Today I received my Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators membership packet with my membership card, bulletin, and publication guide. I ripped into that Express Mail envelope like a kid at Christmas. I highly recommend joining to anyone who writes for kids: picture books, chapter books, YA, and everything in between.
Look at the goodies inside (with photographic evidence):
Preparing and submitting your work with info on critique groups, formatting manuscripts, types of publishers, query letters, FAQ with a children’s book editor, and more.
Legal Questions like contracts and copyrights.
Publicizing your published workincluding grassroots promotion, keeping your book alive, web hosting and design, and more.
School visitinfo on domestic and international directories as well as sample lecture contracts.
Market surveys including small press, magazine, religious, and educational presses.
Directories & resources that were enough to make me bounce like an Easter bunny on speed.
There are times when I shell out money for a membership and a year later don’t feel it’s worth it. I’m only a few weeks into SCBWI membership and I’m already 100% convinced it was worth the membership cost. I’ll keep you posted on more membership perks. Can you recommend other great professional organizations for writers?
I was an English literature major. My brother is an English major now. We have these discussions often.
I loved those discussions of metaphor and meaning when I was an English major. Adored them. Couldn’t get enough of them. But even I had to occasionally say, “Really? REALLY?“
As a writer, I’m so thankful those discussions happen, and as a bookish being, I’m thankful that when a work leaves an author it’s no longer that author’s creation. Yes, the author put in the sweat, tears, and caffeine highs to make it happen and their name appears on the spine, but creation also happens when the reader brings her own baggage to the story, unpacks it, and gets her own underwear drawer, making the story her own. Meaning happens in that lovely blue-green overlap.
No, not the act. The movie. As a child of the ’80s, Dirty Dancing is inscribed in my memory, the epitome of sexy romance, but it wasn’t until I watched it for the first time in years that I noticed a crucial lesson for story telling.
Dirty Dancing has a simple, and often overplayed, premise: repressed, uptight young woman meets “bad” boy; at first they don’t understand one another, but they can’t deny the attraction. In the end, they fall in love; he expresses a vulnerability and desire to be respectable while she acknowledges her own desires and converts to an empowered and sexy figure. Dirty Dancing could have been a sad retelling of Grease, but it escaped that fate because of the ingenious use of memorable visuals ( no, I do not mean Patrick Swayze’s back in the “Hungry Eyes” montage), an important element of atmosphere.
Atmosphere
“Your fiction must have an atmosphere because without it your characters will be unable to breathe.” -Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft
Janet Burroway, novelist, writing professor, and author of the canonized Writing Fiction, says atmosphere is partially created by the story’s setting, including locale, period, weather, and time of day.
Locale
The movie has a larger-than-life setting: a swank summer retreat inhabited only by the obscenely wealthy and the folks who entertain them.
In Writing The Breakout Novel, Donald Maass says that a facet of the great novel is a place that offers experiences most people do not have or do not experience intimately. I don’t go to spend a month each summer at a posh mountain hideaway. Do you? Didn’t think so. (If you do, may I come along next year?)
Maass also says that a breakout story will be set in a locale with inherent conflict, a place where problems already exist. Kellerman’s has the conflict between the wealthy patrons and the staff who serve them, the hierarchy within the staff (college kids from Yale and dancers from the streets), and the owner scowling over them all, not to mention all the affairs. Our MC, Baby, stumbles into a place already full of tension.
Does your novel have a setting that’s different from the expected, crafted with distinct details, and brimming with inherent conflict?
Period
“That was the summer of 1963, when everybody called me Baby and it didn’t occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn’t wait to join the Peace Corp, and I thought I’d never find a guy as great as my dad.” -Baby in the opening scene of Dirty Dancing
We’re immediately grounded in what was, for Baby, a time of innocence, a time that was ruled by her parents and the norms of their worldview. This gives us a standard, and we know there is change coming. Can a reader identify the period of your novel, both in the MC’s personal arc and the wider story? How will the MC change from this initial state?
Weather
I love this scene. Baby, once cowed by Johnny and unable to say anything beyond “I carried a watermelon,” finds her voice, and it’s loud. The storm raging in the background contributes to the atmosphere of frustration and sexual tension brewing between Baby and Johnny. The heavens erupt in thunder at the same time Baby yells. When the tension breaks and they laugh together, the sky clears. This is a perfect example of, as Janet Burroway says, the characters being in harmony with the setting. Dirty Dancing works because it uses weather as a background detail to convey subtle meaning and contribute to tone.
Time of Day
The night belongs to Johnny and Baby, the day belongs to Baby’s family.
Memorable Visuals
Have you noticed that so many movies reference visuals from Dirty Dancing? Even the 2011 film The Muppets has a pink clad Miss Piggy practicing the lift from the Dirty Dancing finale with Pepe the Prawn. It’s been almost 25 years since Dirty Dancing‘s release, but we recognize its shots. Why? Because they are distinct, over the top, memorable.
Watching again I was struck by how the movie is one iconic shot after another. We start with Baby carrying watermelons. And who can forget the scene where Johnny and Baby dance across a log? If you haven’t seen it, go ahead and watch. I’ll wait.
Then the shot moves to practicing lifts in a field. Then, sexiest of all, a shirtless Johnny and clingy-top-wearing Baby practice in the water during a sunset.
Whew.
So why has this been tugging heartstrings and hormones for a generation?
Unique
The film makers don’t go with boring images that are shown over and over again in romances. The images stick with us because we haven’t seen them before in other films. Don’t your favorite books include striking images that are completely unique to them? No other book sees the world in quite the same way or crafts it in the same words.
Over the top
People fall in love all the time. People learn to dance every day. But we don’t do either in the larger-than-life way they do in Dirty Dancing. I’ve never crawled across a floor while lip-syncing love songs with my husband. These visuals make me go back to my manuscript to cut the mundane and replace all those scenes with experiences readers don’t have everyday.
Setting matches mood
Above I talked about the weather matching the mood in Dirty Dancing, but the same is true of the landscape. Sunsets occur when they’re transitioning from one state (Baby idolizing an indifferent Johnny) to another (love).
Setting and action as metaphor
As Johnny balances on the log, he opens up about himself, a precarious spot that tips their relationship toward romance. And then there’s the sweater. At the beginning of the movie, Baby wears a clunky sweater that hides her curves and makes her look both dowdy and immature. The sweater fits the role she wears with her family. When she begins dancing with Johnny, the sweater disappears and Baby’s clothing gets progressively more revealing as she comes into her own and falls in love, until Johnny is banished from Kellerman’s and Baby is left alone with her father’s displeasure. The return to the sweater marked a shift in Baby’s mood and view of herself.
Does the setting, action, and even wardrobe in your story carry meaning that underscores the character arc?
THE GLASS COLLECTOR (Albert Whitman & Company) by Anna Perera came out in her native UK last year, and I’ve been waiting to get my hands on it since then. I’m curious how Perera handles slum life in this YA.
March 17
THE GIRL WHO COULD SILENCE THE WIND (Candlewick) by Meg Medina debuts on March 13th, but the following Saturday is the launch party at bbgb books, my favorite children’s bookstore. Here’s Meg’s post about the launch party and The Hope Tree Project.
March 21-25
Save your pennies and sharpen your pencils for The Virginia Festival of the Book. The name says it all: days and days of books, authors, readings, panels, and, in the past, a parade! There’s stuff for readers, stuff for writers, and stuff for folks who have an unbalanced table that could use just the right height book.
March 23
Pass the popcorn, THE HUNGER GAMES movie is in theaters. I’ve read all the books. Twice. Adam and I have evangelized for the first book, giving or recommending it to everyone in our family, and we’re looking forward to how the cast makes the story their own.
March 29
Rejections & Resilience: Fueling Creativity on an Empty Tank
Every writer has, at one time or another, faced creative blocks, rejection, criticism, or setbacks in their career. So how do we persevere and sustain our creativity in the face of life’s many challenges? Find out the keys to resilience from Michael J. Sullivan, Noah Scalin, and Dr. Keyhill Sheorn. From James River Writers.
March 31
Whether you run, walk, or cheer, I’ve heard it’s a lot of fun.
I don’t have any Dr. Seuss books in the house (I know, horrible, right?), so I’m sharing the prologue from one of my favorite childhood books: TUCK EVERLASTING.*
I urge you, no matter your age, to pick up a copy of TUCK EVERLASTING. It’s a classic story with gorgeously rendered atmosphere (if you can’t tell from the video), immortality, a jailbreak, and a toad.
Everything is better with a toad.
From BBC Nature
*And, no, I don’t love it just because we share a name.
It’s leap year. Leap day, in fact. Four years in the making.This blog has been two years in the making, and I’ve decided now is the time. If the last year has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes we have to take that leap and enjoy what comes. I’m excited, and I’m here to make things.
(Obviously I like cheese. Solid blocks of it, on my plate and in my writing, but I promise to limit it here.*)
All good things start with an introduction. Like those horrid introductions at cocktail parties your spouse** takes you to for work, where a person with gleaming teeth and empty glass of red wine and a dress that indicates her wardrobe budget is more than you’ll make in 2.5 years (yeah, I’m cheesy and bitter) says, “And what do you do?”
I’m always tempted to say I’m a liar and a thief. But the truth is, I write fiction.*** The genre de jour is a YA thriller, a futuristic As I Lay Dying. (I’m not as literary as that sounds.)
Cocktail conversations usually progress to one giving her basic interests–reading, hanging out at independent bookstores, traveling with my husband to places of interest to literary nerds–and receiving a blank stare from the witch in the electric blue dress. (Something like this may have happened to me once.)
Like those cocktail-party introductions, I hope this blog, which is starting off rather oddly, will develop into something entertaining and informative.
So cheers, happy Leap Year, and happy creating,
Kristi
*This is a disclaimer: I’ll limit it to the best of my ability. (Read: expect cheese.)
** Or boyfriend/girlfriend/best friend. One can also substitute school dances, youth group meetings, or campus garden parties for cocktail parties and the same scenario plays out.
