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Last month on National Astronomy Day, I was at the Clay Center Observatory signing copies of How Do You Burp in Space? And Other Tips Every Space Tourist Needs to Know. After inscribing a copy for a young boy, I looked up at his older sister. “Do you want to go to space, too?” I asked.
“I did once,” she said.
“What happened?”
She gave me a small smile, a Mona Lisa smile—that is, if Mona L. were a just-budding adolescent proud of her newly acquired sense of condescension.
“Oh…other things took over,” she said in a tone that implied I couldn’t possibly know what she meant.
Oh…but I do. Having been there and done that, I was actually thinking about something else. Do these other things that "take over" really have to edge out wanting to go into space or a daily check on favorite animal cams? Is this really an either/or situation? Do the hormones make us want to pack away those childish things? Or, despite so many strides, do we still think there’s only one type of girl that does those hormones justice?
This last question still on my mind, I later googled “nerds becoming popular” and immediately clicked on the images page. I already knew that Sheldon’s chic and Zuckerberg’s billions have brought those three words in close company. What I wanted to know was how many pictures of girls I would see sprinkled in among the guys wearing pocket protectors and suspenders.
Discounting “popular” girls torturing geeks, here’s the first “nerd girl” picture I came upon. I was hopeful. What a fool I was. Once I clicked through to its home site, here are the words I found: Who would have thought that being a nerd would be cool? Well the time has finally come. There is nothing more fashionable that an over-sized pair of geeky glasses. PS-When I saved the picture to my computer to easily transfer to this post, I noticed it was labeled, "pretty nerd." Little Mona Lisa Girl at the Clay Center, the deck has been stacked against you. Come on, STEM books, cool geek girl role models, Neil Degrasse Tyson. Help girls aspire to go to space and wear cool nail polish in orbit, if that’s what they want. Help everybody feel as if science and smart is back in fashion and sexy.
I spoke to astronaut Sunita Williams when writing Burp in Space, but never asked her if she felt she had to choose between lipstick and her dreams. I wish I had. Maybe I would have been primed to say something to this young girl. Even if she couldn’t hear me now, perhaps it would plant a seed. I know lots of girls get reacquainted with previous interests as women, but I hate to think of what has been lost in the meantime because their intellectual passions couldn’t coexist with the teenage definition of femininity.
On June 20, Liz Rusch is publishing I.N.K.’s last recommended booklist. This time it focuses on STEM-related topics. Let’s all take a second look.
* * * * *
Thank you, Linda. Thank you, I.N.K. Thanks to all of our readers. It’s been a pleasure.
I started writing for I.N.K. in March 2008. With nostalgia and curiosity, I went back to look at some of my initial posts. I kept on reading and realized that I was also looking at a history of what has happened in the field of kids’ nonfiction from then to now. At least, some of its zeitgeist, its ups and downs.
By 2008 we nonfiction writers had had time to road-test our liberation from straitjacket association with encyclopedic information. We had seen or written books such as Dance, Actual Size, and Action Jackson, celebrating the changes that came with cheaper color printing and more experimental styles and formats. It was no wonder my second post for I.N.K., A Rose by any Other Name? bridled against the confines of the word used to describe our field. I wrote:
As we all know, words matter. So what about the one that describes our genre of writing: nonfiction. I used to feel just fine about it, but now I have a slight twinge. After all, it does have a negative point of reference. The “I’m not fiction” instead of the “I am something” kind of writing…
If you link to the post you can see a discussion of the issue and the difficulty I and other commenters had trying to find a good solution.
Artistically booming , we were about to take a fall. In June 2008, however, most of us didn’t know that. I’m a glass-half-full-AND-half-empty type, perhaps I had a premonition. In The Lucky Thing about Friday the 13th, (prompted by my assigned post date) I amused myself with cheerful grumbling about the luck factor (or lack thereof) in writing nonfiction for kids. Here is part of it:
The lucky thing is that schools and libraries can always use a well-written book to update their collection on a particular subject.
The unlucky thing is that they can’t afford to buy them.
The lucky thing is that you can create books on subjects kids will love.
The unlucky thing is that many publishers can’t imagine marketing nonfiction to the trade market, so the kids don’t find them.
If you click on rest of the post, please note I do end with the lucky side; I love what I do and have, luckily, managed to make a living at it.
Nevertheless a few months later, the fan was hit plunging us into the biggest fiscal crisis since the Great Depression. It hit the book industry the same way it affected the nation at large. I know many people whose completed, even paid-for manuscripts were dropped by publishers looking at a shriveling market with no immediate change in sight. One of my own was pushed to a pub date over a year in the future so it could be “supported more successfully.”
Happily unagented for most of my career, I began to think about the comfort of having an ally. I started a search for an agent and was shocked by what I found on their web sites. Another post, Agents-Agents of Change was born.
A personal nadir perhaps, but hope springs and swings eternal along with changing fortunes for people and professions. In other words, if you stick around long enough, the pendulum swings. On a personal level, I had three books come out in 2012. More globally, picture books, declared a dying form, managed a “rebirth.” YA nonfiction is growing. Nonfiction books are more frequent winners and honor winners of the Newbery, Printz and Caldecott.
I’m not exactly sure when the phrase Common Core first appeared in I.N.K. posts, but it increased exponentially in 2012. My book Skyscraper was included in Math Reads, Marilyn Burn’s series using actual books to teach math; and I posted about future models of using our books in the classroom. When Penguin combined The Truth About Poop and Gee Whiz in a new edition, I wrote about what was lost and gained by very intelligently reissuing these books in black-and-white digest form for the burgeoning middle grade market.
I wasn’t the only one commenting on the Brave New World of nonfiction’s role in education. I.N.K. devoted the whole month of October 2013 to Common Core and nonfiction in the classroom with a spirited discussion about the author’s role in the process.
Is Common Core going to change the role and status of nonfiction in our culture? Who knows. I know more imprints are opening their lists to it. And I wish we’d have more time and posts to report on what happens as a result. But it’s been great to have an opportunity to think and write about all things nonfiction until now. Thank you, I.N.K.
This post, in fact, my tenure at I.N.K. is dedicated to Linda Salzman, without whom…
Last Saturday, I attended a terrific conference put on by the Foundation of Children’s Books (FCB) at Lesley University. It’s a regular event and this year it concentrated upon nonfiction. The speakers were nonfiction all-stars including Michael Tougias talking about adapting to write for middle grade after being an adult nonfiction author, Kathy Lasky reflecting upon the evolution of the nonfiction part of her career, Jason Chin finding the narrative arc of science through words and illustrations, and Steve Sheinkin being wildly entertaining while discussing books about very serious subjects.
I was especially pleased, however, to listen to fellow I.N.K. contributor Melissa Stewart. She appeared in the middle of the lineup, and that’s when you could hear pens scratching on notebooks. Melissa was there to discuss “Nonfiction Books You’ll Love” from 2013 and 2014.
The way that she presented them would do any nonfiction writer proud. She organized her info into topics that provided context to her audience. She gave just enough description about each book to inform and create the desire for further research. Her enthusiasm for her subject/s was infectious. She even supplied back matter: a takeaway list of 30 books arranged in alphabetical order by title and by year.
I guess what impressed me most besides Melissa’s careful curation was the generosity of her presentation--praise, yes, but also ways we could appreciate and use the books she mentioned. That’s why authors in the audience were writing down titles as potential mentor texts while teachers and librarians were listing books to add to their collections.
I remember a post Melissa did a while ago, saying that Common Core is here to stay and one of the best things writers can do (if they have the time and interest) is to give teachers easy ways to use their books to teach these standards. Then she helped us further by providing 10 ways to help educators, complete with with examples of these ideas.
During her presentation at the FCB, Melissa showed us a new idea she is using, a multimedia revision timeline that chronicles the very long road she took to finally publish her book, No Monkeys, No Chocolate. It was a fabulous way to show students and beginning authors that effortless writing takes an enormous amount of steps and work.
Now, she has given us 11 ways to help educators.
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You can’t judge a book by its cover? Rightly or wrongly, we all do. In the children’s book market, trim size matters too. And, when you’re a nonfiction picture book author, these two criteria create a complicated mix.
Here’s why I’ve been thinking about this subject. Last year, Penguin’s paperback imprint, Puffin Books, approached me and illustrator Elwood H. Smith about combining our books, The Truth About Poop and Gee Whiz, into one digest format edition for the middle grade market. Why not? Where Elwood’s original illustrations were vivid and lovely, they were just as funny in black-and-white and worked well in this 5 x 7 ½ trim size.
PLUS
EQUALS
Furthermore, this new edition was in a format that says to kids, “You’re older now, grown up enough for a big person’s paperback. Welcome to middle grade and the road to adulthood.”
The Truth About Poop is remaining in print; in fact, it’s soon celebrating its tenth anniversary. I’m happy to say it’s still selling, being reviewed on Amazon and hopefully offered in brick-and-mortar bookstores around the country. But I realize that these two versions, that share the same text and drawings, are for different audiences.
There comes a day in every child’s life when it’s no longer okay to carry a teddy bear outside or hug Mom in public. For most kids, there’s also a time when reading landscape-format or square-shaped picture books with bright illustrations becomes taboo—at least in public or outside the classroom. The same material that can amuse, amaze and be shared in black-and-white and portrait-shaped rectangles doesn’t cut the middle grade mustard when it’s in color.
But, here’s the rub. So many nonfiction picture books in these sizes and shapes are written for this age group and even older. This short length is just the right sized introduction to an idea or subject that can become an abiding interest. Beautiful pictures or photographs not only bring these subjects gloriously alive, they are a “working vacation,” providing additional information while they also give respite, letting a young reader stay involved while absorbing what was just read. And our readers may need this rest. We often write about complex situations or questions with high level language and abstraction. We talk about the ingenuity of Ben Franklin, the eccentricity of mathematicians and Thelonius Monk, the stuff that stardust is made of.
The Truth About Poop and Pee just came out on March 6th and I couldn’t be happier. It translates well into its new format, and snuggles comfortably into its new home on bookstore shelves where every book is the same dimension. If it reaches new readers this way, I’m very delighted. I’m glad I can nurture an interest in biology, chemistry, sociology, history while kids just think they are reading about poop and pee.
But I also hope these same readers won’t be so ready to “put away childish things” and will still be willing to explore the wonderful world of nonfiction picture books in living color.
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You can’t judge a book by its cover? Rightly or wrongly, we all do. In the children’s book market, trim size matters too. And, when you’re a nonfiction picture book author, these two criteria create a complicated mix.
Here’s why I’ve been thinking about this subject. Last year, Penguin’s paperback imprint, Puffin Books, approached me and illustrator Elwood H. Smith about combining our books, The Truth About Poop and Gee Whiz, into one digest format edition for the middle grade market. Why not? Where Elwood’s original illustrations were vivid and lovely, they were just as funny in black-and-white and worked well in this 5 x 7 ½ trim size.
PLUS
EQUALS
Furthermore, this new edition was in a format that says to kids, “You’re older now, grown up enough for a big person’s paperback. Welcome to middle grade and the road to adulthood.”
The Truth About Poop is remaining in print; in fact, it’s soon celebrating its tenth anniversary. I’m happy to say it’s still selling, being reviewed on Amazon and hopefully offered in brick-and-mortar bookstores around the country. But I realize that these two versions, that share the same text and drawings, are for different audiences.
There comes a day in every child’s life when it’s no longer okay to carry a teddy bear outside or hug Mom in public. For most kids, there’s also a time when reading landscape-format or square-shaped picture books with bright illustrations becomes taboo—at least in public or outside the classroom. The same material that can amuse, amaze and be shared in black-and-white and portrait-shaped rectangles doesn’t cut the middle grade mustard when it’s in color.
But, here’s the rub. So many nonfiction picture books in these sizes and shapes are written for this age group and even older. This short length is just the right sized introduction to an idea or subject that can become an abiding interest. Beautiful pictures or photographs not only bring these subjects gloriously alive, they are a “working vacation,” providing additional information while they also give respite, letting a young reader stay involved while absorbing what was just read. And our readers may need this rest. We often write about complex situations or questions with high level language and abstraction. We talk about the ingenuity of Ben Franklin, the eccentricity of mathematicians and Thelonius Monk, the stuff that stardust is made of.
The Truth About Poop and Pee just came out on March 6th and I couldn’t be happier. It translates well into its new format, and snuggles comfortably into its new home on bookstore shelves where every book is the same dimension. If it reaches new readers this way, I’m very delighted. I’m glad I can nurture an interest in biology, chemistry, sociology, history while kids just think they are reading about poop and pee.
But I also hope these same readers won’t be so ready to “put away childish things” and will still be willing to explore the wonderful world of nonfiction picture books in living color.
NEW BOOKS
Welcome to the World: A Keepsake Baby Book by Marfé Ferguson Delano (National Geographic)
The Truth about Poop and Pee, by Susan E. Goodman (Penguin), a new edition that brings together two of her best-selling books.
A Home for Mr. Emerson, by Barbara Kerley (Scholastic)
APPEARANCES
Deborah Heiligman will be speaking at the Virginia Festival of the Book March 21-23
Anna Lewis, author of Women of Steel and Stone: 22 Inspiring Architects, Engineers, and Landscape Designers, will be speaking at the Bellefonte, PA Art Museum on March 22, which has installed a large Anna Keichline exhibit.
AWARDS
The Animal Book: A Collection of the Fastest, Fiercest, Toughest, Cleverest, Shyest--and Most Surprising--Animals on Earth, written and illustrated by Steve Jenkins (HMH)
• The Horn Book 2013 Fanfare List of the Best Books for Young People
• NPR 2013 Great Reads
• Book Links Top 30 Titles from 2013
• Junior Library Guild Top 10 Books for Youth 2013
• ALA Notable Book 2014
Who Says Women Can’t Be Doctors by Tanya Lee Stone (Henry Holt)
• NPR Great Reads
The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos, by Deborah Heiligman. (Roaring Brook)
• Orbis Pictus Honor Book
• Book Links Top 30 Titles from 2013
Eruption! Volcanoes and the Science of Saving Lives, by Elizabeth Rusch. (HMH)
• Book Links Top 30 Titles from 2013
Courage Has No Color: The True Story of the Triple Nickles, America’s First Black Paratroopers, by Tanya Lee Stone. (Candlewick)
• Book Links Top 30 Titles from 2013
The Nature Generation has announced the shortlist for its 2014 Green Earth Book Awards. The award honors authors whose books best convey the environmental stewardship message to youth.
Eat Like a Bear, by April Pulley Sayre, illustrated by Steve Jenkins (Henry Holt)
Here Come the Humpbacks, by April Pulley Sayre (Charlesbridge)
No Monkeys, No Chocolate, by Melissa Stewart and Allen Young(Charlesbridge)
A Place for Turtles, by Melissa Stewart(Peachtree Publishers)
As kids’ book writers, when we think conference, we usually think NCTE, SCBWI, IRA, or ALA. Now that I teach at the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, I’m also a member of AWP (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs). Last week I went to my first AWP conference—a crazy confab of over 550 readings and panels with 12,000 writers spending four days trying to find connections, inspiration, and bathrooms at Boston’s Hynes Convention Center.
Writing for young people is a relatively new addition to MFA programs so the proportion of programming devoted to our genre is much smaller. I also noticed that many of our sessions were the first and last of the day, seemingly less desirable times. Interpret that as you will.
Hating Your Writing: A Love Story didn’t have a children’s book author on its panel, but still seems a useful discussion for any of us. Five poets and prose writers (Richard Bausch, Molly Peacock, Daniel Nester, Melissa Stein, and Chuck Sweeney) discussed that hideous moment when your euphoric assessment of your draft somehow plummets from brilliance to dross upon the next reading. What are these literary mood swings? Is there ever an upside? Can dejection lead to breakthroughs and better writing?
If any of these writers were feeling literary despair on Saturday, they kept it to themselves. Instead they tried to share their insights on managing the emotional ups and downs of creative life. Here are some of their points that struck me:
Chad Sweeney likened these emotional downswings to exhaustion, then commented that exhaustion is sometimes a healthy reaction, especially if you are trying to write to anticipated criticism or expectations or in a style that once fed you but no longer does so. It can be a sign you have to figure out how you’ve gone off course—dig in or dig out—and come up with something new.
Melissa Stein suggested that there are two types of internal critics: one is discerning and can make helpful comments you should consider, the other is the bad parent (think Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest) who insists you don’t even have the talent or right to tell this story. Give yourself the time and space to figure out which critic is in your head and act accordingly.
Richard Bausch spoke like a veteran. He said it’s working that is important. Put in the time and at the end of the day, ask yourself, “Did I work?” If the answer is yes, you’ve accomplished your goal. Develop a sense of calm; you can’t mess your writing up because you can always do over. If all else fails, lower your standards and keep on going. Remember, revision is all.
Molly Peacock agreed. Keep your standards high and your expectations low; it helps you keep going. But allow room for dormancy; it’s all right to walk away for a while with the intent of returning. Furthermore know yourself and how to interpret your energies and feelings. Peacock is a morning writer. As a result, she refuses to make any judgments or decisions about her writing after 3 p.m.
Donald Nester said he sometimes gets unstuck by changing the form that he’s writing in a little. Let yourself get lost again and something new might happen. Even journaling can transform material into the nugget you need to find your way.
Other miscellaneous tips:
--Be kind and compassion, give yourself permission to fail by reaching into new areas.
--Create the conditions you need for good writing--good food or walks--anything that makes you feel more open and engaged and closer to the source.
--Banish the critic and get it out there. Then draft by draft by draft, things proceed toward grace.
--If you can’t turn off the critical voice, acknowledge it and go on.
--Always remember, things may not be as bad as you think. Vladimir Nabokov dumped his manuscript of Lolita in the garbage, only to have it rescued by his wise wife. In other words, wait a week and read it again.
In 2004, my book Skyscraper was published. In 2010, it went out of print. I wrote a post about it, Skyscraper RIP, a eulogy for a book that was well received, but really because I loved the experience of researching and writing it.
Lazarus, you aren't the only one. I'm happy to say that Skyscraper is alive once more, in some classrooms at least. The story of its resurrection, however, is also the story of how some publishers and school systems will be handling Common Core.
Scholastic has published a series called Math Reads. Marilyn Burns, whose resume in teaching and designing math curricula seems impressive, headed a team of other teachers to create it. Here is a description of their product:
Math Reads is the NEW math and literature program from Marilyn Burns. Designed to support the Common Core State Standards for K–5, each grade-level collection of books brings math alive and serves as a springboard for math instruction.
Each grade-level Math Reads program includes:
- 25 children’s literature titles (5 copies of each)
- Lessons written by Marilyn Burns and Math Solutions authors
- eBooks of select titles for interactive whiteboards
- Math Solutions’ Math and Literature professional development book
If you look at the curriculum for Math Reads' 5th grade, you'll see Skyscraper has been included and is in some very good company, including Hottest, Coldest, Highest, Deepest by my I.N.K. colleague Steve Jenkins, Pennies for Elephants by a friend Lita Judge, Wilma Unlimited by the always good Kathleen Krull, and Mordicai Gerstein's The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, an extraordinary book I've blogged about before. So this Math Reads series contains good fiction and nonfiction books (although only 5 copies of each per classroom), additional titles in eBook format, and lesson plans to use all these books to satisfy Common Core. Hopefully, teachers and students will be exposed to good literature they might not have ever seen. Hopefully it will spur a greater interest in reading as well as a better understanding of math. It will help overworked teachers adapt to the demands of Common Core quickly and, again hopefully, once they get their bearings, they will feel confident to use their own ideas and own favorite books to enrich their teaching. These are possible positive outcomes of this series--along with good profits for Scholastic.It also seems to be a model we will see more and more as publishing and education fulfill both the needs and opportunities that Common Core has created in terms of nonfiction in the classroom. I'm not advocating for this model, I mentioned it to start a discussion of what other models and reactions we'll see. What we think about them. What we realistically hope to see. What we think are practical and will work.
What do you all think? I'm particularly interested in what all the teachers, librarians and other educators who read our blog have to say about the mat
I had another I.N.K. post just about finished when Kelly Milner Halls' plea for school librarians and a package pushed me in another direction.
The mailer came from Carol Sweny, the Henniker Community School librarian, in Henniker, NH, where I had recently talked to kids, K-8. The disc of photos recording my two days there included all the ingredients of a great school visit and reminded me how often a school librarian is at its core.
In the school visit's section of my web site, I have a version of what most authors say on theirs: I find that when kids are prepared for a school visit, they get more out of it. So I ask that students have access to some of my books beforehand, and read (or are read) at least one of them. I also have downloadable pictures of me and book covers to make a poster for your hallway. These efforts alone will invoke kids’ interest and enthusiasm, making the visit more memorable for them.
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| Remember you can click on all these pictures to make them larger. |
This statement isn't an ego thing or a plea to buy more of my books beforehand. When kids know I'm coming, when they have read or heard some of my books, they are psyched to see me. They have had time to think and wonder about things, they listen more attentively, they ask more questions. They get more out of the experience. It's not that I can't grab an uniformed class or auditorium's attention; I can. But time after time, I notice that prepared kids have a better experience. Like Kelly, I know that classroom teachers and principals are overloaded. Some may not even know an author is coming in time to prepare. Besides they are trying to get through their curriculum and whatever enrichments they have planned, let alone teaching to whatever state test is coming up next. PTO parents work hard to raise money for author visits, but their role doesn't usually extend to the classroom or library. The school librarian is the perfect person to rally the troops: to prepare the kids in library class, to suggest and facilitate related classroom exercises, to organize book order forms, to generate excitement.The Henniker has one author come each year, and Carol Sweny makes the most of it. I'm not suggesting that every school or school librarian wants or needs to put in the time and effort she did. Perhaps showing how she rallied her school, however, will remind people how important it is to have school librarians and how much their efforts, with school visits and everything else, help kids learn and grow. |
| Here is part of the flyer Carol made to pass around to the teachers. |
As you saw, grades K through 4 saw a presentation based on my book On This Spot, which takes New York City back in time to when it was home to forests, glaciers, dinosaurs, towering mountains, even a tropical sea. This presentation included, among other things, kids taking many different objects and sorting themselves into a timeline.
Carol asked the teachers to have their classes use timelines to supplement normal learning. They did so in different and wonderful ways. The school's corridors were festooned with examples of this interesting way to think about time and history. |
| The kindergarteners made timelines of their days. | | | |
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| First graders created a timeline that would record a whole year of learning month by month. |
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| The 2nd graders made illustrated lifelines. |
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| Third graders did their lifelines too. |
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| Here's a new way for a 4th grade class to think about the making of the Statue of Library. | |
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| The 5th grade concentrated on learning new computer skills while doing their personal timelines. |
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| The 6th grades' timeline of our presidents was perfectly timed since my visit occurred shortly after the election in November. |
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| The 7th graders learned research and computer skills creating a timeline of Henniker's history that took up an entire hallway. |
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| The 8th grade's timeline cascading down the stairway brought their study of the Harlem Renaissance to life. |
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As Kelly so wisely said, school librarians (any librarians) are teachers. They build relationships, spark imagination. We should fight for them.
I would fight for Carol Sweny. Besides a great school visit, she gave me a moment of feeling like a rock star. Check out what greeted me when I pulled into the school parking lot.
I was delighted that Bloomsbury asked me to revise my 2008 book, See How They Run: Campaign Dreams, Election Schemes, and the Race to the White House for the 2012 presidential elections. The idea of a do-over of one of your books is intriguing, sort of like going back in time to right wrongs. In preparation, occasionally patting myself on the back, sometimes seeing a paragraph or section that could have been better and, worst, seeing something that simply should have been better.
Quickly, however, I learned that economics rules revision as it does just about everything else. The more pages you change, the more it costs. So nobody’s looking to opt for a better verb on page 13, let alone something you feel more strongly about. Unless you feel very, very strongly!
My editor Michelle Nagler read through the book and studded it with Post-it questions and thoughts. I did the same, plus a good amount of research. Then we confabbed.
What got changed? Here are just a few categories and examples:
Factual changes After losing two elections for the Virginia state legislature, George Washington learned his lesson, treated voters to 160 gallons of alcohol in 1758 and got elected. That was true in 2008 and true now. But every “in the now” type fact got rechecked before we went back to press.
--For example, page 21’s sidebar, “Party Favors,” discussed party corruption, mentioning that, after the Civil War, judgeships cost about a $15,000 contribution to the Republican party, a bit more than $200,000 in today’s money. When I checked the conversion charts that track US inflation, I found the sum close enough to current value to keep as is, perhaps the only reason to be grateful for the Great Recession.
--On the other hand, page 51 was changed to say that nowadays only two states allow prisoners to vote. In the original edition, there weren’t any.
Updates Even though factual changes are updates; to me, this category contains the kind of updates that justify a new edition.
--The most obvious one is that we elected the 44thpresident of the US and the first African American. Enough references to Obama’s campaign and presidency were inserted when relevant: p. 31, for example, which talked about the campaign tactics of candidates who have something to overcome; Michelle and Barack’s dancing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show as an example of the current trend of “getting to know candidates as people;” Obama’s bio in the back, which mentions he has read all the Harry Potter books, etc.
--Obama updates I could have and perhaps should have used, but did not. In my first edition, I depicted the unbelievably elaborate security for George W. Bush’s second inauguration held after 9/11. I didn’t have the heart to trump that description with the protection used for Obama’s.
Traumatizing children
--In the original edition, I started the section about qualifications for presidential candidates by saying “You know how they say anyone can grow up to be president? Sorry, another myth bites the dust. (PS. There’s no such thing as the tooth fairy, either.)” With a book that numbered 96 pages and an audience I guestimated at 9 years old and mostly older, I didn’t think much about that. Until I got an email from a mother that said: “Thanks for outing the tooth fairy to my kid.” Another writer friend of mine said that any nine-year-old who still believed in the tooth fairy was either bilking his or her parents or deserves to know the truth. I, on the other hand, felt traumatized myself; so in 2012, I said I must change this. But to what? Who are you going to “out?” Unicorns? Fairies? Ultimately, I took the hit for my hometown of Boston and made it leprechauns.
There’s a puzzle to this revising exercise—you can’t add pages and must change as few as possible for economic rules mentioned above. So, what happens to a logically laid out page when you have to add something important that takes some explaining as well? Some worked out well by snipping words and widows to create room, sometimes even a whole example. Others plague me, still. I had to discuss Obama’s use of the media as a campaign game-changer, had to. It required a lengthy paragraph and cost a seamless argument. If I get to write a new 2016 version…
P.S. If anyone is interest in looking at information about See How They Run’s revised edition, use my web site’s links to the IndieBound or Amazon sites. I don’t make any extra money this way, but there are some Amazon snafus that make this updated book almost impossible to find (except for some weird $123 version).
As I wrote in a post last March, I have three books coming out this year and another one in early 2013, due to the vagaries of publishing rather than my own writing schedule. An embarrassment of riches, I’m not complaining. Nor (at this moment, at least) am I whining about how this traffic jam caused an unanticipated drought of publications for the last four years. Right now I’m thinking about how these past few years have given me time to take some steps toward the Brave Not-So-New World of author self-promotion.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t live in a glass bubble. I’ve had a website for a million years; after all, it’s the modern equivalent of a business card. I’ve always been willing and able to help promote my books. As a former magazine writer, I had contacts and used them. Four years ago, I was already blogging here at I.N.K. and knew all about Facebook, even though I had no interest in signing up.
So what's different now? Many things, for me and for most authors. There are a lot fewer magazines and newspapers, for example. Furthermore their decreasing advertising revenue have shrunk “less necessary” features about authors or their books.
Four years ago my publishers did some promotion for my books coming out, and they are this year as well. Yet more than ever, it’s so clear that even more of the responsibility for promotion has shifted to the author. New and midlist authors certainly. Yet I also have a friend, very well known, who has been firmly told she should post on her blog at least three times a week.
Most of the publishers I work with have sites or pr brochures that encourage us to promote. The Random House Author Portal, for example, lets you track your book sales and subrights online. But before you get to those weekly updates, you are invited to click on the “Connect with Readers” link or the “Monthly Marketing Tip.” Facebook, websites, blogs, twitter, of course. Then there’s the world of Pinterest that our own Melissa Stewart uses so cleverly, Infographics, virtual reader communities (Goodreads, LibraryThing, and JacketFlap being just the beginning), and Linked-In as a social medium—not job hunting—which I still haven’t figured out. It’s mindbloggling, but one ignores it at her peril.
The bad news, I now figure, is these tools have been put in our hands. And the good news is—these tools have been put in our hands. We have the potential of creating word of mouth ourselves in a way authors couldn’t have dreamt of even a decade before.
Do we want to? I have to say that the experience of building the guts of my new Wordpress website, (individual pages, sidebars, etc.) while hiring a professional designer for the customized frame has made me much more confident. And much less likely to glaze over or shrink away when considering my Brave New World.
These are the first new things I’m trying. To paraphrase the late Neil Armstrong: A small step for mankind, a giant step for me. If you find anything new and useful for you, grab it.
Facebook. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I don’t even like answering my email.
An Facebook Author Page This I like better, but try not to post 3 times a week because it feels a little spammy to me. Am I being too retro? I frankly don’t know.
A trailer for my new book, It’s a Dog’s Life. And trying to find more ways to use it than just my own and my publisher’s website.
Again, for It’s a Dog’s Life, a monthly contest on my site showing a photo of a dog in action, which asks, “What is this dog doing?” Kids and adults can email in their responses. At contest’s end, the person who best explains the behavior and the one who makes me laugh hardest each receive a free book. To me, this is a win-win situation. I get website traffic and people get free books. It’s actually win-win-win-win. Teachers can use it for a fun literary activity and dog, mom, or book bloggers can run it as an easy post that will interest their readers.
Am I reinventing the wheel? Sure, but how else am I going to understand it?
What is the sound of one hand typing?
Plunk, plunk…plunk……………plunk…oops, backspace.
What is the sound of two hands typing?
In my case, it’s been: Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Then, after a while, a retreat downstairs to the couch.
About six weeks ago, I had a bad car accident and broke all the bones in my left forearm and carpel (I guess I now have my own version of carpel tunnel syndrome). I feel lucky I wasn’t hurt more severely and that I’m right handed. Two operations and several casts later, I’m slowly on the mend.
So how has this affected my writing? Well, I’m glad I could confine what little writing I did in the early days to email. Back then, painkillers and only one useful hand made the keyboard feel like a wilderness to be conquered. I am a touch typist and have found that using one hunt-and-peck forefinger means a lot more hunting and less pecking than I imagined. My fingers know the keys much better than my visual memory does. It doesn’t help that my emotional attachment to a decade-old keyboard means many of the letter symbols have worn off the keys.
Yes, I know that I can just compose longhand, the way I used to hammer out all my articles when I first started my career as a magazine writer. But technology changed a long time ago. I made the switch and my brain has too. I am so used to my hands being able to keep up with my thoughts that I’m no longer trained to hold the upcoming words --long phrases or a word picture--in my mind for that length of time. Tap, tap, tapping of the forefinger creates the same problem.
Dragon, the voice recognition software? Thought about it, bought it, returned it unwrapped. Maybe it would have been a godsend for email. But, for me, there are essential components to thoughtful writing it just wouldn’t satisfy. The process isn’t all that different, but dictation feels distracting, moor less, as if the words I really want, their order and the meaning I want to make of them could just float away. When typing, words and ideas go from the mind through the hands, then via the eyes back to the brain to continue the process. Mind, hands, eyes—three parts, each with its own job to do, which includes freeing the others to do theirs.
I know Steven Hawking has managed just fine using a different system. And, he’s hardly the only one. If my injury had been worse or permanent, I would work to rewire my creative circuitry. Seems a little daunting, though. So, even though I’ve given serious thought to a book I’m gearing up to refashion, something tells me it will stay on simmer until my cast comes off.
In recent years, we’ve heard a lot about narrative nonfiction—books that uses scene building, dialog, and other elements borrowed from fiction to tell true stories. But narrative texts are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to creative nonfiction for young readers.
Here are some examples:
Lyrical nonfiction employs such language devices as alliteration, rhythm, and repetition to infuse prose with combinations of sounds and syllables that are especially pleasing to the ear. —Vulture View by April Pulley Sayre (illus by Steve Jenkins)
—Lightship by Brain Floca
—Swirl by Swirl: Spiral s in Nature by Joyce Sidman (illus by Beth Krommes)
—The Secret World of Walter Anderson by Hester Bass (illus by E.B. Lewis)
By:
Susan E. Goodman,
on 3/12/2012
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Have you ever waited at a bus stop? Waited and waited at a bus stop? You watch cabs rolling by, watch buses going the other way, watch your watch with increasing irritation. Finally your bus does come--with two or three other buses right behind it. A herd, a pod, a troup of buses. Very annoying, isn’t it?
A similar thing has happened to me in the publishing world, but I’m not sure whether it’s annoying or not. In 2004, I had five books come out in one year. And, up until a few months ago, I thought I would have four coming out in 2012.
How does this happen? I’ve never written four or five books in one year, so how do they get bunched up on the other end like buses? Good question. Some books go into production relatively quickly, while others take a long time to write. For example, I wrote a book called Skyscraper that chronicled the making of the Random House Building and I couldn’t write any faster than the construction. It had a four-year gestation period and came out in 2004 along with Choppers! that took about two years from research to release. Other reasons? Editors have babies. It can take a while to find the right illustrator or to wait for an illustrator to finish two other projects before starting yours or the illustrator goes on strike. The economy tanks and publishing houses thin their seasons and spread out the books so your pub date jumps a year or so into the future.
Let me be clear, I’m not complaining, really. I know having a bevy of books is an embarrassment of riches. It’s certainly better than no books at all, or a surfeit of buses traveling in a pack. But what are the pros and cons for the author—and the books?
In the old days, the perception was: bringing out more than one book a season or a year meant the author was competing against herself. Mark that down as a notch in the “con” section. Of course in the old days, most authors published with only one house so the publisher would be competing against itself too; they controlled supply and demand.
Today many children’s book authors work with several houses. We cannot act as traffic cops giving Simon & Schuster the green light for one season and putting Penguin on hold. Now publishers are competing against each other. Has that changed the model? Does it help or hurt the author? And given the increased avenues of media, does having multiple books out at the same time increase buzz? Advertising wisdom says the more consumers hear something, the more likely they will remember it, perhaps become interested and start word-of-mouth.
In 2004, I decided that if there was any time to hire a publicist, having five books come out was it. Susan Raab and I concentrated on three of them. Susan was great and responsible for a good deal of the media coverage they received. S
By:
Susan E. Goodman,
on 2/12/2012
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Like so many New Yorker subscribers, I am always months behind. They pile up week by week, screaming their silent rebuke. Sometimes I hide them in a corner; rarely, I become defiant and throw them out without a glance of what I might miss. Keeping up with this magazine is the best (only?) reason I can think of for computing to a job on the subway instead of just carrying my coffee upstairs in my pjs.
I’m glad the November 14, 2011 issue didn’t end up unseen and in the recycling. Yesterday I read an article by John McPhee, one of the greatest nonfiction writers around. In “Progression,” he discussed the evolution of many of his ideas, when he lets his subject matter dictate the structure of his piece, and the few times (just two in a very full career) he chose a structure and searched for a subject to fit it.
Many of us here have written about such matters already, but I find the topic endlessly fascinating.
I thought I might pluck a few points from the article that could hopefully spur some conversation in the comments section from my fellow bloggers and some of our readers.
1. McPhee said he once listed all the pieces he had written in decades and realized that 90 percent of them were related to subjects he had been interested in before he went to college.
Is that true for you? I’m not sure it is for me. I really liked biology, but I’d never have predicted I would write so much about science. Is that because I was a young girl at a time when females considered other types of careers? Or is it that I didn’t understand then that there is a poetry in pure science that is as lyric as Shakespeare?
2. McPhee said that his readers aren’t shy with suggestions, then noted these ideas are often closer to the readers’ passions than his own. Yet he did end up using two of their proposals.
Anybody here ever turn an suggested idea from a reader or a kid into a book?
3. McPhee mentioned that “new pieces can shoot up from other pieces, pursuing connections that run through the ground like rhizomes.”
I bet so many of us have written books or articles this way. I’ve already talked about one of mine in an earlier post (http://inkrethink.blogspot.com/2011/02/on-and-on-and-on.html). Have you met a minor character while researching one story who demanded a book of his or her own? Or turned an idea on its ear for another go-round?
4. And finally, what about McPhee’s ultimately successful attempt to tame a potentially disastrous idea: trying to find the right subject to fit within a pre-set structure. His result turned out to be the classic Encounters with t
My friend Carole Horne, general manager of the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, MA, told me a story about this man who came into her bookstore last summer to browse. He thumbed his way through their “recommended” section, then came up to the cashier seemingly empty-handed. Nope. He put a five dollar bill on the counter and said that he was going on a trip and would download his books but had spent a lot of time browsing and felt like he owed the shop some money.
The story is a mixed bag, but there is a measure of good in it. The guy recognized the intrinsic worth of the local bookstore. This time he forewent its paper products that would weight down his luggage. But he did value the expertise of independent bookstore buyers, the taste of those who curated that special section of books worth his attention, the opportunity to look into familiar books to see if they appealed and browse unknown ones to find a treasure. And at least it translated into some value for the store as well.
A worse story. This week I was picking up a book and a calendar (yes, I still write down my appointments in little white squares) at nearby Brookline Booksmith and noticed a shopper jotting down titles on a list next to people’s names. Wanna bet that list is going home to a computer and amazon.com?
The WORST story. Quite simply, the Amazon app. For those of you who haven't heard or read about it, Amazon has created an app called, “Price Check.” People go into stores, enable the app’s location feature, scan products using their phones and are immediately offered 5 percent off 3 identical Amazon purchases for up to 5 dollars. In other words, the app is turning brick-and-mortar stores into unwilling showrooms where consumers can check out the product, and leaf through a few pages before they click a button to save five bucks (plus, don’t forget, the sales tax!)
Right now, Price Check (or as I see it, the Death Star) is only using consumers as its foot soldiers to do reconnaissance on products like electronics, toys, music, sporting goods, and DVDS. Then, with a click, it sucks up this market. How long before books, the product that defined Amazon, will follow? Then how long before all our favorite bookstores will no longer exist?
People in all parts of the book business know something about death by a thousand cuts. But writers—especially kids’ book writers, especially nonfiction kids’ book writers—know that losing local bookstores is more like the Sword of Damocles. The pricelessness of booksellers has been written about so often, I’ll just print the keywords and you can fill in the blanks: know their stock standards, take chances, word of mouth, hand sell, actually read, actually care.
Let's not lose all those beautiful keywords for five bucks and some sales tax.
Come on everybody, it’s the Christmas buying season. There will
By:
Susan E. Goodman,
on 11/14/2011
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There’s a new holiday in town. November is now Picture Book Month. Several picture book authors got together to create this event—and, good for them. As they said on their web site, Picture Book Month: A Celebration!, “We are doing this because in this digital age where people are predicting the coming death of print books, picture books (the print kind) need love. And the world needs picture books. There’s nothing like the physical page turn of a beautifully crafted picture book.”
I have written on this subject myself, a rebuttal to the attitude reported in The New York Times, of parents wanting children to leap past picture books to read chapter books in the quest to get them on the road to...what?
Each day on this site, another picture book author writes an entry titled, “Why Picture Books are Important.” Here are some excerpts from the entries so far:
I believe our first stories become part of our DNA forever. -Samantha Berger
Picture books are important because they are with us for life…No matter how many books we’ve read since, they will always have a place in our hearts…and a relationship that, whether we realize it or not, has shaped our lives. -Dan Yaccarino
When my now 11 year old girl, Eliana, was a preschooler, we bought the book, In My World, by Lois Ehlert. The illustrations are simple. The text is sparse. And yet, there is a magic about this book that completely captured her. It could have been the exquisite die cuts or the bright colors… It could have been. But it wasn't. It was the wondrous way the words and the pictures were married. One could not work without the other. Every night, Eliana read that book to me, putting her little hand, which fit perfectly, inside the die cut hand of the book. And every night I would tear up knowing that I was experiencing a magical moment in my daughter's life… -Diane de las Casas
Picture books have a special kind of magic in the hands of children. They open windows of opportunity — glimpses of new worlds — in the safest of places: in the library, in the classroom, or in their very own rooms. Kids can sound out one word at a time, breeze through full sentences or skip the words altogether to build stories of their own based on warm, vivid illustrations. Anything is possible… -Kelly Milner Halls
I have a sixteen-year-old niece, Sarah. A year ago my sister-in-law, her mom, died suddenly. A friend of the family gave my brother a picture book called Tear Soup to help with Sarah’s mourning.
One night, he walked into her room with the book under his arm. She took one look at him, rolled her eyes, and said, “Yeah, right. You’re going to read THAT to ME?”
“Yes,” he said. “Move over.”
She argued – what teen girl wouldn’t? – but grudgingly made room. They cuddled up and read the book. A couple of days later, Sarah asked, “Dad, whatever happened to all my picture books from when I was little?” My brother pulled a box out of storage and the next night came in with Caps for Sale.
A new tradition was born. For months, every night, he’d read a picture book to her from her childhood.
Picture books heal. No matter your age. -Katie Davis
I have looked up some of the other created holidays for November—International Drum Month, Peanut Butter Lovers Month, Aviation History Month. In my book, this one beats them hands down.
Spread the word.
I can’t remember how long after 9/11 I started hearing about the publication of children’s books inspired by the event. I do, however, remember my reaction. Of course, kids’ thoughts and feelings had to be addressed. But I could not help thinking of the books about Princess Di or Jonestown that strung up like mushrooms after a wet spell. Whether my own feelings were caused by grief, cynicism, decorum or all of these, I do not know. But I didn’t read these books when they came out.
Eventually I did read The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein. I can’t imagine a better response to that day. Gerstein deservedly won the Caldecott for his ink and oil paintings that captured Philippe Petit’s wonderful escapade, stringing a tightrope across the towers to walk and dance in the sky. They are stunning, with perspectives that let us walk and dance right along with him.
But the book is so much more. At the beginning of the story, the towers are just there, waiting—much like Mount Everest for Sir Edmund Hillary. An amazing, soaring structure, yes, but a vehicle for Petit to do his art. It is only on the last spread that we get a hint of Gerstein's impetus. He writes simply, “Now the towers are gone,” showing a skyline that would look full if you didn’t know better.
The final page has a misty image of the towers united by a tiny Petit on a tightrope. It says, “But in memory, as if imprinted on the sky, the towers are still there. And part of that memory is the joyful morning, August 7, 1974, when Philippe Petit walked between them in the air.”
Pretty perfect. By celebrating Petit’s daring-do, Gerstein also celebrates the vision of people who thought big and built big. By commemorating Petit’s courage, he also commemorates those who clear-sightedly rushed in to deal with what turned out to be an even riskier situation.
By telling this story as he did, Gerstein reminds us that grief over anything or anyone’s destruction should never erase the pleasure caused by their existence.
By:
Susan E. Goodman,
on 6/13/2011
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I have had a great gig this year: author-in-residence at the Michael J. Perkins School in South Boston, a small elementary school set right in the middle of Old Colony Housing Project. Old Colony is being renovated and I was hired to work with the Perkins kids on a blog about being in the middle of a construction zone. I described more about the situation in last October's post.
As the end of the school year approaches, it's natural to look back and access the experience. Having done school visits for many years, I have always been in awe of classroom teachers. Now, I bow down to them. To see what they do every day, day after day, is amazing. To see the pressure to fulfill a state's curriculum--teach X from October 12 to November 3rd and then segue to unit Y on the 4th. To understand more fully how my coming to the classroom with extras means extra resources and richness but extra work squeezing to fit everything in, however worthy it all is.
But some great things happened this year, from K to 5. Some of the highlights:
When the kindergarteners read Mike Mulligan and his Steam Engine, they wondered what the workers on the site had named their machines. They were amazed--maybe a little horrified--when they realized those excavators and dump trucks were just called "it" or "they." That's when the Name That Crane campaign was born--the two kindergarten classes each nominated names, ran campaigns and voted for the name to call the huge crane that lifted the steel (they also learned the democratic process in the bargain, which made the See How They Run author very happy). Voting Day was very exciting, take a look.
Here are the kindergarteners at the naming ceremony--with the Big Giraffe, the newly dubbed 400-ton crane in the background. (A fine name, but I was personally rooting for Mr. Lifty! That's democracy for ya--besides I didn't get a vote.)
For National Poetry Month, one first grade class experimented with acrostic poems, which use the letters in a topic word to begin each line. Then all the lines of the poem relate to this topic. Given what was going on outside their class window, they used the word, CONSTRUCT. This poem above was one of my favorites.
One second grade class is collaborating on a book about the day in the life of a construction worker and what these men and women must do to stay safe. For one week, they spent an hour a day observing the construction site and writing down what they saw.
This past Saturday, I attended a seminar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute called Three Poets on “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” It was a blockbuster lineup: Poets Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky and Louise Gluck (two of them Laureates) and Sigmund Freud, who was abundantly present in spirit, within the audience of 60-odd analysts and in his essay, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” Each poet read a poem and talked about how his or her writing related to points made by the Master in this essay about creativity.
Evidently Freud was both fascinated and puzzled by artistic invention. The program notes said creativity was “a mystery he admired, and likely envied as well. Freud wrote that poets had always known what psychoanalysis had discovered, and that it just fell to him to systematize and theorize it.”
And theorize it he did in this essary that searched for its underpinnings. As best as I could tell, Freud believed that creativity's roots lay in childhood (Duh. Where else did he ever look?). Specifically in childhood play. The child constructs a fantasy world in which the elements of the real world are reordered to please him, in part by defusing or dealing with unsatisfactory realities. And since the child is the father of the man, the adult writer continues on the same path.
Here’s the problem, Sigmund. This hypothesis—right or wrong—addresses the poet, novelist and playwright. What about the writer of creative nonfiction? Our job is to deal with, often even embrace the realities of life, not avoid them. And to do it creatively. Take the facts and make something new of them—or why bother?
So do we get our own developmental theory?
Is the creative nonfiction writer born as the kid who is just burning to know? Maybe she watches the first snowfall and wonders what happens to the butterflies. She asks her father who changes the subject because he doesn’t know and induces trauma by answering NO questions. Then she gets sent to a shrink who asks the little girl TOO many questions instead of answering any. Then she asks a librarian who hands her a copy of Under the Snow by Melissa Stewart. Just like Goldilocks, everything is finally just right. Anxiety over. That feeling of relief and its cause is imprinted upon her psyche and determines her future.
Or maybe he started on the Freudian track, building a world filled with purple dragons. Then he discovered that once the world was home to animals called dinosaurs. Everything changed. Yes, yes, he’d say dismissively, I know dragons can fly. Pterosaurs can too—and hey, did you know that a T Rex had teeth the size of bananas? The idea that dinosaurs once walked the Earth, that his wildest fantasies could be REAL, is what fueled his creativity.
Maybe one of these children grows up and asks another question. This time she can search for the answer herself, talk to people who’ve spent their lives wondering about the same thing. She asks enough and they know enough so she can know enough too. And she finds the way the world works so beautiful that when she explains it, she makes music.
Or when he seeks the truth, he finds a sliver of a story that manages to tell the whole thing. His creativity is to hone in. His tale uncovers the core and it echoes and reaches so far that questions his readers don’t even know they have get answered.
Perhaps they even answer yours, Dr. Freud.
Before I start my blog post, a quick announcement: Tonight, March 15, at 7:30 I will be on a panel at Boston College with
Susan Goodman (who INKed yesterday) and
Lorree Griffen Burns talking about NARRATIVE NON-FICTION, called TELL ME A STORY AND MAKE IT TRUE. If you are in the area, please come! Here's the
link.
Now back to our regular programming...
I’ve written a bazillion nonfiction picture books. (Yes, that’s accurate, a bazillion.) And a few fiction picture books, too, by the way.
I have illustrated nary a one. I tell the kids who ask me at school visits that if I did my own illustrations no one would buy my books. Ha ha. It's so true. I also have not sung in public since I was the only girl not to make the chorus in sixth grade. (Would it have been that hard to put me in there, in the back? Really?) Wait, this isn’t my therapy session? Sorry. But my point is this: When I write nonfiction picture books they are either illustrated with photographs or by the deft hand of someone else. Right now I am eagerly awaiting sketches from a brilliant illustrator for my book about a mathematician. I know she is going to bring much more to the book than I ever could, or could ever imagine.
Yes, I am in awe of illustrators and forever grateful to those who illustrate my books. I got to wondering recently what it would be like to create a book from start to finish as others here on I.N.K. do, (I bow down to you who do) and just as I was thinking about that, a lovely new book landed on my desk. A book that I wish I had written, and yes, illustrated. Meadowlands by Thomas Yezerski. (FSG)
Tom is a friend of mine and I asked him if he would share his process with us so I could live vicariously. I asked him which came first, the words or the pictures.
My illustration process usually begins with the words. Actually, it begins before that. It begins with my being interested in something. In this case, it started with getting lost somewhe
By:
Susan E. Goodman,
on 3/14/2011
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In my somewhat new Monday slot, more of my posts fall on holidays (duh!) and I have just let them pass. Last month, for example, Valentine’s Day came and went, but my heart wasn't in it.
Today, however, I’d like to celebrate this week’s unofficial holiday that, in my opinion, deserves to become official--the onset of Daylight Saving Time (DST). What an emotionally lifting gift—especially to New Englanders who have been battling the suicidal impulses that accompany a 4:30 sunset. For months we have tried to keep our spirits up as the light inched back a minute at a time. Then PRESTO CHANGO! In just one day, arbitrary magic multiplies the jump times 60. We get a whole new hour of light—and life becomes brighter in every way. If only Zoloft worked so well.
As nonfiction writers we are obligated to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, right? What about the whole truth, though? In this case, I would have to admit that DST causes increased danger of traffic and pedestrian accidents during its first week because of sleep cycle disruption. It was never created to help the farmers or reinstated more recently to save energy. In fact, farmers hate it and many experts believe it increases energy costs: electricity for air conditioning and over $100 million a year for the airlines.
Why did this idea gain purchase? Some British golfer in 1907 realized that if one hour of sunlight was switched from the sunrise side to sunset, he’d have time to get to the back nine. In fact, when the 1986 Congress debated the issue of extending it into March, the golf lobby went to town. According to Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, the golf industry estimated the extension of DST would increase their revenues by 400 million 1986 dollars, the barbecue industry over $100 million. In other words, if you give Americans the chance to go outside at any time, they will spend money.
Telling the whole truth about DST is not a horror. An ironic example of one of America’s worst traits, perhaps, but not a deal-killer. In the unlikely event that I ever wrote a book about DST, I’d “out” its origins with relish.
But what about other times, when telling the whole truth in our books for younger children is a lot more painful? Then how far do we go? I just attended a conference on sustainable energy this week where everyone had already accepted the devastating long range consequences of climate change as inevitable. Nobody was talking about getting better gas mileage or "clean coal." The focus was on how to think about reconfiguring communities in the Brave New World. I'm not considering a book about this subject either; but how do you give kids hope and this kind of information at the same time?
When I wrote See How They Run: Campaign Dreams, Election Schemes, and the Race to the White Hous
A belated Happy New Year to everyone!
This week I’m teaching at Lesley University’s low residency MFA program for creative writing in Cambridge, MA. Each semester begins with an intensive residency on campus where student writers in five different genres (stage and screen, grown-up fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and kids lit) attend seminars and lectures, critique groups, readings, and meetings with their individual mentors. Then they go off and submit monthly packets to their mentor (me, for example) for feedback.
Being of the nonfiction persuasion, I realize how important research is for writing in every genre. And I’m still surprised this is news to so many students. Sometimes it’s as basic as—you’re setting your steampunk novel in Victorian England. So what are the people wearing and what technology are you going to show us? Or, your character is crossing a large desert. How is she going to survive? Hmmm.
So now I regularly teach a research seminar in which I stress that facts are not just necessary for all sorts of writing, they can actually feed the Muse. How?
Background information isn’t background, it provides a framework for your writing. If you set your novel in the South in the early 60s, you better know about Nehi. And you’d better understand not only historic details, but also attitudes. They permeate your story even if your plot has nothing to do with, say, civil rights or racial relations.
Sometimes your research takes your work in directions you hadn’t imagined. One of my students was writing a middle-grade mystery with a villain who hated crows. Her first assignment—learn everything she can about these birds. When she found out that scientists proposed poisoning of crows on Cape Cod in an effort to save the piping plovers from further depredation, she found a way of deepening her mystery by creating a new character, an impassioned ornithologist at a Wildlife Center, and a new subplot along with her.
Research provides the ring of truth that keeps your reader going. Another student, another mystery, this one a YA. Her villain killed someone with a heart condition with an overdose of digitalis. Our detective/heroine picked up this piece of the puzzle when she opened the medicine chest at the villain’s house during a party and saw the villain’s father’s medicine. Okay, how much medicine would it take to OD? Could that many pills be taken from a man with a heart condition without him noticing? I don't think so. How about the villain stealing samples that her doctor dad got for heart meds from pharmaceutical companies? But then it couldn’t be digitalis because pharma only gives samples for new drugs they can make a profit on, not generics. Time to research!
Good research teaches readers about science or art forgery or whatever your plot involves. I have probably learned as much about Elizabethan England from historic novels as I have nonfiction books on that era. If the authors were making that stuff up instead of researching, shame on them. If they are doing that while writing books for kids, even worse. A pox on their houses (which, if you do your research, you’ll learn is a bastardized Shakespeare quotation and not a reference to the current mortgage crisis)!
‘Tis the season for both gifts and good wishes. Sometimes the two are one and the same. Still good wishes don’t always sound so pretty.
1. I, like so many people, am confused and outraged by the article in the New York Times about certain parents deciding to bypass picture books as quickly as possible to move on to chapter books. (Full disclosure—I write picture books.) This reported trend reminds me of a past fad using flashcards with quasi-verbal kids in an attempt to catapult them into SAT courses about the same time they finished toilet training. Hey, I’m a parent too; I worry all the time about my kids being well and happy and getting ahead. BUT COME ON!
My first wish? I wish that parents will realize that snuggling with their young child and a picture book, looking at it together accomplishes more than the chapter books I write as well. The child hears words she could never read at her age and enjoys a sophistication of story, relationships and ideas he could never read about by himself. The pictures act as an artistic dictionary, helping that young reader equate the look of a word and the word itself with its meaning via a drawing. Why be one of the seven blind men trying to define an elephant when you can just look at a picture of one? Furthermore we live in an increasingly visual age; why deprive a child of a model of using word and image together from the start?
And finally, we not only learn by doing, we learn by liking what we do. Kids love spending undistracted, interactive time with their parents (at that age, anyway) when the parent and a book are guides into new exciting worlds. They love reading picture books. And once they’ve practiced decoding letters and become used to bunches of them together with spaces between them, they love reading chapter books.
So I wish you guys would just calm down, then sit down and read a picture book to your kids.
2. Many writers here at I.N.K. have blogged about evolution and its detractors. They have been as impassioned and eloquent as I could ever be. So I’ll just start this wish/rant by saying, “ditto,” and move on to the general principal that we have never had better access to good, accurate information.
I wish we would value it more. Enough with “truthiness,” Mr. Colbert! And enough of cherrypicking facts or factoids that simply support our previously held views. I wish people would work harder to dig for this accurate information, find it, actually THINK about it, and use the results to create their opinions. Then let’s talk about how to reduce the deficit or raise our students’ math scores.
In other words, I wish we’d all start ascribing to a wise thought attributed to everyone from Bernard Baruch to Daniel Moynihan: Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
3. I mentioned in a previous blog that I am currently an author-in-residence in a Boston school located in the middle of a public housing community. There is nothing like extended time in a school to remind you that teachers are heroes. They’ve got a hard job that is everyday and most of them try their best to do it well. I wish society appreciated them more.
As an author, I also wish they would/could use better hand-crafted books (nonfiction and otherwise) in their classrooms. I now understand better than ever how hard it is for teachers to use initiative and personalize the lessons they teach. There are seemingly endless mandated tests beyond the required state exams. Grade level curricula have units that must be covered from, say, October 11th to November 7th and others that pick up on November 8th. Where is the time for spontaneity? For the magic that comes from an inspired lesson or experiment or book?
I wish that we can somehow figure out how to slip more want-to’s in with ought-to’s. I can see from my time at the Perkins School that sparks do get kindled in kids and we just hav
News:
Books by several I.N.K. bloggers are among the winners of the first annual Eureka! Nonfiction Children’s Book Awards issued in October by the California Reading Association. Barbara Kerley’s The Extraordinary Mark Twain (According to Susy) was a Eureka! Gold Award winner, while Eureka! Silver Honor Books included Bylines: A Photobiography of Nellie Bly by Sue Macy, Down, Down, Down: A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea by Steve Jenkins, Under the Snow by Melissa Stewart, and The Boy Who Invented TV: The Story of Philo Farnsworth and Lives of the Pirates: Swashbucklers, Scoundrels (Neighbors Beware!) by past blogger Kathleen Krull.
Melissa Stewart will be presenting at the TED Women's Conference at the Paley Center for Media in Washington D.C. from a satellite location at Olin College in Needham, MA at 1:00 on December 6. http://conferences.ted.com/TEDWomen/
Penny Colman is joining Ink Think Tank and Ink Link:Authors on Call. Penny has written major award-winning books on women's history. Check out her website: http://www.pennycolman.com/
Vicki Cobb is covering the WISE - World Innovation Summit for Education - to be held in Doha, Qatar from December the 7th to the 9th 2010 for Education Update newspaper. She'll undoubtedly be blogging about it for I.N.K.
Book Recommendations:
As I write, 28 November, 2010, let me note that today is the 115th anniversary of America's first
automobile race. I note it here because author/illustrator Michael Dooling did a grand job of showing
and telling all about the event in his book, The Great Horse-less Carriage Race. And, with another
Christmas bearing down upon us all, I'll be reading & recommending Jim Murphy's grand book about
the impromptu Yuletide TRUCE, celebrated by English and German soldiers, caught up in the Great
and Terrible War, in 1914.
Books
Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream by Tanya Lee Stone
Born to Be Giants: How Baby Dinosaurs Grew to Rule the World by Lita Judge
Charles and Emma: The Darwin’s Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman
The Day-Glo Brothers by Chris Barton (illus. Tony Persiani)
An Egg is Quiet by Dianna Hutts Aston (illus. Sylvia Long)
How Many Ways Can You Catch a Fly? by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page
Lucy Long Ago: Uncovering the Mysteries of Where We Came From by Catherine Thimmesh
Marching for Freedom: Walk Together Children and Don’t You Grow Weary by Elizabeth Partridge
Meet the Howlers by April Pulley Sayre (illus. Woody Miller)
Neo Leo: The Ageless Ideas of Leonard da Vinci by Gene Baretta
Nic Bishop Spiders by Nic Bishop
Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai by Claire A. Nivola
Redwoods by Jason Chin
River of Words: the Story of William Carlos Williams by Jen Bryant (illus. by Melissa Sweet)
Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors by Joyce Sidman (illus. Beckie Prange)
Under the Snow by Melissa Stewart (illus. Constance R. Bergum)
Volcano Wakes Up! by Lisa Westberg Peters (illus. Steve Jenkins)
Vulture View by April Pulley Sayre (illus. Steve Jenkins)
What to Do About Alice? How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy! by Barbara Kerley (illus. Edwin Fotheringham)
When the Wolves Returned: Restoring Nature’s Balance in Yellowstone by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent (photos Dan and Cassie Hartman)
Where in the Wild? Camouflaged Creatures Concealed and Revealed by David Schwartz and Yael Schy (photos Dwight Kuhn)
Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator by Sarah C. Campbell and Richard P. Campbell
From Susan Goodman:
I have two new favorite nonfiction book
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a good & worthy post, Ms. Susan. That last passage was right on the money: at the very least, get a good night's sleep before casting your work [or yourself] out the window.
Thanks, Cheryl. I have tried, at least, to wait before doing myself bodily harm. With my work, not as always as patient.