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!

Jacket Flap

Beginning children's writers should always be looking for quality resources to learn more about the craft. It can seem an enormous task -- besides that, how do you know if a book or a website is valuable?

The internet is a great place to find out more about how children's writers work. You can find answers to your questions, connect with other writers, learn about great children's books to read, and so much more.


Here are a few sites I feel are worth a look:


http://www.jacketflap.com
http://www.underdown.org/
http://www.scbwi.org
http://planetesme.blogspot.com/
http://planetesme.com/
http://www.institutechildrenslit.com/rx/writers_support.shtml

Getting to Terse II


Getting the words on page is the trickiest thing for me when I start a project. When it's in my head the writing presents itself in beautiful 3D (with surround sound) – full color, textured, touchable.

So, that's good, right? I have ideas that get me out of bed in the morning. But here's the part that most always has me reaching for the snooze button. I like my writing clean, tight, and terse.

How can I translate that beautiful, touchable, believable image into something as linear as a sentence?

I start by whining -- no matter how small the project is (like a blog entry). I don't do this out loud to any human being, but occasionally I will whine to my brainy dog, Cooper. (That's okay. He does his share of whining, too). I can't do this! Please, don't make me do this!!!!!

But my boss – my inner boss -- is relentless. You have to write this, she says. No one else will tell this story. Who will give birth to these characters anyway? And tell me honestly, Janet, do you really think you can not write?

No, I can't. I've tried. And so, since I must meet my own deadlines (yes, I do set them for myself) and other deadlines, I write.

In the last couple of years I've come upon a technique that really helps folks like me who find it hard to start. It's called the Zero Draft, and it really works.

A zero draft is basically a brain dump. Before I begin any project, I start by putting everything I'm thinking on the page. For this small blog entry, I typed several paragraphs, including the following:


Kids in school – don graves. They start out trying to write. perfect
paragraph. heavens, they don't want to have to rewrite anything.
This was back when kids didn't compose on computers. It was by hand.

found the idea of a zero draft online made so much sense to me. Brain
dump. Wordy. Time to be verbose. The really fun part revising of
the piece. I'm the finish carpenter. I love to come in and cut,
rearrange, sculpt, fiddle, play

Of course, I haven't used any of this in the blog entry, but the point is that I got something on paper. I wrote fast (it helps to be a fast typist) and wrote every word that came into my head. I've started most zero drafts by just talking to myself on the page: so janet what are you going to write today? you know you have to write something. get going girl. The bird feeder needs refilling call sheree don't worry about not being able to write just go.

Before I know it, I've suddenly launched into the day's work.

More tomorrow on how I've started a novel (my first) using this technique.