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Hello again.

Highlight of the month for me: My novel, Climbing the Stairs, received a lovely review in Kirkus, a starred review in the April 15^th issue of Booklist and is a May Booksense Notable pick. All the reviews pointed to the intricate details that make the story vivid. Which got me thinking about the importance of detail in any work – whether fiction or nonfiction.

The most important thing about detail, in my opinion, is deciding what and how much to include. This is especially hard in nonfiction, because there’s no fictional storyline to act as a “guide” to tell you what to throw out and what to keep in. And, of course, if you’re anything like I am, even if you’re about to write a nonfiction picture book that’s well under 1000 words, you probably read 100 reference books on that topic. At least.

SO how do I choose what to include and what not to when I write nonfiction? First, I sort the information I’ve gathered into little heaps (or group the references in some way – putting the books in different piles, for example).

Then, I list what got me excited about the topic. A few lines on why I like that area of nonfiction enough to want to write a book about it. That sometimes helps me understand the new angle that I see or what I want the book to do that’s different from others on the same topic that are already out there.

And that also helps me to see what I want to be just “background” material, versus what I want to focus on and emphasize. Usually all this is pretty clear when I conceive the project, but by the time I finish my research, it can get pretty muddled. Or, on rare occasions, the focus shifts and I have an even better idea that cropped up when I was doing research which I decide to focus on. Whatever the case may be, it helps me to clearly state my focus and my goal and what I love best about the topic on paper. If there are many things I love about the topic, I write them all down and then pick what I love best.

That means, of course, there will be a huge chunk of material I won’t be able to use. But leaving out the right stuff is just as important as what you leave in!

Once I have the first draft together (and it’s usually 5 times longer than the length I have in my mind as a target), I use my focus/goal paragraph to pick out the details I need to keep in. And I keep asking myself, what’s the main question this book is trying to answer? Anything l that’s not directly part of the answer I start to take out.

Then, I stare hard and once again take a look with the main theme in mind. The theme is the part that needs the greatest detail. Everything else is superfluous. I prune and prune and prune.( Which, by the way, is extremely hard for me to do. I hate pruning our potted plants – my husband does that because I just don’t like to chop the poor things.)

Pruning my writing is equally hard. There are so many interesting facts I have to toss out. But one thing that helps me is to remember that a good book has a focal point, just as a good painting does. The composition of a painting helps to train the eye to the part the artist wants us to see, and a well composed book uses facts to augment a central idea, theme, or argument.

Another tool I sometimes use is my “wheel of ideas”. In the center of a blank sheet of paper, I write the word or set of words that’s most important to me – what best describes what the book is about. Then, radiating out from the center, I write adjectives or themes that relate to the book – and link them to one another, or sometimes make a chain that radiates outward. It’s usually a pretty tangled web, but it helps me pick out the thread or threads I want to use to embroider with in detail.

Here’s a quote I use when I teach nonfiction writing. “The fool collects facts; the wise man selects them.” Powell, president of AAS, 1888. That about sums it up.

Now, for my question of the month – how do you pick what details you’re going to include in a nonfiction work?

What makes a nonfiction picture book come to life?

I've been wondering about that for a while. One thing I do know (or think I know) is this: simplicity works.

Take, for instance, one of my favorite nonfiction picture books of all time.

"Birds have no teeth. No hands. No antlers, horns or spines. But birds have beaks. And beaks are enough." Thus begins Sneed B. Collard III's fascinating book "Beaks!" illustrated by Robin Brickman and published by Charlesbridge. It goes on to describe some of the fascinating uses of beaks, and shows why birds need no teeth, hands, antlers, horns or spines to do all that they need to.

Sneed has also written other books along the same lines – "teeth" and "wings". They are all "just" lists. But what wonderful lists they are.

Lists, which can so easily deteriorate into boring repetition in the hands of a less remarkable writer, are transformed into incredibly interesting work in his hands. You want to turn the pages and find out more, more, more.

Why? Because his prose is evocative, clear, and crisp.

Because each book is packed with wonderful information. They are like mini-encyclopedias in that they contain an amazing trove of knowledge; but the way the information is presented is anything but encyclopedic.

And because the illustrations are superb – scientifically accurate eye-candy.

Those are three reasons that I can think of that make the books as wonderful as they are. But surely, there are other reasons, too.

For those of you who might already be planning ahead for father's day in June, here's an idea for an special father's day gift: "Animal Dads" – another elegant book and a wonderful "list" by Sneed B. Collard III.

Sneed B. Collard is not the only successful nonfiction children's book author to use the "list" format successfully, of course. Visit any bookstore or library and look at nonfiction picture books on scientific topics, and you'll see that many of them are lists.

As an oceanographer-turned author, my "training" was in science and mathematics. In those fields, we were always taught of the importance of a good question. So I'd like to throw out a question that I hope will be good enough to spur discussion: What transforms a nonfiction picture book written using the "list" form into a special, creative, exceptional and exciting work?

A couple of people had questions after last week's post.

Do you think a 7yr old could handle this? With parental guidance, of course. Or would it be way over her head?

I'd say it totally depends on the kid. The math would be way too hard, but I can see some seven-year-olds enjoying the graphing and the detective work. My Rose is 9 1/2 and had no interest whatsoever in the project last year or the year before, even while her big sister was jumping around the room with excitement over discoveries. Today, for the first time, I noticed Rose hovering on the fringes of the discussion. Our group is mostly the ten-to-twelve-year-old crowd, Jane's peers, but one or two younger sibs have joined in.

I think if I were doing it alone with a seven-year-old, I'd pick just one or two of the ten mystery classes to work with.

I am new to Journey North and trying to set up an every other week class like you describe above. Can you tell me a little bit about the structure you envision for the "class?" I am picture mostly group discussion, sharing of data, etc. Do you intend to offer any actual lessons? How long will the every other week class last? Is an hour appropriate? My class will be composed of 5th through 8th graders.

Well, our every-other-week Shakespeare Club has become a meet-EVERY-week club for Journey North. However, most of the kids will probably skip a week or two somewhere along the line. Today we were missing two families, which was fine. They'll do this week's graphing at home, or catch up next week. I am very low-key about this kind of thing—I have to be, or else the structure & planning would intimidate me right out of doing it at all.

So here's how we're working it, more or less. We have about 11 kids participating, give or take a younger sib or two. Almost everyone shows up at our house for lunch, for most of them are coming straight from other activities and I wanted to make things as simple as possible for the moms. They bring their lunches and wolf them down so they can play for a while before we begin.

When everyone is here and has eaten (and that includes me!), I round the kids up and we crowd around the kitchen table. (And may I interject here another gigantic whoop of gratitude for the wonderful BIG new dinner table my parents gave us for Christmas? I can't imagine how we'd have pulled this off with the old one.)

Last week, the first week of the project, I began by trying to set the stage a little: we looked at the globe and I emphasized the mystery element, the ten classes of schoolchildren hidden who knows where around this globe...and we talked a little about latitude and longitude, looking at the lines on the map. We looked up our own hometown latitude and noted how relatively close we are to the equator.

Then we looked up our local sunrise and sunset times for the previous Monday (all the photoperiod data relates to the Mondays) and worked together (with Jane at the chalkboard) to calculate our photoperiod. We did it both as a subtraction problem on the board and just by looking at the clock and figuring the minutes and hours.

Then I passed out the graphs (we had printed them out in advance), one for each kid, and we graphed our hometown photoperiod. Nice simple beginning. We divvied up the ten Mystery Classes (again, one for each kid, with two kids sharing a class) and that was that for the first meeting. We are still working on our scenes from Shakespeare Club, so we practiced those for a while and then there was a snack and free play time.

Today was more Journey North, less Shakespeare. (We will keep working on our scenes for a few more weeks and then perform them for the parents.) I think today's meeting set the pattern for the whole project. Again, we worked on hometown photoperiod first, graphed that, and then everyone pooled their Mystery Class photoperiod findings and graphed all ten locations. This was a busy, noisy, jumbly activity. Another mom helped me help the kids who needed help. (You follow that?) We took one Mystery Class at a time, graphing everything together. Some of the kids had already calculated their photoperiod, but most had not, so we just did figured it out as we went.

It went pretty smoothly, though there was certainly some confusion in places over how to read the chart, which class # were we doing now, etc. I imagine it'll get a bit less jumbly as we go: these beginning weeks present a lot of hands-on activity that is new to most of the kids. Only two of our group have done Journey North before.

All this figuring and graphing took under an hour, I think. I know we were finished quite early in the afternoon, and then of course the kids stuck around for some play time. Our Titania and Oberon performed their scene for us, which was delightful (and included a cameo by Beanie as Puck).

I won't be teaching any formal lessons during the project, but I'll pull in other resources as we go...there are some good books about longitude, for example, and some fun websites that show what part of the earth is in daylight at any given hour, things like that.

Honestly, I'm very much a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person. The main thing is for the kids to have fun, and I figure the less they have to listen to me yap, the more fun for them. Today they were all giggling because I kept getting the times mixed up and announcing (authoritatively) the wrong answers, and the clever twelve-year-old girls at the other end of the table had to keep correcting me. Which is why I keep clever twelve-year-old girls around, of course!

In yesterday's links I mentioned with some jubilation that the Journey North Mystery Class is starting this week. Tami asked,

Melissa, do you know if it's too late to join the Journey North class? In a nutshell, can you explain it, and how much time it takes? Thanks!

With the caveat that I am incapable of writing the 'nutshell' version of anything (hee!), I'd love to take a stab at answering this. We (Jane and I—the younger kids have not yet been interested) have participated in the Mystery Class the past two years, and it has been delightful.

It is definitely not too late to join. Things are just getting rolling. Here's how it works: Journey North has selected ten classes of schoolchildren in cities all around the world. Their locations are kept secret until the big reveal in May. These are the ten "mystery classes," and the game is to figure out where in the world they are.

You begin by figuring out their latitudes. Each week you compare your own local photoperiod (the amount of time between sunrise and sunset) to the photoperiods of the ten mystery classes. You graph this data on a chart. In just a few weeks' time you'll begin to see patterns and get a feel for where some of the mystery classes might be.

(It's very exciting.)

Sometime in March, Journey North will release "longitude clues." By performing some calculations, you'll be able to determine the longitude of the Mystery Classes. Now you're really starting to have an idea where these classes might be!

Next come the cultural clues. Each week, as you continue to chart the photoperiod data, you'll be given a set of clues about the culture and terrain of the ten mystery locations. This is when the fun kicks into high gear. You'll be able to zero in on the specific towns in which the mystery classes are hiding.

In late April, you submit your guesses to Journey North. The following week, the answers are posted on the website and you can see how close you came. You may participate alone or as part of a group. All you have to do is register at the Journey North website (no cost, no strings). All the instructions and clues are there, along with a download of the chart.

The past two years, I led a group of online friends in the activity. We divided up the Mystery Classes so that each family was only responsible for calculating the data for one or two locations. (This is totally permissible and is in fact encouraged. Most participants are classes of schoolchildren who are usually divided into partner groups, each with its assigned mystery class.)

This year, I'm hosting a group of local friends. The kids in Jane's peer group have been coming over every other week to read Shakespeare together (such a blast), and we're going to set the Bard aside for a while to do the Mystery Class project together. We'll be meeting weekly, more or less, to keep up with the data-sharing.

If your family was working solo and found the eleven sets of calculations to be too much to keep up with (ten mystery classes plus your hometown), you could easily drop some of the mystery classes and just work on a few. The registration with Journey North is largely a formality; there is no real interaction on the website except for submitting your answers at the end (which you don't have to do if you don't want). Of course, the JN folks love feedback, and they post lots of letters and ideas from participants.

It is amazing how much learning is packed into this activity: we have learned so much about geography, latitude, longitude, other cultures, math, etc etc etc. I cannot say enough good things about the project. I've been positively giddy about getting started this year. Jane too. Last year she worked side by side with the one local friend who was part of our online group, and those two eleven-year-olds had a wonderful time, let me tell you. So did their mothers. Right, Erica?

The project is just beginning this week, so it is by no means too late to get started. You calculate your local photoperiod every Monday—that is, you use each Monday's sunrise and sunset times for the calculation. Here's a website where you can look up the sunrise and sunset times for any date. Journey North releases the week's new clues on Fridays, but the info is always up on the website for whenever you are ready to work with it. We'll be doing all our work on Wednesdays, for example.

Working with online friends was great fun, these past two years. With hometowns spread all over the world, simply comparing our local photoperiods was fascinating. And I have to say, charting the increase in daylight time week after week really helped combat the late winter blues. (The first year, I mean, when we still lived in Virginia. Here in San Diego, last winter was a marvel of sunny days. This year has been quite a bit chillier.)

Tami asked about the time commitment. As you get started, it doesn't take very long: a math problem on Monday to get your local photoperiod; and then however long it takes you to figure out and chart the photoperiods for the ten mystery classes—or however many you are responsible for. A half hour, perhaps? If you're doing all ten? Maybe an hour for a younger child? I would say an hour a week is probably realistic, for the first six or seven weeks. The longitude day will take longer, but it's fun, exciting work.

Later you'll spend lots of time on Google and elsewhere, reading up on the tidbits revealed in the cultural clues. That's fun time, detective time, and it flies by.

I told you it wouldn't fit into a nutshell! Not even a Brazil nut.

Earlier posts on Journey North Mystery Class:
this one has a picture of our graph
this one was from last year

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