Desperately Seeking Title

I posted this on that Facebook/SMtP page my publicists set up for that book, but I'm contained by space there. Not here.

I'm futzing around with these poems-about-the-Greek gods. All the Olympians and a few of their cronies or girlfriends or pets (Cerberus, for example). The poems (and they are poems vs. straight-up prose) sound like me -- smarty-pants and fast with dollops of what they call in TV writing ""moments."

But I can't come up with a title that's both attractive and true. I did like "A Hipster's Guide to Olympus" but I think 'hipster" is almost archaic by now and I don't much want to use now-slang. Still, the angle of that title is right.

The subjects are the true Olympians -- Zeus, Hades, Persephone, Demeter, Aphrodite, etc. Both their Greek and roman names apply: Ares/Mars, Dionysus/Bacchus, etc.

Any ideas?

RK

Tell Me A Story

A Sunday night ritual at our house is watching Sixty Minutes. A few weeks back, shortly after my return from the Hamline residency, the show featured a segment on Don Hewiit, the genius producer of the longest-running TV show in history. "Tell me a story," Hewitt says to his reporters. "Every kid in America knows that."

Hewitt passed away last year. But footage from interviews and production meetings revealed a man who valued story above all else. What's the best story to tell about this person, this situation? What angle serves the story best? These questions to the likes of Mike Wallace. Hewitt discussed how every week he likes to feature three stories, one of which wil appeal to every viewer in America. Not to water down, but to reach Americans coast to coast. There is always one story segment that draws me in more than the others.

This week I am reading James B. Stewart's book Follow the Story: How To Write Successful Nonfiction. I just wrote to one of my students in her packet letter about Stewart's emphasis on story-telling rather than analysis. The old show not tell.

Every kid in America wants a story. Let's go write them.

Slaying Angels for Fun and Profit

I appreciate Ron's post below, and I've been thinking about all of this a lot. Writing depends, not just on time, not just on having a nice room of your own, but on having the mental space to create. And sometimes life just doesn't allow that. I just went through a period where I wrote next to nothing for over a year. Even typing that kills me. Oh, I tried. I came up with ideas. I started books. But nothing took. I couldn't see in stories any more. I couldn't hear voices. I just didn't know how to make the books go anymore and it killed me. Because this is what I do, it's all that I do. You want to depress a writer, ask them what they would be doing if they weren't writing. I have no other skills, except for obsessive Olympic-watching, making snarky comments about Project Runway, and pie.

Sure, a lot of it was situational. My husband was ill for a year and a half. My little boy was labeled a social deviant by the toddler program at the school we'd been so happy to get him into. I couldn't manage to write around my teaching. I hadn't really figured out how to write and be a mom. There was so much stress, and when there wasn't stress there were time sucks, and when there weren't time sucks there was the croup, and more croup, and still yet more croup. I wrote nothing. People kept asking me, "What are you working on?" and the question would make me want to weep, or at least eat many cupcakes. I wanted to print up a t-shirt: DON'T ASK ME ABOUT MY WRITING.

My husband's better now. My boy, by switching schools, has magically lost his social deviant status. And after the last residency at Hamline--which was particularly awesome and inspirational--I got home and began to write again. I'm nearly done with a draft of a book I started five weeks ago, and I'm in the deep romance phase of writing. The truth is, things aren't that much less stressful, but a switch turned on in my brain and I remembered how to tell stories again.

It bothers me how whimsical these muses are, how easy it is to forget how to do what we do. Life is always hard. There is going to be more illness, more hardship, more croup. And this is what I do, and I need to be able to do it when the angels intrude. Or when the well is dry. Or when I forget the only thing I know how to do--make up stories.

I admire our students so much. They write. They figure out their lives and they get their work done. They amaze me.

All I can do is listen to the better angels, and scowl at the worse ones, and tie up and threaten my muse, and wait for the moment when the ideas come and the story lays out in front of me like a shining path. It feels helpless. But when you're on that path, nothing's better. I just wish I knew how to find it more often.

Slay the Angel in the House

Not only did Ms. Woolf want women to have rooms of their own, she advised them to "slay the angel in the house" if someone wanted to write. She urged women to make time for their work even if it meant being bad wives and mothers.

I think it's good advice. Most people -- both men and women -- spend far too much time making nice. That time really could better be spent writing.

However, I know and know of a lot of women who not only don't slay the angel, they fix breakfast for it and make sure it's warm enough and has clean socks. Lucille Clifton, who just passed away, said that one of the reasons her poems were so short is because she had so many children! But she wrote the poems anyway. Clearly, the angel in the house spread its astonishing wings over everything and every now and then gave her ten minutes to herself.

Between poetry and prose, I turn out a lot of work, but I should. It's all that I do besides indulging my low-voltage vices. The writers who deserve the credit are the ones with wives and husbands and children and parents and health problems and dingy colors and less than sparkling whites who also get the work done.

My hat, the one with the feather, is off to them.

RK

Significance of YA Lit

I was interviewed recently for a local paper. This was one of the questions and my answer. It’s a question with different answers so feel free to chime in. I’d love to know what you think.

Q: What is significant about young adult fiction? How has it changed and where is this industry heading?

A:
Young adulthood is a time of life that exists unto itself. It is full of “firsts.” It is a place of limbo between childhood and adulthood that can be awkward and confusing and incredibly enlightening. The literature speaks to that.

Young Adult literature has grown tremendously in popularity since I started in the field in the early 90's. Then, it was a lesser-known field and had small to moderate sales, though quality writing was evident. It was kind of a hidden and marginalized field, giving those in it a certain bond. But things shift and publishing is cyclical. Now the YA field is booming and it has “cool” factor--much due to Harry Potter and Twilight, both so immensely popular that it put the field on the map in a big way. These books were (and still are) being read, selling, and making money. This is both good and bad. Good, because more people are aware of the legitimacy and excellence of books for children and therefore more writers are emerging and publishing. Bad, because like everything that becomes popular it can attract quality of all levels and tends to follow the immediate trend. The trend now is vampires and the super natural, so that overshadows those who want to read and write more contemporary or historical fiction. The heightened popularity of one or two "big bang" books can sometimes take the focus away from the smaller, riskier books. However, the need for all types of young adult literature is not going away. More adults are reading in this field because there are so many good books available.

As far as the future of the industry, you'd get a more knowledgeable answer from someone directly in publishing—publishers are thinking very hard about all that. Publishing will likely continue to shift to a variety of multi-media forms, but we will always need good storytellers. The form in which it reaches an audience doesn’t matter. Writers who continue to create thought-provoking, entertaining, and enlightening stories for children and young adults do.

Mothers and Daughters

Well, it’s happened. Over the weekend I received an email from a teen who said, “My mom says she remembers reading and really liking one of your books when she was in high school.”
The math adds up. Fortunately the fact her mother liked one of my books apparently didn’t negatively influence the daughter’s reaction to the book she read. She was very kind and it was a fun message to get.

I read Anne of Green Gables for the first time this past year. One of those “should-read” books I could just never bring myself to read. It was my mother’s favorite girlhood book, and I’m pretty sure that’s the reason I resisted. I also remember my mother not being too bothered by my resistance because she had always refused to read the book her mother had loved and pushed on her: On Our Hill, by Josephine Daskam Bacon.

I have my grandmother’s copy of On Our Hill. The book—which appears to be a first edition—was published in 1918. That would mean it wasn’t a childhood favorite of my grandmother’s, just one she must have discovered as a young married woman during the year of her first pregnancy and no doubt hoped to share with a daughter someday. That didn’t happen, but her granddaughter, nearly a century later, is suddenly curious. I may have to give it a whirl.
Oh, by the way—I liked Anne of Green Gables a lot.

MQ

Next to Godliness

If you're stuck, clean your desk. I like to throw away every precious note and scrap of paper w/out glancing at it. The more valuable I believe it is, the faster it gets tossed. I figure I'm stuck for a reason and part of that reason is the debris in front of me. How can my characters talk with all that paper in their mouths?

I'd like to hear what other writers do when they get bogged down.

RK

Time Away/What Do Kids Think

The discussions you miss while spending time away from the internet and our blog. Over President's Day weekend, we went cross country skiing and time away from the computer does open up one's brain without needing Mac's Freedom program. I have stopped bringing my laptop along on these weekend trips, but still have that trusty notebook to jot down ideas and prioritize all that I will get done upon my return. Besides the thinking time, I love listening to radio programs in the car with my husband. Somehow the contained space allows the interviews to really sink in and gives me time to reflect. We went over the border into British Columbia, so I enjoyed CBC radio's enthusiasm for Canadian Olympians - refreshing. And I enjoyed the interview with American author Kate Walbert - A Short History of Women. What a novel about five generations of women, starting with a suffragist in 1914. Such a thoughtful interview about her work.

Made me sad that children's/YA authors don't usually get to discuss their work in such depth. Makes me appreciate so much our lectures at Hamline where we do. It also made me wonder if the internet is the only way to communicate with young readers about what they are reading. Yes, schools visits give us face time with kids. But that is usually about our own books and perhaps their writing. Not so much about what they are reading and how it affects them.

WE also listened to a show about Charles Darwin and I thought again of how much I loved the book Charles and Emma: The Darwins Leap of Faith. When I got home I took a look at that book again and wondered. Do teens like it as much as I did? A friend suggested I log onto Goodreads. I enjoyed the discussion about the book but was disappointed that it was mostly adults commenting. Many of them also wondered if teens would like this NF book as much as we adults.

Thanks for reading my riff. What is your take? How do we connect with young readers as well as the gatekeepers? I know Lisa has younger friends on Facebook. Some of you still have children of the age you write for. What's a writer to do?
As always, the best books are those that resonate with young and old. Let's get writing them.

Tax Time

I woke this morning thinking it is time to do my taxes…. oh the horror! When I was in graduate school I learned one of the biggest tax tips of my life—SAVE EVERY receipt and DEDUCT EVERYTHING! If you make any money from your writing, all that you spend on it can be deducted.

So for what it’s worth I thought I’d share my rudimentary system of doing taxes:
I take every receipt from 2009, which I have collected in a large manila folder in the bottom of the desk drawer (this is the most important step—really save every receipt, even the ones you don’t think are deductible--you can always figure out later if they are!) This includes every book, every tube of paint, every pencil, every toner cartridge, every bus or plane I took for a reading or speaking gig, every meal I bought while on that trip, every art museum I visited or play I saw (I get huge inspiration from art, plays and movies for all my work), etc….

All those receipts get dumped on the floor and I start organizing them in five piles labeled: Office, Art, Books, Printing/Copying, Postage, Travel, and Research. I add them up on my handy calculator. Then I write what I make from my three sources: Teaching, Royalties, Speaking and School Visits, and figure what percentage of the itemized receipts is to be deducted from each income earned. I add and subtract all those numbers, along with deductions from my home office/studio (1/4 of rent or mortgage plus 1/4 of utility bills, which goes against my royalty earnings). Then, the easy step, I bring those numbers to my magic accountant, and hold my breath while I wait for him to do the rest. He is so worth his fee, and his fee is also deductible.

So to recap: SAVE EVERY RECEIPT, DEDUCT EVERYTHING, and GET AN ACCOUNTANT!

You'll find me under a pile of receipts now…

Public Service Announcement

Have a Mac? Have no willpower? Find yourself procrastinating from writing by checking the 'Pot?

Download Mac Freedom. It will disable your internet connection for whatever interval you specify.

Thanks to Lisa Yee for the link.