A couple of months ago, I put out a call for challenges from friends because I had a break in just about all of my schedules. One friend challenged me to write an action book for her very young son, but she wanted it to be something he could grow into.
The only children’s books I read these days are the basals at work, and I hardly ever read them any more. I don’t honestly know the first thing about writing for children. So, I started researching. I talked to people who work with children’s books, and I looked up websites that dealt with writing for children.
One of the websites recommended How to Write a Children’s Book and Get it Published, so I put it on hold at the local library and started reading some recommended picture books. It finally arrived last week, and yesterday I sat down and started reading it.
I realize that books like this are really written to target the person who is considering writing for the first time (which I’m definitely not), and people who are completely new to how publishing works (which I’m also not), but it was also outdated. For example, the author refers to the American Girls series and its three girls. A fourth (the lovable Addy) was just being developed. I think there are now six or seven girls, but I’ve admittedly lost count.
Someone new to writing would probably find this book, its exercises, and the appendices very helpful, but at my stage, there were few truly useful gems. I think I’m going to be better off with the websites I found and my small army of those familiar with children’s books.
All this, just to create a story for my friend.
Posted by Rebecca as book love, writing at 10:05 AM EDT
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Not long ago, there were commercials encouraging children to turn off the television and go outside and do something. They even used a popular cartoon to help them out at one point. The tagline for the commercials was: Verb- It’s what you do. Now when I ask my writing students to define “verb”, some of them respond with that tagline.
The campaign was all well and good. Add more verbs to your day and become more active. But not all verbs are created equal. You can sit and watch television. You’re doing something. You can just be. That’s also doing something. You’re not doing anything active, but you’re still adding verbs to your day.
So, how can you add better verbs into your day, or more importantly into your writing? Cathy Moore has a great interactive slide show in choosing more engaging verbs. They tend to be the ones that describe a movement rather than just an action. It’s rather clever, and a great reminder for those who are writing.
When you write, you’re painting a picture. Verbs that describe an active movement will add more to that picture that ones that just allow things to be. Stronger writing is active. Add more active verbs into your writing and your day, and see just how interesting things become.
Posted by Rebecca as writing at 10:25 AM EDT
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Several years ago, I walked out of the movie theater completely disappointed because Tom Bombadil was missing from Peter Jackson’s interpretation of Fellowship of the Ring. I wasn’t alone. Other friends were upset Tom was missing; a few were glad to not have to put up with him. It was maybe two years later before someone told me he’d been edited out because he wasn’t caught up in the power struggle over the ring, and that made him pointless and extraneous.
I don’t know how true that is, but for those of us expecting Tom, it was a shock to not see him at all.
Sometimes, it’s good to break an audience’s expectations. With so many books, movies, and television shows coming out every year, many of which are just rehashing old classics, it’s actually become critical to shake things up if for no other reason than to genuinely capture people’s attention.
In the case of adaptations, it can be as simple as removing a character like Tom. A character can be changed out, as was the case when Jounouchi’s rescuer in Yu-Gi-Oh shifted from Seto Kaiba, a man who despised him, to his sister Shizuka. (It’s always fun to watch Yu-Gi-Oh fans when they learn Jou’s sister wasn’t his original savior.) A character can be changed completely. The Harry Potter movies have actually danced around this one repeatedly, moving lines and scenes between characters with no regard for whether or not the new character would do the same thing as the original character. Movies based on comic books also suffer from similar problems.
While it can be fun to mess with audiences and their beloved books, it can be almost as much fun to ruin their expectations by being something different in original works. The girl saves the world while the guy is hostage bait. The young son stands up and defends his family because he can’t bear the thought of losing his family. The assassin actually has a well-defined sense of ethics that almost makes him look like a good guy instead. Authors and screenwriters take chances all the time, and the characters aren’t appreciated because the audience was too hung up on their own expectations.
Can you think of a time when your expectations were broken? Share it in the comments!
Posted by Rebecca as writing at 7:57 AM EDT
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For those who haven’t met him yet, Dead Bunny is my teaching assistant. Don’t worry. He isn’t really a dead bunny. He’s a live bunny whose name just happens to be Dead. (Blame my students.) He has his own (neglected) blog where he was teaching algebra last year. He’s starting to produce his own tutorials on algebra topics.
But he actually started out teaching writing. After a year’s break, he’s now starting to help my writing students again by teaching the basic foundations of grammar.
While he hasn’t figured out how to teach nouns yet, he has figured out that “bunny” is a common noun and “Dead Bunny” is a proper noun. He’s still working on this one.
Verbs are much simpler. As the commercials say, a verb is what you do. So if you’re trying to decide if a word is a verb, simply ask yourself if the bunny can do the word you’re looking at. One of my students loves this one. As she’s working on her worksheets, she whispers to herself, “The bunny (word)”, and keeps going until she hits a combination that allows the bunny to do something.
Dead Bunny also likes adjectives. An adjective is a word that describes a noun. When looking for adjectives, just put the word in front of “bunny”. If it can actually describe the bunny, you’ve found an adjective. (It’s kind of funny listening to my whispering student work through these. She asks herself, “Can the bunny be (word)? No, but he could be (word). Wait, no he can’t. Aha, but he could be (word).”)
Adverbs are words that describe verbs. If the word you’re looking at can answer any one of the four following questions:
- The bunny did it how?
- The bunny did it when?
- The bunny did it where?
- The bunny did it how often?
then the word is an adverb.
The only other part of speech, the original one, that Dead Bunny has taught is prepositions. If the word can describe where the bunny is in relation to a box, then the word is a preposition. (This lesson is actually how the bunny was given his name.)
While it may seem strange to learn grammar from a fictional bunny, it’s really helped a lot of my students better understand the parts of speech. In fact, after our verb lesson, my whispering student went back to her English teacher and asked if she could retake a test she had just failed. With the help of the bunny, she got a much better grade on the retake, and she’s now using Dead Bunny to explain grammar to struggling classmates. Her teacher was quite amused.
Posted by Rebecca as teaching moments, writing at 9:15 AM EDT
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After spending two years begging and pleading with young writers to add more detail to their essays, I finally met one who added far too many details in the wordiest way possible. I spend four hours a week begging and pleading with her to either cut excessive details or state them more concisely, but she really struggles. As she said recently, her words are her babies and it hurts to cut them out.
I sympathized. I’ve been writing in one form or another since I was in elementary school. Learning to revise and edit wasn’t easy for me because I could turn out a paper that would earn top scores without even trying. It wasn’t until I got to grad school that someone (the department chair) sat me down and explained that while my writing was exemplary, it lacked any sense of finesse.
I’m still trying to find that finesse, actually.
But that wasn’t going to help this student. Since she responds well to metaphors, I told her that essays are like a dish. You follow the recipe to a point, and then you add and subtract spices to suit your own taste.
In her case, there are too many spices and the flavor is so overpowering that no one can enjoy the delightful ideas she’s writing about. Where many students serve a bland essay in need of those spices, hers is almost spice with a side of essay.
A well-written essay is like a well-executed dish. Through the right blend of basic structure and attention to spices, it catches the attention and makes the consumer want to stay with it to the very end. If it’s done just right, the consumer even regrets when it’s over.
Posted by Rebecca as teaching moments, writing at 8:18 AM EDT
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When asked why they write, many authors and poets start talking about how they either hear voices in their head or how they love the language.
I can relate to the ones who hear voices in their head (and I’m so grateful to know I’m not the only one). Trying to capture the random bits of story that fly through my head sometimes can be tricky. As much as I’d love to have a way to record the idea electronically, I keep notebooks stashed around my room and go bag for quick capture. Even with those, characters often deliver bits of dialogue or introduce themselves when I’m not in a position to write it down, and then I have to repeat the information to myself over and over until I get to one of my notebooks.
While the ones who hear voices make sense to me, the ones who extemporize for hours on end about their love for words don’t. I’ve read interviews where authors go on about loving how words roll around in their mouth and being obsessed with language. Some of them talk about the texture or rhythm of language. For me, words are a tool. I don’t think much about them beyond trying to get my point across.
For a while, I thought I wasn’t a true writer because while I hear flashes of characters in my head, I don’t have this odd obsession with words. I don’t have a favorite word. I don’t compare words with wine or truffles. I started thinking I don’t care about words at all.
Except I do. I may not be fascinated by the feel, texture, rhythm of words, but I love learning about etymologies. I enjoy finding out where a word or phrase came from, and using that to help me down the road. I use these etymologies when I’m talking with international friends or teaching my students (more and more of whom are international) to help them better understand our idiomatic language.
I figure that’s close enough to an odd obsession with language to allow me to say I’m a “true writer”.
Posted by Rebecca as anthropology, writing at 8:03 AM EDT
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My mother has a reading log from when I was in kindergarten that clearly shows I read pages from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. As the story goes, I used what I read in the book to tell her what was wrong with Clash of the Titans, my favorite movie at the time.
Five years old and reading a college-level book. Is it any surprise I tested at college-level on many reading tests I took as a child?
I’m an extreme case. Through the course of my teaching, I’ve met middle schoolers who are working their way through early readers because that’s where their reading level is. In fact, today’s mainstream books are generally aimed at anywhere from a sixth- to eighth-grade level because that’s considered the average reading level of the nation’s adults.
Scary, huh?
I’m also an avid manga fan. There are actually now more manga than any other type of book on my shelves. Quite a few of my students also read manga, and it always terrifies me when one of my middle schoolers bounds up to me and tells me they loved Descendants of Darkness, one of my favorite titles. Manga has age ratings on them, and that particular one (like the majority of the titles I read) is labelled “Older Teen, 16+”. It’s not that the language is over my middle schoolers’ heads; it’s that the content is. Had they asked me first, I’d have steered them toward something better suited to their age.
There is a movement afoot to mark all children’s novels with age bands to show what group the story is targeting. Of course, some people are up in arms over this, but they feel the age labels will shut out potential readers in a society where a disappointing percentage of adults don’t read unless they have to. What I think is really going on here is that the books are being labeled for the content. The labels are just saying that the average child at that age will be able to digest what’s happening in the story.
Of course, you will always have the overly bright child who’s reading books far beyond their age, and the child who just needs a little more time to understand what they’re reading picking up a book below their age group. These bandings aren’t supposed to be used as a means to shun either of these groups; they’re just guidelines. Just like the movie and television ratings. Just like the age warnings on manga.
A college student enjoying a PG-13 movie isn’t stigmatized for watching something accessible to children, and I suspect the age bands won’t be quite the stigma some people think they will either.
Posted by Rebecca as readiing, writing at 11:37 AM EDT
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