yet to learn, but not to be dismissed as someone who was unintelligent or unaware. If you don’t speak “child” it is easily spotted by the children's book gatekeepers and rejection slips quickly follow.


Second, never underestimate the intelligence of your readership or overestimate their prior knowledge. The first makes sure that your tone is not patronizing. The second makes sure that they “get” what you’re saying. It is only when you are clear and accessible that you demonstrate mastery of concepts. This runs counter to some writers who believe that inaccessibility manifests erudition.

Third, you have to know when you’ve said enough. Eyes tend to glaze over with too much information.

If this post is the first one of mine you’ve read, I have failed if it is also the last.

MAPS MAPS MAPS

I love maps—not necessarily the GPS versions that send your car straight to the middle of a construction site, but those mysterious ancient illuminated maps decorated with sea monsters, wind gods, ornate compass roses, miniature sailing ships, and oddly shaped lions or camels or kings or headless beasties with faces on their bellies.

I was a kid so many moons ago that our teachers' handouts had all been copied on mimeograph machines. Does anybody here remember those things? If so, you might also remember the bland purple mimeographed maps that were such typical fare, and of course, our homework assignment was to correctly label each city and state and country and river and ocean.

Well as I already said, I was a kid many moons ago, and we didn’t even have a TV to occupy our extra time until I was 12 years old. So during my plentiful spare moments, I used to gather up my Crayolas and spend way too long decorating these boring mimeographed maps by adding row after row of blue waves to an ocean filled with spouting whales, goofy mermaids, and sea bass. If I was really bored, I also added little pine tree forests and purple mountains majesty with snow on top. Drawing the pictures was just for fun; I didn’t exactly color any maps so that I could learn about geography. I don’t know—maybe all that coloring was a nerdy thing to do. But purely by accident, it did help me learn a whole lot more about geography than I would have done any other way.

Fast forward very, very far into the future. Because I get to illustrate the books I write, I still add plenty of maps to my stories from history every chance I get. I've also drawn such things as a cartoon map of America showing about 100 cities with strange names like Truth or Consequences New Mexico and Nag's Head North Carolina and Hoop and Holler Texas and Hog Jaw Alabama. And I've painted funny maps showing everything from tropical rain forest animals to medieval Paris to the modern-day canals of France and Panama and beyond. Besides the fact that maps are a hoot to draw, they're a great learning tool that can help readers find out lots of cool (but often important) stuff without even trying. Here are just a few small examples of my own maps from nonfiction books along with the reasons I drew them:

Above is an end paper map showing John Smith's journeys all the way around the world. Bet you didn't know he went to so many places. Maps like this can help put an entire series of historic adventures into perspective.

Here's a detail from the same map featuring a compass rose, a wind god, and some of those tiny ships I was telling you about. They're the real ships the colonists used. If the maps are fun to look at, readers might remember what happened as the story unfolds.

This is a detail of a much bigger map that shows John Smith's exploration of the Chesapeake Bay. It also shows some of the animals he saw along the way. At the beginning of each chapter, I used one of 6 big full-bleed maps like this one in order to show battle locations and pirate attacks and more.

This photo is kinda dark, but it's the end paper map from my book that tells how Lewis and Clark crossed the West. Besides showing the route in both directions, it includes pictures of many Indians the explorers met (wearing the same clothes they would have worn at the time), lots of animals they encountered along the way, and present-day state borders for reference purposes.

Here's a detail from that map. The red line shows the explorers' path during the westward part of their journey.

So here's my helpful little soapbox idea-of-the-day for any teachers or parents out there who want kids to learn all about geography by accident and have some fun at the same time. Just encourage them to decorate their own maps the coolest way they can. You can even print out a big non-mimeographed map as a guide. The pictures can be funny or purty or informative or all of the above, and if you're so inclined, they can always be part of a history or geography lesson--that's one way to raise their test scores. And be sure to show them some books with amazing maps inside while you're at it.