Why I Write for Kids

Okay, so the kittehs are all good fun, but it's time I posted about writing again. I enjoy writing for the adult audience, it's freeing to cuss with abandon and let my characters explore their sexuality. But my heart belongs to kids.

Why?

I could pretend that it's because I'm a soccer mom. I spend so much time with children, that it's only natural that I write for them. Between soccer, cub scouts and Sunday school, I spend the majority of my time around those under the age of 18 and I like it that way.

Why?

I like kids. I care about the things kids care about. Kids have an innate sense of justice. They like to know that they will be okay. They like to feel that no matter how grim things seem, there is hope. The good guys will win. Order will be restored. The guilty will be punished. I'm down for that.

Why?

Kids are honest. By the time we reach our upper teens, we become masters at putting on different faces depending on what the world expects us to be. We choose our own labels and slap them on. But kids will tell it like it is.

Why?

Kids are uninhibited. Roll in the mud? Where cowboy boots with shorts? Pretend you're a dog and bark all your words for a day? Why not? I'm down for that too. Which I guess brings me to the real reason I write for kids.

Why?

Cause I never grew up myself. I'm always up for a good game of pretend. I love silliness and frivolity and candy. I have trouble behaving like a grown up when I'm surrounded by pompous folks who take themselves waaaaaaaaaay too seriously. Honestly, when I'm watching a political debate, I can't stop thinking it would be hilarious if someone made farty noises right in the middle of a speech. I'd love that.

I read children's literature because I like it. I write it, because I read it.

I hope I never grow up. I've managed it thus far.

Rawr--I iz fierce!

Okay, I've been tagged with a new meme called Roar for Powerful Words by Melanie. She gets a nifty award for taggin me and since I loves me some awards, here's what I gotta do.

1. link back to original tagger (done!)

2. list three things that I think are necessary for good and powerful writing. (done!)

3. tag five more people via comment. (to be done.)

Oh goody. Another list.

1. Curiosity: Do I need to explain this? To me, this is truly the key to what makes me a writer. Curiosity is what drives me forward. People always ask creative sorts "where do you get you ideas" and the answer for me is simple. I find them everywhere. Curiosity is the reason I have a bookcase filled with esoteric subjects. You can find everything from ancient Japanese myths to books on tropical fish.

Take for example a children's space fantasy I've been playing with. I don't really need to know everything about our solar system in order to write Planet Hoppers, but the book has sparked my interest and find myself reading endlessly about gaseous giants and orbits and suns and moons. All this reading has given me new ideas and enriched the story.

2. Perseverance: I know of some writers who are taken on by the first or second agent they query and sell their book to the first editor who reads the manuscript. But we all know that this is a rarity. Publication isn't a sprint but a marathon. You can cross the finish line by outlasting your competition. If you give up during the process of learning your craft, you'll never find out how far you can take it. It's easy to say that you shouldn't get disheartened by all the rejection that goes with being a writer, but in reality, this is a bitter pill. You must have some sort of love for writing or it simply isn't worth it.

3. Insight: If I don't have something to say, then why even bother? Writing should illuminate something. You need a new way to tell a story or a fresh perspective or an original character that reveals something about the human condition. We always hear "show don't tell", but writing really is about showing something.

Okay, now I need to tag some folks and I will. I will. I think I'm going to tag Tori, Kristine, Carrie, AJ, and Lori. Play if you want to or ignore if you want to. Now I need to go polish something for the kittehs. I've been working too much to have new kitteh posts and I need to rebuild my Friday kitteh writings. Believe it or not, they take some time and thought to draft.

Writer's Block and Other Bad Things

We all have our favorite music to write to and mine would have to be Sergei Rachmaninoff. His works have a soaring beauty, underscored with a quiet pain. His pieces are complex, moody and strongly rhythmic, all things I respond to. He suffered from depression and periods of when he was simply non-productive. He started with an early splash, winning a gold medal for composing as a child.

It was his first symphony that nearly did him in. The first performance of Symphony No. 1 was a disaster. The conductor butchered the piece so badly that Rachmaninoff's wife later insisted he was drunk. It was so bad, that Rachmaninoff went and hid in another room. Critics savaged him and made a mockery of his promising career. The piece was never performed again in his lifetime. And he stopped writing music. For three years.

Imagine that. One of the greatest composers of his generation--indeed of all time-- a veritable musical genius. And he just stopped. He plunged into a dark despair. A psychologist finally helped him unlock the chains that bound him and the result was one of his best known and loved compositions, Piano Concerto No. 2.

During this time of blockage, he received some great advice (although little sympathy) from Leo Tolstoy who reportedly told him something to the effect that he should "work every day, young man. Just as I do. It's the only way. Do this or you'll never amount to anything." Not terribly helpful for someone with depression, but good advice for anyone whose craft requires you to work alone.

On another note, I had a parent/teacher conference today at the school. My son is flunking the writing portion of English. His paragraphs are short and thin. Here he should be able to write 250 words on a topic, he only manages 50. Or 30. Or 25. I asked him about this, but he got flustered and said he just couldn't think of anything to say. What if it was wrong? What if he sounded stupid? What if he was just repeating himself? So instead of say something wrong, he said nothing. If you don't try to write, you can't suck at it. I expect that sort of logic from a nine year old, but I'm surprised how often I see that from wannabe writers. They talk a lot about writing and they write a lot about writing and they blog about it and post about it in message boards. Someday they will write that novel. Someday they will finish that book they started three years ago.

Tolstoy (and Uncle Jim and a host of others) have the answer to this paralyzing self doubt. The only way to be a writer is to write. You'll never know that you write crap if you don't actually write it. So what happens to the writer, one who actually does it for years and then just stops? I go through an annual writing stoppage around December and January of each year. For me, it's two parts hectic schedule and one part seasonal depression. I get caught up in the craziness of meat space and family life until I feel myself sliding towards the darkness. So I try to keep the darkness at bay by filling it up with more activities and responsibilities and lots and lots of food. Gradually, I'm jolted out of this bad place and emerge blinking into the light a good ten pounds heavier.
I'm unstuck once again and productive this week. I don't have the answer to getting out of writer's block. I just do it. The good news is that I seem to do this even faster each year. Last year was bad. It took me until March. But here we are in 2008 and I'm writing again in January.
If you came here expecting kittehs, have no fear. They will return. Writing my Friday kittehs was something I could do, even when blocked. This year, I wasn't completely blocked. I thought I was, but the truth is that I edited, beta read for people, wrote the occasional blog post and kittehed great works of fiction. Hey, I just wrote 704 words about not being able to write. And I call that progress.

Great Expectations

I had the best of intentions this week. I would edit, write a couple of blogs for this week, clean my house, yadda yadda. None of this has come to pass. Instead of a fresh burst of New Year energy, I seem to have found inertia. I remember this happening last year. I finally seem to have crawled into motion and begun editing again.

Okay, I've been asked what the verdict was for my NaNo outline. Truthfully, I loved it. I know I'm supposed to find it confining, but I can't help it. I love a good outline.

And I finished the novel. 93K and some change which is perfect for me. Not so long that I can't add to it in rewrites or so short that I'm afraid to whack scenes that just don't do it for me.
I've been editing heavily and it makes me feel like the Godfather. I shamlessly kill my darlings--both characters and scenes--with the cold heart Don Corleone.

I look back to editing my first book and have to laugh at the amount of angst it caused me to delete scenes and lose characters. Now I read a scene, realize it's garbage, and simply hit delete and rewrite it. I don't save endless copies of my book in every revision phase. I just keep my current version (with appropriate back ups).

If the scene works but simply doesn't belong, I might save it in a folder that I call snippets for further use. If it doesn't work or there is no chance I'll ever want it again, I rub it out with savage glee.

Die! Die! Die!

Goodness but I've become ruthless. Good thing I write mysteries.

Don't take that tone with me!

Tone: In my previous post, I mentioned that I was reading Larklight: A Rousing Tale of Dauntless Pluck in the Reaches of Farthest Space, by Phillip Reeve and David Wyatt. I can't recommend this enough. It's a middle-grade space fantasy set in the Victorian British Empire--if they had developed space travel. It's a rollicking good time and I think a great deal of it's charm derives from the tone. (The rest of it's charm is probably due to the space pirates and enormous, man-eating spiders, but I digress.)

It's a first person narrative, told by Art Mumby, an eleven year old boy, with the occasional intrusion of his sister's diary. The prose is wordy and veddy, veddy English as befitting a proper Victorian lad. But the tone is something more, there is humor, an arch wink and a nod that makes the whole thing just a delightful, frothy read. I'm having such a lovely time in this world.

But sometimes I want something else, something darker and richer. I'm a fan of L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s Forever Hero trilogy. Modesitt is the master of the brooding, thoughtful tone. As we see his character move from a wily young orphan to a weary immortal, the tone progresses so that you feel the character's burden of everlasting life.

When I'm discussing tone, I mean specifically manner in which words and thoughts are expressed. For me, it's often a conscious choice. When I conceive of a story idea, the tone comes wedded to it. I think about the tone, the feel, the mood, as much as I think about anything when I write. I concentrate on maintaining the tone. My greatest joy in both reading and writing isn't the perfect description, the gorgeous prose. While I appreciate those things, I either fall in love with the tone of a book very quickly, or I don't. And that makes it very important to me.

How do you approach tone? Is it a conscious choice or happy accident? Something you concentrate on or completely organic?

Lightening is gonna strike me

This is blog was inspired by Pete's recent blog about Office Space and the question posed: Where do you write. The short answer for me is anywhere. Anytime. Anyplace. Any means. I'll use my desktop, laptop, notebook, envelopes, sticky notes, pretty much any piece of paper.

I once wrote a horror flash piece on the back of a church program while sitting in the choir loft. I was the Music director at the time and it was a rather boring sermon. I sold that piece too. I have a lot of downtime in church and it really frees my mind. I hope the Lord doesn't smite me for it, but Church is a peaceful place and I love writing there.

Soccer season makes me very happy for several reasons, not the least of which is that I write very well at the soccer fields. The other parents have stopped giving me funny looks and accepted the fact that Mary always has a notebook and is prone to writing fits. They don't stare anymore, just sigh and give each other that look. But they tolerate me and that's the best I can hope for. That and I wrote an entire children's novel in a month during soccer practice which is only twice a week.

Sometimes I write in my car. (Don't worry, I park first.) I drive a lot for work and I'm prone to squeezing in a little extra writing time after I park. I've written flash pieces and short stories during my lunch hour and I often email myself scenes written while at work to include in my novels.

I do have a desk banished to a corner of the marital bedroom and I'm happily typing away there right now. I also have a laptop, but I’m not such a laptop fan. I dislike the little keyboard and I tend to drop my thumbs onto the touchpad which makes the mouse do odd things. But I have written an entire novel on it.

Since the desk in our bedroom and my husband enjoys sleeping without the constant tap-tap-tap of my keyboard, I'm often forced to abandon my desktop just as my writing gets rolling. So one of the downstairs rooms is my office-under-construction. It's been under construction for about a year now, but I'm confident that I will provoke my husband into finishing with fits of typing at eleven o'clock at night. When else would I write my blog posts?

Church?

You think I want to get struck by lightening or something?

My Strangelove for Maps (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the outline)

It's the eternal debate on writer forums: To outline or not to outline. That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous characters hijacking your story or...not. You get the picture.

I've written a lot of stuff. I've tried writing every way possible, from sitting down to write a whodunit without knowing whodunit or why, to carefully planning each scene down to drawing the location. I've come to the conclusion that I'm a planner. That's who I am in life.

I love a *to do* list. Love it. I like having a schedule and knowing what is going to happen each day, even if all I pencil in is : write or play on computer.

And I love maps.

When I go someplace new, I love detailed directions and a map is even better. I'm good with maps. The reason for this is I get lost. A lot. A whole lot. I've been lost all over the world: Greece, Egypt, Japan, France--pretty much anywhere I've been. I have no internal sense of direction. Put me indoors and turn me around and I'm completely lost. I could get lost going to my bathroom during the night. (Hey, things look different after dark, okay?) As a consequence, I've become great with maps and have developed quite an affection for them. My house is full of Mapscos and globes and atlases.

Which brings me back to outlining. I like to know where I'm going and how I'm going to get there. It reduces my stress and lets me focus on other things like the scenery and the interesting people along the route.

Outlining helps me see the structure of my book broken down into scenes, spot flaws, flesh out my characters and think through things in a logical fashion. If I change direction part way through, it's a lot easier to go back and rewrite bits of my outline.

Not everyone is an outline fan. There are many good writers that simply sit down and write. My friend Jeanne claims her entire book is in her head. She knows exactly what she wants to say and just channels the characters. Me? Not so much. Sure, the book is in my head, but I can't reliably find it. The outlining process helps me locate it and draw my fuzzy ideas into sharp focus.

Others claim that this spoils the trip. Once they've hashed out the details and events, they are no longer interested in the story. To me, an outline is simply a plan for the vacation. I'm still going to take the trip because the experience is worthwhile. Even if I know what I'm going to see, the trip can still surprise me with wondrous discoveries made along the way.

I hear that outlines are confining. For me, they are the opposite. They free me from worrying about structure and plot and let me obsess on the actual words instead.

So I outline. It makes sense to me. As far as I'm concerned, if Moses had an outline, the trip would have taken a week. Ten days tops.

How do you write? Pants it? Rough outline? Topographical map? I'm currently working on the Mother of All Outlines: 25,000 words and counting. If I ever reach the point where my outline is longer than my novel, I'll know it's time to turn back. Until then, I'll just keep plodding along, enjoying this leisurely ride.