Children's book #2
Mar. 15th, 2004 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cleolindaSo. I have to start working on my second children's lit project for tonight's workshop--a chapter book. I love picture books, but I realized pretty quickly on that I love them for... the pictures. I collect artists, basically, and barely read the text. (Now, when I was a kid, the actual demographic of the picture book, yes, I read the text.) Chapter books, though, are what I really loved to read. Harry Potter is technically young adult literature--a lot longer and more complex. What I'm talking about is more like Bunnicula, Bridge to Terabithia, Babysitters' Club, Sleepover Friends (seriously, am I the only person who read these? No Sleepover Friends love?), Little House on the Prairie, The Westing Game, The American Girl books, and so on--see all the variety there?
The textbooks we're using--something very silly and thin; at least one of them is titled You CAN Write for Children!, you know, as opposed to something like, "On the Craft of Writing for Children"--says that series books are huge, because kids buy all of them, rather than just check the one they're interested in out of the library. (Witness my box of 5,647 Sleepover Friends books and my mom's vintage Nancy Drew collection.) So publishers love children's series. (Which is funny, because I'm not aware of adult publishers who are like, "Yes! Let me publish 30 volumes of your crappy fantasy series, Totally Unknown Writer!") Also mysteries. Kids like mysteries. Fantasy and mystery. I'm just goin' on what the book says here.
So. I have to turn in "something" tonight. Seriously, Crunk was like, "Notes, freewriting, an outline, I don't know, I don't care. SOMETHING." A chapter book is generally 60-80 pages, and I have no doubt he would have made us write the whole thing if we didn't have five weeks left in the class. So we're having to turn in the first page, the last page, and a page from the middle. And because I write out of order anyway--hell, that's about the order I write in--this is a piece of cake. (I'm also really comfortable just turning to a random part of the story and saying, "All right, let's work on this part now," completely out of context. Or rather, I keep the context in mind the whole time, and working ahead allows me to go back and make sure everything I need is in place. You ought to try it sometime.)
So what I'm really having to do for tonight is the background work. This is the stuff I really like. I already have an adult fantasy project I've been working on for several years now--I think of it as crop rotation, and this is the fallow field right now, and so I'm letting it do its own thing while I try to actually finish Black Ribbon--but I'm thinking of doing a completely different fantasy for the children's book. I like Joan Aiken's The Last Slice of Rainbow collection a lot--it's the kind of book where the boy can be on the bus in the first part of the story and be helping a knight at the end, and both these elements are internally consistent. He's not transported anywhere; his world actually contains both buses and dragons. The adult fantasy thing is very Old World; I think a kid would get more of a kick out of a story where a princess could answer the telephone.
I'm thinking about making it a fantasy mystery, actually. I was obsessed with opening my own detective agency when I was a kid. The only problem was, I set up shop, and... there was nothing to detect. The only case I ever got was the Case of the Missing Garden Spade, and I couldn't crack it, and my mom found it two weeks later on her own. Mysteries are hard to plot, but I seem to be all right with plotting. I mean, I've done Black Ribbon and all. Mysteries really have to be plotted back end first, which is how I write anyway. So imagine if you had an Encyclopedia Brown-type mystery, only with two girls, the girl detective and her sidekick, who happens to be a princess (and I really like that the princess is the sidekick), and they've got mysteries to solve.
I should probably stop writing here and get to work--mostly because I don't want to give away too much of the idea. Like every other writer you've ever met, possibly including yourself, I'm paranoid that someone will steal my ideas. Feel free to laugh at that idea.
The textbooks we're using--something very silly and thin; at least one of them is titled You CAN Write for Children!, you know, as opposed to something like, "On the Craft of Writing for Children"--says that series books are huge, because kids buy all of them, rather than just check the one they're interested in out of the library. (Witness my box of 5,647 Sleepover Friends books and my mom's vintage Nancy Drew collection.) So publishers love children's series. (Which is funny, because I'm not aware of adult publishers who are like, "Yes! Let me publish 30 volumes of your crappy fantasy series, Totally Unknown Writer!") Also mysteries. Kids like mysteries. Fantasy and mystery. I'm just goin' on what the book says here.
So. I have to turn in "something" tonight. Seriously, Crunk was like, "Notes, freewriting, an outline, I don't know, I don't care. SOMETHING." A chapter book is generally 60-80 pages, and I have no doubt he would have made us write the whole thing if we didn't have five weeks left in the class. So we're having to turn in the first page, the last page, and a page from the middle. And because I write out of order anyway--hell, that's about the order I write in--this is a piece of cake. (I'm also really comfortable just turning to a random part of the story and saying, "All right, let's work on this part now," completely out of context. Or rather, I keep the context in mind the whole time, and working ahead allows me to go back and make sure everything I need is in place. You ought to try it sometime.)
So what I'm really having to do for tonight is the background work. This is the stuff I really like. I already have an adult fantasy project I've been working on for several years now--I think of it as crop rotation, and this is the fallow field right now, and so I'm letting it do its own thing while I try to actually finish Black Ribbon--but I'm thinking of doing a completely different fantasy for the children's book. I like Joan Aiken's The Last Slice of Rainbow collection a lot--it's the kind of book where the boy can be on the bus in the first part of the story and be helping a knight at the end, and both these elements are internally consistent. He's not transported anywhere; his world actually contains both buses and dragons. The adult fantasy thing is very Old World; I think a kid would get more of a kick out of a story where a princess could answer the telephone.
I'm thinking about making it a fantasy mystery, actually. I was obsessed with opening my own detective agency when I was a kid. The only problem was, I set up shop, and... there was nothing to detect. The only case I ever got was the Case of the Missing Garden Spade, and I couldn't crack it, and my mom found it two weeks later on her own. Mysteries are hard to plot, but I seem to be all right with plotting. I mean, I've done Black Ribbon and all. Mysteries really have to be plotted back end first, which is how I write anyway. So imagine if you had an Encyclopedia Brown-type mystery, only with two girls, the girl detective and her sidekick, who happens to be a princess (and I really like that the princess is the sidekick), and they've got mysteries to solve.
I should probably stop writing here and get to work--mostly because I don't want to give away too much of the idea. Like every other writer you've ever met, possibly including yourself, I'm paranoid that someone will steal my ideas. Feel free to laugh at that idea.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-03-15 02:15 pm (UTC)*snorts with laughter*
It's a classic! I'm still laughing about it. I love your story idea - I can just see the princess tagging along as something to do. You can get all sorts of conflict happening if she suddenly decides to stop beause she's a princess and, well, she can do what she wants. And I shall not laugh at you over your paranoia, mostly because I share it myself. Good luck with your book. It sounds like it could be good fun.
I was interested to read about your way of writing. The idea of writing later, potentially more interesting, bits has often appealed to me but I rarely do it. But it is a good idea to know where you're going, so you can make things fit (as you said). I once read that Terry Pratchett usually tries to write his last scene first, so he knows wot to aim for. Makes perfect sense to me.
*goes back to waiting impatiently for the next installment of Black Ribbon*
no subject
Date: 2004-03-15 02:38 pm (UTC)*goes back to waiting impatiently for the next installment of Black Ribbon*
Awwww.
If it makes you feel any better, the Sarah Bernhardt bio I'm reading now has all kinds of good stuff for Black Ribbon...
no subject
Date: 2004-03-15 11:40 pm (UTC)Paging Mr. Jordan, paging Mr. Robert Jordan, please.
ANYway...I try writing that 'whatever, whenever' way and it doesn't work for me. Of course, the chronological thing doesn't work for me. In fact, no way at all works for me. *whimper*
But I admire you. You got moxie, toots. And you can actually write interesting stuff, to judge by "The Black Ribbon".
no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 09:58 am (UTC)Wasn't there a girl who only wore white, red, and black? She was a White Stripe fifteen years early!
no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 09:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 10:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 11:00 am (UTC)Oh, and I saw something really funny last night. I think you'd just posted in a community on my f-list or something: pasunepipe. The post above you on my friends page, by total coincidence, had an icon of a popular marshmallow confection that said, "Ceci n'est pas une Peep." I just about died laughing, because I am easily amused. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 11:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 03:31 pm (UTC)http://www.livejournal.com/community/dot_cattiness/1083991.html?nc=1
no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 03:47 pm (UTC)