Books that Break the Rules
I was an editor before I was a writer (still am, in fact), and I can tell you there are certain things you look for in a manuscript when you first pick it up, a sort of mental checklist before you can even begin deciding whether or not it’s a fit for your list and something your company could publish successfully. Will it fit in a recognized format? Does it have a protagonist of the right age? Does the main character grow and change as the book progresses? Does it preach an irritating and stuffy moral? Stuff like that.
It is surprising, then, when I’m reading the classics to my daughter, to find how many of them violate these rules. Like these:
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever: Can’t be beat for sheer transgressive fun and sly humor and a dead-on perception of the trials of childhood (like being FORCED to be Joseph in the Christmas pageant just because your father is the minister). Violates the rules by having a protagonist who is barely developed, doesn’t even get a name (!), and essentially exists as a set of eyes through which to see the action.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The ultimate wish-fulfillment book, as tasty to read as a chocolate bar is to eat. Violates the rules by having a passive protagonist who does nothing to earn his good fortune—who, in fact, earns his good fortune BY doing nothing.
Stuart Little: There’s something just so oddly satisfying about this book, although I have trouble putting my finger on it. Is it the sharp perception of the experience of being tiny in a giant world, perhaps? Violates the rules by not wrapping up plot threads once they have been started. (Did Stuart ever find Margalo? Did he ever see Miss Ames again?) And the car that goes invisible, too. That part’s just silly, E.B.
And yet, they’re marvelous books. I enjoying reading them as much as my girl loves hearing them. So is the moral that geniuses (genii?) can break the rules, or that the rules are silly?
Read MoreDoing Something
A moment in the library at Ferguson, Missouri.
If you’re like me, you’ve been deeply sad and angry about the things that have been and are happening in Ferguson, and all the things in our country that we now refer to just by saying the name of a neighborhood. And you feel frustrated and helpless, too, and wish here was something you could do.
I can think of four things.
1) Take a deep breath and admit that racial bias is real, and that it hurts people daily.
2) If someone of color says that he or she has experienced racial bias, believe it. They are the experts. They know.
3) Try to read, write and publish more books that feature children of color. If we are going to see each other as real people, and not caricatures built of fear, we need to start young.
4) Donate some money to the Ferguson Library. This small library has stayed open when schools and other public services shut down. They are trying to buy “healing kits” for the kids in the community, to help them deal with the traumatic events all around them. If there is every a community that needs a safe, calm place where minds and hearts can meet (is there ever a community that doesn’t?), Ferguson is it.
More about the library here.
Read MoreBoo!
A little treat for Halloween–a short short story called “Cat’s Paw.”
The boy sat up in bed, listening.
First a feathery sound. Like a dry paintbrush whispering across paper.
Then footsteps softer than his own heartbeat.
Finally a thump more felt than heard as something landed on the bed.
The boy groped for a lamp. He touched the switch. He looked at the cat sitting by his feet.
He sighed. “It’s you. I thought it was something scary.”
“Silly,” said the cat. “Cats aren’t scary.”
“I’m dreaming,” the boy whispered. “Cats can’t talk!”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” answered the cat. Her whiskers were black with something sticky and dark.
“I’d worry about the rats,” she added. “Now that’s scary.”
Inside the wall, the boy could hear tiny claws scrabbling at plaster.
When the claws broke through, the boy could swear the cat smiled.
For more like this, check out Half Minute Horrors, an anthology of tiny and terrifying tales, edited by Susan Rich.
Read MoreScience Marches On…
…but books stand still.
One of the hardships of a nonfiction author’s life is the way you can scramble to get the most updated information for your book, only to have those ding-dangity scientists discover brand new facts that throw everything out of whack right after your book hits the shelves.
It’s a particular problem with dinosaurs. Kids, of course, love to know about the most extreme dinosaurs (biggest! longest! smallest! tallest!). Just as you have firmly declared that so-and-so-asaurus is the biggest, somebody will come up with a newer, bigger find. Sometimes you wish they’d just knock off all the discovery for a year or two. On the other hand, sometimes you need them to hurry it up. Remember when Pluto was in the process of becoming not a planet after all? I was in the middle of writing a nonfiction book on outer space. Deadline was approaching. Scientists could not make up their minds. I was sitting there tapping my fingers on my desk, thinking, “Come on, guys, either it’s in or it’s out, but make up your minds! I’ve got to get this to my editor!”
Now, just after Terror Bird has been published, people are starting to wonder if these marvelous and outlandish birds were VEGETARIANS. No! What will happen to the marvelous illustration of the terror bird chomping up a teeny horse? And can a plant-eater be called a terror bird anyway? I’m pretty sure my editor would not have taken the book if it had been called Extremely Large Seed-Nibbling Bird.
Well, these particular scientists are studying a European species of terror bird, not my South American beauties, so let’s hope that the ones in my book can remain predators at least until the publisher runs out of stock.
Read MoreThe Cats Are Coming!
Saber-Toothed Cat by Sarah L. Thomson–the latest in the early reader series Ancient Animals.
The latest title in the Ancient Animals series has been published! Check out Saber-Toothed Cat. If you know a newly independent reader (think first or second grade) who loves dinosaurs, this would be a perfect introduction to a wider and wonderful world of prehistoric creatures.
Read MoreDo We Still Need Libraries?
I used to do library research here, at the New York Public Library. Loved it. There’s something about great architecture combined with books–transformative.
Rural Maine libraries on borrowed time. Libraries that survive on fundraisers, donations, and grants–or that are closing.
Stories like this make me weep. But then I think–I admit it. I don’t spend as much time in libraries as I used to.
Well, I just don’t. A lot of the research material I need is available online. A few keystrokes and I can get it, without leaving my desk. And like a lot of people in the publishing business, I am buried under books. I rarely need to go and pick up a paperback to while away the time. I’m too busy cowering guiltily away from the tomes piled up under my coffee table and on my nightstand.
So do we need libraries anymore? Let me think. What do libraries provide that I can’t get at home?
Access. Not every person, especially not every child, has a computer with high-speed internet. Libraries used to the the only place it was easy to find reference books, encyclopedias, dictionaries–the kind of book you didn’t need every day, but when you needed them, you needed them. Now a lot of that stuff is available electronically, and libraries are there to make sure we are all able to get it–not just those of us who can afford expensive gadgets. Libraries are still about the democratization of information, without which a democracy is doomed.
Community. I see them. Sitting there. Staring at a screen, flipping through a magazine, curled up on a beanbag chair with a book. READERS. Reading is a solitary pursuit, but when I go into a library, I’m surrounded by evidence that I am not the only person who does it. Granted, some of these readers look a little odd, and some of them seem to be carrying on conversations with invisible table mates, and they aren’t all the kind of people I want to invite home for a cup of tea. I don’t like all of them. I don’t like all of their books. It doesn’t matter. They are fellow members of my tribe, people immersed in words and ideas. Libraries build that community–and we readers can’t do without it.
Expertise. It’s too easy to discount this today. We can shop for any book we want online; we can browse through a million websites; we have a world of literature at our digital fingertips. But librarians still know things the rest of us don’t. The wider and wilder the world of information and literature grows, the more we need guides who have read the maps and can point out the signposts.
Choice. Shelves and shelves of books spread out all around us. We don’t have to read the latest bestseller or the book that just got the hot review or the one our mother-in-law gave us for Christmas. We can look at all the possibilities on the shelves, and we can choose. How especially wonderful this is for children, who can break out from the books their parents have picked for them (“Mom. Nothing about India or adoption,” my six-year-old said sternly to me the other day. Rats. She’s on to me.) and read what catches their eyes and calls to their hearts.
And those things are worth $22.24 per taxpayer per year, or about 6 cents a day–which is what it costs per resident to keep the library in Mexico, Maine, open. A bargain.
Read MoreTug of War
Detail from Hokusai Manga
Historical fiction is a balancing act–better metaphor, a tug of war, accuracy pulling hard on one side and accessibility on the other. If you make your characters talk like they actually did four or five centuries ago, you will quickly lose readers who don’t have the patience to mentally translate. For example, here’s a snippet of Meriwether Lewis’s diary from his expedition to find the Northwest Passage. He’s presumably writing and spelling more or less as he spoke:
…this may in some measure assist us to account for the heavy dues which are mor remarkable for their freequency and quantity than in any country I was ever in— they are so heavy the drops falling from the trees from about midknight untill sunrise gives you the eydea of a constant gentle rain.
And that’s just from 1803, and the man is speaking/writing English. If you’re trying to go farther back historically and farther afield geographically, it gets harder and harder to make your characters sound comprehensible.
On the other hand, if you make your characters talk like today’s teenagers, they just sound ludicrous. I knew I had gone too far in that direction when one of my writing group participants told me that my ninjas sounded a bit like her Yiddish-speaking relatives.
And the thing is, you don’t actually know if you’ve kept your balance until the thing is published and you get reactions from readers. That’s when you discover if accuracy had yanked you so far off into Meriwether-Lewis-land that nobody can understand you, or if accessibility has pulled you flat on your face.
Read MoreSarah L. Thomson
A children’s book author publishing award-winning nonfiction, poetry, picture books and novels including…
“Thomson focuses on newfound connection, magic, and suspense to conjure a fast-paced, heartwarming mystery. Thomson’s world is populated by resourceful protagonists, fanciful creatures, and quirky supporting characters.”
—Publishers Weekly