Your ticket back in time to middle grade school days.
Hi there, would you be kind enough to humor me and share the following information:
1. the name of your best friend in middle school
2. the name of your middle school
3. the name of the sibling closest in age to you
4. the name of your baseball home team
Based on the information you have provided, I’m going to ask you another question, and for this one you need to be wearing your honesty cap. Hold it, you don’t have one? Back in the old days, elementary schools should have given them out along with those terribly helpful thinking caps they doled out during arithmetic lessons. Eh, but if my workbooks attest to the powers of caps, you didn’t miss out on much.
Okay, so psychological integrity is a foreign concept to some of us. Let’s try a more manipulative method. Stare at the edge of your nose, close your eyes and think Truth. Truth. Truth. You’re going to say the truth.
Now that you’re in a hypnotic state, what’s the first thing that comes to your head when I say the answer to number three? (Please refer to the list above.)
What? I didn’t hear you. Oh, I see, you’re wary of speaking up. Hmm, then I guess I’ll have to take the keyboard back, big brave me. I’m not scared of retribution; I’m also probably the only one here today who’s writing under a pen name that is unknown to her siblings, but that’s beside the point.
Maybe I’m not being fair claiming to be more courageous than you; perhaps you’re all grownup, and believe you’re so over “that”— the petty torments of your childhood. So what if the answer to number three flushed your card collection of the answer to number four down the toilet, hung up pictures of you as a baby in the bath in the answer to number two’s main entrance, and stole the answer to number one? You harbor no ill feelings.
But here I am, stuck in my nursery. Hey! That explains why I wrote Launching Sisters to WitchCamp while other authors out there are writing the next great American novel.
On a more serious note, tapping into those raw childhood emotions was one of the first steps I took to write my middle grade fantasy. Though I have more than ten years of experience working with families, and I myself am a mother in a dynamic family, I wrote from neither of these vantage points. Instead, I traveled back in time and wrote from my own middle grade mindset.
Critics will doubt the feasibility of doing that, and I admit I couldn’t remove the effect of my adult hindsight, but I tried to stay in that time period and emotional framework as much as possible. I don’t have a remarkable memory when it comes to facts and figures, but I do have a strong episodic memory. More significant is the fact that I was “blessed” with an acute emotional awareness, and my memories evoke the same emotions I experienced at the time of occurrence. I wasn’t kidding about being stuck. At least I found a way to take advantage of my baggage when I played out my feelings of sibling rivalry and familial frustrations with J.J. and his sisters.
I hear you. So what can those writers who aren’t bogged down by phenomenal episodic memories do? I basically said it already, but am going to reiterate, in a different order, the steps to writing in an authentic middle grade voice:
Be brave. Man up and own up to the demoralizing fact that indeed, you were once a kid. And that kid lived through many different types of experiences.
Put on your honesty cap. What emotions stand out from those times? To me the need of affirmation, the lack of control, and the desire to be number one lay at the very top of my middle grade emotional storage box.
Get hypnotized. Or whatever it takes for you to deal with those long-buried emotions; they are real and raw, but therein exists their power to transport you back in time.
Just a cautionary note: before you embark on this emotion-laden historic journey, dash off a text warning the answer to number three. It’s only ethical to give your potential victim a chance to run away from the rage crime of the century.
1. the name of your best friend in middle school
2. the name of your middle school
3. the name of the sibling closest in age to you
4. the name of your baseball home team
Based on the information you have provided, I’m going to ask you another question, and for this one you need to be wearing your honesty cap. Hold it, you don’t have one? Back in the old days, elementary schools should have given them out along with those terribly helpful thinking caps they doled out during arithmetic lessons. Eh, but if my workbooks attest to the powers of caps, you didn’t miss out on much.
Okay, so psychological integrity is a foreign concept to some of us. Let’s try a more manipulative method. Stare at the edge of your nose, close your eyes and think Truth. Truth. Truth. You’re going to say the truth.
Now that you’re in a hypnotic state, what’s the first thing that comes to your head when I say the answer to number three? (Please refer to the list above.)
What? I didn’t hear you. Oh, I see, you’re wary of speaking up. Hmm, then I guess I’ll have to take the keyboard back, big brave me. I’m not scared of retribution; I’m also probably the only one here today who’s writing under a pen name that is unknown to her siblings, but that’s beside the point.
Maybe I’m not being fair claiming to be more courageous than you; perhaps you’re all grownup, and believe you’re so over “that”— the petty torments of your childhood. So what if the answer to number three flushed your card collection of the answer to number four down the toilet, hung up pictures of you as a baby in the bath in the answer to number two’s main entrance, and stole the answer to number one? You harbor no ill feelings.
But here I am, stuck in my nursery. Hey! That explains why I wrote Launching Sisters to WitchCamp while other authors out there are writing the next great American novel.
On a more serious note, tapping into those raw childhood emotions was one of the first steps I took to write my middle grade fantasy. Though I have more than ten years of experience working with families, and I myself am a mother in a dynamic family, I wrote from neither of these vantage points. Instead, I traveled back in time and wrote from my own middle grade mindset.
Critics will doubt the feasibility of doing that, and I admit I couldn’t remove the effect of my adult hindsight, but I tried to stay in that time period and emotional framework as much as possible. I don’t have a remarkable memory when it comes to facts and figures, but I do have a strong episodic memory. More significant is the fact that I was “blessed” with an acute emotional awareness, and my memories evoke the same emotions I experienced at the time of occurrence. I wasn’t kidding about being stuck. At least I found a way to take advantage of my baggage when I played out my feelings of sibling rivalry and familial frustrations with J.J. and his sisters.
I hear you. So what can those writers who aren’t bogged down by phenomenal episodic memories do? I basically said it already, but am going to reiterate, in a different order, the steps to writing in an authentic middle grade voice:
Be brave. Man up and own up to the demoralizing fact that indeed, you were once a kid. And that kid lived through many different types of experiences.
Put on your honesty cap. What emotions stand out from those times? To me the need of affirmation, the lack of control, and the desire to be number one lay at the very top of my middle grade emotional storage box.
Get hypnotized. Or whatever it takes for you to deal with those long-buried emotions; they are real and raw, but therein exists their power to transport you back in time.
Just a cautionary note: before you embark on this emotion-laden historic journey, dash off a text warning the answer to number three. It’s only ethical to give your potential victim a chance to run away from the rage crime of the century.
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