Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 42

Learning to Write, Then and Now

When I first mentioned the MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program at Vermont College of Fine Arts in this blog, I said that when I was invited to teach there I was skeptical. I had learned how to write without any such program. I had come to be published without even a meaningful creative writing class or a mentor.

As a University student, I took a couple of creative writing classes, but they gave me little except an excuse to use homework time to write, which was itself a blessi...

A Great Way to Teach, a Great Way to Learn

I ended my blog last week with a dubious yes, having agreed to teach in a brand new, first-of-its-kind MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. The program was at Vermont College in Montpelier, Vermont. It was to be a low-residency program, meaning that faculty and students would spend ten or eleven days on campus twice a year attending workshops, lectures, readings and that the rest of the work–the actual writing and then the critique of the writing–would be done by corresponden...

An Invitation

I have recently returned from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier where I received an honorary MFA in Writing. I’m not sure what one does with such a thing, but receiving it was a profound honor.

From the time I was very young I knew I wanted to write stories. What kind of stories I didn’t know, just stories. One day in college I happened to write a single paragraph for a creative writing assignment, a paragraph that was never shown to the professor because it didn’t fulfill the assignm...

The Adult Narrator in a Children’s Story

Last week I quoted Dallas Bradel and her support for my call to keep adults more present in stories for young people. I agreed, of course, with all she said.

But she had more to offer, and this is the way she continued her very articulate argument:

I applaud your understanding of the importance of supportive, likeable adults in the lives of your protagonists. In Little Dog, Lost, Mark’s mother and the lonely old man give readers some insight into the value of adults as human beings and as allie...

Another Reader’s Perspective

I’ve been sharing my readers’ responses to my July 10th blog about excluding adults from our stories. Here’s a response from Dallas Bradel:

It may seem as if an author is empowering children by communicating that kids can solve their own problems, but I believe these authors, however well-meaning, are doing a disservice to their readers. Children need, and need to recognize that they need, the guidance, instruction, love, support, and presence of adults in their lives in order to fully develop...

The Pendulum’s Swing

I mentioned last week that I’ve received a number of interesting comments on my blog on July 10th concerning the long-standing practice of excluding adults from kids’ stories. Here is one by Moira M:

I remember when writing teachers would state, as a rule, that children did not want adults in their books. One of the things I love about Carl Hiaasen’s books for young people is that his child protagonists interact with three-dimensional, fully-realized adults, and Hiaasen has scenes with only ad...

On Excluding Adults

I’ve received more responses on the topic I wrote about last week—the practice of excluding adults from stories for young people—than any other I’ve taken on, so I’m going to stay with the topic for a couple of weeks.

One young mother, Meghan Gordon, responded this way:

Adam and I have been thinking about this issue recently. Several weeks ago, our 7 year old son decided to have an adventure. He and a friend packed their backpacks with the essentials (Fig Newtons and a baseball bat) and left ou...

Taking Sides

In 1976 when I published my first middle-grade novel, the lines were clearly drawn. If you wrote for young people, you had to be on their side, because there were clearly sides. Adults were on one. Kids were on the other. And though it’s trite to say it, the twain did very little meeting.

Adults, it was assumed, were to be banished from juvenile literature, or if they were there, they were to appear only in the shadowy background or to take their proper role in the story as the villains, the o...

Fido in Love and Mark’s Mother, Too

I mentioned in my blog last week that in gathering ideas for another story set in Erthly, the home of Little Dog, Lost, I decided that the cat Fido would be an important character in the new story. And if he is to be an important character, then he needs both to go on being the dog-dominating cat we already know and, at the same time, to grow more richer, more complex. And what better way to make a character richer than to discover a soft underside?

A quick leap. Fido will fall in love!

With wh...

Back to Ideas … Where Do They Come From?

Usually ideas for a novel grow slowly, gathering over a period of weeks or months from bits and pieces that cling to a central idea.

I have such a novel idea gathering now, even while I’m deeply immersed in writing another. And because I’m writing this blog I’ve been more intentional than usual lately in noting the way that gathering process works.

I have known from the moment I finished writing Little Dog, Lost that I wanted to return to the town of Erthly and to the characters I created there...