Mentor Monday: Where Are You?

For every career, there's a career path. When I started teaching, I really hadn't thought much about the path itself. I only knew I wanted to teach. Fresh out of college, I was armed with lots of theory, but had little in the way of actual practice (student teaching just gives you a glimpse into what's truly involved).

Once in the trenches, I realized just how little I knew about this path I'd chosen. Over the years, I learned (oh, how I learned!). Teaching is so much more than working with kids -- you have to deal with administration,  parents, politics, budgets, etc. If only it were just about teaching!

Same is true with a children's writing career. You may think you know how to write for kids (I mean, how hard can it be?!?!?!), but when you get right down to it, you discover you really know squat. 

It's important to recognize where you are on the path -- and to also recognize the waymarkers -- the signs that you're advancing . . . or not.

Over the course of the next several weeks (during my turn at blogging), we'll look at the different stages of a writing career. Today, it's the Novice category.

You know you're a Novice when:

• You read picture books or middle grade novels or young adult novels and think writing for kids is a snap.
• You have stories you want to tell, but haven't put them in writing yet.
• Or, you have put them in writing, but haven't paid attention to things like voice or word count. Or perhaps you've told a story exactly as it happened.
• In fact, you aren't even aware that you're supposed to be aware of the above.
• You've started to read some how-to books like The Complete Idiot's Guide to Children's Publishing by Harold Underdown or Writing Picture Books by Ann Whitford Paul.
• If you aspire to write picture books, you write them in the style of picture books from your childhood.
• You may enter your work in writing contests.
• You perhaps believe you have to find your own illustrator if you are a picture book writer.
• You may also think you have to pay someone to publish you (no lie,The Write Sisters have heard this many, many times). Seriously, publishers pay you! 
• You think you're going to get rich writing for kids (ah, don't quit your day job just yet . . .)
• You believe that any children's publishing house will take any of the children's genres.
• In fact, you aren't aware there are different children's genres. You think writing for children is all about picture books (it just isn't so!)
• You read your stories to family members and kids (your own, your friends', your child's classmates), and you believe them when they say it's great. It may be, but chances are good, they're responding to you.
• You've started a rejection file, and don't realize this is a good thing (it means you're submitting!).

If you aspire to be a children's writer, these are just a few of the things you may experience at the novice level. We've all been there! The Write Sisters have each been writing for kids for twenty+ years. Among the seven of us, we have over 100 published books. We couldn't say that twenty years ago.

Every once in a while, we do a retrospective, individually and collectively. It's fun to see how much we've learned, how much more we've published, and how much fun we've had doing it.

You can, too!

Mentor Monday: Picture Book Dummy

I hadn't really considered myself a picture book writer, but at one Write Sisters critique session, I suddenly found myself -- with the strong encouragement of the Sisters -- with a possible PB manuscript.

One of the best pieces of advice on how to turn it into a publishable piece was from Kathy Deady. She suggested I make a dummy to get a feel for how my manuscript might appear in a published book.

I took printing paper and folded it into what I thought was the requisite number of pages -- 32 (turns out that''s not exactly true -- I should have done more research!). After that, I printed out a couple copies of my text and started cutting it into bits that I pasted onto the bottom of the pages.

Of course, my little experiment was nothing like how the Sail Away, Little Boat (Carolrhoda Books 2006) eventually turned out. That is okay, however. It helped me start thinking the way a picture book illustrator might.

Among illustrators, there is a debate about how artists (and writers) should think about laying out a PB. One good discussion is here at Drawn: The Illustration and Cartooning Blog. It's one of my favorite go-to blogs for so many reasons. The page I'm sending you to is a discussion of an original post by illustrator Bob Staake


This is Staake's version:

His version isn't necessarily correct, and neither is the version suggested by Drawn reader Michael Johnson. This only shows that it pays to know that there is more than one way publishers lay out picture books.

It's also useful to understand the way illustrators work. Another recommended resource is Writing with Pictures by Uri Shulevitz. Harold Underdown at The Purple Crayon has this to say about the book:

"It's not over-praising this book to say that there's no other book like it, and that it's an unmatched resource for anyone involved with children's book illustration. I've had a copy for several years, and I learn something every time I open it. Of course, I'm an editor, but the illustrators I know tell me the same. That may explain why no other book has come along to replace it, in spite of the fact that one section is mostly out of date."

Some websites will suggest to aspiring PB writers that they submit their PB manuscripts in the form of a dummy. The Write Sisters do not submit their own manuscripts in that format. We submit PB manuscripts in simple manuscript form -- usually just a few pages long, with notes to the illustrator as to how the author 'pictures' the final manuscript.

If you'd like to have fun with dummies and book binding in general, there's a good video at Break.com.