Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 33

Why Write for Children?

All of us who write for young people have experienced it, that moment when someone asks what we do, we tell them, and they say, “Oh, that must be fun!” or “How sweet!” or a head-patting “Isn’t that nice!”

And we’re annoyed. This is serious work, after all.

P.L. Travers

But how often do we ask ourselves the unspoken question that lies behind that rather condescending response. Why do we choose children or young people as our topic, as our audience? Why are we compelled to reach so far back into o...

Transformation

Transformation

The natural warmth that emerges when we experience pain includes all the heart qualities: love, compassion, gratitude, tenderness in any form. It also includes loneliness, sorrow, and the shakiness of fear. . . . these generally unwanted feelings are pregnant with kindness, with openness and caring. These feelings that we’ve become so accomplished at avoiding can soften us, can transform us. Pema Chodran

Pema Chodran, the famed Buddhist teacher, isn’t talking about pain experi...

A Right to Exist

Last week I wrote about revision, about how much I love the process of reworking and rethinking a manuscript I already have down, how I find revising so much more satisfying than “pushing a dirty peanut across the floor with your nose,” Joyce Carol Oates’ description of writing a first draft.

I asked for comments from my readers, your own response to revision, and I received a number of responses. Most, however, were in the form of questions.

The first and biggest question was from Mary Atkinso...

In Praise of Revision

In Praise of Revision

“Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.” —Joyce Carol Oates

I’m not sure I would have said it quite that way, but I agree entirely that first drafts are hard work. Nothing like the fun of revision.

The fun of revision? Yes! And yes, yes, yes! I love revising. Don’t you?

When I sit down to write a first draft, I have nothing before me but a blank screen or, it used to be, a blank sheet of paper . . . and sometime...

Mingling Souls

Mingling Souls

John Donne: “ . . . more than kisses, letters mingle souls.”

D.J. Taylor: “It’s is difficult not to feel that when writers stopped sending old-fashioned, hand-written letters to each other, literary life lost a dimension.”

A quote from “Along Publisher’s Row” by Campbell Geeslin: “Does anyone think an exchange of a lot of e-mails deserves to be printed and bound into a book?”

Even as a young girl, I had letter-writing companions, a favorite cousin, a fellow counselor from camp, a f...

My Picture-Book Guru

Kathi Appelt

Kathi Appelt, the amazing Kathi Appelt, is my picture book guru. Everyone who has ever attempted to write a picture book should have one.

I have been struggling with a 400-word picture book for months now. It was sold. I had an introduction to a new editor, a contract in hand, the first half of the advance. And then the editor and I realized that the text she had purchased was going to be too much like another picture book I had coming out with another publisher. (Don’t even ask ho...

Joy in Fiction?

We are programed, each of us, to pay attention to the negative emotions, fear, anger, jealousy, sorrow. Being aware that we are afraid and tending to that fear is a matter of survival, even today. We don’t need a saber-toothed tiger waiting to pounce to justify our fear. A semi barreling toward us will do very nicely. Or a rumor that there are going to be cut-backs at the office.

But joy is another matter entirely. It comes on the breath of a spring day and is gone with the passing breeze. Tar...

April Fool!

It’s been a long winter for those of us in the Upper Midwest. I won’t bother with the statistics, just let the word long stand. Snow and ice and winds and below-zero temperatures. Broken pipes, crunched cars, middle-of-the-night furnace emergencies. Our two small dogs beg to go outside then stand, bewildered, holding up one paw, then another.

Last summer my partner and I landscaped the yard of our rented house. (An odd thing to do, I know, but we had lots of yard and few plantings and isn’t al...

Writer’s Heaven

From Isaac Asimov:

A couple of months ago I had a dream, which I remember with the utmost clarity. (I don’t usually remember my dreams.) I dreamed I had died and gone to Heaven.

I looked about and knew where I was—green fields, fleecy clouds, perfumed air, and the distant, ravishing sound of the heavenly choir. And there was the recording angel smiling broadly at me in greeting.

I said in wonder, “Is this Heaven?”

The recording angel said, “It is.”

I said (and on waking and remembering, I was prou...

Try to be Alive

The most solid advice . . . for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough. — William Saroyan

Someone once suggested to me that my writing was clearly a substitute for living, that I was choosing, day after day, to li...