He would drive and drive and my dad would sit in the back When my son was 9 or 10, my dad and I used to let him drive the car on them. It closed years and years ago - but much of the ruins of it are still there, particularly the runways. When I was a child, there was an Air Force base near my home. My dad was the biggest dog lover on the face of the earth. ![]() There's a country western song by Toby Keith that goes: I was now thinking about how others were going to react to my work, rather than writing freely and purely and honestly. When I posed the question to her, she said to me, with a tinge of surprise in her voice: You're censoring yourself!Īnd she was right, of course. Should I leave the profanity in? Should I take it out?įortunately, I have a wise and wonderful editor. That is exactly what that character would have said. When I was working on my third book ( Moonpie and Ivy), one of the characters (Ruby) has an argument with her sister. That profanity came out without a thought - because, in my mind, it belonged there. I'm just wondering out loud, I guess, if sometimes the inexperience produces a purer form of creativity.įor example, to my naive surprise, I got some negative feedback about mild profanity in my first two books. I'm not saying most writers don't get better with experience. Interestingly, those earlier books required less revision than my later books.ĭon't get me wrong. And I know that they spilled out the quickest and the most freely. I think those first books were the "purest" books I've ever written. I wasn't thinking so much about structure or pacing or worrying that much about whether the main character had grown enough, yada yada yada. I wasn't thinking about the "rules" of writing for children. I wasn't thinking about whether my books would be read in a classroom. While I know that I'm a more skilled writer now than when I first started, I also think that I haven't written as freely and "joyfully" as I did my first few books.īack when I was new, I wasn't thinking about reviewers. That discussion made me think about my own creative work as a writer. ![]() In addition, perhaps their lack of technical knowledge allowed them to be freer creatively - they didn't get all bogged down in the "rules" and the technical stuff. We both agreed that one reason that the high school students were creatively freer is because they didn't know enough to censor or judge themselves or to even think that much about how others will perceive their work. So that led to a discussion of why that was so. ![]() My son commented that the high school students had the best work, creatively. On the last night of each session, all the groups get together to view a slideshow of work by all the students. The workshop is attended primarily by adults and college students, but there is one designed specifically for high school students (which my son attended when he was in high school). Last night he got home from three weeks at a photo workshop in Maine, where he's gone for several years now. My son is a photography student at Parsons. (But, um, why is it so much easier for me to write MORE words.?) So here's what I did: I took that dog Willy and wrote the novel How to Steal a Dog - and I took the character of Aggie and put her in the Sleepy Time Motel in the Smoky Mountains and wrote the novel Greetings from Nowhere. I tried and tried but I just could NOT fix that picture book. She gave me some specifics and some good questions to ponder and left me to figure it all out. "But there's something that keeps it from being completely satisfying." Then came the BUT (you know how you're always waiting for that word - like the other shoe dropping). One of the main characters was an old lady named Aggie and her dog Willy. It was set in the Smoky Mountains (at a motel - duh). It was called Four Fine Friends at the Sleepy Time Motel. I tried to write a picture book a few years ago. ![]() How do they do it.tell a story with so few words?
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