Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 29
March 24, 2015
Two Disparate Thoughts
Two disparate thoughts accompanied my breakfast this morning. The first was from a book called 365 Buddhist Inspirations, which I’m using for my morning reading: So many of our problems arise because we always feel cut off from something we need. We do not feel whole and therefore turn expectantly toward other people for the […]
March 17, 2015
To Save Yourself
The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself. —Sherwood Anderson to his son Last week I talked about some of the financial realities of being a writer, and this week I’m turning the coin to its other side. I want to talk about why we write, why any […]
March 10, 2015
Wealthy, Connected or Supported?
A discussion has been going on the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators site as to whether it’s necessary these days to be wealthy, connected or supported to launch a career writing children’s books. The discussion has made me smile the way limited-to-now visions always make us old folks smile. The truth is, being […]
March 3, 2015
Only One Rule
A reader of last week’s blog delivered an impassioned lecture on never saying “every writer” or “always,” something that I have long taken care not to do. When I was a very young teacher teaching high school, I taught passionately according to the way I would have wanted to be taught. And I had a […]
February 24, 2015
Kill Your Darlings
Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your […]
February 17, 2015
A Wonderful Childhood
Sometimes I think that because it is so difficult to reconcile the wonder and horror of childhood, people make a choice to remember only one or the other. —Richard Hoffman, “Backtalk: Notes Toward an Essay on Memoir” Many years ago, I sat with a student discussing her work. I was having a hard time knowing […]
February 10, 2015
Grit and Magic
Part of learning to create things well is just practice—putting in your time, keeping at it, refusing to give up when you make mistakes, which you are going to do a lot. Nowadays, people are calling the willingness to persist like this:grit. And yet there is another aspect to this business of creating things—call it […]
February 3, 2015
To Market, To Market I Go
Crinkle, Crackle, Crack . . . It’s Spring! Well, not just yet, but soon . . . soon. I have a new picture book coming out April 1 with Holiday House, Crinkle, Crackle, Crack . . . It’s Spring, wonderfully illustrated by John Shelley who also illustrated another of my picture books, Halloween Forest. Having […]
January 27, 2015
Writing Across the Divide
Much discussion in the children’s literature world centers these days on the topic of diversity. Do those of us who are white, which is still the vast majority of us who are publishing, simply go on writing out of our accustomed white privilege without any thought to the changing world around us? Do we write […]
January 20, 2015
To Tell the Truth
Last week I wrote about my beginnings as a children’s writer, what had brought me to the hard truths that often form the core of my stories. But I wrote about only one level of that beginning, my discovery that it was possible to write hard truths, even for a young audience, and to be […]
