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    Books where the main characters are animals are among my favorite.  Charlotte's Web is forever and always the one book I would take to a desert island.  I love the work of picture book authors Kevin Henkes, Carolyn Crimi and Lisa Wheeler, who often place their stories in the animal world.  (If there is a Hall of Fame for picture book authors, those three should definitely be included.)

     I love what I call "talking critter" books, in which the animals are anthropomorphic.  I just can't write them.

    To me, anthropomorphic books are a form of fantasy.  Animals don't talk or go to kindergarden or wear sneakers. Fantasy.  I don't write fantasy. I can't write fantasy.  My creative mind just doesn't work that way. My stories are mostly rooted in the real world of children. I'm a literal sort of person.

    I have published two "talking critter" books.
Surprise Soup was written about little boys. Something about that manuscript inspired the art department and the illustrator to make the little boys into little bears. Changing the species of the character made it a much funnier book...but I can't take any credit for writing an anthropomorphic book.  The illustrator did it for me. (Thank G. Brian Karas!)
     The other book, Camp K-9, was inspired by my dog, Nilla. She was a cocker-spitz mix, with floppy ears, a thick white coat, and a joyful personality.  In fact, Nilla was far more popular with the neighbors than the Downing family.  She was actually invited to parties that we weren't! Nilla was so human-like, it wasn't hard for me to imagine her as a teen-age girl.  My husband and I would invent adventures for her. Nilla as a Laker Girl.  Running up a phone bill.  Hanging out at the mall with her (also imaginary) BFF, Stacy.

     When we traveled, we boarded our "child" at a kennel called Camp K-9, which had a cute logo of a dog toting a sleeping bag and a tennis racquet. That got my imagination going.  What would dogs do at camp? I used my own experiences as a camper and a counselor to put together a day as a "doggy camper." I used a lot of dog puns and references to add humor.  The other "campers" were based on the dogs in my neighborhood.  That was pretty easy.

    After that, I had to find some tension, a problem, that my girl dog might experience with her bunkmates. That was the hard part. I fiddled and fiddled with the story for four or five years. Finally, after many many critiques by my friends and writing group, I felt Camp K-9 was as good as it was going to get. (Fortunately, my publisher liked it.)

     Will I write another "talking critter" book?  I don't know.  I had been inventing "Nilla adventures" in my head for ten years before I tried to write one down, and it was the most difficult thing I've ever written.  Cute one-liners and puns are one thing; shaping them into a coherent story, with a beginning, middle and end. Who knows?  Right now I am "inventing adventures" for my extremely ill-behaved cat, Rosie.  (She's giving me the evil eye right now.) Maybe...

     Don't forget to enter our latest book giveaway for Stephanie Lyons' new book, Dating Down.  The deadline is midnight, May 15 2015, so don't miss out.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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     I might have mentioned this before, but in a former life, I was a drama major. Perhaps this is why I think of picture books as "performance pieces." After all, picture books are meant to be read aloud.
Jill started off this topic with her discussion of rhythm and rhyming picture books. Jill is a far braver soul than I. I have published six picture books (with another on the way) and none of them rhyme. My brain doesn't work that way.

    This is not to say that my stories don't have rhythm. They do. Jill covered this pretty well in her last post so I won't belabor the point here. I'll just say that if you aren't sure if your story has that "swing," read it out loud.  Better still, have a non-judgemental friend read it to you. If you find yourself stumbling over your own words, or if your friend's voice hits a word that sounds like an out-of-tune piano key, go back to Jill's post. 

     So if I don't rhyme, how do I (hopefully) hold my listener's interest?

     Repetition, for one thing.  There's nothing like a little group participation, whether you are reading to one child or seventy. If you want a good example of that, check out my First Grade Stinks. The title is also the main character's catch phrase whenever she is frustrated by yet another unfamiliar aspect of a new grade and teacher.  After awhile, the listener will chime in as well. (Loudly.)

    I love to play around with words. I'm a big believer in alliteration. In Camp K-9, Roxie goes to camp with a Pooch Pouch and makes friends with Pearl the Pug. A word of caution. Be spare with the mirroring consonants. When my daughter was small, there was one particular picture book (no titles mentioned here) that her father and I tried to hide at storytime.  Why?  Seemingly every word in this book began with the letter "p." It was not a short book either.  Two pages into it and my husband and I were sputtering and stuttering like Porky and Petunia Pig. Sometimes, we got so flusterated that certain expletives (not written by the author) slipped into the narrative. Not good.  Not good at all.

     My favorite writing technique (in novels as well as picture books), is the use of sounds.  (There is a polysyllabic word for this that I can't spell, and I am using a computer that doesn't have autocorrect.)  The stories I remember from my own childhood were actually songs, like "Old MacDonald Had. a Farm" and "The Wheels on the Bus."  When I began writing my own stories, without really thinking about it, a "moo moo" here and a "cluck cluck" there showed up on my pages.. Sounds are fun to write, fun to read and gives the listener another opportunity to "read along." (The only one who doesn't enjoy my "sound technique" is the copy editor who sends me notes questioning the correct spelling of "va-va-varoom.")

    If you want to see me go crazy with the sound effects, check out Surprise Soup.  In fact, when I was writing it, I began by listing all the kitchen sounds I could thing of.  Here is a partial list: chippity-chop (a knife), ka-rickety-ritch (a manual can opener), splishety-sploosh, slippety-slop,
shakety-shake (ingredients going into the soup pot.) Once I had a list of thirty-something sounds, the story wrote itself. 

    A successful picture book is one that a child wants to hear over and over (and that the reader can read over and over without wanting to rip out his/her hair.) I think playful language is the grace note that adds zip and zing to "Jill's swing," and a little fun for the adult reader as well.

   Don't forget that the deadline for our latest book giveaway Forget Me Not by Carolee Dean is this Thursday, Oct. 11.  Good luck!
 

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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The International Reading Association (IRA) has declared Sept. 5-9, 2011 to be "Revision Week." Visit the IRA's Engage: Teacher to Teacher Blog this week to read/hear comments about revision from several well-known children's authors, including Cynthia Lord and Kate Messner.

Classroom teachers often tell me that one of their greatest challenges is helping students understand that a first draft is only the first step in the writing process. And many adult writers also dread the "R" word: Revision. Yet, as Kate Messner says today on the Engage: Teacher to Teacher Blog: “Revision is where writing really happens.”
(In the audio interview, Messner also talks about making time to write while working full-time and raising a family.)

One of the best ways I've found to help writers of all ages appreciate the benefit (and necessity) of revision is a bit of "show and tell." I "show" the drafts of my novel Rosa, Sola with all the post-it notes from my editor and I "tell" about how that feedback helped me polish that story. You can see some photos of one of my drafts and read a bit about that process in this post from last year.

For both young students and adult writers, it's often difficult to look at our own work objectively. Below is a revised version of the Writing Workout I shared last year. (Yes, even blog posts and writing exercises get better with revision!) The Workout is intended as a way to help trick ourselves into reading our work as though it were written by someone else.     

Speaking of revision, the next session of my Craft & Critique Workshop, which is held in Oak Brook, IL, begins on Tuesday, Sept. 27. That class is ALL about revision. For more information, see my website. If you don't live in the Chicago area and are looking for some feedback on your writing, check out the Blogosphere Buzz below for help finding a critique partner.

In addition to Revision Week, this is the third annual Random Acts of Publicity week, a chance to celebrate and publicize the work of our fellow authors. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that THREE of the TeachingAuthors have new books out this year. If you're new to our blog, please read these posts to learn all about them: JoAnn Early Macken's Baby Says "Moo!", Mary Ann Rodman's Camp K-9, and Esther Hershenhorn's Little Illinois.
 
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The winner of our latest giveaway is Megan Bickel, who blogs at The Write-at-Home Mom. Congratulations, Megan!

Megan will be receiving an autographed copy of Mary Ann's terrific new picture book, Camp K-9.
Megan posted that she plans to share the book with her three boys. I'm sure they'll all enjoy it.

A big THANK YOU to all who participated in the contest. Don't forget, there's still time to enter our Second Annual Blogiversary Critique Giveaway. You could win won of two manuscript critiques. See this post for all the details.

And, as always, happy writing!
Carmela

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     Roxie and her pals sat in my "possibilities" file while I wrote and sold two more picture books, and researched my next novel. I kept thinking of one of my first editors who told me "There's a story in there somewhere." She was referring to Yankee Girl, which, at that point, I had been writing for over three years. I knew there was a story in Camp K-9. . . somewhere.
    I would like to say that I had one big "Aha!" moment and found that story.
    I didn't. Instead, I had a lot of little "Oh" moments.
    One "oh"came when I realized that most of my camping experience had been as a counselor. I was fourteen when I had my only experience as a camper.  I thought of Roxie as an eight-year-old in "people
years." Most of my personal camp memories would have to go.
    Great.  My manuscript was vanishing, not growing.
    Another "oh" moment came while stuck in Atlanta traffic, which happens at least once a day.  I was
planning a writing exercise for one of young writers' day camps. I decided I would have them write about their most precious possession.  I needed to give them an example of something or someone you are deeply attached to. I didn't want a lot of essays on X-Boxes or their latest birthday present.  What had been my most precious possession?
    From nowhere (because I wasn't thinking all that hard) I thought "my quilt." When I was born, my Grandmother Rodman made me a quilt from corduroy remnants. It was the size of a twin bed coverlet. I wasn't as bad as Linus and his blankie, but I dragged "the Quilt"everywhere.  I called it "Meemaw's Quilt" after it's creator. After I started school, the Quilt left the house only for road trips and sleepovers.  Since everyone took bedrolls to sleepovers (in the days before pink My Little Pony sleeping bags) no one ever noticed the quilt.
      I had taken it to that 8th grade camp, rubbing on particular corner, worn velvet soft, comforting myself to sleep.
     I had just enough time to scribble "M'maws quilt" on a Wal-Mart receipt before the traffic on Georgia 400 once again took off like the Indie 500.
     I was actively thinking about Roxie as I was taking the MARTA train to the airport one day. Specifically, the conflict between Roxie and Lacy. Lacy was a bigger dog. Would that be enough to make her so disagreeable?  Would it be enough for Roxie to fear her?
    The answer; no. What if Roxie had a secret she didn't want anyone to know, especially not Lacy?
    I heard the voice of one of the many superstar writers I had listened to over the years.  I don't remember who it was, but the voice said "It isn't enough to get your character into a jam.  You have to put them in as much peril as you can without killing them. And remember, they have to figure it out for themselves. No fairy godmothers, no magic genii's coming to the rescue."
    Now the voice didn't say that the Situation (not the one from Jersey Shore) must be life-or-death. The character didn't have to be tied to the train tracks with a locomotive roaring in her direction. "You find  the worst thing to happen to your character. It might not be life-or-death for you, the reader, but you must understand how perilous this is for him/her."
    Not an "aha" moment...just another question I couldn't answer. I scrawled "life or death for Roxie" on a Walgreens receipt before I was shoved out by the crowd at the Airport Station.
    That night I was in an unfamiliar city, trying to sleep in an unfamiliar bed. I always fret over these presentations, no matter how many times I have done them before. A good bed helps. I recall with fondness a room in Miami with one of those cloud-like coverlets and a pillow t

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      When I get a writing idea, I usually live with it awhile before I start working.  ("Awhile" could be two weeks or two years.)  I never sit down right then and plough into it.
      Except sometimes. Especially if it has been awhile between good ideas. This was one of those times.  I had a character I already knew very well (Nilla) and more than enough scenes for a 32 page book. I banged away at the computer far into the night. What's more I finished it! In one sitting!  I went to bed, wondering which of my editors I would "grace" with my genius.
     I wait a couple of days before re-reading a picture book manuscript. You know, long enough to catch a bug here and there. I figured Camp K-9 needed so little "de-bugging," I would mail it that day.
    Hmm. This manuscript seemed unusually long for something that was supposed to be under 800 words. (I know editors like them shorter than that, but I have never which managed less than 775.)  I read on and on, then hit the word count command.
     2500 words. Gulp.
     I wasted three pages (usually the length of the entire manuscript) with a story "frame":  Nilla belonged to a little girl and this would be the first time they had ever been apart, and there was a wizard who turned the kennel into Camp K-9 every night and blah, blah, blah. What was I thinking?  I never use story frames, not even in novels.
    Things went from bad to worse when I realized that I had written a YA picture book for seven-year-olds.  For thirty seconds, I considered turning it into a graphic novel...until I remembered that I
can't draw.  And what editor would buy a graphic novel about a Valley Girl dog and her friends?  Who would read it?
   My hand hovered over the delete key.  I didn't want to give up on Nilla. I liked the title Camp K-9.  I would simply write about Nilla as a puppy.
    The trick to writing a picture book (if you are not your own illustrator) is to include a lot of action scenes to give the artist something to work with.  After three hours I had only two Nilla puppy memories.  She would fall asleep across your shoes, thus trapping you in place until she woke up. And whenever you came home, she would be so excited she would pee at your feet (not on them, thank goodness.) Not great visuals. And worse, no story.
    Sigh. I deleted Camp K-9, except for the title.  There would be a book called Camp K-9 some day.  Just not this day.
     Months went by with Camp K-9 in my mental "creative crockpot."  I had a critique group meeting coming up, and no manuscript to contribute. I re-opened the empty Camp K-9 file.
    Maybe the real Nilla was getting in the way of a fictional one.  I changed her name to Roxie, the name of the boxer who lived down the street. I suddenly realized that almost everyone I knew had a dog.
A dog with a human name;  apparently people don't name dogs Spot and Skippy any more. I quickly had a roster of dog campers with names like Bea and Hannah. I didn't specify breeds for any of the dogs, save two;  Lacy, who was a standard poodle who lived across the street. Since I planned for her to be "the mean girl," I thought the combination of a breed known for being "a chick dog" along with her sweet name, would be hilarious. The other "real dog" was Pearl the Pug, who incidentally belongs to Emmy of A Tree for Emmy fame.
     Once, I had those dog names, I could see them, doing all sorts of things that canine campers would do;  hiking, swimming, making paw-print crafts. Yeah, I gave my future illustrator a lot to work with.
I counted the days unt

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