Category Archives: Writing

If I had a dog, he would have eaten my homework this week

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Whew. I’ve been slacking on the blog, but I have a plethora of good excuses.

First, thanks to my daughter’s playground fall, I’ve spend a total of eight hours in the Children’s Hospital ER in the past week. We went from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. one night while they decided whether her elbow was broken (yes) and whether to do surgery (no). Then we went back a few days later from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. while they put on a cast. Good times.

Along with learning about elbow bones, I learned that anyone in need of a little drama should hang out in the ER. There were crying babies and crying moms and twisted ankles and severe fevers and everything in between.

That’s only my first excuse.

Second one: I went with my daughter and her newly plastered arm to see Annie Barrows on Tuesday night. She’s the author of the Ivy and Bean books (which my daughter loves) and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (which I love).

I always enjoy hearing how other writers work. According to Annie, it takes six months to write an Ivy and Bean book. The first draft takes a month, then she puts it away for a couple weeks. Then she rewrites, and puts it away for a couple weeks. Then she might rewrite again. When she’s finished, she sends it to her editor… then rewrites again. She said one book took nine rewrites.

Nine rewrites to create a chapter book. Yikes! But there must have been a hundred little girls lined up for her autograph. If that doesn’t inspire you to rewrite, what would?

She also mentioned that she’s not working on a children’s book at this exact moment, because there’s a new grown-up book in progress. This made me happy and my daughter unhappy.

I have a third excuse.

Has anyone else noticed how long this blog past has become, though? I think I’ll make my next excuse tomorrow. Because if one can combine excuses with procrastination… well, isn’t that the secret to the whole writing life?

The blank page

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At my last writers’ group meeting, we talked about how to get over the terror of facing that first blank page in the morning. Here are three possible methods, from three different people:

  • End each day with a cliffhanger sentence, something that will immediately get you writing again.
  • Begin with a random writing prompt, but insert your main character’s name.
  • Set a timer. Commit to writing for 20 minutes… then hope you keep typing after the ding.

Other suggestions?

First love

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Today, I finished an outline. (I know. Outline. Shocking concept.)

And, I wrote two pages. That may not seem like much, but I’m in the flush of first-draft love. Nothing’s gone wrong. I like the characters. The plot still makes sense. Not a revision in sight… until at least page three.

It’s been done

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My son recently received a set of four early readers: Wizards, Dragons, Robots, and Pirates.

They are all mind-numbingly dull, so as I read them aloud, I had time to wonder if I could incorporate all four “boy” topics into one book. It would be great! An early chapter book about wizards, dragons, and robots, with a modern pirate thrown in.

Then I realized… that would be Star Wars.

My mini-comicom

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Last Friday, I escaped my keyboard, left my children to the ice-cream indulgence of their grandparents, and headed off to a professional development seminar for teachers called Getting Graphic: Effective Literacy Learning with Comics and Graphic Literature.

Official Story:
I was at the conference as part of a CWILL BC group of writers and illustrators. The opportunity to meet more than 100 teachers and librarians was too good to resist — I set up a display of the 50 Questions series and The Lowdown on Denim, spread out some teachers’ guides, and prepared to boast about some of the comic-style illustrations incorporated by Ross Kinnaird and Clayton Hanmer.

Unofficial Story #1:
I was secretly spying.

Teachers and librarians know what catches student interest. Many of the teachers who stopped to chat seemed to think 50 Underwear Questions would appeal to both the girls and the boys, while teachers with reluctant boy readers turned directly toward 50 Poisonous Questions. Apparently, there’s still a need for good, gross, bubbling boy topics.

Unofficial Story #2:
A stellar panel talking about graphic novels? Sign me up! This whole meet-the-teachers thing was a great way to sneak in and see the actual presentations.

There were four experts speaking about their experiences with graphic novels: senior UBC instructor Margot Filipenko, UBC Instructional Programs Librarian Jo-Anne Naslund, illustrator Kathryn Shoemaker, and primary teacher Dionne Risler.

Now, I have a confession to make. Graphic novels make me go cross-eyed. I’m usually a fast reader. Slowing down to absorb all the visual information makes me feel like a long-distance runner in lead sneakers. I love novels. I love the visual cornucopia of entirely illustrated books such as Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. But a mix of the two? I feel like I may have a seizure.

This was the advice of Kathie Shoemaker: get over it.

In technical teacher terms, I’m lacking the abiliy to decode multi-modal texts. In other words, once I learned to read, I stopped paying enough attention to the pictures.

I now have a list of graphic novels to check out, both fiction and non-fiction. And did you know the opera was a multi-modal experience?

As I’m getting over my visual impairment, I can now notice all sorts of graphic novel details. The way time passes. The way panels can show moment-to-moment action, or scene-to-scene. The way white space can leave room for emotion.

Thanks to Kathie and her panel cohorts, the next time one of my books is destined for graphic-novel-style illustration panels, I have a whole new world of variety to consider.

So, from this conference-crasher, many thanks to the panelists, Vi Hughes, and LOMCIRA for a great morning!

The big reveal

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Here it is! The project I’ve been working on for the last few months. It’s all about the non-scientific roles that blood plays in human culture. (Hmmm… I’m really going to have to find a more-fun way to say that.) For now, the cover probably says it best:

It’s illustrated by graphic artist Steve Rolston, entirely in black, white, and red. It looks fantastically cool and I’m justalittlebitexcited.

Real-life copies available in the spring!

Everyone likes a forest

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I am very pleased to say that 50 Poisonous Questions has been shortlisted for the Ontario Library Association’s Silver Birch non-fiction award. Public and school librarians make the Forest of Reading shortlists each year, then students read the books and vote for their favourites.

Pick me, pick me!

Just kidding. (Not really.) There are lots of other great titles on the lists, such as Cynthia Pratt Nicolson’s Totally Human. I met Cynthia at Celebrate Science last month, and her writing is captivating. As are the illustrations in her book!

Good luck to all…

How to keep an idea

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Ideas are slippery little suckers. One can be thrashing around in your head as if it will live forever. The next thing you know, your great aunt calls. By the time you’re off the phone, the idea has slipped the hook and you can’t remember a single wiggle of it.

[Whew… enough with the fishing analogy. I think that will be my first and final of those.]

My point is: when you have an idea, you have to catch it. (Incidentally, you should watch this Elizabeth Gilbert TED Talk for the description of the poet who felt poems coming like freight trains across the fields.) You have to write your idea down. Over at Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh talks about keeping a pen in her shower, and taking a notebook on runs.

I have not resorted to either of those methods. I have, however, been known to run naked from the shower directly to the computer. My family’s quite used to it. Probably the neighbours are, too.

My point is this: ideas might be infinite. They may keep arriving like freight trains throughout your entire life and if you miss a few, well… you can always grab the next. OR, they might be finite. And if that’s the case, you don’t want to let the big one get away.

Where Ideas Come From

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One of the questions most commonly asked during my school presentations is: “where do you get your ideas?”

The answer is different for every book.

Some are easy. When Annick asked me to write a title in the True Stories from the Edge series, I asked Min what boys would want to read. He chose fires. And so, I wrote True Stories from the Edge: Fires!

I wrote The Blue Jean Book because my publisher called and she was so convinced that a book about blue jeans must be written, I agreed. Right there and then, on the phone. Somehow forgetting that I was really quite pregnant, and newborns and book editing don’t necessarily work well together.

Other idea origins are harder to pinpoint. I knew that somewhere between phone call one, when Annick asked for a middle-grade book about fire facts, and phone call two, when we disused concepts, I had arrived at the 50 Questions format.

What made me decide on 50 silly questions, with semi-serious answers?

This week, I decided it must have been my work environment. Because here are just a few of the questions my son has asked in the past seven days:

  • Are vampires real?
  • If God breathed on Adam to bring him to life, does He breathe on babies, too?
  • Why can’t you eat ear wax?
  • Wouldn’t it be good if we could all stay in the air like astronauts?
  • Have you ever eaten guts?

I’ve decided that it’s no surprise at all that my books ended up in question-and-answer format. The only surprise is that the questions aren’t even more wacky.