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Quite often when adults hear that I write for children their first question is,
“Are you going to write an adult novel?”
This is always said very nicely, even eagerly, or in a slightly encouraging tone – as though children’s books are training wheels for the real thing.

I thought it was just something about me – but on NPR a few days ago Katherine Paterson said that people often asked her that, too. Why do people do this? Obviously, they think it's easier to write for children -- but do they realize how insulting the question is? That it implies that people only write for kids because they aren’t good enough (yet is often implied, too -- that's where the encouraging tone comes in) to write for grown-ups?

It’s not easy to write ANYTHING good – but I don’t think the age group that you’re writing for has anything to do with a book’s difficulty. It just takes a different kind of talent, or set of interests – and if anyone doubts this, think of how few people there are who have written great children’s books AND great adult novels. I really can’t think of anyone!

The closest is probably C.S. Lewis – I at least really like That Hideous Strength and Out of the Silent Planet; but are these books as good as the Narnia books? Louisa May Alcott and E.Nesbit both wrote trashy books for grown-ups, I’ve never been able to even finish any of them, and I’ve read their kids books over and over and over.

If you think this just proves the point that kids books are easier: Thurber's adult stories make me laugh (and still are read in literature classes), but I don't think anyone would still read the book about the Princess who wanted the moon(Many Moons ) if it weren't for the great illustrations. And Dickens and Thackeray would be out of print today if their children's books were their only books.

Robert Louis Stevenson did write for adults, and actually, some of his adult stories are pretty amazing (if you like well-written, well-plotted adventure stories) – but are they as good as the best poems in A Child’s Garden of Verses? I don’t think so. If you count YA, then I can think of one person: F.Scott Fitzgerald. His Basil and Josephine stories still make me laugh out loud. I especially love the ones about the ten-year old, totally obnoxious Basil (based on Fitzgerald himself), with his best friend who – no matter how crazy and impossible Basil’s ideas were -- responded to each one with an immediate:
“Let’s do it!”

But those aren’t BOOKS. Maybe there are people who write brilliantly for both age groups that I just haven’t read. If you can think of any, please put them in the comments! And another question: what do YOU say when adults ask if you’re going to write for adults? I usually just mumble no. No child has ever asked that question, by the way: they just say “Have you written any other books?” and

Last weekend some of the Blue Rose Girls and our friend Alissa visited Anna in her beautiful quiet cozy country cottage. As usual, conversation was the main activity -- Tilda and Juniper (Alissa's daughter) stayed close to us, eagerly joining in with smiles and babble. Neither can talk yet, but they seemed to enjoy being part of the group.

We talked about our writing (so inspiring! and so tempting to just stay in front of the fire doing that the whole time) but one afternoon we did manage to leave the house to attend the Ashfield Fall Festival, where local children make, set up, and run the games. When we arrived, Alissa's boys had already won a small bag of marbles doing things like climbing rope ladders and ringing the bell at the top. They and the other children did this with just as much excitement as the children Grace described grabbing for the brass ring at the Tuileries in Paris or the ones I described dancing at the ceilidh in the Hebrides.

The one that seemed to delight them the most was the corn bath -- tubs filled with raw corn kernels. They rolled and dug and played and only got out when the person running it said -- several times "Come on, guys, time to go -- we have to clean up." Maybe the real proof of how much fun they had was that they helped her do it.



Since I got back I have been comparing this country pretty unfavorably to Scotland (though in fairness to me, at these kinds of festivals where I live, people mostly just buy things, eat, and sit listening to loud music). So it was really great to be reminded that there are communities right here in this country where people take just as active a part in their own amusement --and with just as much enthusiasm and energy. Maybe there are more of these kinds of communities here, and children are taking more delight in simple pleasures, than the media would have us think.

After all, as Grace pointed out, big companies aren't making money with things like corn baths -- maybe THAT'S why we don't see them in the media. But that's no reason not to put them in our books, even if some people do find such things old-fashioned. For others (maybe more than we, and some publishers, realize?), it's reality....and as much fun to read about, too:maybe more fun to read about than, say, Angry Birds. It depends how it's done, of course, like everything else in writing!

When I was a child and a teenager, I would read almost anything: just gulp it down and the fatter, the better (picture books were thin books, chapter books were fat books to us). Now I’m much pickier – but last week I had the flu for a few days and I read the way I read as a kid when I couldn’t go outside: I just put a big stack of fat books next to me and when I finished one, started the next. One of the books I read was Thimble Summer by Elizabeth Enright (Newbery winner, 1938). It opened to this:


--and my first thought was: the author must be the illustrator (she was). I kind of like the drawings in this book – they’re just so bizarre. And I also always liked Arthur Ransome’s drawings for Swallows and Amazons, which was published in the 1930s, too. They’re charming and suit the books.

I’m guessing that these authors weren’t ever professional illustrators (girls, what do you think?). And do you think authors this amateurish could get away with illustrating their own chapter books today? I hope it’s possible, even if the illustrations aren’t up to Grace’s charming drawings in the equally charming Year of the Dog, it’s just FUN to find colorful illustrations like these scattered throughout a book, especially when the author is the illustrator:

The girl on the left is described as fat -- I’ve never seen the word “fat” mentioned so often in a book as it was in Thimble Summer. People were also described as “fleshy,” as when someone says, “They are one fleshy family.” I didn’t know people were that preoccupied with weight in the 1930s – or was it just this author? Pigs were mentioned a lot, too – one is described as “unusually greedy and selfish, even for a pig.” This isn’t a criticism, I enjoyed the book; I just found this sort of thing unusual:

“Garnet watched Mrs. Hauser [the mother in the “fleshy family”] get into the car. Did she imagine it, or did she really see the Ford sink down a little on its springs, as if it sighed under a great weight.”

Last week, I sent in a ms. for a children’s book – my name won’t be on it, and I’m not getting royalties, and the publisher probably wouldn’t want me to name it here anyway. So I won’t. It’s the second book I’ve ghostwritten for this artist and publisher (and of course, but I better say it anyway, the artist is not one of the BRGs! They write their own books!).

My usual method is to procrastinate and agonize about that and (once I finally settle down) write most passages over and over – but for some reason I didn’t do that with this project. I just calmly did the research at odd moments here and there (well, maybe it wasn’t quite THAT effortless, but that’s how it seems now)….and when I was ready to write, I did. (I put that in bold because I think it’s important.) I didn’t fiddle or fuss, when I knew something I wanted to say, I poured it into my laptop or Neo. Once, I think. Maybe I wrote some parts a few times, and I did a clean up at the end, but the point is that I didn’t agonize over any of it. I thought about what was interesting in the research and then wrote it down when I was in the mood to do so. I alo told the artist the main idea I had for the fictional part of the story and she loved it – and it was fun to talk about it with her, too.

When I was done with the ms., the artist and I went over it together (I thought if we did it together it would be easier and go faster. It did!), and amicably crossed things out– my goal had been to get rid of half. But:
“I LIKE the page about Lincoln!” she said. I said we could at least take out the fact that the statue of him in the Capitol is missing the left ear (that was its state when Lincoln died and the sculptor decided to leave it unfinished.) “I think that’s really interesting!” she said, sketching it. There were a few conversations like that, but we did take out a third of it.

I went home, rewrote a few things the next day, and the day after that, rewrote a little more and sent it off. I liked it; but had a (slight) sense of unease. It couldn’t be THAT easy, maybe it was all garbage, was I deluding myself? (etc.) But about a week later I got an email from the editor saying she loved it and thought kids would be “really excited” about it.

I’m going to remember this incident. Maybe it can always be this easy – and even if it can’t, agonizing doesn’t help! So, I have some new rules (as if I need more rules!). But these may really HELP me and I believe in the almost-magical power of writing things down or saying them out loud. This blog is both. So – although these may be incredibly obvious to others, here’s what I’ve learned.
1. Don’t wait to write until I have “enough time,” or a long stretch of uninterrupted time. That will never happen. (Until I really get into it and then no one CAN interrupt me, because I won’t hear or notice them.)
2. DO wait until I know what I want to say and am sure it’s interesting to me.
3. Don’t rewrite as I go along – just keep going and clean it up at the end.
4. Don’t worry about what other people will think of it: just please my

Black Beauty grows old (and Ginger dies!); Mattie never is nice to Wanda Petronski, and joins the other girls in egging her on about her “hundred dresses”; Lyra causes her best friend’s death; Anne Frank goes off to a concentration camp …. but all these books still left me with a feeling of hope -- about people and possibilities. Great books do this not with platitudes or PC messages or Walt Disney happy endings, but because of the way their (very real and believable) heroes and heroines react:

“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart,”

“Yes, she must have [really liked us],” said Mattie, and she blinked away the tears that came every time she thought of Wanda standing alone in the sunny spot in that sunny spot in the schoolyard, looking stolidly over at the group of laughing girls, after she had said, ‘Sure, a hundred of them – all lined up…”

“The first ghost to leave the world of the dead was Roger. He took a step forward, and turned to look back at Lyra, and laughed in surprise as he found himself turning into the night, the starlight, the air, and then he was gone, leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness that Will was reminded of the bubbles in a glass of champagne.”

“Hope is the thing with feathers –
that perches in the soul.” – Emily Dickinson

And I sure hope my daughter's sixth-grade English teacher is reading this. A limerick, unlike some other forms of verse, does not have a restricted syllable count. It's got a stressed beat pattern.

Limericks are five-line poems, almost always humorous, and quite frequently bawdy. Edward Lear is sometimes credited with inventing them, but they existed a good 100 years before his birth in published form.

They are a song-based poem, with common wisdom being that they came from a tavern song (hence the humor and bawdiness references). If you're a musical type (and I'm not just talking to here), you will understand when I tell you that limericks are recited in 6/8 time, and begin on a pickup to the first "measure."

I will write it out for you as best I can -- ta is a pickup (the 6th beat of a 6-beat measure). Capitalized Da is a stressed syllable, and lowercase da is an unstressed syllable of the poem's text. The numbers in parenthesis are actually the count of the rest, when you've paused at the end of the line.

ta Da da da Da da da Da (2-3-4-5-)
ta Da da da Da da da Da (2-3-4-5-)
ta Da da da Da (2-)
ta Da da da Da (2-)
ta Da da da Da da da Da

They often begin "There once was . . . ", but not always. They are almost always in rhyme, as follows: AABBA (all three long lines rhyme, and the two short lines rhyme with one another).

Sometimes, the last stressed beat has syllables after it -- they cut into the "rest" time, but the beat goes on just the same.

Examples:

A wonderful bird is the Pelican,
His bill can hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week;
But I'm damned if I see how the helican.
&emsp &emsp by Dixon Lanier Merritt

or, for a mildly bawdy one:

There was a young lady from Lynn,
Who thought that to love was a sin;
But when she was tight,
She thought it quite right,
So everyone filled her with gin.

Again, there's no ACTUAL syllabic requirement, although truly, 10 is the most you can fit in a long line, and seven is the most for the short lines. (Minimums are pretty much 8 and 5.)

Then why, I ask you, did my daughter's teacher send home a sheet telling them they had to count syllables in order to write limericks, with no regard for the stressed meter of the poem? *Heavy sigh*

And I offered to come in and do a poetry presentation if she wanted, but they're pressed for time and jamming poetry into 5 days at the end of the school year. Not that that's kept her from requiring the kids to write an entire book of poetry using her incorrect patterns. (You should see what she said a cinquain was -- it was also all wrong, because she told them it was a certain number of words per line, when the key to a cinquain is syllables Blurgh.)