Sands Hetherington's Blog, page 14

Top Obstacles Children’s Authors Face, and How to Get Past Them

Hi all! Before I get into this week’s blog post, I do have an announcement to make.

Coming up on December 5th, I will be holding a reading and signing at Scuppernong Books in downtown Greensboro at 11 a.m.

I am so excited for this event—holding readings where I can listen to kid’s reactions, see their smiles, and meet people who have shown an interest in my stories is one of the most rewarding experiences a children’s author can have. However, children’s authors (and all authors, at that) face a number of obstacles every day that make these rewarding experiences all the sweeter. Here are a few typical obstacles children’s authors face, and my tips on how to make the most of those difficulties.

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The number of children’s books on the shelves. How do we get our books to stand out among not only all the new children’s books coming out every day, but also among all the old classics (Roald Dahl books, Junie B. Jones, etc.)? Parents will often want to read their children the same books they loved as children, and they’ll pick up other, newer books as other parents recommend them.

So how do you make this obstacle work for you? Promote your books among parenting websites, among the parents in your town, among mommy and daddy bloggers—anyway you can think of to reach parents with your books, this is how you will get your book to stand out. Word of mouth is the best promotion tool there is!

Finding an original story to tell. Children’s books tend to want to promote good, moral values to children. But how many books can be written about being kind, sharing, finding self-assurance, being a good friend…the list goes on and on. The types of characters that interest children tend to be limited as well, with countless stories featuring princesses, and dragons, and animals, and magicians or wizards.

So how do you overcome this challenge? My biggest piece of advice is to focus on your characters. Maybe on the outside your story could seem like just another stereotypical, archetypal story, but if you put in the time to flesh-out your characters, your story will be original. Just like no two people are exactly the same, no two characters, if written well enough to seem like real people, will be the same either.

Balancing writing and a day job. Writing children’s books will not make you a living. Yes, I know there are exceptions (JK Rowling certainly made more than enough money to live on with Harry Potter), but don’t expect to be the exception. Most children’s book authors also need a day job in order to put a roof over their heads and food on the table. And it’s hard to come home from a day job and get back to that book that may or may not stand out and may or may not be original enough of a story to tell, but they have to do it anyway if they ever hope to put a book out to struggle in this world.

Overcoming this challenge is simple—choose writing. Choose to put in the effort. Sit down every day. Give your hands to your day job, but give your soul to your writing. You might not make money, you might not be the next massive success, but you will be able to fulfill your calling to be a children’s author, and hopefully touch a few readers’ lives.

No obstacle in the world should stop you from doing what you feel called to do. And no obstacle in the world will stop me from writing Night Buddies books.

What obstacles have you encountered as an author, or in following whatever passion you have? Have you found a way of coping with those obstacles? Let me know in the comments!

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“For Parents, Happiness is a Very High Bar”

This week I came across a TED Talk that I would recommend to any parent, whether your child is just learning to walk, is just starting school, or is old enough to have a family of their own. It was a talk by a woman named Jennifer Senior called “For Parents, Happiness is a Very High Bar,” in which she discusses how the aim of the modern day parent is to provide their children with happiness, and how that aim is one that causes stress more than anything else.

(If you’re having trouble watching the video above, you can watch the TED talk here)

This talk struck me particularly because I have never heard anyone who could blame the hardships of parenting on wanting children to be happy. You hear it time and time again, from every parent you meet, even from your own parents: “I just want my kids to be happy.” But Senior questions, what does happiness look like? We can hardly control our own happiness, and yet this elusive state of being is something we take full responsibility of in our children?

And this goal not only puts in parents hands something that is practically impossible, it also means that everyone forms their own judgment about what creating happiness looks like. Our society is full of parents putting down other parents for parenting differently than they do. Married homes look down on single parent homes. Gluten-free homes look down on homes that order pizza on Friday nights. Some homes stress academics over extracurriculars, others the reverse. Everyone achieves happiness in different ways, and so everyone parents differently to pass happiness down to their children.

In Senior’s talk, she comes to the conclusion that rather than pass down happiness in our children, maybe we should pass on decency. Morals. Work ethic. Things that will allow children to find happiness in this world for themselves. I agree with her. I raised my son without consulting thousands of parenting books, and without concern for the judgment of homes that might be raising their children differently than I was.

When we take “happiness” out of the picture and fill that role with something concrete, maybe we can take the judgment out of parenting, take the stress off of parents who feel they aren’t doing their jobs if their children aren’t always 100% happy, and maybe we can even raise children that will be be good, productive, and dare I say it, happy members of our society.

What did you think of Senior’s TED talk? Do you agree or disagree with her stance on parenting? Let me know in the comments!

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Tips to Make Traveling with Kids a Breeze This Holiday Season

It’s November! Changing leaves, Starbucks red cups, and with every passing day a step closer to the holidays, which for parents with young children brings up one terrifying image—spending hours on a plane or in the car with screaming, unhappy children on the way to visit family. But traveling with children doesn’t have to be the nightmare we all know it can be. Here are some of my tips to make your holiday travels go smoothly and leave your children with smiles on their faces!

Plan ahead to avoid rushing. Traveling can be stressful enough traveling with adults when you’re running to catch your flight or train, but including children in that mess makes it all the worse. When you leave plenty of time for your travels, your kids can enjoy stopping and checking things out in the airport, there is plenty of time for bathroom breaks or just “I’ve been in this car too long” breaks, and eliminates unnecessary stress.

Play observation games. When you make traveling, especially on longer trips, seem like a game rather than a pain, your child will be less prone to having a meltdown. Give them a camera and ask them to take pictures of all the animals they see, their favorite cloud, or a different road signs along the way. Play “I Spy” or other road trip games to keep them entertained and focused on the trip.

Plan for their comfort. Pay attention to what the weather will be, and pack anything they might need to be comfortable. Let them wear sweats or shorts (depending on the weather) so they won’t feel as fidget-y from discomfort. Basically, set all those minimalism thoughts aside, and just pack everything. But don’t let your children over-pack their own suitcases. Nothing is worse than the complaints of a child carrying a suitcase or backpack too heavy for them—and ultimately you’ll end up being the one carrying the extra weight.

Avoid sugar. It’s just not a good idea to placate an unhappy, tired child with candy from the gas station or airport kiosk. They will have too much energy to sit still, and their crash isn’t going to be fun for anyone.

These tips worked well for me over my son’s youth, and traveling became one of our favorite things to do together!

Do you have any travel tips of your own? Have you ever tried using one of these? Let me know in the comments!

P.S. Thank you to everyone who participated in my Goodreads giveaway of Night Buddies and the Pineapple Cheesecake Scare! Winners were chosen today, and your books will be coming to you shortly!

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How to Filter What Your Child Should Be Reading

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This is a tough topic for me to approach, because as a children’s author and an advocate for #BoysWhoRead, I would like to believe that there are no books that should be off-limits for children to leave. All books have the power to expand our children’s minds and help them with their studies, their critical thinking, and their ability to empathize, but just as we filter what our children watch on television, it is important to many parents to make sure books are “age appropriate.”

But how do we go about doing this? Books aren’t categorized like movies into ratings from G-R, and most likely you don’t have the time to read every book your child brings home before they do to make sure it meets your standards for appropriate. And many times you won’t be able to spot all of the content in a book by a quick flip-through and reading of the back cover. That being said, here are some practical and helpful tips to help you filter what your children are reading, and how to decide what you should be filtering for:

Understand your child’s reading-level: This is a suggestion based on filtering by what your child will be able to understand. Part of helping kids fall in love with reading is providing them with stories that will challenge their reading skills, but not frustrate them to the point of putting the book down and never wanting to pick one up again. Children’s books are labeled by age ranges and reading-levels, which will help you determine whether or not a book is going to be the right reading-level for your child.

Take another look at those reading-level labels: Maybe your child is above their own reading level, I know my son John was when he was growing up, but if you want to filter for appropriateness, this is another tool for you to use. Typically the level of appropriateness correlates with the age range a book was intended for, so if your second grader wants to read a junior high level book, not only might it be too far above their reading level, it cold touch on subject matters they simply are not ready for.

Understand the difference between inappropriate and mature: Some books are risqué simply for the thrill—Fifty Shades of Grey, for example. Other books simply touch on mature themes, such as peer pressure, sexual abuse, etc. Risqué books aren’t necessary for your child to read before they are old enough to filter for themselves. Mature books should be allowed based on your judgment of your child’s maturity level. Some young children are ready to be exposed to tough subjects through literature. And the best part about letting your child read these kinds of books is that it opens the channel for you and your child to talk openly about these hard themes they will probably have to come to terms with at some point in their life.

Read Amazon/Goodreads reviews: You might not have time to read a whole book before you give it to your child, but reading reviews is quick and easy! If there is anything truly inappropriate or shocking, the reviews will most certainly call it out.

When it comes down to it, know that only you know what your child is and isn’t ready for. If you are truly bothered by a certain word, character, or theme in a book, you have the right as a parent to keep it on a higher bookshelf until your child is ready to make the decision of what to read on his/her own.

Are there any books you have kept your children from reading? Do you believe that filtering what kids read is wrong? Let me know in the comments!

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How Much TV Should Our Kids Be Watching?

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This is a question I know has come up again and again within groups of parents, education systems, and in my own life as a father trying to raise a son who knew the pleasure of reading in a world ruled by television screens. No household is without a TV, no school doesn’t have one in their classrooms, and it’s known that we can’t stop ourselves or our children from spending time in front of it, but how much is too much? Where is the line between watching a healthy, even educational, amount of television, and becoming addicted and attached to our nightly programming?

According to an article on kidshealth.org, “Most kids plug into the world of television long before they enter school. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF): two-thirds of infants and toddlers watch a screen an average of 2 hours a day. Kids under age 6watch an average of about 2 hours of screen media a day, primarily TV and videos or DVDs.”

There’s no argument that those statistics reveal that there’s a large amount of TV watching in our children’s lives these days, but rather than determine a specific “healthy” or “unhealthy” amount of TV watching, I think it is our job as parents to rule what is playing on our children’s screens. Watching two hours of a PBS show, for instance, or a Disney show that you think is teaching your child wholesome life lessons such as learning to apologize or being thankful for what they have is probably less harmful than watching two hours of mindless entertainment.

It is also important to make sure you add other activities into your child’s life than television, and the amount of time they have to watch TV will dramatically decrease the more outside activities they have to do. Whether those activities involve playing a sport, taking music lessons, spending time outdoors, hanging out with friends, or reading books, all of them will help to make sure your child is getting a range of experiences off the screen, and becoming a healthier person for it—emotionally and physically.

When it comes down to it, television is not evil. It doesn’t need to be cut out of children’s lives. And if you as a parent approach television in a responsible way, your children will too.

How much time do you and your children spend in front of the TV? Do you have any suggestions to keep it from becoming the main source of entertainment in your house? Let me know in the comments below!

 

 

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My Journey from Single Father to Author

I’m so excited to share with you this week an article I wrote for the Good Men Project! This was my first time writing for them, and I hope to have many more articles to share in the future. Let me know what you think of this one either in the comments, or over on the Good Men Project comments.

Looking forward to hearing from some of you guys. Enjoy!

Post originally appeared on goodmenproject.com here

When my son John was born, I didn’t expect to become a stay-at-home father. I didn’t know any other dads who stayed at home to take care of their kids most of the time. I didn’t grow up with a stay-at-home father, and the concept of being a man who changed his job description from a solid 9-5 to being a single homemaker was not something I ever envisioned.

But then John came around, my wife and I soon divorced, and there I was with full-custody of a young boy who needed someone to stay home and look after him. I didn’t know it yet, but I had just entered the greatest time of my life.

As a stay-at-home father, I felt like two different people. Half of the time I spent with John I felt like a kid again. John and I did everything together, went everywhere together, and were about as inseparable as any two friends can be. During the summers we drove through forty-eight states and five Canadian provinces.  We participated in all kinds of father-son activities: little league football, basketball, and baseball, as well as boxing, golf, boating, camping . . . the sky was the limit, and I loved seeing the smile on that boy’s face when he got lost in doing something he loved.

John got his first puppy, a St. Bernard he named Henry, and we loved him so much that I began breeding St. Bernards. Most of the memories I have of John’s youth are of our adventures, his laughter, and the feeling that I was getting to experience life through a child’s eyes for a second time. But the reality of being a stay-at-home father and raising a child by myself wasn’t always idyllic.

There was the time I arrived to pick him up at the movies when he was ten, and the theatre he had gone in was dark and deserted. He was nowhere to be found. When I finally got hold of security, we turned the lights on and found him sunk down in one of the seats, asleep and quite unaware of the panic he had caused.

There was the time when his kindergarten French teacher told me John probably had a learning disability because he was having trouble in her class. Now he speaks ten languages and has an M.A. from Edinburgh University with honors in Russian and German—and wouldn’t I love to tell all this to that teacher!

There were the six years of piano lessons that were like ripping out my fingernails just to get him to practice, until we finally threw in the towel.

There was trying to be both mother and father, parent and friend, teacher and student. I had no examples to follow, no comrade to turn to on the hard days, no office to escape to when watching Sesame Street for the hundredth time made me think I might actually be going crazy.

But those hard days are nothing compared to the good stuff.

Sitting side-by-side on cross-country trips, lots of sports honors, tons of academic awards, a year in Germany and learning German, but best of all, reading stories at night before John went to sleep. In fact, being a stay-at-home father led me to my current occupation as a children’s book author.

[image error]It was essential to me that John be exposed to literature and the pleasure of reading from Day One, so I stocked up on children’s stories, from Grimm, Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, and Roald Dahl, eventually to the likes of Dickens and Victor Hugo. But one night when he was about seven, I suggested that he ought to create his own bedtime companion to keep him company while he slept—from there, the main character of my children’s series, Night Buddies, was created.

Many nights John and I made up stories involving him and this bedtime companion, a red crocodile named Crosley, until Crosley became another member of our little family. John always held onto his love for reading, and when he grew up and started traveling the world, creating new adventures for himself, I turned my memories of the little guy I once looked after, and his goofy buddy Crosley, into a book series that I would be able to hold in my hands. Because in all honesty, being a stay-at-home father was the best job I’ve ever had—I don’t want to forget a thing about it. And given the chance, I would do it all over again.

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“Do Schools Kill Creativity?”

Recently I came across a TED Talk entitled, “Do Schools Kill Creativity” by Ken Robinson, and was immediately struck by the importance of his message. If you haven’t had a chance to see this talk yet—though it is the most viewed TED talk on at nearly 40 million views—here it is:

I have been an advocate for children’s creativity since starting this blog. After I discovered how important it was to my son’s education that he be able to read and imagine stories, it became clear to me that creativity is something that, as Robinson points out, “is as important in education as literacy.”

What I enjoyed most about this TED talk is his claim that all education systems across the world value certain components of education more than others: sciences and math first, humanities second, and arts third. Children are told to give up the things they love when they aren’t “practical” enough, or if their passions won’t land them a job. But with so many people educated in those highly employable skills, the demand for workers decreases, and people find that they’ve given up their creative sides and passions only to be left unemployed and dissatisfied.

I think the point of this talk wasn’t to shame schools, it was to show that some children and some people excel in areas outside of what schools encourage. Children who are highly intelligent individuals are told they are mediocre students, and won’t carry out the creative, brilliant things they are capable of after being given up on in the academic atmosphere they grew up in.

My only critique of this talk—though I realize these speakers are limited in time—is that he didn’t address what was to be done about this problem. Yes, creativity needs to be encouraged. Yes, schools only push one form of academia. But how do we fix this? With budget constrictions, and altogether limited resources, how do we allow students to learn everything? To explore their creativity, but still take those science and math courses? Should there be more charter schools aimed at students with “alternative” talents?

I don’t have the answers. But I am certainly glad the question has been raised, and that people are paying attention. Creativity shaped the course of my life as an author and a father, and I think our world would benefit in many ways from encouraging more of it, so that people don’t “grow out of creativity” as Robinson put it, but rather continue to grow in their creativity for their entire lives.

What is your stance on this TED talk? Do you think schools are to blame for not encouraging the arts and humanities? Let me know in the comments!

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It’s Okay to Ask for Help as a Single Parent

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There’s this secret a lot of single parents hold inside of them. A secret they think sometimes they might be judged for, that society would look down on them for, that their children won’t forgive them for. It’s a secret I used to hold inside of me while I was raising my son, by myself for the most part. It’s a secret with consequences I am going to reveal as myths, right here, right now.

The secret is that sometimes as a single parent you just need help.

I don’t know at what point in time parenting started to be thought of as a one-man job. Moms parent, dads go to work; dads parent, moms go to work; if you’re a single parent, you somehow work and parent and figure out how to do that all on your own. But you chose to be a parent, which means you must be prepared to go at it by yourself, right?

Wrong. Why is it acceptable for you to have an assistant or intern at your job, but bringing in a babysitter or live-in nanny means you just aren’t parenting well enough? Society might be more accepting of this way of parenting now, but it still doesn’t erase the guilt I know many of us feel—the guilt that we aren’t giving our children our all, or that we are somehow failing by reaching a point where we have to ask for the help we know we need. That guilt is a tricky little sucker who carries the weight of “unworthy” on his shoulders and plants it in our brains.

I am unworthy of help because I volunteered to be a father. I am unworthy of help because I can work from home. I am unworthy of help because my child needs me to be there. These are all sentences I have told myself before. These are all sentences that hold no truth.

It is okay to accept help as a single parent. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t there for your child, or that you aren’t parenting well enough. Sometimes it actually means you are parenting better, because with help, nothing slips through the cracks of your son’s or daughter’s childhood. They will always have the help and support they need, always have someone taking care of them, and not your half-attention when you’re trying to work and earn a living to support your family and raise them at the same time.

Throw away your guilt when you enlist family, friends, or professionals to help your raise your children. It takes a village to raise a person to be their absolute best, and you’re doing the best you can.

Have you ever felt the guilt of asking for help as a single parent? Share your story with me in the comments!

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Should Kids be Reading on Tablets? The Benefits and Drawbacks of Reading on the Screen

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You can call me old school, but I don’t do the e-reading thing. I like to sit down with a book in my hands, flip through the pages, write in the margins, and keep all the screens at bay even if for just a few hours. Reading, to me, is an escape from the world. And lately, it seems like the world is full of nothing but smart phones, laptops, and tablets.

But what about the next generation? The parents raising kids now, not those of us who raised our kids thirty years ago? It seems they won’t be able to avoid keeping tablets in the house, and with cheaper books and easier access, shouldn’t switching from books to screen actually be a benefit to today’s children?

In some ways, yes. Books are more easily available than they have ever been. Children’s e-books are usually made with interactive features now, so kids can feel even more like they become part of the story they’re reading. They can guide the content, write pieces of the stories themselves, draw pictures of the characters, and take their creativity to entirely different levels.

An article on amplify.com said it best: “Kids aren’t just passive receptors anymore, they expect to be able to interact, remix some of the content, and work collaboratively with others to do things with the content.”

Kids are excited to sit down with these e-readers, because it’s no longer a time just to clock silent reading hours—reading has turned into another kind of game time. And while I am glad that books are getting out there and children are reading, I would also argue that this is the exact problem.

The experience of reading changes when it is filled with hyperlinks, game times, and endless upon endless distractions. It distracts from the general enjoyment of reading—losing oneself in a narrative. Why have interactive features when you can instead take the place of someone else’s consciousness, and live a different life than your own for a few hundred pages? An article on mom.me quoted a study which said, “Of those who took part in the UK’s National Literacy Trust survey, only 12 percent of those who did their reading on a screen said they enjoyed reading, while 51 percent of those burning through pages said they liked to read. Print readers, even if they mixed it with screen reading, made up a larger percent of above-average readers compared to those who only read on a screen—15.5 percent vs. 26 percent.”

Long story short, we can turn reading into a sort of game time, but real game time is only going to be a tap of the screen away from their book. Why spend a few hours reading when Angry Birds is just as easily available on the same device?

I think kids and parents benefit from putting away the distractions, locking the screens away for just an hour or so, and sitting down to read books together. You can still encourage your children to create stories and imagine for themselves—that’s how the character Crosley from my book series was created—but without a tablet and all the distractions tablets come with in the way, hopefully the pure pleasure of reading a book will continue to be passed on through the generations.

Do you prefer reading books or on tablets? Let me know in the comments!

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Writing Essentials: Tips to Build Conflict in Your Story

After spending the past month at the Bookmarks Book Festival and SIBA 2015 (pictured above), I’ve walked away with a whole lot of inspiration and ideas about what makes a book a success, what people love to read, and what constitutes good writing. So today I wanted to share some of my thoughts on that with you!

When I first set out to write Night Buddies and the Pineapple Cheesecake Scare, I didn’t realize how essential building conflict in the story was. You can’t just have one main conflict in mind and have that carry the entire story—the book also has to be filled with little bits of tension and little conflicts that keep the reader turning every single page. Each chapter you write should contain a major conflict, each page should be your character finding ways to resolve it. Yes, you should have one main conflict (all the pineapple cheesecakes in the pineapple cheesecake factory are disappearing) but conflict needs to always be in the front of your mind when you sit down to write.

So what are some ways to do this? Here are a few tips to help you figure out how to raise the stakes, build the tension, and create the most dynamic story possible.

Create strong values for your characters. When you know what they value and what they hold closest, it is easier to come up with conflict that will interfere with those values. Let’s say a character doesn’t drink because of an alcoholic parent, and then falls in love with a major drinker . . . conflict. Let’s say a red crocodile who loves cheesecakes more than anything now has them start disappearing . . . conflict. It can be silly or serious, but values that are being tested, internally or externally, create conflict.

Bring the family into it. Families are a huge area for conflict in a story. In Night Buddies, John’s parents question him and his sanity when he talks about his adventures—they even argue between themselves because of it. This isn’t a huge plot point in the story, but it still fills the book with extra tension and drives the story forward.

Think internally. Don’t only think of external events to build conflict, like storms or people, but think about your character’s feelings. Do they feel disappointed in themselves or their life, do they hate their siblings, do they suffer from depression? Emotional conflict is just as, if not more, essential to a dynamic story.

Keep bringing back the enemy. Your story should have an antagonist—think the Joker, or in my story’s case, a band of evil iguanas. The more they show up, the more conflict your protagonist is going to have to face. Not only do they have to deal with the trouble the enemy causes, but they also have to deal with the emotional conflict of either sinking to their enemy’s level, or taking the high road and maintaining their moral as the good character.

So there you have it! There are probably a hundred ways to build conflict in your story, so just always remember that when things seem to be going too well for your character, it’s your job to knock him off his high horse!

What are some writing essentials you’ve discovered? Let me know in the comments below!

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