Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 41

Writing for Money

One of my editors said to me recently, “I tried to support myself with my writing once. The whole endeavor lasted for about a day and a half and scared me to death.”

I am one of the privileged ones. I do support myself with my writing. I no longer even supplement my income by teaching on the side, something I did for forty years. Nor do I supplement my income by speaking in schools as many children’s writers do. More than a decade ago I ran out of the energy required to hold the attention of g...

A Search for God

I talked last week about the years I spent plumbing novels for scraps of ideas about God. What I found in church and discovered through reading more traditionally theological sources was too expected, too much cloaked in arcane language, too certain of itself. I needed questions that didn’t come with ready-made answers. And so I turned to novelists, the creative minds that challenged and validated the rest of my world, for my theology, too.

What I rarely did, though, was to carry to my own wor...

The Forbidden Topic … Religion

Last week I took on same-sex marriage. While I’m on a roll, I might as well talk about religion, too.

There aren’t many topics forbidden to those who write for young people these days. Especially if the audience is defined as young adult, writers can take on sex, violence, racism, social taboos, war . . . you name it. And sometimes we can even tiptoe into religion.

Religion has long been a topic of passionate interest to me. And not just because I was married to an Episcopal priest for 28 years...

Hate Enshrined

In this new and sometimes bewildering world of blogging, bloggers are advised to stake out a territory. Define who you are, what your topic is, where you have credibility, what will draw your audience to your words and stay there.

That hasn’t been difficult for me. I write for children and young adults. For years I have also taught those who want to write for children and young adults. Writing my own books and teaching developing writers forms the core of my experience and thus the lens throug...

A formless form

I’ve found a new way to write. It’s something I’ve been doing from time to time for several years now. I gallop along in a free-swinging prose dropping in rhymes here and here and over there, too, just for fun. It could almost be called free verse except that free verse specifically doesn’t use rhyme.

My first picture book to be published using this oddly formless form was In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lamb published by Holiday House in 2011 with delightful illustrations by Emily Arnold McCully....

When Is Scary Too Delicious?

Last week I talked about my new picture book, Halloween Forest, and about the function that fear has in a story, even for very young children. Fear tucked inside the safety of a story can allow us an exciting chill without submitting ourselves to danger. It allows us to move through our own feelings and emerge on the other side, having grown larger.

But that leaves us with a question, an important one. When is scary entirely too delicious? The truth is—and it’s an important truth for those pre...

The Purging of Pity and Fear

Halloween is almost upon us, and my newest picture book, Halloween Forest, is on the shelf.

When I received my first copy with John Shelley’s marvelously creepy illustrations of the forest of bones I’d written about, a rather delicious shiver ran down my spine. All those bony tree hands reaching …reaching.

And my own shiver brings up an interesting question. What is the point of scary for kids?

The question carries me back to another book and a very specific child. When my son, Peter, was a todd...

Emotional Power

A while back, talking about gathering ideas for a sequel to Little Dog, Lost, I wrote, “I’m off and running, the story that’s growing in my mind gathering emotional power as I go.”

And that is the key concept to understand when it comes to choosing the stories we write …emotional power. If an idea doesn’t touch my own emotions, I can’t possibly write it in a way that will touch my readers.

How do I tell if a story idea is right for me, worth embarking on the long process of committing it to the...

Writer’s Block?

On page 161 I discovered that I had forgotten how to write a novel.

It’s happened before. I’m moving along at a fairly steady pace and suddenly . . . what’s that? A brick wall? And what’s my nose doing pressed up against it?

The popular term for the experience is “writer’s block.” Even grade-school children have heard of it and consider it a serious disability. “Do you ever get writer’s block?” they used to ask solemnly back in the days when I went out to schools. And I suppose I have, though i...

A New Teaching Opportunity

I’ll be teaching two on-line sessions with Writing for Children Live this month. One, on “The Basics of Writing Successful Picture Books” will be on Wednesday, September 19th, at 7 p.m. EDT. The second will be a webinar entitled “Point of View and Psychic Distance in Fiction for Young People.” That will be presented on the next Wednesday, September 26th, 7 p.m. EDT. You can sign up, no charge, for either interactive session. These two sessions will launch a new on-line teaching venture, Writi...