Thanks!

Here’s one Q and A to whet your appetite:

I’ve heard many editors say that when they read submissions, they’re looking for reasons to turn it down. Besides voice, what are some of the things that you look for as reasons to accept a submission?

A really fresh hook–a sentence that sums up the book that totally grabs my attention.

OK skedaddle on over there and read the whole interview!

I did an interview with with author Kim Norman on my All About Children’s Books blog last week.   Some of what she said was instructive on writing PBs.  

Author Kim Norman’s first picture book, JACK OF ALL TAILS, was released by Dutton, a Penguin imprint, in 2007. CROCODADDY, (Sterling, a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble), makes its grand debut in May. She is looking forward to the release of two titles in 2010: I KNOW A WEE PIGGY WHO WALLOWED IN BROWN, illustrated by Henry Cole, (Dutton); and TEN ON THE SLED, (Sterling.)

Kim is active in community theater and her church’s music program. (She loves pretending she’s a pop star singing into a mic for the praise & worship service.) She lives in Virginia with her husband, (the REAL Crocodaddy), two sons, a dog and a cat. 

Which leads me to the best piece of advice when writing rhyme: even when you think it’s perfect, ask friends to read it aloud, so you can hear where they stumble. If they do, you know you’ve got more work to do. Rhythmic rhyme should be so flawless that anyone can read it “cold” and not stumble on the rhythm. If you have friends who are musical, that helps, because they’re likely to have a strong sense of rhythm. If THEY stumble, you definitely need to fix something.

Sally: One reason editors get bad rhyming books may be that so many people think that picture books are easy to write. They think all it takes is knowing how to rhyme. Are picture books easy? How long does it take you, from conception to final draft, to write one?

KIM: Hmm. Depends. Some come to me very quickly, and I can write and revise them in a few days. Some, like Crocodaddy, need several rounds of revisions — not so much to perfect the rhyme as to perfect the plot. Even a rhyming book needs the “C” elements which make fiction interesting: character and conflict. (Even if it’s a simple conflict, like a kindergartner not knowing how to tie his shoes.) A perfectly rhymed book without those elements would be hard to sell to a publisher.

And back to your first point in that question, whether they’re hard to write. Picture books are deceptive. They’re short and quick to read, so people (namely celebrities, it seems), think they’re easy to write. In fact, it’s very hard to write a good picture book. Most picture book authors have gone through a long apprenticeship learning to write strong, salable manuscripts. Picture books cram a LOT of elements–characterization, conflict, pacing, repetition, humor or pathos, well-timed page-turns, story arc and visual variety–into a tiny space.

Visual variety is key in a picture book. You may have written perfectly-paced, hilarious dialogue between two unforgettable characters, but if they’re just sitting there, there’s not much for the illustrator to do.

Sally: I’ve heard that a picture book needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. Now, you talk about character and conflict. In Crocodaddy there is conflict/character goal and resolution. Do all picture books need this?

If not a conflict and goal, at least an arc that makes the reader feel as though there has been forward motion, however gentle. Gentler books with less conflict are sometimes called “slice of life,” such as a sweet book about a family’s day at the beach. Even a book like that will usually have a nice arc — something that refers you back to the beginning: for instance, riding in the car, only this time in the opposite direction, returning home. Sometimes a carefully repeated phrase will provide the arc, a phrase you pluck from the beginning and repeat near the end.

Some books are more about concept than conflict, like Which Rabbit are You?, a pop-up board book by my friend and critique buddy, Liz Dubois. There is no central character or plot, but she brings it to a nice resolution, reminding the reader that we’re all different, like the colorful rabbits in her book.

Sally: And we are all different. For instance some people love the pictures in PB’s. And they aren’t wrong. The pictures are obviously important (hence the name picture book instead of word book). Still, I’m a word person. I’m attracted to PB’s  more by the fun words than by the fun pictures. What are fun words and how can we learn to use them in our writing? I think crocodaddy is a fun word, why are we attracted to a word like that?

KIM: Ooo, excellent question! I think it’s pleasing for two reasons: because of the consonants, especially the hard “c,” (humorists contend that a “k” sound automatically adds humor), and because it has such a strong stress on the first syllable. So my refrains are almost a drumbeat: “CROC-odaddy, CROC-odaddy.” Even though it’s a totally made-up word, I have never heard even one person mispronounce it. AND, they immediately have an idea of what it means, as soon as they hear the word.

I agree with you. Fun, surprising words improve a book, especially for reading aloud. I adore when an author makes up a word, and yet — even though it’s new — I know exactly what it means. And even books written in prose borrow tools from poets to increase read-aloud enjoyment. Among my favorite borrowed poetic tools are repetition and alliteration.

Sally: Yes, I like repetition and alliteration, also. OK, so let’s say you love to rhyme, you love rhythm, you love fun words, and repetition and alliteration… How do you come up with ideas that will interest youngsters?

KIM: I’m not sure I have child readers in mind when I’m first developing a concept. I just play with words and ideas that please me, then begin to shape them into a format that works for the picture book crowd. Some themes that are eternal, whether you were a child in the 1960s, 80s or now: school, siblings, nature, pets… the choices, (and ideas!) are endless. 

Read the entire interview here.

I can’t resist looking at another passage from Savvy. That book is full of gems:

“WASH YOUR HAND, WILL JUNIOR,” I screamed again, raising my voice to be heard over the brawl and over the sound of breaking glass. As my brother’s pressure system grew, the window closest to Fish began to fracture, spreading splintering cracks outward like spiderwebs zipping and pinging through the glass as Fish’s gusts and gales swelled in speed and strength. Bobbi screamed and Lester cried out as first one and then another window shattered outward. Ducking and dancing and wincing and flinching with every new explosion of glass, Lester grabbed both boys by their collars and pushed and pulled and dragged them off his bus with Bobbi following after.

Screamed and raising her voice  are redundant, aren’t they?

You could say, “I screamed, trying to make myself heard over…” I suppose. But it’s not necessary. In the flow of conversation it works as written. 

But what I love about this passage is all the stuff that follows. The fracture spreading splintering cracks and the gusts and gales swelling with speed and strength. I love that Bobbi screamed and Lester cried out. I love the ducking and dancing and wincing and flinching and I love that Lester grabbed both boys by their collars and pushed and pulled and dragged them off the bus.

It’s extravagant.

And I guess it’s a matter of taste. I have heard over and over and over that with action scenes you are to use short sentences  and fragments to speed up time. And I understand how that works. But in the midst of the storm Fish is making on the bus, I’m glad that Ingrid Law didn’t use short bursts. Instead she blusters and blows, piling up words like thunderclouds–like a storm building to a climax. She puts me in the middle of the noise and confusion. It’s kind of a “sensory overload” thing going on in that bus.

There’s only one thing I’d change in that paragraph if it were mine to change–I’d make the spider webs pop and ping. But perhaps she was right not to do that. With gusts and gales in the same sentence it probably would have been overkill to have popping and pinging, too.

Anyway, it’s beautiful writing. And it goes against all kinds of rules. It’s full of redundancies. It has long sentences cluttered with unnecessary words.

But there’s more to need than expressing a thought. Readers need beauty. They need sensory input. Cutting dead wood doesn’t mean you strip away all redundancies.

Pushed and pulled and dragged…is all that really necessary? It’s not necessary, at all, that’s what makes you feel like Ms. Law is giving you a generous helping of apple pie ala mode on top of the huge helping of meat and potatoes you just ate. The paragraph is fat. But fat doesn’t always mean bloated. 

Pushed and pulled and dragged gives you a picture of chaos, of a man trying desperately to restore order and not quite sure how to do that. He’s acting because he has to act and he’s deciding as he goes how he should act. First he pushes and then he pulls. But why dragged? It says the exact same thing as pulled.

It’s about rhythm. If you are looking at meaning, dragged is dead wood. It adds nothing to the story. If you are looking at rhythm it adds to the story. Pushed and pulled, for one thing, need dragged to keep you from feeling like there’s too much cutesy alliteration, I think.

But more importantly, it’s about mood-setting. In the paragraph above there is a storm going on in the bus, so the author paints a scene using words that give us a feeling of noise and chaos. 

When you match your prose to your content it gives the reader a fuller experience. Do you ever take time to write a paragraph several different ways? Lean and mean, fat and friendly? Noisy, quiet, crashing, dashing, plodding, plinking…there all kinds of ways to write the same thoughts.  

If you want to post a paragraph below that sets a mood, feel free. I’d love to see what you come up with.

So here I sit, ready to discuss some of the things I learned while reading and I have no passages marked to use as examples.

Never fear. I flip the book open to a random page and here are lovely passages, bursting with lessons for wannabe authors. Here’s one now:

Red-faced and mortified, I just stood there. I couldn’t believe those girls had just called me that horrible name in front of Will Junior, I felt like crawling under the stained brown carpet and staying there. Fish scowled at the two girls, and a burst of wind hit us all so sharp and sudden that it sent them scurrying from the open doorway to check their hair and to fix up all their froufrou frippery.

The Critique Group Response:

I’ve been in enough critique groups to guess that some earnest writer critiquing this passage would say something like, “You’ve shown she’s mortified by her red face, you don’t have to tell us, too. And you’ve used the word ‘just’ in consecutive sentences when you shouldn’t ever use that word at all.”

I’d disagree with that critique. Great writing has a flow to it that is interrupted when we tinker too much with the sentences, trying to follow all the rules. “Red-faced and mortified” works. It flows. Sure we know from context that she is red-faced because she’s mortified and not because she’s just run a mile. We don’t need to be told she’s mortified. But the rhythm of the sentence is pleasing to the ear. The way Law extravagantly piles up words gives the reader a feeling of being pampered with Häagen-Dazs. This is rich fare, not some cheap store brand. 

And the first “just” is necessary. She is saying she did nothing but stand there. “Just” aptly modifies her standing.

The second “just” could be lost without damaging the flow of the words but it certainly doesn’t harm anything by its presence.

Cliché and Alliteration:

Clichés can actually help a writer if she can learn to recognize them as she writes and give them a twist. The cliché in the passage above is, “I felt like crawling into a hole.” Law changes it to feeling like crawling under the stained brown carpet and staying there. That’s much better than crawling into a hole. It’s familiar so we don’t have to work at understanding how mortified she is, but it’s different enough that our brain processes it instead of gliding over it without really seeing it.

And then there’s the alliteration. Sharp and sudden and sent them scurrying. Can you hear that? Do you like it? This a read-aloud book. This is a book that is pleasing to the ear. Not every book has to be written this way, but if you want to add a little pop to you prose, you might consider reading your work aloud and seeing if you can hear a buzzing behind the words. There is the meaning of the words–a gust of wind hit, and the girls ran away–and then there is the way the words are strung together. They give off a little buzz–a feeling of movement. They trip happily along. They trickle and build like a stream picking up power as is runs down the mountain.

So the buzz starts with red-faced and mortified, which is a redundant in context but gives us a sense of movement. That movement builds to sharp and sudden and sent them scurrying, which has four words starting with S but with all different second letters. And then the buzz bursts out at the end with  fix up all their froufrou frippery.

At face value we see that Mibs holds the girls in disdain. She finds their attempts at beauty to be pretty worthless because the girls are ugly on the inside. They have just called her a bad name but they are unaware of the fact that the filth coming from their mouths makes them ugly, and they rush off to fix up their outward appearances, as if those things matter. Mibs sees this as a pointless exercise.

But how great it is that the author didn’t tell me this. How great that she didn’t say, “Mibs looked at them with disdain. They could fix their outsides, but inside their hearts were ugly.” Instead Ingrid Law sent the girls scurrying to fix-up the froufrou frippery.

It just doesn’t get better than fixing up froufrou frippery.

This is not the best passage in the book. This is a random passage. If you want to gain an ear for rhythm, buy this book and read it. Aloud. Listen as the words roll across the page.

Unfortunately, the blog tour is in full swing and I don’t have time to do a decent post about the writing in the book.

What I am able to do is suggest you buy the book (get your own copy so you can mark it up) and study it. If you want to learn about fun language and rhythm, or quirky character descriptions, this is the book to study.

I think you ought also to study the last book we toured,  The Year the Swallows Came Early, by Kathryn Fitzmaurice. That book, in my mind, is perfectly executed with prose that dances, wit, and theme woven in beautifully. I plan to look at both of these on this blog in the near future (If I ever manage to come up with any more time in my day).

The blogging agents have said their slush piles have grown quite a bit lately. Some people have guessed that with the shaky economy more and more people are losing their jobs and thinking, “Well I’ve always wanted to write a book. Now’s a good time. Selling a book may be a good way to make a quick buck.”

I’ve thought, “No way! No one really thinks that writing a book is a way to get rich quick.”

And then a friend called to ask me about the whole publishing deal. She had a book idea. And she was sure it was going to. Sell. Really. Well. She was ready to quit her job so she could devote all her time to spitting the book out, but she wanted to make sure she’d make several hundred thousand dollars first.

Um. Good thing she asked BEFORE she quit her job. I was able to disabuse her of the notion that making scads of money from writing and selling books is easy.

Oh, I encouraged her to write the book and told her I’d help her craft a proposal. Writing a book is never a dumb idea. It’s great, cheap entertainment. It’s just not the best way to get rich quick. You probably have better odds of getting rich if you buy a lottery ticket.

I have four chapters to go.

I’ve been stuck for months. Stuck because I knew that I needed my character to do something at the very end that she would never do. I needed her to make a horrific choice and I couldn’t motivate her.

So I happened to catch a random comment Jim Bell made on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. He pointed to a post he’d done on Novel Journey about the Q factor.

His Q factor post was about foreshadowing so when your character whips out his secret weapon it’s not a total surprise. There’s nothing worse than reading books where the character conveniently takes off his coat and lets his wings out so he can fly out of danger when no one knew, not even the author, for the first three-hundred pages, that he had wings.

You cannot save the day by throwing in some new device.

But then Jim used that thing we all know–you have to foreshadow physical help that is going to effect the outcome of the story–and moved it into the moral, emotional, inner conflict a character faces. The internal struggles needed a Q factor as surely as external ones. Maybe more so.

I could not make my girl do the thing I needed her to do, because I’d not given her proper motivation. I’d not equipped her earlier to make the choice I needed her to make later.

So I added in a moral Q factor. She learns something before the climax that makes it possible for her make a decision so horrific that it seemed she would rather die.

Go read the Q factor post. It got me writing again. Yee haw!

She gives hope to those of us who are…ummm…somewhat less attractive than Amanda Holden.

One of the best things about writing is that you can keep on doing it into old age. Still, we dinosaurs go to conferences and find it’s easy to be intimidated by the young agents and editors. But, heck. If Susan can melt Simon’s heart, anything’s possible, eh?

In case any literary agents ever stop by here, I’d like to make it known that I’m a year older than Susan and much homelier.

I have been kissed, I admit. But still. I think I’d make a pretty good underdog hero.

You can only enter if you have not been paid for your writing (even writing in magazines or on the Internet) and if you aren’t currently under contract for a work of fiction.

If that’s you, get writing and enter.