Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 40

How Do You Know?

“How do you know,” a reader asked, “when a picture book is right?” She was writing in response to my blog about my most recent failed attempt to write a Christmas picture book.

In the blog I said that after two rather intense weeks of work, I had a picture book text that I loved, but even as I finished it I knew it didn’t work. This reader came back to ask, reasonably enough, how a person knows when a picture book does work.

And the truth is, if I could answer that question definitively I would...

A Surprising New Way of Writing

If necessity is the mother of invention, then perhaps disaster—even a relatively small one—is the mother of necessity.

On a snowy Sunday, December 9th, I slipped on hidden ice, dislocated my elbow, and broke my rotator bone just below the elbow. That evening and in the days that followed I made a number of interesting discoveries.

The first was that if you arrive at a hospital emergency room via ambulance you might as well be the Queen of Sheba. You get instant attention. In my mother’s last ye...

Starting Over

Every morning, right around 6 a.m., I spring awake. I could stay in bed longer if I wanted to, but I’m done with sleep. I step across the hall to my study where there is just enough open space on the floor for my Pilates exercises and a bit of yoga.

That done and my body beginning to unfurl, I settle in to meditate.

Breathe. Breathe again.

I’m not a particularly experienced meditator. I’ve explored mindfulness meditation several other times in my life, but only in the last couple of years have I...

A Happy Christmouse to All!

“We need a sweet Christmas story, and we know you can do sweet.”

It was an editor on the phone, one I especially enjoy working with, and I found myself smiling. That the author of Killing Miss Kitty and Other Sins would be admired for her capacity to write sweet! I was charmed. So I wrote The Christmas Baby. It was sweet, and the book has been a success …probably in great part due to Richard Cowdrey’s illustrations, which are even sweeter than the text.

However, the next time the same editor ca...

Is Remembering Enough?

Every time I happen across a children’s television program where adult actors are pretending to be children I am grateful that those of us who write for young people are permitted to appear in the world in our adult clothes. We are even allowed to grow old!

What we must do, however, to make the leap from our own world to those we serve is to remember what most adults prefer to forget …our own childhoods.

It’s understandable that few adults want to retain a deep knowledge of their own young selv...

Writing into the “Golden Years”

The boy sat at his desk, his long legs splayed in front of him, his face twisted in disbelief. “What makes you think you can write for kids?” he asked.

Well, no. He didn’t say it quite that rudely, but that’s exactly what he meant. He looked at the old lady standing in front of his high school class in creative writing—and I must have been twenty years younger then—and clearly couldn’t believe what he was hearing. How could such a crone possibly think that she knew anything at all about what i...

What about Branding?

Once you’re published, you hear a lot these days about “branding,” about getting settled into and known in a single genre. No one talked about branding when I came into the field forty years ago. But then my peers and I almost always started out under the guidance of a single editor, and that editor usually did his or her own shaping of our careers. If you succeeded with your first novel or your first picture book or your first work of nonfiction, your editor was very apt to want more of the...

The Unglamorously Hard Work Part

In the last few weeks I’ve been talking about writing for the pure love of writing, not as a career, and then I turned to asking what it takes to make a career, beyond serendipity, which is usually one of the most important ingredients. Today, as promised, I’m going to talk about the unglamorously hard work required to make a living as a writer.

It starts with all I’ve been talking about, sitting down to write with consistency. And that begins with defining your writing as your work, because n...

Serendipity

Last week I talked about what it takes to build a career as a writer.

I discussed the importance of setting a writing schedule and keeping it.

I said that it is essential to learn to revise and to get the kind of input that tells you what kinds of revisions will be useful.

And then I marched straight on into the deepest secret of every successful writer . . . serendipity.

No writing career gets very far without it.

My serendipity came about in 1987 when my novel of the year before, On My Honor, wo...

So You Want to Write for a Living

Last week I talked about the benefits of writing for your own deep pleasure, not having to depend on this uncertain craft to have a warm bed at night and food in your belly. And as disingenuous as that sounds, coming from someone who is a career writer, I do remember from my own early years the pure joy of writing simply because I loved to write.

But I also remember yearning for a scrap of recognition, yearning to earn enough dollars even to pay for paper and typewriter ribbons, for the courag...