Creative kids can't spell

This is a personal rant against a trend in children’s literature.

This rant does not represent the thinking of Pen Parentis, just of me.

Ready?

I am so frustrated by the current trend of books aimed at a younger child audience that are filled with intentionally misspelled words (Junie B Jones, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, etc.) – presumably to show that the main character who is writing the book is a child.

Not only does it presuppose that all kids are dismal spellers, it pushes the (false) notion that creative people must have terrible spelling. And it enshrines the belief that spelling doesn’t matter.

Idea#1 – "It makes the book more real." My son actually said this to me in defense of one of these books.

I seem to recall plenty of diary books written in first person from the point of view of a child who had no spelling issues: Are you There, God, it’s Me, Margaret comes instantly to mind. Nothing was more real. I never had any doubt that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s main character was a child who grew up on a prairie writing on a slate--never! She didn't have to write letters and numbers reversed for us to know she was young.

As far as verisimilitude goes, I don’t recall The Outsiders having misspelled words among the slang S. E. Hinton used throughout. Far as I recall, the book uses the apostrophe very properly. And its author was actually a child. Well, ok, 19. So they say.

Idea #2 – "creative people all have terrible spelling."

Not going to grace this one with an answer. Well, okay. One: what about Harriet the Spy? 

Idea #3 – Spelling doesn’t matter.

It duz. Rilly. Its soupr annoing to reed bad speling. Even if you CAN.

I’m hoping that this trend will pass. You learn to spell mostly from early reading—just like you learn language from the people that surround you when you are an infant. If your parents have an accent, guess what, you have one too. It’s hard enough for a kid to figure out how to spell Light when it is spelled Lite on every package of food she has ever seen—can’t we petition the schools to please ensure that the books our kids read for reading class follow proper spelling and grammar rules?

The other books can all be in the library – I dislike censorship - but any assigned reading should really help the kids learn to write. If you're going to supply only broken tools, don't expect anyone to be able to build a birdhouse. 

I know, it’s a losing battle (heavy sigh) –which is why this is a rant and not a post.  Go write something. Sit in the sunshine. Listen to your inner editor. Buy him a cup of ice coffee. I'm buying mine an aspirin and a huge glass of water.

Publishing or Self-Publishing for Kids

This rambling post isn’t about what you think.

My kids and I have a ritual of me reading while they eat breakfast. It started because my son had read Castle in the Attic for school in third grade and wanted to share with his little sister, so, with his own money and without telling me, he bought it, along with its sequel, at his school’s book fair. Let’s just pause a moment over how awesome that is.

Yeah. Books are awesome. Kids who buy books, super-awesome.

Anyway, when he asked me to read the books aloud to both of them, it started an amazing practice of read-aloud at breakfast. She liked Castle in the Attic a lot, even though it was clearly a boy-targeted book (the only female characters are an overly busy mother and an old British caretaker who sits and sews and encourages the boy to think and act for himself). The book, however is a fun adventure story. Not perfect, but charming. We couldn’t wait to read the next part.

None of us enjoyed the sequel as much – it felt rushed and irrelevant, my daughter hated the excessive violence, my son was frustrated by the unmotivated villain (Why was there a big rat? Who made him? How did he control the other rats?) and I hated the irrelevant fake-swearing (What 12 yr old says “blast” and why put swearing in at all if the kid is only going to fake-swear? ) But ok. I figured this two-book series was a double book sale, where the new author won awards with a book she’d slaved over for a decade, and had to get the second one out within a year. The book ended and we wanted to move on to something else right away.

So I needed another book.

Last year at BEA—after seeing my badge and assuring himself I had kids—an author thrust a chapter book into my hands. “Your daughter needs this book,” he said. I remember wanting to throw it immediately into the nearest circular file, just based on his arrogance.

But it had a pretty cover, which was not pink or sparkly. The title intrigued me, and the summary implied the book would help girls learn about environmentalism.

Let’s start with the above, and talk about self-publishing.

• ·      This guy has written a (let’s presume) good book.
• ·      He wants to market it to girls only.
• ·      He does not want it to be turned into a “pink, cursive” book.  (You don’t think the publishing industry does this? Have a look at this.)

So, he decides to self-publish.

Awesome, say I. We need more books for girls that don’t force a societal “you will be pink and cursive” style on them.

Ah – but.

Now comes the next step of our saga.

Cue this morning, when we finished the highly-unsatisfying sequel to a book we had all liked, and needed something new. Immediately.

I pulled this old BEA freebie-book off my shelf. My son was willing to give it a whirl because the girl wearing a long dress in the forest on the cover was not in pink and had no tiara. Yes, the book’s subtitle mentioned a princess, but after all, fairy tales have great plots. The illustrations promised some pretty vicious bad guys, so okay.

We began.

I read the introduction. It was a scene from nature: a butterfly’s flight. My son stopped me when the chapter ended. “What was that?” he said, bewildered, “Some kind of symbolism?” I told him to give the book a chance. (Meanwhile, I was stumbling over the plethora of adverbs. The insect didn’t just fly: it flitted happily, fluttered gaily, flew hurriedly…and at the end, darted off deeply saddened.) This author wasn't writing a book, he was narrating a screenplay for a blind person who was also a little bit...slow.

The second chapter, also called “introduction,” began with a detailed description of the castle. When I say detailed, I mean: the ornate grand piano handcrafted of rosewood was actually described as a “highly ornate and handcrafted grand piano made of imperial rosewood and other exotic materials. These materials are only known to be owned and imported by those elite enough to do so. The craftsmanship on the piano is the highest level known and the attention to detail is painstakingly meticulous.”

I can forgive a bit of excessive detail. I kept reading. My kids squirmed.

A few paragraphs down, the kitchen whisk was called a “wisp” which I corrected as I read aloud. Two pages into the description of the castle, my son pushed back from his breakfast with a loud sigh and an eye-roll, “Ok! Ok! We get it! It’s the nicest, fanciest castle in the whole world!”

And that’s when I realized what excellent readers children are. Because of television and the accessibility of movies, our kids have grown up on narrative. They have been raised on action in the first moment, they have been raised with characters that have great backstory, clear motivations, and concise descriptions. They ask pertinent questions (why are all those lights flashing when he only pressed one button? Why did the bad guy not just shoot them, why talk to them first?) and they remember things that adults have long forgotten (I thought the girl had put the button into her vest pocket. When did it get into her jeans pocket?). They might be our best editors. Certainly they are the harshest critics: This book is boring. Let’s read something else.

After his sister goes to bed, I’ve been reading Jules Verne aloud to the ten year old: he is fascinated by every archaic word. The descriptions all matter – things you are assumed to know are not described, unfamiliar things are. Every character’s motivation is obvious and many chapters end with huge surprises.

Had this princess book been better edited, I have no doubt it would have been an excellent read. As is, even my daughter was squirming after the first ten pages. I’m purposefully leaving the title and author out of this post, because I hate to discourage any writer – the lesson in this post is merely: edit with a kid’s eye. They are quick to grasp and have vivid imaginations - they will fill in all your details without even trying.

And they read every single word, so they notice unintentional typos lightning-quick. My son is reading Matilda for class and he has already caught two typos (c'mon Scholastic!) and nothing pulls him out of the narrative faster.

But this isn’t a blog for children’s book authors. Here’s my question to you – given that self-publishing allowed this guy full creative control over his cover and presumably also allowed for the rambling over-detailed writing that made at least two kids not want to finish his book…what do you think? Should he have held-out for a publisher? Should he have hired a high-end professional editor? What should authors do in this day and age to ensure they have the best editing possible, hire kids?

Inspiring article - read it and WRITE.

Had to share this inspiring article by Shawn Vestal, sent over by our newest advisory board member, NYC-based literary agent Renee Zuckerbrot.  Shawn's debut collection, Godforsaken Idaho, was published earlier this month--check out his wonderful essay on The Quivering Pen (link below).

Did this ever happen to you? I will admit, I was frantic about my writing while I was pregnant the first time - thought for sure that I had to make it all happen in those speedy nine months.

Follow this link for some wonderful inspiration: "My First Publication as a Father" by Shawn Vestal.

And write something wonderful today - even if it's only a paragraph. Make something happen.

Dystopian Future of Publishing

I'm reeling.

I was at a cell phone service store today, chatting with the staff while waiting to deal with a billing question and my guy noticed my email address. "Are you a writer? Carlos is a writer," says my guy, "Well, not exactly a writer. A publisher."

"Carlos" (name changed, obviously) is a heavyset, laughing, youthful man in his late twenties, with short dreds and really nice shoes. "Yeah. I don't write a word. I make books. I'm not exactly a publisher, though," says he. "More of a market research guru."

Intrigued, I asked for more details.

"Well, I have an Amazon imprint, you know? for eBooks. And I take a look at what's hot - like what's being Googled a lot, what books people are searching for, you know?--and then I think of a title and a pen name and get some cover art, come up with a table of contents, do some graphic design and then I get my writers to do a 'report' for me. Each report is a chapter of the book."

I am now trembling and appalled (and despite myself, really impressed at the nerve and cleverness of this scheme). "Do you pay the writers?"

"Sure," he says, "I pay them $50 or $60 for a ten thousand word report. Then I throw it all together with good graphic design and put it out on Amazon as an ebook. They sell like crazy; no work for me."

"Sleep money," says my guy.

"Yup," Carlos proudly nods. "Sleep money. I just started, and it's going great. The guy who told me about this? He makes 60K per month."

Let me repeat that last bit. The guy makes sixty thousand dollars per MONTH. I hope you weren't trying to eat while you read that. I nearly choked.

On the good side, this can only be done in non-fiction, where people search by keyword and where people don't really care who wrote the book, just that it's by "an expert."

In fiction, we are still...so far...safe.  So get back to writing your novel, people. Or, hey - pool together with your writing group to each write a short story on a very popular, contemporary topic - self publish the collection, and promote it on Twitter using the popular hashtag. It might not be a bad way to fund the annual party!

--

There is still time to submit to the $1000 Pen Parentis Writing Fellowship for New Parents. All writers at any level with a child under ten are eligible. Follow this link for guidelines.  Deadline April 17, 2013.

Emotional Garbage Truck

Okay, so here's what last week's crazy parenting moment reminded me of: 

I was writing a novel while I worked (at my fancypants corporate job I was required to look busy but there was often no work to be done) and one day found myself in an all-out war with a secretary over the office supply products that kept vanishing from my desk. It wasn't exactly a "stapler" moment (have you seen Office Space?) but very very close. I resolved to leave as soon as I got into an MFA program. And luckily it was the right time of year and I was able to schedule and take a GRE within a week and the applications sent by the end of the month and I was in by the end of the year. Never looked back. 

That's how I tend to deal with situations in which the emotional weight is preposterous compared to the actual reality of the situation. I assess, I change things, I fix it or I go away from it.

But last week, I got caught up in a stupid emotional undertow that was all about parenting. A riptide of useless anger at things that I have no business being irritated by. Normally, I would tell myself to asses, change, fix, or go away. How can you do that as a parent? I find myself in emotionally overwrought situations daily, if not hourly. I discover I am yelling over the fact that a kid wants to wear a summer dress when it is obviously a fall day outside. I find the last, uneaten bite of scrambled egg can give me hives. Pajamas on the floor? Look out.

It's not like I can give up parenting and go to grad school. I haven't even paid off the last one.

This is what a time-out is supposed to be about: this stepping away from it to asses and destress. But we don't usually. We have too much to do. If we manage to extract one kid (by giving them a time out for yelling back at us) we usually still have another kid or spouse or bills to pay or someone texting us or a dog to feed or garbage to take out or god knows what to deal with - we can't just duck into our laptops and try to write about it. 

And yet, writing your situation into words helps a lot - write it down, get it out of your head. Use the back of a receipt or email it to a close friend. This is why Facebook posts are good, or Tweeting. Because it forces you to take your emotions and turn them rationally into words. In order to do that, you have to assess. 

On the other hand, be sane about it - FB, Twitter, even emails - you're sending out this stuff into the universe. People are going to respond. Think before you publish! 

And that's hard as a writer. We love to publish.

Here's a tip: write and then assess. Was I writing this down in order to clear my head? If yes, then it's emotional garbage. Don't try to publish every piece of emotional garbage that was cluttering your head. You're writing to get it out of your head, not to put it into the world. Put it away. Post in on FB if you have set up appropriate privacy standards. Or better still save it in a file. Don't look at it again. Head cleared, get back to your real work.

Obviously if your real work is a memoir, well, it's interesting isn't it? Memoirs and creative nonfiction are such a delicate balance of the author needing to process his own feelings (listen to our podcast of Darin Strauss discussing why he wrote his memoir) and wanting to advise others on how to deal with the issues you faced (Abby Shur, our very first Pen Parentis Fellow, wrote a memoir about obsessive praying. The podcast of the panel discussion that night is available to logged-in members of Pen Parentis.) And the noise of the garbage in our head can be so damned loud sometimes that it's hard to find the creative space to actually write fiction. So maybe that memoir is important. But take some real time assessing whether it's important because it cleared out the creative space in your head, or if it's important because it will actually help other people get through what you went through.

We as writers forget that writing does not necessarily equal readers reading. So many writers publish too quickly and are appalled at the horrific feedback they get in comments (too easy for response, no one writes you a letter flaming your book, they just post it to the whole world after they give you one star on GoodReads.) So think twice before you publish your personal junk. Be sure. And then treat it like any writing - get an editor, make every word count, and like I said last week, make sure your main character (that would be you) is clear on what they want. In a positive way.

Remarkably? this helps with parenting too. If you are clear on what you want "I want you to wear shoes that will not get damaged in the rain today." Then your kid can assert what they want "I want to wear my diamond studded felt-and-cork flip flops" and you can discuss without fighting. "Will your diamond-studded shoes be damaged by the rain?" "Yes, and I don't care." "I'm sorry you don't care. However, you must find shoes that won't get damaged by the rain." "I hate you, you are a horrible mother."

Well, it's dramatic, anyway. Write it down on the back of that receipt for those shoes (what possessed you to buy those in the first place??) In the novel you're writing, that girl would have put on her rhinestone-studded rubber flip flops and gotten to school on time. When you drop off Princess at third grade, come home and change the scene to reflect the much-more-entertaining reality of conflict. Or have your character wear the shoes to school and they'll dissolve into a puddle of actual money that slips down into the sewer...

One day you'll be stuck in your writing and you can go to your file of angry moments and you can harvest it to get your characters in a scene again: all scenes have drama and as a writer said at our salon, Kids are drama all the time. For them the stakes are life-and-death over everything: which shoes to wear to school, who took their chair at the table, the fact that they erased something they meant to keep. Use these moments. Be inspired by them. It doesn't have to be a memoir or a blog - it can be inspiration to get your paper characters acting like flesh and blood. 

Want help? Give it. Part 2.

Face it, there’s a reason you’re not getting an agent: it’s not because your writing sucks. If your writing sucked, you wouldn’t be getting encouraging emails from agents saying they are sure it will find a market at some point. You would be getting only standard boring-as-hell, form-rejection letters that probably don’t have your name on them (if you are getting only this sort of rejection, quickly go take a writing workshop or writing class and find out why—the problem is likely technical and easily fixed)—but no, YOU are getting rejection letters that feel like apologies for not wanting a second date after a great first one… Short little half-apologies with lame excuses. Often it’s that your subject matter isn’t easily marketable, that your novel isn’t easy to categorize, that it doesn’t fall within typical guidelines, or just that the agent ‘didn’t connect’ with the material. I mean, if you were writing a zombie detective novel, or a torso-baring typical romance novel with a main character named Delphinia who at 27 is still a virgin, it would already be in print. But then you, dear author, wouldn’t be you.

Now the advice I’m about to give is time consuming, so listen up. I’m talking about FRIENDS here. I’m talking about people that you went to grad school with and held their hair as they puked and didn’t post the photos to FB (okay there wasn’t FB back then, but whatever) – I’m talking people who went to your kid’s first birthday party and who you swore to be friends with forever. Don’t let one-sided success screw up a good friendship. Just don’t!

I am NOT talking about the crazy guy from the MFA program who keeps friending you from other accounts because you sat next to him one day and were nice. I’m not talking about the crazy bitch from day care who keeps haranguing you to have a playdate because she has just written her fifth novel manuscript and wants you to blurb it (oh wait, crap, that’s me, nevermind) – and I’m certainly not talking about anyone that you don’t actually LIKE.

But that does leave a handful of friends. Even writers, you know who you are, have friends.

So what can we do to help each other? Well, you’ve done the first step: you’re seeking community. We really CAN help each other. It’s just that the one-on-one “here’s my agent’s cellphone number” help isn’t going to happen. Here’s a list of what we can do for each other:

• 1)   Read your friend’s books. (yes, some of them will suck. But just the fact that you bothered to put them into your long reading queue will mean SO MUCH to your friend that the next time his agent asks if he knows someone who writes X and you do, your name might come up.) – this goes for published and NOT published books. If you have three novels under your hat and your best friend from grad school is still struggling, well, do the shlub a favor and read his MS. And be honest: tell him, you need to take a writing class (he will hate you, but he won’t hate you more than if you keep NOT reading his MS). And vice versa: “I’m working on my own novel” is no reason not to read that friend’s book. Skim it. Read pieces. It’s not nice not to. If it’s awful, be gleeful in private and plan how yours will be better.
• 2)   Review that book wherever you’re a member, but keep the review really short (it was a great read! Or I loved this book!) – long reviews for friend’s books seem nepotistic. But do give your friend five stars if they deserve five stars: that’s just being nice. Plus (added nepotistic bonus) they might thank you in their blog which has 20,000 followers. And if the book really sucked, just skip the stars and say what you liked “great character of Pauline on page 245!” And published author-dude and dudettes: if you do read an MS that was great, guess what? Your 20K followers might want to know that too. You don’t have to be embarrassed to say “I just read a friend’s unpublished novel and really enjoyed it; I hope they find an agent soon!”
• 3)   GO TO YOUR FRIEND’S EVENTS! It’s so important to stay in touch, and if you are the only one who showed up at Barnes & Noble on that rainy Saturday, it will mean so much.  I learned this from my days as an actor: I can’t tell you how many auditions I got (mind you, it wasn’t jobs, no one hires you without trying you out: not in theater and not in books) – just because I showed up at a friend’s show. And it’s really good for YOU to go to these events: you’ll meet other authors. You’ll meet your friend’s agent. You’ll be able to network. Maybe you’ll meet your next editor, or at least know one editor’s name when you send your book out. Hell, just leaving the house for something other than a milk-run is a bonus these days.

These are super-easy things to do. Well, okay, the events thing might require a babysitter, but in general, what I’m saying is that we are a COMMUNITY. It is important to stand up for your friends. And yeah, Stephen King might not really notice when you show up, but he’s a freak of nature anyway. You went to high school with him and were best mates and now you saw him at a live event? Blog about it, cc-his alumni email address or tag him on the Facebook note, and maybe, just maybe, he will reply. Which will earn you a “like” on your site, which will lead to another blog entry, which will gain you a few Twitter followers, &etc…