I loved Tara’s post from Day 22 because I get a lot of my ideas in the opposite way. Re-read your favorites and examine what you love about them? I like doing this too, but it completely freezes my creativity. I end up thinking I could NEVER write anything THAT wonderful and I go eat a pint of chocolate ice cream instead.
I would LOVE to be inspired by good books, but (sadly) I’m not. My biggest-ever writing epiphany (next to understanding rhyme) was learning this about myself: good books are bad for me.
No, what I need to feed my creativity is bad books. Nothing gets me more fired up than a book/story/idea that I think could be improved. Books that I read which annoy me in some way that I recognize instantly, or the ones that gnaw at me weeks later, asking me, “Why…? Why…? Why…?”
Books with ill-conceived plots that obviously should have gone This Way instead of That Way (obviously to ME, anyway–ha!) Books with poor structure. Books with over-worn themes that bring nothing new to the world. Characters that should be funnier. Characters who do things I don’t understand. Settings that don’t matter, but could–or should! Why did the author set it there when here would have been so much better?
Wasted opportunity–that’s what basically gets my creative juices flowing. It plays into re-tellings and re-interpretations and parodies very nicely (and I write a lot of those), but you can also use the ideas you come up with in original stories.
When I grew tired of singing Hush, Little Baby to my twins several times every night, wondering at the wisdom of giving breakable (a mirror), small (a diamond ring) or potentially stampeding (a bull and cart) items to a baby who’s screaming, wondering at the lack of funny lullabyes to entertain the parent AND send the child off to Sleepyland with a laugh in their heart, those cogs in my brain just started grinding away.
Most versions I could find at the time were built around a human baby (although several others have proliferated in the last five years), but what if it was a baby… dragon? What would his mother bring him that both made more sense AND was funny? When I thought of a princess to eat, I laughed and started writing.
Most versions of the song Over In The Meadow center on animal communities. And there are so many different versions, every ecosystem on earth! Geesh- nothing new there. But wait. What about all the people at a busy place… like a castle! I did some research, and Bingo! Book #2.
I wrote a twin manuscript because I was tired of picture books that only showed the twice-as-nice, double-the-love side of twins. If you have twins, you KNOW this is only half of the story. Where are the twins who love each other but ALSO shove each other because they’re tired of 24/7 sharing? Mine DO that! So I wrote it.
By: Erin,
on 2/13/2008
Blog: Miss Erin (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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"It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass."
~Sam, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Bonni – I have the same reaction as you – if it’s a well-written, enjoyable book it conjures up self-doubt instead of inspiration. But, a badly written book really motivates me! Thanks so much for this post.
Another awesome post. Amazing what cool variety you got this month!
So true! The bad the better. Another great post.
Oh yes, bad books give me all sorts of ideas plus they have the added bonus of making me think I can actually be a writer!
Brilliant, yes. And honest. Love it.
Oh, yes! I am high-fiving, Boni for this post! I am the same way. Don’t show me something good. I’ll just feel badly for not thinking of it myself. But, show me something bad and a fire is lit under my butt!
Thanks for such a great post!
Thank YOU everyone! I’m so glad to know my brain isn’t wired wrong, just differently, and that there are others who have similar wiring
And thank you Tara, for giving me the opportunity to contribute to your *fantastic* PiBoIdMo project. I know it was way more work than you thought it would be, but just think about how you’ve inspired so many people! Very, very cool.
As someone who has to read the same picture books about eight million times to my kids before they have to be returned to the library (the books, not the kids), what really tweaks me out are books where it’s clear that nobody ever bothered to read the text out loud to a kid first.
I notice this particularly with dialogue, but elsewhere too. Too many kids books are just chock-full of sentences that aren’t as clear and crisp as they should be for little ones who are still learning the nuances of English. I’m often surprised by how much in-line editing and clarification I have to do so the sentence reads aloud the way it was intended to read on the page.
I think that when these authors, or their editors, or their agents read the books to themselves, with the perspective of literacy and decades of experience, they forget that they are being supplied with an enormous amount of additional context by the cues of punctuation, line breaking and paragraph breaking.
Kids who are listening to the story don’t have that. So I find myself clarifying a lot while reading. I learn to read aloud a slightly different book than the one on the page.
It’s particularly pernicious in dialogue, because dialogue involves conversation, and conversation involves multiple characters, so there’s the issue of who’s saying what. The parent gets to see the quote marks, so it’s easy to track when the speaker changes. Not so for the kid. And in these books, there are always passages where one character’s dialogue runs up against the next character’s, so that for the listener it’s not at all clear that there’s a speaker change right there. I end up adding or moving the “he said”s and “she said”s around to make things clear.
If you’re writing a picture book, do everybody a favor. Read it out loud twenty or thirty times to an actual kid, and try to put yourself in the kid’s mindset. Will he/she understand the stream of words, when the context cues of punctuation and whitespace are removed? If not, you know what to do. I hope.
Jason, thanks for your comments. I’m pretty sure every author reads their work aloud before it is published, but a lot happens in the editing stage that is sometimes beyond an author’s control. I’m not sure what books you’re reading, but what I enjoy doing is changing voices for the different characters. My kids easily understand someone else is speaking when I alter my tone and inflection.
Fantastic blog! I feel exactly the same way! I had to post this on the Cradle Fables facebook page … too good not to share.
As an aspiring writer good books definitely freak me out and bad books make me think “I can so do this!”
Funnily enough, as a new publisher it’s the amount of ‘bad books’ for toddlers that inspired me to start Cradle Fables in the first place. I’ve had some great manuscripts come through and I KNOW there has to be more out there!