I had such a great time at SCBWI Western Washington’s Weekend on the Water retreat this year. Nestled in a cozy lodge-style resort on the Hood Canal, 49 other writers and I had the privilege of learning from superstars Arthur A. Levine and Linda Sue Park. I wanted to capture and share just a few of the nuggets of wisdom I gleaned from their talks, so here goes…
From Arthur:
First chapters are like first dates. You need a spark, but also must establish trust if there is to be a long-term relationship. You must choose an appropriate setting for the mood you wish to create. Choose the right outfit—don’t write to trends if they don’t suit you. Don’t give too much away in the beginning—keep a few surprises for later. Be honest. Don’t rush in.
Think about your story’s “best self,” the most important aspect of your book and hopefully, the one you are best at. Is it character? Plot? Voice? Setting? Yes, you need them all, of course, but one probably stands out as the key element or your best trait. Be sure to lead with that component in the first chapter, both to make a good impression and set the stage for what comes next.
Make sure your story’s “beating heart” is revealed in the first chapter. What’s the emotional theme?
You can’t start writing with a moral or theme in mind. Go back to the characters and find out why it matters.
Main characters will have thoughts and feelings about the facts you need to present. Reveal character through description to get two for one.
When receiving feedback, be sure to ask WHY critiquers are making their suggestions. Don’t just make the changes they propose without understanding the real reasons behind them.
Enjoy the journey!
From Linda Sue:
Young children are learning about THEIR WORLD. Middle-grade children are learning about THE WORLD. Young-adult readers are learning about THEMSELVES. “Reading is practice for life.”
Without showing the where and when of setting, you only reveal part of character. Tell readers how your characters interact with their environment, not just what the environment is.
Every sentence should do double-duty (plot + character, plot + setting, or setting + character). Look for this during revision.
Try it! Instead of just thinking about something, (1st person POV vs. 3rd person, present vs. past, different structures and timelines, different settings, etc.), try it both ways and see what you like better. Don’t be afraid of wasting time! This is the work of writing.
Using present tense for what is happening right now is technically incorrect. Present tense is for things that happen every day or are routine. Present participle (-ing) is for what’s happening right now. “I sing” vs. “I’m singing.” But it’d be awfully cumbersome to right a 1st person present novel this way!
Use line breaks to see the rhythm and length of sentences in a picture book. Edit it as free verse, then put it back together for manuscript form.
Act out the parts and try reading your work out loud AS your characters! This helps you catch things they wouldn’t say or do and guarantee authenticity.
Write one scene at a time. In every scene, you only have to choose if there will be progress or impediment, and which quest will affect, internal or external? Now make it MOVE—every scene needs some kind of action.
Even if you don’t believe in yourself, believe in your STORY.
The only way to know what’s good is to read—a LOT!
There was so much more from each of them that my notebook (not to mention my brain) is full! If you ever get the chance to hear either one of them speak, don’t let it pass you by. They are both phenomenal.
Another great component of the retreat is learning from the other talented writers in attendance. We had peer critique groups, networking and social time, and work shared aloud throughout the weekend. So, with all of that feedback and learning in mind… back to revisions!
Author Jean Reidy’s new picture book, LIGHT UP THE NIGHT (Hyperion, October 2011) was inspired by her connections to Uganda and its children, many of whom have been displace due to past civil war or orphaned by AIDS. To celebrate the release of the book and honor those children, she is holding an online auction to benefit literacy in Africa and a library at Musana Children’s Home in Iganga, Uganda.
There are all kinds of great items available including:
For many writers, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a month-long commitment to creativity wherein writers turn off their inner critics and pound out a complete 50,000-word novel in 30 days. I’ve seen the results, and it’s nothing short of amazing. A self-imposed deadline can be very motivating, especially when shared with others!
Alas, how could picture-book writers join in the fun and enthusiasm? I suppose you could try to hammer out 100 500-word picture books in a month, but writing 100 different stories, even if they’re short, is a very different beast than writing just one long one. It may not take long to write the first draft of a picture book, but it can take a very long time to find one really great picture-book idea (and we won’t even talk about revisions!).
Last February, I participated in a month-long picture-book writing marathon, where we challenged ourselves to write 26 picture books in 28 days, and it was a fantastic experience. In fact, two manuscripts from that experience are very close to being final drafts ready for submission. Of course, that means there were 24 that weren’t so great, ranging from “might be worth working on” to “total stinkers” (lots more in that category, to be sure), but still, I feel it was well worth the time–and a ton of fun!
Perhaps an even better idea, and certainly less intimidating now that I’ve done the picture-book marathon, is Tara Lazar’s Picture Book Idea Month (PiBoIdMo). Sign up starts today, right here!
If you’ve ever even thought about writing picture books, I urge you to try this challenge! So far, almost 300 people have signed up, so there will be camaraderie. Tara will feature daily inspiration and guest bloggers to help keep us going. And, as if that wasn’t enough, there will be PRIZES: signed books, picture-book manuscript critiques, original art by picture-book illustrators, book jewelry, hand-made journals, vintage children’s books, and feedback from one of three literary agents!
I’ll hope you’ll join me, Tara, and hundreds of other picture books writers for this year’s PiBoIdMo. Please let me know in the comments if you’re participating!
I’m still pinching myself about signing with Ammi-Joan Paquette at Erin Murphy Literary Agency. I’ve always known Joan and Erin are amazing, but I wasn’t expecting the close-knit, ultra-supportive group of EMLA clients who totally sweeten the pot. I set about trying to read all of their books and was thrilled to discover fellow nonfiction (and fiction!) author Audrey Vernick. I knew I wanted to get to know her better as well as pick her brain a little, so I’m excited to be the 3rd stop on her summer 2011 blog tour!
Audrey Vernick Laurie: Welcome, Audrey! Thanks for stopping by. Your first book, IS YOUR BUFFALO READY FOR KINDERGARTEN, was a light-hearted, hilariously funny book for the preschool set. Your second, SHE LOVED BASEBALL: THE EFFA MANLEY STORY, was a serious, passionate picture book biography. Now, here we are celebrating your return to young fiction with the release of TEACH YOUR BUFFALO TO PLAY DRUMS. (Congratulations!)
Laurie: One of the things that jumps out at me about all of your books is what a strong and unique voice they have, yet they’re totally different! As authors, we’re told, and often struggle, to find our own one true voice… but you’ve found two! How did you develop them? How do you switch back and forth between your BUFFALO voice and your nonfiction voice?
Audrey: I struggled with this question, because before I was published, I found it maddening the way people, especially editors, talked about voice. “It’s hard to define, but I know it when I see it.” THAT IS NOT HELPFUL! I want to give an informative answer, but the truth is that voice is the one part of the writing process that’s just there for me. I’m not at all conscious of developing voice or switching between voices. I write and it’s there.
Audrey: But as I think more about it, my brain keeps me pulling me back to the truly dreadful picture books I used to write, which had no voice at all. Before writing for kids, I wrote literary short fiction for adults (which makes writing for kids seem like a lucrative business decision). My voice was always in the short stories, but it did take me some time to get it into my children’s writing. A lot of time, actually. Something clicked into place with the buffalo books, and the best explanation I can give is that I learned to get out of my own way. I used to waste a lot of my narrative space explaining the world I created and why characters acted as they did. Now I state it and move on. And that, somehow, cleared out the room my voice had been waiting for.
Audrey: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about voice in nonfiction. I really admire some voice-heavy nonfiction books, and I’m playing around with that, at least in my head, for the nonfiction project I’ve been working on for years. The examples that come to mind are both baseball books–Kadir Nelson’s WE ARE THE SHIP, about as perfect as a book could be (though maybe more for adult readers of children’s books than for children), and the wonderful YOU NEVER HEARD OF SANDY KOUFAX? by Jonah Winter (illustrated by Andre Carrilho). Those books deliver on three fronts, where I was only expecting two–information about a subject in which I was interested, gorgeous art, and the bonus: a really interesting voice to tell the story. Laurie: You also have a novel coming out this fall. How did you find that voice, and how is it like or unlike the two we’ve already seen?
Audrey: The voice in WATER BALLOON is truest to… me. To who I am. Not necessarily who I was at thirteen, the age of the book’s narrator/protagonist, but who I am now, distilled back to a younger age.
Audrey: I started this book seven years ago and the voice was the exact same in the first sentence of the first draft as it was when I completed the final revision. But man alive, did I need to work on plot. If my characters had their way, they would lounge and emote for 300 pages. Laurie: Another multi-talented author of both fiction and nonfiction (and fellow EMLA client) Chris Barton wrote in a guest post on Rasco from RIF, “I slide back and forth between fiction and nonfiction without really thinking much about it, my experiences with one building on the other. I suspect the youngest readers approach the two genres pretty much the same way—when you’ve explored only a smidge of the world, all books are about exploring more of it. It’s as we get older, as both readers and writers, that our tastes divide.” Laurie: I guess, for some of us, our tastes never did divide. (Perhaps because we never grew up?) Do you have a preference? Which creative process do you enjoy more: fiction or nonfiction?
Audrey: I think writing funny comes more naturally and is more fun. Writing nonfiction is harder. But sometimes there’s a greater satisfaction in successfully completing a difficult task. And I feel something that’s found at the crossroads of pride and delight at sharing someone else’s story with a wide audience.
Audrey: I wouldn’t say I’m drawn to nonfiction as a whole, though. Some individual stories just call me. And while it’s obvious that some of them are baseball–in the case of my first book, BARK & TIM, it was a painting. I have likened seeing Tim Brown’s painting to the human-interest story I once read about a woman who saw a news story about an orphan in another country and had this immediate, strong knowledge: That’s my son. It was that strong when I saw “Feeding Bark.” That’s MY painting. My art. My story. For the playful, fiction books, I’m simply drawn in by the strong pull/desire to write something funny. Laurie: Chris also wrote, “based on my own experiences slipping back and forth between genres, I believe they might even find inspiration for their next fiction project.” Laurie: Do you also find that one informs the other? Do you need to do both to stay balanced? Where do you pull such different ideas from? Do you think they come from the same place somehow?
Audrey: Both kinds of stories—fiction and nonfiction—call to me. I don’t go seeking story ideas. I find myself wondering about something or someone (nonfiction) and wanting to explore to find out more. Usually in the case of fiction picture books, I say something, though sometimes I just think it, and it echoes until I start looking at it for story potential. The closest I’ve come to one informing the other was when reading a particular kind of nonfiction picture book—the spate of inter-species friendship books—led to writing a fiction spoof of the genre, the upcoming BOGART & VINNIE. Laurie: Do you tend to work on fiction projects and nonfiction projects at the same time? Or do you keep them completely separate?
Audrey: I work on them simultaneously. I don’t have any trouble switching gears, for the most part. Laurie: How is your process different for something like TEACH YOUR BUFFALO TO PLAY DRUMS and SHE LOVED BASEBALL?
Audrey: I just need an idea to start writing fiction picture books. A title, a premise, a character–those have all been my starting points for different fiction picture books. For nonfiction, I need a lot of information. I need interviews, background information, etc. And I need time for the story to boil down enough that I can envision an opening scene, where an opening scene almost always naturally emerges for me when writing fiction picture books.
Audrey: When I get stuck writing nonfiction, it’s usually a good hint that I need to do more research. When I’m stuck writing fiction, it’s kind of my own problem to fix. After waiting a few days to see if an answer comes to me, I’ll sometimes try to sit down and write five possible ways out. This usually works. One thing I’ve done when stuck writing both fiction and nonfiction, with success, is talk it through with smart people.
Audrey: The editing process is similar in that both are almost always about stripping away to find the essential story. With nonfiction, it’s wrenching, because you’re cutting away parts of a life. I still mourn for a scene in SHE LOVED BASEBALL. I find it more satisfying with fiction, because for me, my humor usually comes through best when it’s in a stark, brief form. But that’s not how I write it–that happens in revision.
Laurie: What are you working on now?
Audrey: I am revising a recently acquired picture book entitled BOGART & VINNIE, A COMPLETELY MADE-UP STORY OF TRUE FRIENDSHIP. I find myself in the new-to-me situation of turning a character from a potbellied pig into a rhinoceros.
Audrey: I’m also planning to start a new upper middle-grade novel this summer, which scares me more than any other kind of writing. Novels are so consuming and, for me, really hard! I know a lot about my main character and her situation, about where she starts and where she’ll end up, but getting her to move and do things has proven to be a challenge.
Audrey: Mixed in there are a couple of other picture book projects–mostly fiction, with one nonfiction–that I return to every now and then. And one new one that’s just starting to scratch its way to the surface. Laurie: What do you most want people to know about you as an author and as a person?
Audrey: That is a big question.
Audrey: I’m a big reader. The moments I love best as a reader are the ones that make me laugh, or the ones I HAVE to read aloud or paste into an email for someone else whom I know will get it exactly as I do, or stumbling upon phrasing that pleases me to my core. Most recently, it was this sentence in Ann Patchett’s STATE OF WONDER, when a character receives bad news: “There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles.” It’s not an especially important moment in the book, but those words evoked something in me. I reread them several times, with great satisfaction and pleasure.
Audrey: As a writer, I don’t think there’s any way to consciously strive for such moments in our own writing. But I think that’s why I write–in the hope that I might provide that kind of moment for a reader.
Audrey: As a person, boy that’s hard. When my sisters and I describe people, we always find ourselves falling upon the same rubric of funny, smart, and nice. They claim they haven’t, but I believe they have, more than once, subtly suggested that I might want to work a bit on the nice part. I am a strange combination of misanthrope and someone exceedingly fond of and loyal to the core of people I adore. Laurie: Thanks so much, Audrey! I can’t wait to see TEACH YOUR BUFFALO TO PLAY DRUMS and all of your other upcoming projects.
Read on about Audrey, the buffalo, and more on the rest of her summer 2011 blog tour:
Yes, the SCBWI Western Washington’s 20th Annual Writing & Illustrating for Children conference was over a month ago. I’m finally coming down from the high that weekend always leaves me with–and recovering from the hard work and long hours that go into organizing it. So, I thought I’d share some of the high points (for me) here.
On Friday, April 15, 2011, I attended our first ever Nonfiction Intensive, presented by Lionel Bender, Editorial Director at Bender Richardson White (BRW) and Jim Whiting, author and freelance editor. They gave us a great over of work-for-hire nonfiction from initial concept all the way to promotion and reviews, with everything in between. Some of the key takeaways for me were:
Always ask for a style guide
Consider getting your own consultant to fact-check for you
Always think globally for the broadest appeal
In many highly graphical nonfiction titles, design and layout come first, with author fitting appropriate text into designated spaces.
Never submit a manuscript that is under the requested word count. Better to be over if necessary, but try to stay as close as possible!
Try not to use any sources more than 4–5 years old.
Saturday, we started out with the editor/agent/art director panel. I always love hearing a) optimistic, b) down-to-earth friendly, and c) similar these industry professionals are. Far the doom and gloom scenarios we hear so often (picture books are dead, ebooks are going to destroy the world, etc.), these people believe in the power of story, and the need for those who can deliver it. They’re human beings (and darn nice ones, usually, if they’re in children’s publishing). And they all want to find the same thing, a great book. Deborah Wiles gave one of the best keynotes I’ve ever heard. She’s a human being, too, and one of the most authentic and lovely ones I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. I was not the only one in the room dabbing my eyes and trying not to start the day with my makeup all a mess!
For Saturday’s afternoon breakout sessions, I first went to Lionel Bender’s “Working With a Book Packager.” Did you know most work-for-hire projects are published within about 6 months of when they are STARTED? I also went to Lionel’s “Visiting Book Fairs and Exhibitions.” I can’t wait until ALA midwinter is right here in Seattle in 2013! How great would it be to have a book to promote by then? I also learned about revision from the amazing Deborah Wiles in a stuffed-to-the-gills room. She analyzed some wonderful picture books for universal examples we should all try to emulate. Some of her tips included:
Every good story has a surprise–the end isn’t really the end.
Stick with NOUNS and VERBS!
Incorporate both contrasts and echoes.
Every emotion has an ACTION. What does it LOOK like? Show, don’t tell.
“The better you know your own story, the better writer you will be.”
Make and keep lists!
Saturday night we ate, drank, and danced the night away with both the faculty and the attendees. Ah, could it get any better?
I’ll answer that in the next blog post!
Children’s Book Week has been celebrated through the United States since 1919 with appearances by authors and illustrators, parties, storytelling, and other book-related events in schools, libraries, bookstores, etc., and this year it takes place May 2–8!
Don’t you just love that poster (above) created by the talented Peter Brown? I do! You can order one for yourself right here.
Here are some of my favorite ways you can celebrate (this week–or anytime!):
Test your skills with our Children’s Book Week puzzles!
Help great authors finish a story they have started at Story Starters!
Buy books, check out books, read books… every day!
Locally, Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park has some fun events scheduled, including book talks with Mark Kurlansky and his daughter Talia (WORLD WITHOUT FISH) and Sean Beaudoin (YOU KILLED WESLEY PAYNE) tonight (May 3rd) at 7:00 p.m. and Carmela D’Amico (SUKI THE VERY LOUD BUNNY) on Sunday, May 8th, at 4:00 p.m. They’ll also have a craft table set up all week for kids to make bookmarks and will be offering grab bag coupons.
So, no excuses–it’s time to celebrate!
I just pre-ordered my copy of WHAT YOU WISH FOR: A BOOK FOR DARFUR, and I am so looking forward to reading it.
Coming from Penguin Group’s G.P. Putnam’s Sons in September, 2011, the book is a collection of YA poetry and short stories written by various authors, including Cornelia Funke, Meg Cabot, R. L. Stine, John Green, Ann M. Martin, Alexander McCall Smith, Cynthia Voigt, Karen Hesse, Joyce Carol Oates, Nikki Giovanni, Jane Yolen, Nate Powell, Gary Soto, Jeanne DuPrau, Francisco X. Stork, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sofia Quintero.
Profits from the book sales will be donated to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), an organization building libraries in Darfur refugee camps in Chad.
Read more here or pre-order your own copy here.
Roger Sutton put up this post on the Read Roger blog for continuing the discussion about Marc Aronson’s “New Knowledge” article in the Horn Book, in which Marc argues that nonfiction authors should be allowed to speculate, draw conclusions, and reveal their points of view in their books.
While I found Marc’s terminology of “new” versus “old” nonfiction to be pejorative, I do agree with his basic thesis that speculation in nonfiction can be valuable when done well (which he elaborates on here and here and here and here–all worth reading!). The “done well” part is the key, I think, and involves both laying out the foundations for your conclusions as well as explicitly pointing out to the reader what is accepted to be fact and what is speculation (by anyone, author included). Many of today’s nonfiction authors for kids, including both Marc and Jim Murphy, are already doing that, and I believe it’s a good thing.
But one anonymous commenter to Rogers’s post distrusts this approach:
“The new NF seems to be all about embracing the slant and deliberately writing non-fiction from a specific viewpoint. Whether I agree with the author or not, I think it’s perilously close to propaganda and I don’t like it.”
Okay, I can understand the fears behind a viewpoint like that, but ew, boy, does it make my skin crawl! Why? Because sharing an opinion based on one’s own broad and deep research, and then openly stating that it is your opinion, is NOTHING like propaganda! Propaganda would be making a slant by manipulating the research or by not admitting where the facts stopped and conjecture began. A good nonfiction author would NEVER consider doing either one. And any work that tried to would be quickly called out and criticized.
In our polarized, conflicted society we need more opportunities to share well-reasoned opinions with each other, not less. This kind of debate based on the interpretation of known facts is how we move society forward. Equating opinions backed up by rational arguments with propaganda gives us permission to ignore them, permission to stay stuck in our old ways, permission to hate. I may disagree with you, but I’d love to know how you came to your opinion so I can understand it better, so we can at least have a conversation about it. And if you ask me to explain mine, to back it up, to justify it, I just might discover that it really doesn’t hold water and I have to readjust my thinking.
Marc responds to the propaganda comment himself here. In his post, he says:
“Propaganda is writing in which the goal of influencing the reader is paramount — you select what you say and how you say it to manipulate, entrance, alarm, convince the audience. It is a form of advertising. Any book I write, edit, or praise lives and dies by the rule of “falsification.” That is, no matter what position I begin with, or what passion I experience in writing, or what goal I have in telling the story, my first obligation is to evidence. If I find evidence that contradicts the story I had planned to tell or the message I intended to get across, or my motivation in writing, I must still share it. So long as an author does his or her best to abide by that standard, that book fits my standards for NF.”
Yes, I totally agree! He goes on to say:
“I say that writers can, if they choose, show their hands, reveal the dog they have in this fight, show their own personal passion to investigate and tell one historical story. That tells the reader why he or she might care — it is why the author cared.”
I love that—as a reader, as a parent, and as an author! Then, however, he adds this in a comment to his own post:
“I think that concern exists more broadly in kids books where NF is in this strange place where it is criticized for being dull, yet many want it to be neutral and “objective.” In other words we are both urged to take the distant voice of the textbook and criticized for doing so.”
Um, I was with you all the way, Marc, right up until you equated neutral and objective with dull and distant. I don’t believe they are, or ever will be, mutually exclusive. Good writing is good writing, whether it is speculative or not. 🙂
The March/April 2011 issue of The Horn Book Magazine is a special issue devoted to “Fact, Fiction, and In Between.” It’s a fantastic compendium of articles and notes from some of today’s top writers of nonfiction for kids, and it’s giving me a lot to think about. I’ll probably post more on these thoughts later, but for now, I wanted to explore the ideas in Marc Aronson’s article called “New Knowledge.”
Marc says that today’s “new” nonfiction is different from “old” nonfiction in that it doesn’t just present the existing work of adult scholars in a format young readers can digest, but instead discovers new knowledge and speculates on its meanings for the first time. He concludes with:
“Just as we have both realistic fiction and speculative fiction, maybe we ought to split up our nonfiction section into books that aim to translate the known and books that venture out into areas where knowledge is just taking shape.”
While I definitely admire some of the works he cites as representative of the “new” nonfiction, including Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s They Called Themselves the K.K.K.and Tanya Lee Stone’s Almost Astronauts, his assertions make me nervous on a couple of levels.
First, the line of “old” versus “new” implies “not-as-good” versus “better.” I don’t think this is necessarily true. Books that take existing knowledge and synthesize it in a way that make it palatable to kids are important, and they can be very, very good. I think this is part of what rankles Jim Murphy so in his rebuttal blog post on the topic, “The Line of Difference.”
Second, by association, is that he seems to imply that speculation in nonfiction is always a good thing. I agree that it can be a good thing, if done carefully and well. But if not, speculation in nonfiction can be a very dangerous thing indeed. Now, I really don’t think Marc is saying that speculation should be done without solid research to back it up or without calling attention to the fact that it is, in fact, speculation, but there’s a chance it could be taken that way by some readers. Many a wonderful nonfiction book would be ruined if the author felt compelled to speculate beyond the facts to fit their work into a more desirable category. As a nonfiction author, I am only going to speculate on something if the subject I am writing about calls for it; I have been completely convinced I am right; I am able to explain how I came to those conclusions so readers can judge for themselves; and I’m going to tell the reader they are MY conclusions, no one else’s. Is it valuable for kids to be exposed to that kind of speculation in nonfiction? You bet! Can nonfiction be valuable and current and relevant without it? You bet! Do we need a way to distinguish between the two in this way? I don’t really think so. Good nonfiction, whether it contains high-quality speculation or not, is good nonfiction.
For me, a more useful division is between what I’ll call “straight” nonfiction version creative nonfiction. Straight nonfiction is the nonfiction I remember being exposed to as a child of the early 70s in rural Wisconsin. I admit I was an information junkie, and I would pore over our encyclopedia sets (thank you Mom and Dad!) on cold winter days, undaunted by the dry, “just-the-facts-ma’am” presentation.
But when I first read creative nonfiction, it set my brain on fire. Using fictional techniques to turn facts into a story is what I view as a bigger shift and a more useful division than the one Aronsen proposed.
If I’m doing a research project, I’ll probably want to seek out straight nonfiction so I can find the information I need quickly. Are these types of books valuable and necessary? Of course.
But if I’m reading for pleasure, simply for the joy of learning something new, by all means wrap it up in an engaging story for me! Tracy Kidder is a master at this for adults (Squee! I got to attend his lecture last week, and he’s currently working on a book about writing creative nonfiction!); Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map is one of the most riveting books I’ve ever read, fiction or nonfiction; and I’d count BOTH Marc Aronson AND Jim Murphy among the best doing this kind of writing, for children or adults.
As a reader, I mostly want to know if the book I’m picking up is straight nonfiction or creative nonfiction, because they serve different purposes for me, both of which I need, but at different times. I don’t need to know, when I pick it up, if a nonfiction book will have speculation or not, or if the knowledge can be found in other books. I can encounter that along the way, either in the text or in the backmatter.
So, I understand the distinction Marc was making in his article, and I greatly admire him and the other authors who are breaking new ground in their research and thinking and sharing it with young readers. I just don’t know if “old” versus “new” is a necessary or helpful division, and I find his choice of terminology to be insulting to the many wonderful authors who dedicate their lives to researching, organizing, and presenting the facts to children in their non-speculative nonfiction works.
I love fairy tales. My husband loves fairy tales (thanks to him we own an almost complete set of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library!). And of course, my kids love fairy tales. Who doesn’t?
Old photos of Snow White and one of her dwarfs—Hungry, maybe?
While searching for ideas for this month’s Picture Book Marathon, I’ve been reading more fairy tales and folktales than I normally do. And I’ve been loving every minute of it!
Imagine my surprise when I discovered the February 26th is National Fairy Tale Day! I can’t find an official source for that, but other people seem to celebrate it, so why not? I’ll take any excuse to share some of my newly discovered favorites with the kids at bedtime tonight, or maybe I’ll even read them some of the retellings I’ve written this month. 🙂
Looking for more fairy tale facts or fun? Here are some resources I’ve found:
SurLaLune is THE place to start researching fairy tales on the web. It features 49 annotated fairy tales, including their histories, similar tales across cultures, modern interpretations and over 1,500 illustrations. Wow!
“[Fairy tales] work through so many personal and cultural anxieties, yet they do it in a safe, ‘once upon a time’ way,” says Maria Tatar, a professor at Harvard College who writes about, and teaches classes on, fairy tales. “Fairy tales have a real role in liberating the imagination of children. No matter how violent they are, the protagonist always survives.”
I’d rather just read and enjoy (and write!) them, though. Two of my favorites have always been The Ugly Duckling and Puss in Boots. I guess I’ve always been a sucker for a good underdog story. What are your favorites, and why?
p.s. February is also National Love Your Library Month. Why not head to your local library and pick up some fairy tales to enjoy with someone special tonight?
