bad days

"If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not -- and the odds are against it -- go to your desk, no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper -- write."
J. B. Priestly


"Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day."
Norman Mailer

"The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write."
Gabriel Fielding

written to be read aloud

"All really good picture books are written to be read five hundred times." Rosemary Wells

"The longer I live, the more I see there's something about reciting rhythmical words aloud — it's almost biological — that comforts and enlivens human beings." — Robert Pinsky (b.1940), poet.

It's odd, but have you noticed that what you hear in your head as you write is completely different from what you hear when you read it out loud? And that even reading something out loud to yourself isn't the same thing as hearing it read to you?

It's something many writers talk about. C S Lewis, for instance, read his books out loud. Here's Fran Lebowitz: "In conversation you can use timing, a look, an inflection. But on the page all you have is commas, dashes, the amount of syllables in a word. When I write, I read everything out loud to get the right rhythm."

Here's another tip: get a friend to read your work out loud to you (you provide snacks and cups of tea to keep their strength up!) that way you can hear where they stumble. And know what to fix.

But, of course, there's the ultimate test for a children's book: read it to some real life actual children. The good news is: they're not very good at pretending when they don't like a story. The bad news is: they're not very good at pretending when they don't like a story.

right and nearly right

"The difference between the right and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug."

Mark Twain

tinkering til your eyes pop out

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) said "[poetry must] be tinkered with and recast until one's eyes pop out of one's head."

He also said, "Almost the whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of maneuvering. You may feel the doorknob more strongly than some big personal event, and the doorknob will open into something you can use as your own."

Picture books I think are a form of poetry. At least if they're good they are. If you do it right, then remove a single word and it won't work anymore. Or change the order, and the rhythm is thrown off. Or swap a word and the emotional impact vanishes.

And just like a poem, behind a picture book that looks simple, lie many drafts. And eyes that are popping out! One thing I know: you have to work hard to make it look simple.

After the 15th revision, though, the challenge, as with a poem, is to constantly be "bringing it back to what you really feel"—not what the editor wants, not what "sounds good", not what someone else did before—but what is true, the place where your heart pounds, the reason you put pen to paper in the first place.