And They All Live Happily Ever After ...Not! Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

 Has this ever happened to you? You've invested hours, days, weeks of your precious reading time in the Novel of the Season. The writing is wonderful, the plot a page turner. The characters have become like members of your family. The  book resides in your brain when you've not reading. This is the best book ever until...

Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am... it's over. It's over and you feel cheated. What a terrible ending! Maybe it was ludicrous, given the 400 previous pages. Maybe you didn't see it coming...and not in a good way. Maybe the writer got tired and looked for the nearest exit ramp.

Endings are your final impression of a book. A sucky ending is not likely encourage you to read another book by that author. And we authors do like return readers. (So do publishers.)

One of the reasons I became a writer was the awful endings of books as I read as a kid. The books available to me in the 60's were primarily written in the 50's and 40's, the Era of Perpetually Happy Endings. No names mentioned, but there were a couple of "teen romance" writers whose plain but brilliant female main character always landed her dream boat by the last page. If Dreamboat had discovered the inner beauty of Plain Jane, I would've been happy, but that's not what happened. In every single book, Jane suddenly became a curvaceous beauty, with a perfect complexion and shimmering hair. I can't tell you the number of times 10-year-old me threw a book across the room, yelling, "Real life isn't like that!" I vowed to myself I'd become a writer of books with Real Life endings.

The first Real Life ending I encountered (although I didn't realize it) was Charlotte's Web when I was 8. I cried for days (one of the few books that have made me cry.) I didn't really think very much about why E.B White chose to end his book that way, until I was in the Vermont College MFA program. Someone on the faculty--if only I could remember who--said, "Endings should be inevitable." Light bulbs! Fireworks! Lightening! Yes! But the lecturer was still talking, "Inevitable doesn't need to be predictable. The ending should be organic to what has come before." Ding ding ding! In two minutes, I learned the secret of a good ending.

Now all I had to do was write one.  

There are people who don't write without an outline, complete with ending. I'm not one of those people. I know the beginning, I know some of what happens in the middle...but the end? The end is always as much of a surprise to me as I hope it is to the reader. If I have to think hard, then the end is neither inevitable or organic. It's just an ending.

In writing both of my middle grade novels, Yankee Girl and Jimmy's Stars, I thought I had the end firmly in mind and then... In Yankee Girl, several new characters came out of nowhere, jumped in the scene and took it to another place all together, with me, racing behind, trying to keep up. Jimmy's Stars had my main character remember something from chapter one--something I had forgotten--that ended the story for me. Organically. Inevitably.

Picture books are a little easier to end, because the story isn't as complicated. However, I had no idea how to end First Grade Stinks. I didn't so much write that one, as take dictation. My daughter came home from school every day with a new complaint about first grade. Why wasn't it cool, like kindergarten? I couldn't use reality here, because my daughter and her first grade teacher never came to terms. I had to let that one "germinate" in the computer files for a year as I contemplated what my character... wanted from first grade...and what she really needed. What she needed was a new attitude. Once she found that...the ending came all in a rush. Happily-ever-after-but with a twist of reality.

Not all my readers appreciate my endings. I've lost count of the kids who've asked  "Why did such and such have to happen?  That was so sad!"   I ask them, "So what would the story be if that thing didn't happen?" The answer is usually, "Well then Ellie/Alice Ann/Lily would be happy." 

"OK, now tell me your version of the story," I say. The young reader starts to retell the story until the troubling plot point. They fumble around for a minute, before saying "And they all lived happily ever after." Pause. "That's not a very good story, my way, is it?" Nope. (No conflict, no story...but that's a different post.) How the character (and author) handle and resolve conflict realistically makes a satisfying ending.

 I'm sure there are kids all over the world, throwing my books across the room, yelling, "What a dumb ending!" But I'll bet they don't say "Real life isn't like that."

And they always ask about a sequel.

P.S. Indulge me a minute. This is my daughter, on the first day of kindergarten, and the same daughter, heading off to her first week of teaching her own Pre-K class. I could not be prouder of her. She also uses "extra story time" as a class reward. If you're a picture book writer and you're my friend, your books are in her classroom library.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

Welcome to Wild Wild Cyberspace!

Happy (early) Internet Day.

My husband and I are former drama majors, who met in community theater.

What does this have to do with the Internet?  Patience, please!

We are huge movie fans. Pre-child, we would see three or four movies a week. Post-child and Pre-Netflix, we were Blockbusters' best customers. Watching movies is not a passive experience for us. We discuss the direction, the acting, the anachronisms that pop up. (The average upperclass American 1950's wife did NOT have pierced ears!)

 For years our biggest argument was over a line in The Godfather.  Did Tom Hagen say to Michael Corleone, "You know Pop worked hard to get you a deferment" or "You know Pop worked hard to get you into Furman"? (A small Baptist college in South Carolina...my husband is a South Carolinian.) It didn't matter that the book said Michael went to Dartmouth.

"They changed it for the movie," my husband insisted.

This guy went to Dartmouth.

    Enter the Internet!  I first met "the 'Net" when I was a university reference librarian in the mid-90's. I learned that the right combo of search terms on the right search engine (my favorite was Alta Vista) would get me any information my heart desired. The Godfather screenplay was online. Yes, Don Corleone got Michael a deferment, not into Furman.

   Having settled the matter of Michael Corleone's alma mater, my husband and I continue to "discuss" movies and actors. Thanks to a wonderful database, www.IMDb.com, our differences in opinion are settled before the first commercial.

"Oh there's what's-her-name.  You know her; she was the Lucky Hat Girl in Goodfellas?"

Tap tap tap. "Welker White. She does a lot of Law and Order."

"Didn't we see Goodfellas when we were dating?"

"Nope.  We were living in Wisconsin."

Tap tap tap. "We're both wrong.  Goodfellas  came out September 1990.  We were living Alabama."

     What does all this have to with writing? The Internet, used with caution, saves a boatload of research time. I wrote the first version of Jimmy's Stars in 1984. I spent months in the microfilm room of the Pittsburgh Carnegie Library reading old newspapers, making hundreds of pages of notes. After I finished the book, I sensed it was missing something. (A plot! A conflict!) So, Jimmy lived in my bottom desk drawer for nearly 30 years. (Never throw anything out. Especially something you have researched so long!) When I re-wrote the book (this time with a plot and conflict), I could re-verify my information from my home office with just a couple of hours of online searching.

   In the past, I would begin a writing project by collecting information.  Pictures, maps, books and bits of ephemera picked up here and there (ration books, streetcar schedules, old postcards.) My tiny office looked like an episode of Hoarders. Now my pre-writing prep consists of a list of questions and items in an notebook.  99% of what I need, I can find and use online. The other 1% comes from my collection of diaries, family letters and photo albums. (OK, there is a still a corner of my office that looks like Hoarders.)

   Fairy tales can come true, if you are a reference librarian! No more juggling enormous reference books. No more waiting for the new edition of that reference book to come out. Instant reference gratification! Almost everything you could ever want to know is online, somewhere.

   Along with the good stuff, comes the wrong, the bad and the half-truths (to say nothing about the wonderful world of Photoshopped pictures).  It's the Wild Wild Cyberspace out there. Anyone can publish anything online, and it doesn't have to be the truth. I am reminded of students from my first school library job, circa 1982.  Do you remember the old Sprite commercials, that showed a "limon--half lemon, half lime"?  I could not convince otherwise intelligent kids that a limon was not a real fruit because...they saw it on TV!  

A limon is a mythical fruit.

 Just because it's online, doesn't make it true.

There is no such thing as a jackalope, either!

The Internet is an endless source of information and misinformation. Some sites may or may not have accurate information (Wikipedia) that has to be verified another way. I found "satirical" news sites, such as The Onion, masquerading as legitimate information sources. If it's too weird to be true, I either search the name of the original source (which will tell me if the site is "satirical" or affiliated with a particular political agenda) or I hit www.snopes.com.  Snopes keeps up with latest rumors, urban legends and conspiracy theories.

 Some people avoid writing by playing Solitaire or Candy Crush online.  Me?  I can spend hours happily toggling from one site to another, answering for own curiosity (and not story research) question after question.  And then double checking those answers.

As the old Russian proverb (which was swiped by President Reagan's speechwriter) says, "Trust but verify." If you don't verify on the front end, some editor is going to ask you to do it eventually.

Now, I am taking a break from blog writing to scroll through my new obsession, www.murderpedia.org, a data base of murderers, living and dead, from around the world.

Don't ask, OK?

Happy Internet Day on the 29th, y'all

   Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

Inspiration is a blast from the past

     I find inspiration in real life. Rummaging through flea markets and antique stores, examining the jumbled pieces of other peoples' lives sets my story radar pinging. How did these odds and ends come to rest, unwanted by their "families," in a junk store? A story begins simmering in the back of my brain.

    I am addicted to old family pictures. I gaze at the walls of other people's houses, memorizing family portraits. My mother practically raised me at estate sales and junk stores. I was not allowed to touch anything, but I could ask all the questions I wanted. What was this metal thing used for? Who wore shoes that buttoned up the sides? Did you have a doll like this when you were a little girl?

   The two people who encouraged my curiosity in the past would be surprised to learn I consider them the fairy godmothers of my writing.  Those two people were my Grandmother Rodman and my mom, both natural born storytellers.

The couple in the middle are my Rodman grandparents

      Although her father had been a country schoolmaster, my Grandmother Rodman's education ended at 11. However, she loved to read and never stopped learning through out her very long life (she lived to be 97). Her childhood was positively Dickensian; orphaned at 11, she lived with an "evil stepfather" and numerous half-siblings. Her older brothers had gone off to "seek their fortunes" and escape their abusive stepfather.  Murder, the county poor farm, setting off on her own at 15 to make her way in the world...all these elements were part of my grandmother's story.  As a young mother she survived the most deadly tornado in U.S. history. She told "The Storm Story" when few people talked about tragedies.  My grandmother made sense of her own life by telling the stories, over and over, always in an undramatic, matter of fact voice.

     She knew which details would make her story real for a little listener...the taste of homemade peanut brittle, the mustard color of a funnel cloud so enormous it blocked the sky, the stiff, slick material of her mother's "Sunday dress." Her stories were peopled with characters named Country and Myrtle and Ardell.  She evoked the sound of their voices, the way they stood and moved, the little quirks that made those long-dead people come alive. She was economical with her words, as she brought the events to the climax, never once saying "Oh I forgot to say that..."

   Not only could my grandmother put names to the family photos she kept in a big silk stationary box under her bed, she could spin stories about every one of them. She also told me about my father growing up in small-town, Depression-era,  Southern Illinois. My father did not tell me his own boyhood until very recently.  Learning what kind of little boy he had been, helped me understand my sometimes puzzling, taciturn dad.

Mom on the far right, her brother Jimmy and sister Agnes

   My mother would be shocked to learn that she inspired me. I was a sickly kid and missed a lot of school. Mom entertained me with stories of her childhood, first on a small family farm and then helping her mother run a Pittsburgh boarding house during the Depression. The middle child of eight, her stories seemed exciting and exotic, better than any library book. Mom prefaced her stories with, "Now times were different when I was a little. We probably shouldn't have done some of this stuff then, and you aren't to do it now. If you do, I will stop telling you stories." That was threat enough to keep me from trying some of the stunts of Mom and her family.  My uncles' trapeze in the farm's apple orchard. The Great Silverware War of Easter 1932. Their beloved maiden aunt who taught them to play poker. The first story I ever wrote at age seven was about Mom moving from to town after the bank took the farm.  My 11-year-old mother and her sister rode a streetcar back to their old home, to gather whatever they had could of what was left behind. (No, I'm not telling you what they took...I'm still working on this story.)

   Mom was a one-woman show. She imitated voices, created sound effects and even acted out the events when her vocabulary failed her.  Ironically, she considered herself shy and disliked speaking in public. Writing anything, such as a letter, was a laborious process that would go through several drafts before she would write on her good linen stationary with a fountain pen.  Since Mom wrote to at least some of her family every week, that was a lot of moaning and groaning and crumpled up notebook paper. (I learned the pain and value of revision early!)`

    Jimmy's Stars began when I found a WWII two-star service flag in a box lot of china I bought at an auction. I knew from photos that Mom's family had a four-star flag in the window of the boarding house (three for my uncles and one for Mom who was a WAVE). Looking at that flag, I heard my mother's voice recounting life on the Homefront, the terror of receiving a telegram, the peculiarity of wartime rationing. With those stories as a foundation,Jimmy's Stars was the fastest I've ever written anything...18 months. (That included lightening striking my computer and wiping out the unbacked-up first five chapters.)

  Yankee Girl is based on my own childhood stories I told my daughter. I am currently working on two books that are based on Grandmother Rodman tales.
                                                                                                             
    I'm sure that neither my grandmother or mother knew they would inspire my own books. Their stories taught me the beauty and drama of everyday life. This sense of wonder in what seems ordinary to us, I try to pass on to my own students. Over the years, they have told me about grandparents who wandered in the rubble of WWII Europe, orphaned and homeless. Of their parents as children, in refugee camps, fleeing Asia by boat. One girl's family escaped the Holocaust by immigrating to Cuba... and then fled Cuba after the Revolution. My hope is that these tales will live on in my students' writing.  I think the best gift you can give a child is a family story.

     I was blessed to be descended from two of the best storytellers ever. Thanks, Meemaw.  Thanks, Mom.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

Libraries--Better Than Ever

     On our first date, my husband-to-be asked what I did for a living.  I told him I was a school librarian.  "Well there's a profession that will be obsolete in twenty years," he chuckled. I did not chuckle. I did marry him and twenty five years later I am still waiting for his prediction to come true.

   OK, I admit that twenty five years ago I never dreamed that I would have a phone that could help me find my way around the zillion streets of Atlanta named "Peachtree."  Or a device that could download hundreds of books, cutting down considerably on overweight luggage fees. My 1989 school library had computers, but they were little more than fancy typewriters. Who knew that entering the right search words on my jazzy little laptop could find pictures of the battleships my father-in-law served on in WWII?  Or the history of the long demolished amusement park of my childhood, the genesis of The Roller Coaster Kid?  Yes, Craig was right...I could access all that information without setting foot in a library.

    But yet there are still libraries. In my neck of the woods, it appears that most people are there for free computer time and to check out videos. If I am there, it is to do research. Guess what? Not everything is available on the Internet. At least not for free.  When I wrote Jimmy's Stars and Yankee Girl I spent months reading newspapers from WWII and the 1960's....on microfilm machines.  While there are a good number of old periodicals available online these days, they never seem to be the ones I need or there is a hefty fee to join a database.  All the branch libraries in my immediate area were built in the last 15 years and don't have microfilm machines. But if I need one, all I have to do is go downtown to the main library.

   The library is a source of professional literature such as Library Journal or Publisher's Weekly. Usually they are kept in the librarians' work area, but they have always let me read them on the premises if I ask.  There are also databases and reference materials that I can't find anywhere else...at least not for free.

    I have had the good fortune to have worked in a university library which gave me access to all
kinds of information not found in a public library. My library allowed the public to use the collection for a nominal yearly fee. As an employee I had free reign, but even if I hadn't, I would have paid the fee.  It's something to investigate.

     I could go on forever about the information that you will find only in a library....but why tell you?  Check it out yourself. By the way, my husband has had to finally admit that libraries and librarians are not obsolete or likely to become so any time soon.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

Getting It Right

    First off, a big Teaching Authors welcome to our latest TA, Carla McClafferty. Not only did Carla and I meet and bond some fifteen years ago at an SCBWI retreat in Arkansas, we once shared an editor. Greetings, old friend, and welcome aboard. For the next couple of posts we are going to be talking about your genre, non-fiction, and what it shares with fiction.

    I have always wanted to be a Carla-sort of writer, a non-fiction writer. "Write what you love" is one of those things writing teachers (like me) tell their students. I love non-fiction. My "adult" reading consists almost entirely of biographies and history. If I read two adult novels a year, that's a big deal for me.

   So why don't I write non-fiction for children?  The reasons are endless, so I'll boil it down to one.  I just can't stick to the facts.

    Both of my novels, Yankee Girl and Jimmy's Stars began life as memoirs. YG was about my life, JS about my mother's family. Because they both took place in other times and places...Mississippi 1964 and Pittsburgh 1943...I did a boatload of research to make sure I had the details right. For the World War II world of Jimmy's Stars, I made a timeline of what battles occurred where and when between September 1943 and September 1944, and when news of those battles reached the States.  I compiled a radio schedule for the Pittsburgh stations. I studied streetcar routes. I poured over the various rationing schedules for gasoline, food, clothing.

    You would think that Yankee Girl would not require quite so much research, since after all, this was based on my own elementary school years.  I even had my 5th and 6th grade diaries. Still....do you remember what week the Beatles' "I Feel Fine" reached number one on the charts?  Neither did I.  Since the main character is a huge Beatles fan, there is at least one reference to a Beatles' song in every chapter. In addition, this the height of the Civil Rights Movement (the Selma March to Montgomery occurs about three quarters of the way through YG). I had to know exactly what date  this protest or that bombing occurred.  I remembered that these things had happened but that wasn't enough. I had to know exactly when. I spent a dismal five months in the microfilm room of the Jackson Mississippi library, going through a year's worth of newspapers, reliving a sad and scary time.

    By now you are thinking, "Well, with all this research, why didn't she just go ahead an write those memoirs?"  Good question. All I can say is that my mind refuses to march in a straight line . Yes the facts are there, because they are part of the story.  But once I start writing, my "real" character refuses to stick to their own "real" story.  I start thinking "but wouldn't it be more interesting if this happened instead?  Or if her best friend was this kind of person?"  Before I know it, I am off on a completely different story than I had first intended. The only thing that remains the same is the structure of historical fact and detail that makes the story "real" for me (and hopefully for the reader as well.)

    I am just beginning to write contemporary fiction for young people and guess what?  There is no less research involved.  Next month I will have a story in a YA anthology called Things I'll Never Say. 
I live in Georgia.  My main characters live in Georgia.  I have lived here for fourteen years.  Yet, for a 3,000 word story here are just a few story points I needed to find out to make the story real:  price of admission to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, driving times between different towns, the academic school year of Emory University, the most popular spring break towns with Georgia teens...well, you get the point.

    My point?  Getting the details right is one of the ingredients for making a story real.  Editors care about details. I spent weeks nattering back and forth with my Yankee Girl editor over the dates of those Beatles songs.  Readers care.  I had an adult write me that if the mother in Yankee Girl used a steam iron, then she didn't also need to sprinkle her clothes before ironing. I was a little miffed that someone could read a 225 page book and this is what she chose to write me. It never occurred to me look up that sprinkling/steam iron detail.  That's the way my mom always ironed. (I still probably need to look that up.)

    I once read a Big Time Award Winning Book that took place in a state where I had lived and knew very well.  This author had placed four major cities within an hours drive of each other. In reality, they were in different corners of the state and hours away from each other.  Whatever affection I had for the book died right then. Good grief, anybody could look at an atlas (this was pre-Internet) and see where those cities were.  I later read an interview by the author and discovered that she had never visited that state (or apparently done any research) but she "knew" somebody who "used" to live there. That was one of those moments when you want to scream and throw the book across the room.

   That was the moment when I decided that for me, getting the details "right." Facts are front and center of a non-fiction, but they are no less important in fiction.

     Now about that steam iron....

  Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

Hitting the Target Without Really Trying

     The question I am most asked by parents is "What is the reading level of your books?"

     I am currently teaching an adult class on writing for children.  The first question I am usually asked by those students is "How do you write at an appropriate reading difficulty for an age group?"

    Those questions are not as easy to answer as you might think.

     Carmela's Friday post stated that in reaching "reluctant readers" a writer should simply write whatever they are passionate about and the readers will follow.  I have most certainly found this to be true.

     When I first began writing, "targeting" a group, or writing with a specific grade level vocabulary never crossed my mind.  Thanks to years and years of working in children's library service, I have read thousands and thousands of children's books for all ages.  When I write, my brain goes into "child mode."  That's just the way I write, period.  My normal style involves short sentences and short paragraphs using simple words.

     I was not aware of my writing style, until my then elementary school-aged daughter introduced me to "Accelerated Reader."  This was the program her school used for "pleasure" reading. (I am not sure how pleasurable it was since it was required.)  Only books on the Accelerated Reader program were counted for the reading grade.  Books had point values, based on complexity of language and interest level.

    I was thrilled to learn that all my books were on the Accelerated Reader list, which increased the likelihood of their purchase by a school library. However, I was puzzled to learn that my middle grade books, Yankee Girl and Jimmy's Stars, were not being read by the fourth and fifth graders, my intended audience.

     The mystery was solved when one of my daughter's friends told me how much she liked Jimmy's Stars "even though it doesn't have many points."  A trip to the school library informed me that both of the books had a point value of 3.  For comparison, anything written by J.K. Rowling had a point value of upwards of 7.  That particular year, my daughter was supposed to read 7 points worth every six weeks.  How could I compete with Harry Potter?

     A little digging into the mysteries of Accelerated Reader yielded the information that while my middle grade books had a third grade reading level, their content was appropriate for upper fifth grade and sixth grade students.  Considering that the subjects of those books were Civil Rights Era Mississippi and the ravages of World War II, I thought that was a fair evaluation.

     Then parents began to ask me that troublesome reading level question.  This was often prefaced with something like, "My daughter is in second grade but she reads on a fourth grade level. She should be able to read your books, right?"

     I found myself in the strange position of talking down my own books. While the child in question would be able to read and recognize the words I had written, would they be able to understand the events in the book?  It had never occurred to me that a seven-year-old might read those books.  Tough things happen in them:  racial prejudice, death, violence.  Although I didn't "target" my writing, I didn't think anyone under ten would be reading them.  I started hedging my answers by telling parents they could buy the book but perhaps they should put it away until their child was older.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.  No matter what I said, some parents completely missed the fact that some "low reading level" material might contain concepts too mature or sophisticated for a first grader who was "a really good reader."

     What did I learn from this experience?  Did this cause me to become a cautious, self-censoring writer?  Do I now write in a more complex style?

     No.

     I write what I am passionate about.  I write for my inner eleven-year-old.  It's the best that I can do.  It's all any of us can do.

     Don't forget to enter our latest book giveaway for a chance to win a copy of the 2015 Children's Writer's and Illustrator's Market.  See Carmela's post for details.

     The giveaway ends Oct 31.

     Best of luck,  Mary Ann

Food and Fiction

      I hate to cook. Period. I have mageirocophobia,the cook's equivalent of stage fright. Just knowing that someone else is going to consume and judge what I am cooking turns me into a quivering pile of Knox gelatin. Then why do I own shelf after shelf of cookbooks?
    To me, cookbooks are literature. My favorites are the organizational fundraisers, each contributor adding a little history. ("My mama always made this milk punch for Christmas brunch" or "Uncle George used to stir up this stew on hunting trips.") Family tales aside, each recipe really is a potential story.  The ingredients form a cast of characters waiting for the right circumstances...a specific way of combining, a certain degree of heat...to become something delicious and memorable. Thank goodness my husband does cook.
     For someone who doesn't cook, food and recipes are an integral part of most of my books.  I have my mother to thank.
     I fear cooking. Mom hated it. I remember finishing lunch at the kitchen table, while Mom went into meltdown mode over supper, five hours away.  With her head inside the ice-encrusted maw of our non-self-defrosting refrigerator freezer,  Mom shuffled through frozen bricks of meat and vegetables, muttering "What can I make for supper?" Finally, she would extract a couple of frost-covered, foil-wrapped bricks and with an exhausted sigh, toss them on the countertop to defrost. Mom had sentenced herself to making yet another meal.
    Eventually I learned the source of Mom's distaste. During the Depression, my mother's mother (known as Maga to her grandchildren) ran a boarding house as a way of keeping food on the table for her family of eight.  (If this sounds like a certain fictional character from the American Girl series...well, sorry. It's the truth!) My teen-aged mom served as Maga's sou chef, in cooking vast quantities of food, not only for her own family, but for a dozen or so boarders. That meant a hot breakfast, a hot supper, and a packed lunch for everybody. No wonder Mom hated cooking.
    This also explained why all of Mom's recipes read"Yield 24".
    "Frances, are you cooking for the Fifth Army?" Dad would ask, peering into an enormous vat or skillet or roaster pan. "You can reduce the recipes."
     "Too much trouble," Mom would shrug.
     I understood.  Cooking was bad enough without adding a math exercise to the mix. Even though Mom was only cooking for three people, the food didn't go to waste. If we had hash on Monday (a good meat-stretching Depression era meal), we also had it Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. When I moved out on my own, Mom didn't offer me a file of heirloom recipes, and I didn't ask. I never wanted to eat Fried Salmon Patties or Scrapple again.

     In fact, I didn't even think of those old boarding house recipes until I was writing Jimmy's Stars. It suddenly dawned on my that Maga was running a boarding house through the World War II rationing. Sure, her boarders ration stamps helped out, but sometimes it didn't matter if you had the money and the stamps. The food just wasn't available.   It was being sent to "the fighting boys overseas."
     Aha!  This explained Maga's "meat" loaf where the main ingredient was a soy "meat extender." And Wacky Cake, made without eggs, flour of sugar.  Even my all-least-favorite-dish-ever, stewed tomatoes.
     I dug deeper into a world where sugar, butter and meat were scarce. Recipes emphasized "natural sweeteners" (like prune juice), "sweetbreads" (which are neither sweet nor bread) and "the lesser organ meats." I wondered what the average American kid thought of finding a "tongue" sandwich in his lunchbag.  I decided that in matters of school lunches, the kids' tastes haven't changed that much over time. The difference would come in that the kid of 1943 had come to realize that patriotism and sacrifice took precedence over personal preference.
    Food became integral to Jimmy's Stars because finding and preparing food was such a large part of WWII homefront life. "Use it up, wear it out or make do" inspired "Rookie Cookies" (butterless, rock-like lumps that could withstand the trip from homefront to battlefront) and "Tomato Aspic."  I had so much fun researching additional recipes, never thinking that bloggers and teachers would ask for them, and actually make them! Check out the results at Mawbooks.

     My latest picture book, Surprise Soup, came from my husband and I swapping childhood food memories, both involving our fathers. Considered too young to "sit still" in church, Craig and his father stayed home Sunday mornings, making pancakes for the return of the rest of the family.
    My dad was (and still is!) an excellent chef. He pitched in with mealmaking when he could, but as an FBI agent, he didn't have a lot of time to indulge his inner Emeril.
My favorite memories are of weekends when we would make Dad's vegetable beef soup, a process that could consume an entire Saturday.
    I sliced and diced these two memories, chopped them together, added and subtracted ingredients and fiddled with the heat. After several years of simmering on the back burner of my mind...voila! Surprise Soup!
    True, I can't really make soup or aspic or even the allegedly goof-proof Wacky Cake without scorching or botching something. But in my mental kitchen, there is always a pot of soup bubbling on the stove, a batch of cookies in the oven, and a loaf of home-made bread, rising under a clean dish towel. And sometimes, when I am lucky, my husband who is a good cook, brings my food fantasies to fruition.

Writing Workout


   Try this with your young writers.
   Write down your favorite food, whatever it might be.
    Now describe this food, without telling how it looks.
   Here are some questions to consider:  How does it taste?
Is it sweet, salty, sour, a combination? Can you taste individual ingredients?
How does it feel in your mouth? Crisp, crunchy, smooth, slippery, hot, cold?
    What does it smell like? Does one ingredient dominate the aroma?
    Do you have any specific memories of this food? Where did you eat it first? Does it remind you of any place or time or person?
  
    The last time I used this exercise, my entire group of middle schoolers, except one, all described the same dish...macaroni and cheese! Yet, no two descriptions were alike, because everyone had their own personal vision....from mac-in-a-box to Grandma's-from-scratch!

Reading Recommendations


    Usually I don't recommend books per se. I just tell you what I am reading. But what I am reading now fits in so well with our current topic, I just had to tell you a little about it. It is The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food--Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food Was Seasonal by Mark Kurlansky. The WPA Writer's Project was compiling an encyclopedia of American food when World War II essentially ended the work. Kurlansky has compiled some of the never-published essays into this fascinating book. Some of the contributors' names are familiar...Zora Neale Hurston, Nelson Algren, Eudora Welty...and some are not. All transport us back to a time when local food meant just that. Happy reading and Bon Appetit!

Mary Ann

Announcements and Sneak Preview

We received many original and fun submissions for our latest giveaway contest in celebration of TeachingAuthor Esther Hershenhorn's S is for Story: A Writer's Alphabet. I have drawn a winner, but have yet to hear back from her. If she doesn't reply soon, I'll choose a new winner. Meanwhile, I'd like to share some other news. (See the end of this post for an updated announcement regarding our winner.)

First off, congratulations to our own TeachingAuthor Mary Ann Rodman. Her middle-grade novel Jimmy's Stars was named a 2009 Children's Choice for grades 5-6 by the International Reading Association and the Children's Book Council. See the complete list of winners here.

And if you're thinking of using Jimmy's Stars in conjunction with a study of World War II, be sure to check out the wonderful online resources set up by Usborne Publishing, the book's UK publisher.

Speaking of wonderful online resources for teachers, our friends April Pulley Sayre and Gretchen Woelfle of the group blog INK: Interesting Nonfiction for Kids have announced the launch of a free online database of nonfiction books called the InkThinkTank. The database is designed to help teachers, librarians, and homeschoolers find the books they need to meet curriculum requirements in grades K-12. We've included a link to the database in our sidebar.

Our loyal readers may have noticed some other new features in our sidebar, including:

• more links to reading lists, websites, graduate writing programs, and author/illustrator blogs 
• a new "search" function that allows readers to search for posts containing a word or phrase not listed in our subject index
• a "Bookmark and Share" link that lets you quickly add our blog to social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg, and/or share our blog with your friends and colleagues
• and, in addition to receiving our blog posts by email, as a Google follower, or via an RSS feed, you can now include it in your JacketFlap blog reader.

As always, if you know of other resources that would be helpful for aspiring writers or writing teachers, please let us know.

And now, for our "Sneak Preview:" In case you haven't heard, next Tuesday, October 20, is the National Day on Writing, sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

According to NCTE:

Today people write as never before—texting, on blogs, with video cameras and cell phones, and, yes, even with traditional pen and paper. People write at home, at work, inside and out of school.

The National Day on Writing is meant to celebrate all forms of writing. In conjunction with the event, NCTE has created a National Gallery of Writing, a digital archive of writing samples showing how and why Americans are writing every day. The Gallery will be unveiled on Tuesday.

This Friday, October 16, we will begin a series of posts to commemorate the National Day on Writing. We will also join other Kidlitosphere bloggers by submitting our posts to the local Gallery called A Lifetime of Reading, curated by Franki Sibberson and Mary Lee Hahn, two teachers who blog at A Year of Reading. We hope you'll make plans to take part in the National Day on Writing, and post those plans here on our TeachingAuthors blog!

I'm updating this blog post a few minutes past noon on an overcast day here in the Chicago suburbs, but the sun is shining on our latest giveaway winner: Kristy Worden of Fort Myers, Florida! For her entry, Kristy wrote:

"I say, A is for Arc. Your story must get from its compelling beginning through the challenges of the middle and finally arrive at a most satisfying conclusion."

I'm happy to say that Kristy's entry led to a "most satisfying conclusion" for her. For those of you who didn't win, we hope you'll enter our next giveaway, which will be announced in early November.
Carmela

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! As any student will tell you, the new year doesn't begin January 1; it's the first day of school. Today it's heading toward another 95 degree day here in Atlanta, but it's "the new year"; the first day of school.

If you've read First Grade Stinks, which is based on my daughter's struggles to adjust to a new teacher, you might guess that "Happy New Year" is not the way we greet the first day of school at my house. My daughter is now a sophomore in high school, but the first week of school is always Mr. Toad's Wild Ride with new teachers and schedules and lockers. It's a lot to juggle.

Teachers have their own juggling act with new students of wildly varying personalities and abilities. I now realize that the perennial first day writing assignment, the dread "What I Did on My Summer Vacation," was not meant as an instrument of torture while the teacher re-arranged her seating chart.

The "five paragraphs, no erasures, spelling counts" essay was supposed to give the teacher an idea of how well we could write. For me, it was an introduction to the Wonderful World of Writers Block.

As the kids around me scribbled away about trips to the Wisconsin Dells or Riverview Amusement Park, I thumped the eraser end of my pencil on the desk. Here was my summer; checking out library books and reading them in my self-built "clubhouse" while consuming a bag of Brach's Wintergreen Mints. (They didn't melt in the heat.) The end. Every year I got a C for the brevity of my writing...and lots of erasures.

At some point, teachers stopped asking for that vacation essay, and I stopped having writer's block. I had forgotten that fear of the page, the fear of "looking stupid", until I began teaching young writer's classes. My very first student, a fifth grade boy, stalked into the room, threw himself into a chair, and with narrowed eyes, informed me that his teacher had "sentenced" him to my Saturday afternoon workshops so he would "learn" to write. When we began our opening exercise (which I no longer remember), I watched the boy bounce the eraser end of his pencil on the table. Deja vu! Thanks to this particular boy (who I later learned was mildly learning disabled, but turned out to be an articulate writer), I developed this lesson.

Writing Workout: New School Year Writing Lesson

LESSON PLAN (appropriate for fourth through eighth grade)
Objective: To free the student from "fear of writing" and to show them that they can always find something to write about (also known as brainstorming...but don't tell them that)
Goal: Fluidity of thought in writing. Secondary goal, the concept of first and second drafts.

Lesson: Give the students a word or a phrase as a writing prompt. Do NOT use the word "summer"! Use something generic like "fall" or "school" or even "happy New Year." (I would not use the word "teacher" unless I was very, very brave!)

Instructions. Tell the students they are to write for the next ten minutes without thinking or stopping. They must keep their pencils moving. They are to write the first thing that comes in their head that relates to the prompt, and then write whatever thoughts follow. It is not important that they "stay on the subject." Spelling, punctuation, and grammar do not count. Do not write in paragraphs or even complete sentences. If nothing comes to mind, write "blank blank blank" until something does. Remind them that this is only for ten minutes, and they must keep writing.

At the end of ten minutes, they are to stop. They now must revise their work by adding punctuation, arrangement on the page, and corrected spelling. They are not to leave out anything they have written, including the blanks.

The purpose of this assignment is not to assess the student's ability to write in complete, well-punctuated sentences with perfectly spelled words. This is to show them that everyone has something to say, and that if you let yourself go, you can say it on paper. Emphasize that spelling and punctuation is something that you can correct the second time around, but not the first. (I can spend all day fiddling with the placement of a semi-colon, or I can produce ten pages of miserably spelled and punctuated prose that I can clean up in the second draft. I choose the latter!)

The student's final paper will look something like this. This is my stream-of-conscious "poem" using the prompt "fall":

Football football
Rah rah rah
I hate football
Running and running
Get that ball!
Run this way
Run that way
Yea!
We score a goal.
Who cares?
Jump on the guy
with the ball.
Grunt grunt grunt
Clunk clunk clunk
Heads butt
Helmets crunch
Fans go wild
Scream and yell
Stomp'em! Kill'em!
Just like war
Hate like war
Hate the other team
We don't know them
but we hate them
Because they have the ball
and
we
don't.

So I'm not Emily Dickinson. That's not the point. The point is written self-expression.
You have the whole rest of the year to turn your students into Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson (kidding...a little bit).


IN MEMORIAM: Those of you who have read Jimmy's Stars know that the novel was based on stories from my mother's family, particularly those about my Uncle Jimmy. I was saddened to learn that the "real" Jimmy, my Uncle James Smith, passed away in Florida this week at the age of 84. RIP Uncle Jim. Thanks for the memories. (That's Uncle Jim in his Merchant Marine uniform picture above.)

Writing from Life Without Boring Yourself by Mary Ann Rodman

I read somewhere that all first novels are “semi-autobiographical” and are always dedicated to the author’s parents. Guilty. However, what I learned in writing Yankee Girl is that “semi-autobiographical” is not the same thing as a memoir with all the names changed to “protect the innocent.”

When I critique a manuscript, the author is always amazed when I say, “This is something that happened to you,” or “This is a family story, isn’t it?” I’m not Karnack the Great. There are certain hallmarks of writing ripped from your family album/high school diary. Here they are:

1. Stories that meander. Life doesn’t fall into neat little story arcs with climaxes and denouements and resolutions. Between the exciting and interesting parts that inspired you to write the story, are the dull parts . . . flunked tests, bad hair days, barfy school lunches. In the first draft of Yankee Girl, I included them all. Then I wondered why a book about a pretty intense time and place (Mississippi, 1964) was so boring. Which brings me to a cardinal rule of writing; if it doesn’t move the story along, cut it. Unless that bad hair day turns out to be a key plot point, or you need it for a specific reason, CUT IT!


2. “Because it really happened that way” is not that reason. A truckload of specific details can bury your story. Anyone who reads my novels knows my fondness for using period detail . . . AquaNet hairspray, Beechnut’s Fruit Stripe Gum (“five different flavors!”), popular music titles. But a little bit of this goes a long way. When you describe every article of clothing a character is wearing, I expect that character to turn out to be a major player, and those clothes to tell me something about the person. If not . . . well, you know what to do! When I point this out to the author, nine times out of ten, I get the argument “But it really happened that way.” Rule three . . .


3. . . . unless it makes sense within the context of the story, nobody cares if it “really happened that way.” This is fiction. Fiction is shaped reality. I didn’t “invent” any of the events of Yankee Girl. I did fiddle with time lines, smooshing events that happened over perhaps five years into one school year. Some of the things that happen to Valerie actually happened to me. Some of the things that happened to Alice Ann happened to my parents or their friends or people I knew in high school. I combined several people to make one character. This is why it’s semi-autobiographical and not biographical.


4. The “real life” part of your story is only the seed. Yes, you might start off writing about something that happened to you in the eighth grade, with yourself as the main character, but the story eventually has to find a life and meaning of its own.


5. Writing a main character who is essentially you is the hardest thing you’ll ever do. It sounds easy, but like playing “yourself” on stage, it isn’t. With Yankee Girl, I grew bored writing about myself as Alice Ann. I never realized how utterly dull I was. Why would anyone want to spend 200 plus pages with this character? That is when you try to put as much distance between you and your fictional self as you can, while remaining emotionally true to the story. At eleven, I had no self-esteem and was afraid of everything (not without reason, if you’ve read the book). I made Alice Ann everything I wished I had been . . . mouthier, braver, smarter.
   

I went through the same process again with Jimmy's Stars, which was based on my mother’s family during World War II. Ellie, the main character, began life as my favorite aunt. By the time I turned the manuscript in, Ellie was part Aunt Agnes, part my own mother, and part a girl I knew in second grade. When my aunt’s daughter read the book, she asked “Um . . . was that supposed to be my mom?” The answer? No. My aunt was the sand in the oyster who attracted all sorts of other influences. In the end, Ellie McKelvey was not my aunt or my mother or Barbara from second grade. Ellie was a full-blown fictional character, living in a real time and place, living events that had their genesis in family lore, but that turned out much, much differently in the book.

This week’s reading list is on the meager side. By the time you read this, I will be recovering from retinal re-attachment surgery. So here it is (such as it is):
Picture book: FARMER DALE’S RED PICKUP TRUCK by Lisa Wheeler (2004, School Library Journal)
Middle grade: ANYTHING BUT TYPICAL* by Nora Raleigh Baskin (2009, Kirkus Reviews) TROPICAL SECRETS* by Margaret Engle (2009, Kirkus Reviews)
YA: WHAT WORLD IS LEFT by Monique Polak (2008, YALSA list), HOPPER GRASS by Chris Carlton Brown (2009, Kirkus Reviews)
(* indicates that I couldn't decide if this was upper middle grade or lower YA.)

Writing Workout: Fictionalizing Real Life

Write about an event or an anecdote from your life in which you are a central character.

Now write the same anecdote in which the central character (you) is the exact OPPOSITE of the real you. If you are shy, make the character aggressive. Instead of kindly, make yourself a bully or a “mean girl.” See what happens to your anecdote.

Did the story take a different direction?
Was it harder or easier to write about that central “you” character?
Are you surprised by the results?