Category Archives: writing

Supporting the Avid Young Writer in your Life

Although I’m still relatively new to being a published author, I’ve already done more than a hundred school visits. They are often long days, but I find them energizing and they really motivate me to finish the next book. Often a teacher catches my eye during a visit and wants to have a word with me about a student. Almost every time it’s an avid writer who produces volumes of stories or poems—finished, unfinished, skillfully written or simple, wildly creative or somewhat familiar. And what they want to know is what to do with all that writing. Teachers are great at teaching children who can’t write or won’t write or need lots of support to write. I am routinely impressed by the dedication of teachers I meet. So they can see that the avid writer needs guidance, too, but they are often at a loss about where to begin. Parents of these kids are often equally in the dark—proud, but unsure of how to best support a budding author. I have four kids myself, some of whom are avid writers so it’s a topic I’ve given a lot of thought. Here are three things you can do to nurture the young writer in your life.

Help them save and safely store their work.

I’m bad at this myself. I love my stories but I don’t take very good care of them. One of the most helpful things a teacher or parent can do is set up a file to keep stories both those finished and those abandoned. Most working writers begin as many as a dozen stories for every story they finish. So it isn’t important for your avid writer to finish every project they begin. Learning when to set aside a story that isn’t working is an important skill, too. But many times a writer will return to an old idea with a fresh insight and make a new story from one that wasn’t working before. Sometimes a character that didn’t work on a first try is exactly what you need in a different story. So having those files accessible is a gold mine. If your students write on a computer, getting them in the habit of a daily back up to a disc or thumb drive helps. Because thumb drives are easily lost, it’s also good to email a file and store it at the email account.

Help them find with a time and place for writing.

When writers get together, one of the most common topics of conversation is the struggle of finding a time and place to write. Some young writers are great at tuning out their surroundings and writing wherever they are—school bus, dinner table, math class. This of course has problems of it’s own. But students who need a little privacy to write may need help finding a quiet corner of the classroom or an undisturbed nook in the house, and a few free afternoons a week.

I know a 4th grader who came to school one day on fire with a great idea for a screenplay. She begged her teacher for time to write it and he agreed, letting her use the class computer through all the lessons, recess and even lunch that day. In five hours this girl wrote the first three and a half acts of a screenplay. In the last half an hour of the day the teacher asked her if she could show at least a part of her work to the class so they could see what a screenplay looks like. She chose a scene she wanted feedback on and got the class to read the roles out loud. As a result a half dozen other kids got the screenwriting bug for a few weeks. A gift of time like that is a rare and precious gift for a young writer and went a long way to helping this child believe she could be a professional writer some day.

Instructional time is precious and extra curricular activities are valuable, too, but for the avid writing child nothing is so enriching as simply the time and place to create something new.

Help them find a writing community.

I don’t know a single author who works alone. Most of us have critique groups or at least a writing partner. They are people who help us work out all the many details of writing well. It means the world to me that if I’m stuck I can call on my neighbors Heather Vogel-Frederick, author of Absolutely Truly, or Susan Blackaby, author of Brownie Groundhog and the February Fox, and go out for coffee and just talk through a writing problem.

For young people community can be hard to find. A teacher who is aware of two or more avid writers might encourage them to join the newspaper staff or school literary magazine. Younger students might find kindred spirits in a Newbery Club or on a Battle of the Books team.

The connection need not be formal and organized. I met two eighth grade cousins on a school visit who have an ice cream date every Sunday after church to work on the YA novel they are writing together. Some kids enjoy fan fiction websites because they create a sense of community and offer a place to share work.

Some communities are wonderful about offering writing opportunities for children and teens. Here are two of the best children’s writing communities here in Portland, Oregon and I hope you will add your local resources in the comments.

League of Exceptional Writers.

Every Second Saturday from 2 to 3 at the Powells Bookstore on Cedar Hills Blvd. in Beaverton from October to May.

Come meet your fellow writers, learn the craft of writing from amazingly talented and friendly authors, bring your own work to share and get feedback. Anyone ages 8-18 is welcome.

We have two sessions left this school year. April 11th Anne Osterlund will talk about developing strong characters. On May 9th Fiona Kenshole will talk about the role of literary agents in the book world.

Young Willamette Writers

First Tuesdays of the month from 7 to 8, the young Willamette Writers meet in their own space during the meeting of the adult Willamette Writers. They practice the craft of writing in the company of great writers from all over the region. The meeting is held in the Old Church on SW 11th and Clay in Portland.

If you’ve got a great kids writing group in your town, please share in the comments!

To #%& or not to &^%$#: Swearing in Middle Grade Fiction

The expectations for the use profanity in children’s fiction are pretty clear. It’s commonplace in YA novels and completely absent in picture books and easy readers. But middle grade fiction takes the middle ground. Is swearing okay in a middle grade book? Well, it’s complicated. The issue is balancing authenticity with respect for your audience. Everybody encounters profanity; it is a language intensifier and can be useful in conveying the weight and reality of your characters situation. And yet it is the nature of profanity to offend, so any use will have consequences in how the book as a whole is received. As a practical matter MG books with profanity tend to be shelved with YA no matter how young the character is. This is not necessarily a problem, To Kill a Mockingbird and it’s 9 year old protagonist Scout have been doing just fine in the YA section of the library for the last five decades. Even so any use of profanity should be carefully considered. When I’m confronted with an opportunity to use a swear word in my novels, here are five choices I consider.

Omit

Every time I use profanity I rewrite the scene with out it, let it sit for a day or two and read the result out loud. I have been surprised by how often the scene was stronger without the swear word. Sometimes profanity is just a habit of the author and not integral to the character’s worldview or the movement of the plot.

Reduce

My editor once told me that swearing is loud on the page in a way that it is not in real life. I think of it as the equivalent of yelling or texting in all caps. As the mom of many I can tell you yelling is most effective when used sparingly—usually when lives are at stake. I think the last time I actually yelled at home was when someone’s sleeve caught on fire while roasting a marshmallow. Because swearing functions as an intensifier, it’s power is diluted by overuse. If I am working with a character who would naturally swear a lot, I’ll run a word search and see if I can limit the swearing to places where it will have the most impact.

Evade

Sometimes you can duck the issue when the swearing is done by a non-viewpoint character. When I was working on Second Fiddle I knew that the moment that the girls discovered that they were all alone in Paris with no money, no passports and no return train tickets, any normal eighth grader would swear. But my main character wasn’t really the swearing type. Instead, I had her report that her friend said every swear she knew in English and then moved on to exhaust her supply of swear words in French and German. This preserved the authenticity of the scene without getting into a specific swear word.

Substitute

Here is one of the more entertaining devices of MG fiction. Most kids get in trouble for swearing, and yet they have the same need for the occasional language intensifier as everyone else. So kids are great at making up substitutes. It’s the “drat, darn, and golly” solution, and it has great comic potential. The advantage to a curse word substitution is that it can also serve to convey information about the character and setting and lighten the mood of an otherwise tense situation. We had a fascinating conversation at a bookstore event recently with some women who wrote adult mysteries. There is an expectation in adult cozy mysteries that swearing is omitted so this author had her spice shop owner detective say things like, “Well that just frosts my chili peppers!” I had no idea such rules extended to the world of adult books.

Commit

There are circumstances in which the first four choices are wrong for the voice of the character or the gravity of the situation. And in those cases swearing maybe appropriate. Freedom of Speech means nothing if we never use it, and if you have used profane speech appropriately in your book you will find both people who passionately attack any use of profanity and those who just as passionately defend your right to tell the story as you must, free of censure. I opted to use swearing to a very limited extent in Heart of a Shepherd, having considered and discarded the above considerations, and it has done no harm whatsoever to the book. It was warmly received, sold well, and was carried by Scholastic Book Clubs. A few libraries don’t shelve it in k-4 schools. I really have no argument with that. Most teachers who read it aloud chose to skip or modify the swear word in the classroom. No argument there either. On the other hand, many teachers and parents have told me that because they weren’t expecting profanity in a middle grade book, it gave them a good opportunity to discuss where profanity is socially acceptable and not, and what it was about that particular scene that made a character swear when he ordinarily wouldn’t. In my opinion that’s a conversation worth having.

I’d love to hear what other people consider when making decisions about profanity, both in terms of writing and in terms of sharing books with middle grade kids as a parent or teacher or librarian.

Writing Outside your Culture: thoughts on The Madman of Piney Woods

I read The Madman of Piney Woods, the latest book by Christopher Paul Curtis, this fall because I am working on a novel with two protagonists and I wanted to study how a real master of the craft handled the inherent difficulties in dual narration. But I become distracted from my initial goal by the story of Alvin “Red” Stockard. If you are looking for a more traditional review, this book got starred reviews at both the Hornbook and Kirkus. I’m going to take a look at the story from the perspective of cultural authenticity.

I’m a person of Irish descent who’s read a lot of Irish history. I read Irish writers regularly, play Irish music, and have a long involvement with the Irish music and dance community in the Pacific Northwest. I’m making an assumption that Mr. Curtis is not Irish, although many black people in North America do have some Irish heritage. Mr. Curtis didn’t mention his ethnic heritage in his bio or author’s note so I’m going to assume that he’s chosen to write outside of his personal cultural experience for the character Red.

The first thing I noticed in reading Red’s section of the book was that his voice sounded unlike any Irish person I know. Accent and turn of phrase is tricky, even when you know it well. Most readers would not be taken aback by Red’s word choices or turn of phrase, but I found them outside of my experience of the Irish. I also found a couple of idioms that sounded off to me. The phrase to twirl the cat, is unfamiliar but a similar phrase not room enough to swing a cat is one I’ve heard in several places and has a completely different connotation than the one Mr. Curtis refers to in the book. It would be easy to conclude that he’s guilty of lazy writing; HOWEVER, an idiom is a slippery thing, prone to multiple and regional meanings and inclined to change over time. In a story set a hundred years ago, it’s quite likely that the idiom I’m familiar with did not exist in its present form or had several meanings right from the start. Likewise the accent Mr. Curtis is portraying may well be one with which I’m unfamiliar. I speak regularly with people from Donegal, Clare, and Cork. I’ve recently been to Dublin. Accents differ in all four places and I’m sure there are accents I’m unfamiliar with. Even my extensive reading of Irish authors does not make me an expert of every Irish dialect. Other aspects of the book are well researched so I’m going to assume this accent was also based on appropriate readings and recordings.

Characterization and cliche are another area of concern in the book. Though it is not in vogue to remember, racism has often be directed at white people. Try searching on the term “Irish” in an image directory and see what you get. Here are four things that turned up amid a sea of shamrocks on Google Image.

As you can see we get the unflattering sports mascot, the depiction of drunkenness, the quaint and pastoral people wearing green, and a display of domestic violence. These were among the top twenty-five images containing people. I decided to leave out the lewd Halloween costumes, the magical druids, the leprechauns, and the beer. For comparison take a look at what a google image search gives you for French or British or even African American. It’s a pretty striking difference. I don’t want to get into a debate about who has it worse in terms of mainstream depiction of their ethnicity. There are no winners in that game. Just making an observation.

The Madman of Piney Woods contains some cliches and overly broad characterizations of the Irish. None so egregious as the images above, but cliches none the less. The most obvious ones are Alvin’s red hair, domestic violence, the grandmother’s anger and bitterness, and the father’s too-good-to-be-true sagacity. So what to make of all that.

Red hair is rare, occurring in only about 4% of North Americans. Even in Ireland, only 10% of the population have red hair. It’s an easy way to telegraph Irish-ness without giving a more thoughtful and nuanced description–red hair is the feathered headdress of the Irish. On the other hand, further description would get into skin tone and comparative coloring to the black characters in the story and that’s a linguistic minefield. I’d probably make the same choice myself.

Domestic violence is a crime long associated with the Irish and I was sad to see that characterization repeated in this story. On the other hand, in 1901 the beating of children was more common among all races and classes of people, and not on anyone’s radar in the way it is today. And Mr. Curtis did not equate the violence with Irish-ness but clearly laid the blame on the ravanges of alcoholism or PTSD from a traumatic migration experience. It’s not “nice” but it’s fair and authentic to the period.

The dynamic between the saintly dad and evil grandmother was a bit over the top for my taste. Red’s father was very Atticus Finch-like in his goodness, and he was even in the legal profession. The grandmother’s bitterness also seemed a bit one-note to me. I’d have like to see a more developed version of this character. For example a woman in her position would have attended Mass as assiduously as she avoided the racist grocer. I found it odd to find so little mention of church. Most Irish of the era whether Catholic or Protestant had a lot of cultural identity and social support wrapped up in church-going. A view into that part of the Stockard family’s life might have made them all seem more rounded and realistic. That said, in many families with an abusive member, the other adult in the situation compensates for it with heroic kindness and a hard won wisdom about human nature.

And here are some things I found completely realistic and true to the Irish-American experience.

The connection between Irish and African music is longstanding, and in my opinion, a great benefit to the cannon of North American music. When I hear Reggae, I hear a slow and soulful version of the traditional hornpipe. In Gospel music I find much in common with Irish ballads. Contemporary Irish music is full of influences that echo it’s development alongside African-American music That connection was beautifully portrayed in the climactic scene where Red sings to the Madman of Piney Woods. I found it the most moving portion of the book.

The racism towards Black Canadians by Grandmother O’Toole was also true to what I’ve heard and read about the Irish immigrant experience. Black freedmen and Irish immigrants were often scrambling for purchase on the lowest rung of the economic ladder which tended to put them in conflict. I wish the history were otherwise but it isn’t. I think the discomfort that the prejudice is likely to generate is ultimately helpful in terms of the conversations it might inspire about how fear and hatred arise.

And finally what I really loved about the story was its willingness to show in careful (but not overwhelming for a young reader) detail the horrors that many migrating Irish experienced. Our current experiences with Ebola provide a very striking parallel to the Irish who were quarantined on ships carrying Typhus. (What a terrific book discussion that could be!) The Irish immigration experience is not a story that comes into the school curriculum very often or very accurately. It’s seldom the subject of a kid’s book. I was very grateful to see it portrayed so sensitively here.

Ethnic diversity in children’s books matters and I’m thrilled that someone outside of the Irish writing community was willing to take on this topic and bring it to light with compassion. I’m happy to see that the book has been well-received by critics who might have quibbled over details of authenticity or who has the “right” to tell an Irish story. Details matter but intention matters too. I want lots more books with ethnically diverse characters, not just the few that can pass the narrow gate of some critic’s opinion of their authenticity. Because here is the most uncomfortable truth of all. Even though I’m of Irish heritage, it’s no guarantee that I would write a more “authentic” story. My experience of being Irish is specific and narrow. I have biases about my own history, and any writer working from their own heritage faces risks of censure from within their own community.

Sometimes the view of an outsider who is willing to do solid research and the hard work of empathy is just as valid and maybe even a bit more objective. Thank you Mr. Curtis for a thoughtful and bravely told tale.

What I did this summer

Today is my kid’s first day of school and I thought I’d celebrate by tackling my least favorite essay topic from school. I hated it simply because if something exciting happened it felt like bragging to write about it, and if nothing much happened, well, it’s a little depressing to call that to mind at the beginning of a school year.

The truth is I’ve had, by most standards, a very ordinary summer. We took a little trip to the mountains and a day trip to the beach. We did yard work. We made jam. But four things have stood out for me as making a difference in my writing. So I thought I’d say a little bit about all four.

1. A change of setting tends to lead to new work or at least new ideas.

It was my great pleasure to participate in the Outpost Workshop of the Fishtrap Summer Gathering. I spent a week tenting out on the Zumwalt Prairie in northeastern Oregon. It was an astonishing landscape–outwardly empty, yet on closer inspection teeming with wildlife from bull elk to least weasel to all manner of song birds. The days got into the 100s with barely a scrap of shade and the nights dipped down into the 30s. The altitude was a challenging 5000 feet or so. Not the most conducive environment to productive writing, and yet I found myself flooded with story ideas, thinking for example, of what it would be like to homestead such a place with it’s punishing climate but rich resources.

2. New company tends to lead to new perspectives

I met a woman named Janet at the Outpost workshop who has worked on the Zumwalt and in the near by Wallowa Mountains and Snake River canyons for most of her life. She knew an incredible amount about the natural and human history of the area. She shared some of the history of the Joseph band of the Nez Perce who lived near Wallowa Lake up until the famous surrender of Chief Joseph in 1877. You probably remember ‘From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.’ Its one of the most quoted bits of Native American writing ever. Janet gave the fuller version of his surrender and cast the story of Chief Joseph into an entirely different and far more interesting light. Whether the things I’ve learned become a story I write or not, it’s good to periodically revisit what I’ve learned as historical truth, and consider what that truth might look like from a different perspective.

3. World news is less distant than it seems

Along with the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri and the ebola outbreak in Africa, one of the world events that has dominated the news this summer is the solo migration of children from Central America. It would be easy to think of these events as comfortably distant and unrelated to me personally. However, I’ve been researching the famine-era migration of Irish children to the US and a shocking number of them came to this country alone at very young ages. It’s easy to mentally scold parents that would send their children into such danger and hardship and yet, just like Central America of the present day, the children of mid-1800s Ireland faced near certain death in their home country. I find it much easier to think through the issues about what to do with these migrant children knowing my own ancestors were in exactly the same position a mere 150 years ago. I read a great book from a migrant’s point of view called Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea. It was so thoughtfully done and not at all the pedagogic thing I’d be tempted to write if I took on this topic directly myself. The topic of migrant children is a rich one but I think if I took it on I’d write about the famine-era Irish. I’ve been thinking about what books might help children process the information from the ebola epidemic and from the human rights demonstrations in Ferguson, but that is a post for another day.

4. Changing genres is good for the brain

I’ve been working on the same two novels for quite a long time and as much as I love both of the stories I was feeling a bit uninspired at the beginning of the summer. But I spent a little time being a workshop participant rather than a leader and I learned a bunch new things which lead me to try a non-fiction picture book and a screenplay. I managed to get through a whole draft of the non-fiction and part way through a screenplay, and I’m feeling more energized than I have in ages. Not a vacation exactly but definitely a change that did me good.

And all this changing up and refreshing has been perfect timing because one of those two novels I’ve been working on for such a long time is going to be published by Random House in 2016. I’ll do the final edits this fall and now after my summer break I’m 100% ready to dive into the revisions whole-heartedly. The new book will be called The Turn of the Tide. It’s a contemporary middle grade adventure story set in Astoria, Oregon and told in two voices. I’ll have lots more news about that in later posts.

How about you? Did you change things up in your summer routine? Gain an insight from a summer trip? How do you refresh yourself when you’re feeling stale?

Learning to Love your Book-alikes

When my very first book Heart of a Shepherd came out back in 2009 I met Suzanne Morgan Williams from the Class of 2K9 marketing group whose book Bull Rider was astonishingly similar to mine. It was all the more surprising because they were western stories about ranching families with family members deployed to the Middle East. Not exactly the most crowded genre. It was very tempting to think of this as a disaster, a head to head competition, a diminishment of what I had worked so hard on. But my husband pointed out that selling a book is not like selling a car. It’s not like a person buys a book and then doesn’t need another for 5 to 10 years. A very helpful perspective. The beauty of the book business is that the more people read good books the more they want new good books.

And the really terrific thing was getting to know Suzanne and working together to promote our books because we’ve found that if a reader likes one of our stories, they will probably like the other. They aren’t identical books after all. The main character in Suzanne’s story is a little bit older. Heart of a Shepherd is about the experience of having a deployed parent. Bull Rider is about the experience of having a brother return from war with a traumatic brain injury. We’ve done joint book store appearances, spoken together on panels and in workshops at writers conferences, and even sold our books together at the Reno Rodeo. And much to our mutual delight these books have flourished side by side.

But I’ve also known people who’ve worked for months, years even, and seen a book published which is very similar to their own manuscript, and then decided to drop their own project completely. It’s such a shame because there is often plenty of room for multiple

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books on a topic. I think of them as “book-alikes” and in some ways they can be an asset to your own work. If somebody has written a book similar to mine then it’s a great strategy to encourage my book to be grouped in with a similar book. Often teachers are looking for several books from a historical era so that there will be something to suit every reading level in her class. Many bookstores prefer to host multi-author events. The picture to the right is myself and Elizabeth Rusch (dressed as Nannerl Mozart) and Virginia Euwer Wolff. We are doing an event which drew dozens of vocal and instrumental performers and lots of families to a community center to celebrate our three music-themed books: Virginia’s Mozart Season, an absolute classic YA story of a girl preparing for a music competition, Liz’s picture book biography For the Love of Music about Mozart’s big sister, and my middle grade novel Second Fiddle.

I’ve learned to love my Book-Alikes over the years and have become good friends of people whose books are similar to mine. And in celebration of that here are four books who like my story Written in Stone are set in America in the early part of the 20th century. They are Crossing Stones by Helen Frost, A Whistle in the Dark by Sue Hill Long, Born of Illusion by Teri Brown and In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters.