Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 38

“Really Touched Me”

Last week I talked about an e-mail from a student. Here is one I just received from another reader:

Dear Mrs. Bauer,

My name is Mia and I am 8 years old. I am home schooled. I found one of your

books at the library called The Very Little Princess and I loved it. When I was

reading the story, I wanted to go into the story. The very last lines really

touched me. I really hope to find other books you have written.

Maia’s response is particularly interesting given the nature of The Very Little Princess...

I Don’t Like Your Book

It was the heading for the e-mail. “I don’t like your book.”

The text repeated the sentiment. It said with the same directness and simplicity, “I don’t like your book.”

The message was “sent from awesome.”

Since I have a lot of books out there, my response was as simple and direct as the incoming e-mail. I wrote back and asked which book Awesome was referring to and why he didn’t like it. (Am I right to assume that, almost inevitably, Awesome is a he?)

Awesome responded. The book he referred to,...

Resonance: The Core of the Verse Novel

What would prompt a perfectly respectable writer of prose fiction to attempt a novel in verse?

Because verse can accomplish things prose cannot?

Because experimenting with new methods and styles is the best way to stay fresh in the midst of a long career?

Simply for the challenge?

Because, beyond the hard work of it, writing a story in verse is great fun?

For me it was all of the above.

Little Dog, Lost, published by Atheneum last spring, was my first novel in verse. I am currently working on my se...

The Ending in the Beginning

The ending lies in the beginning . . . always.

That’s true of stories, anyway, and it’s something I’ve known about them for a long time. In fact, when I first assemble a story I always have a few basic things in place: the story problem, the character who will struggle to resolve the problem, other characters who will assist or create more difficulty along the way, the incident that starts the story off and . . . the ending. I won’t necessarily know how my main character is going to resolve he...

The Question of Courage

A couple of weeks ago I talked about my father and the role he played, in a rather perverse way, in encouraging my unlikely career as a writer. I asked my readers, “What gives you the courage, the drive, the against-all-odds determination to seek out a working writer’s fraught existence? And what keeps you struggling with it, day after sometimes discouraging day?”

Here are some more responses to my question:

Janet Fox said this:

I have such a similar story, in a way. My mother was a frustrated w...

The Blessing of Contrariness

Edna O’Brien

Last week I wrote about my father, about the way he, disappointed in his own existence, discouraged my brother’s and my every aspiration, thinking he could save us from disappointment that way. I told how our dad’s discouragement actually gave us both the determination we needed to succeed in our very different careers.

I asked my readers, what gives you the courage, the drive, the against-all-odds determination to seek out a working writer’s fraught existence? And what keeps you s...

An Unintended Gift

Chester Dane

My father was a disappointed man. He graduated from college into the teeth of the Great Depression with a degree in chemistry. He landed a job, married my mother and soon found himself out of work. In those hard times, the last-hired, first-fired doctrine ruled.

After a long struggle to find a job that didn’t disappear out from under him, Dad was finally forced to accept work on his brother-in-law’s farm in Minnesota. He had grown up on a poor southern-California farm, so he knew f...

Cobbling Together an Income

Being a working writer means just that …working. And it also means continually strategizing ways to cobble together an income. Especially if you have no back-up salary, your own or a partner’s, to count on for the groceries, the medical bills, the rent.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

Last year I published three new books, a verse novel, Little Dog, Lost, and two picture books, Halloween Forest and Dinosaur Thunder. All received starred reviews. My writing life seemed to be in order. But I’ve...

The Real World of a Working Writer

I prefer that term, working writer, to professional writer. In asking myself why that’s so, I went searching for a definition of the word professional and came up with this one from Reference.com. Here it is in part: “In western nations, such as the United States, the term [professional] commonly describes highly educated, mostly salaried workers, who enjoy considerable work autonomy, economic security, a comfortable salary, and are commonly engaged in creative and intellectually challenging...

Write to Publish . . . or Write to Write?

A couple of weeks ago I shared a twelve-year-old writer’s request for help publishing her novels. I asked for responses to pass on to the young writer and have shared those here, too. Today let’s bring the topic back to ourselves, the grown-up writers out there longing for, needing publication.

Of course writers need to be published, because we need to share our work. It’s as hard for most of us to write in a closet as it would be to play a violin in one. But there are many ways of sharing, an...