CROOKED PERFECT

You might have noticed that I only post when I've got something I really want to say.  Today, is one such day.

The recent publication of Kelly Fineman's At the Boardwalk resulted in a really interesting email conversation about poetry and picture books and how they arrive in the poet's brain and -- even more interesting to me -- how the poet understands when the work is complete.

I loved the conversation so much, I asked Kelly if I could share it with you.  She, kindly, said yes.  And so, here it is:

But first, the book.  Look:

Doesn't that look like fun?  It is fun.  The illustrations, the text, the rhyme -- it is just plain fun.  And I wondered if it was top to bottom fun to write.  But more importantly, I wondered if she had always conceived of this poem as a picture book.  So this is what I asked:

Me:  I know you to be a poet.  I’ve read poems that you’ve written for grown-ups as well as for kids and I’ve had the pleasure of watching you craft an entire biography in verse.  I’m wondering, specifically, about the poetry you write that is meant for the picture book format.  Does it start for you as a poem first and then later you might see its application to the picture book format, or do you know going in that a particular work feels like a picture book poem and craft it with the form in mind?

Kelly said this:   Your question presupposes that I know what I'm doing when I sit down to write, which is decidedly not always the case. AT THE BOARDWALK, which is my only published picture book to date, started out as a five-stanza poem, the first two stanzas of which essentially fell in my lap on the way home from a trip to Ocean City, New Jersey a few years ago. After I got home, I wrote a bit more, and it was a poem about the boardwalk, the beach, and the sea. When Tiger Tales approached me to ask if I had a manuscript that might be suitable for them, it occurred to me that the seashore poem I'd written might be good - but it needed work first. I scrapped one or two of the original stanzas in order to limit the book to the boardwalk, and expanded the entire poem to eight stanzas that covered the arc of a day. (It later expanded to eleven stanzas, which is what you'll find inside the book.)

The most recent single-poem picture book that I completed was most definitely a case of me picking a particular form and running with it.

Me:  I love that you say that two stanzas fell in your lap – I imagine that happens a lot.  And that other poems come as the result of much less magical circumstances.  Can you describe what it is like to get the beginnings of a poem?  Is it a feeling? A word?  A desire to write about a particular topic?

Kelly:  I have to laugh, because the correct answer is "yes": it could be any or all of those things. 

I could just imagine Kelly laughing at this, because I've been lucky enough to hang out with her at a number of New England SCBWI conferences.  In case you want to imagine her laughing, here's a photo:

It's a terrific photo -- Angela de Groot took it -- and it looks just like her.   Keep the picture in mind as you read what else she had to say, and you'll see why she's smiling.

Kelly:  Sometimes a line or two of a poem turn up all at once, seemingly from out of the blue, like the start of "At the Boardwalk" or the first two lines of "Lawnmowers," which is on my website and was printed in slightly different form in Summer Shorts, an anthology from Blooming Tree Press. The opening of that poem turned up while I was in the shower. (I get a lot of good ideas in the shower - I think it's the white noise from the water - the trick is remembering the lines well enough to write them down after you get out.) Sometimes I sit down to an "assignment" (often a self-imposed one), which could be a conscious choice to write a particular form of poem (say, a sonnet, a terza rima, or a haiku) or to write about a particular topic. That was the case with the poem "A Place to Share", which I wrote about the three guys who founded YouTube, which will be appearing in the forthcoming anthology Dare to Dream . . . Change the World (Kane Miller 2012). Laura Purdie Salas asked me to write a biographical poem about YouTube's founders, while she worked on a paired poem of a more inspirational nature (the marvelous "Just Like That!", also in Dare to Dream . . . ) Sometimes it's a word or a phrase that won't let go of me. So, basically . . . there's no magic to it, and no easy answer, either.

 See?  The smile is because even though there's no easy answer, she always makes it work.  I'd smile, too.

Anyway, all of what she said above makes sense to me -- when I start a novel or even a picture book, I don't know where it will lead exactly, but since my form is character-based, I know when the book is done.  The main character has achieved what she set out to achieve, or recognized that her goal is unattainable but that something else of value is good enough, etc.  But with many of the poems that Kelly writes, there isn't a main character, etc.  So, I wondered how does she know when a poem is "done"?  And that's what I asked her.

Me:  How do you know when a poem you’re working on is done?

It took Kelly another day before she could respond -- but her answer was worth the wait.

Kelly:  I confess to this question bringing me to a hard stop. It's one of those amorphous sort of things that's even harder to answer than how you get started or revise or whatnot. I have decided to relate something that Billy Collins said when I heard him speak a couple of years ago. When asked "How do you know when a poem is done?" Collins first replied with this quote: "In order to be a great painter, you need two people: one to paint the painting and another to cut that guy's hands off." He went on to say (I'm paraphrasing) that he always feels like his poems are moving: he starts somewhere and is moving toward somewhere else. But because he feels that sense of forward motion, he starts to feel a sense of arrival when he gets near the conclusion. "The more of a forward roll and a sense of direction you have, the more of a sense you'll get that it's reached its end."

That is all true. It is also, of course, false. Sometimes you know for sure that the poem is done. For instance, if you're working within a closed form (a form of poetry that has a specific number of lines, such as a villanelle or a sonnet or even a sestina), you know where the end is because the poem must fit in its particular box. Sometimes, though, especially when working in free verse or in an open form (such as a pantoum or rhymed couplets, say), you can't be certain where the ending should fall. In those cases, you have to ask whether you've conveyed what you intended, and whether the place where you've stopped the poem is the strongest place - perhaps you've gone to far, or not far enough. Perhaps you've gone the right distance, but without sufficient oomph. Perhaps you ended in a straightforward way when a twist would work better, or vice versa.

That's why it's important (when possible) to let a poem rest for a bit, then come back to it with fresh eyes, so you can more easily assess it as a whole and evaluate whether it's doing its job the way you wanted. It's also why it's important to have a first reader or two, who can take a look at it and tell you whether it works, and where it needs improvement. And really, they almost always need improvement. It's a rare poem indeed that arrives in perfection.

And yet, so many of Kelly's poems reach that stage.  

Thanks, Kelly, for letting me share our conversation.  You gave me a lot to think about!

A friend pointed out a Twitter discussion of Hound Dog True in which the following comment was made:

"It's more than a story being told - almost like a story being felt by the reader."

I don't think I could have asked for a higher compliment. Now, I need to acknowledge that the person who made the comment, the very thoughtful Brian Wilhorn at helpreaderslovereading, was not in love with Mattie's story -- especially not at the beginning. So I guess I appreciate even more that someone who didn't initially connect with the book still engaged enough to feel what Mattie feels.

As much as I wanted readers to feel along with Mattie, I did need to create at least a tiny bit of distance between reader and character.  I tried to address that here, at a visit to John Schu's library.  There, a young writer asked me why Hound Dog True is written in third person, rather than first.  If you click on that link, you'll see a video in which I:

1. Use my hands a lot.
2. Explain that if the book were in first person, every sentence would have the word "I" in it and you would quickly tire of the character.

The video does not include all the stuff I thought right after I was done speaking.  Including:

1. I should try to stop talking with my hands so much.
2. It's not just a matter of being irritated by the self-centerdness that is reinforced by the first person pronoun "I", it is also that the tiny sliver of space that comes when we shift to even very close third person gives the reader the ability to question Mattie's perception of the world.  It allows us feel Mattie's desperation to show her uncle her doorknob-installation prowess even as we obtain the distance to understand that her efforts are not going to turn out well.  It allows us to question her perspective even as we connect with it.  Or at least, that's the goal.  I won't claim to have always reached it.
3. What a smart question on the part of this young writer.
4. Was I that astute a reader when I was in fourth grade? (answer: no)
5. This book will probably be most satisfying for readers who are willing to feel the "I" behind the "she" and in the places where I was able to convey that feeling. 
6. I have a lot to learn about writing.

I just realized that I wrote a few other bits about writing Hound Dog True but never posted them.  I'll try to rectify that this week.

Meanwhile, if you've got thoughts about point-of-view and "feeling" a book, I'd love to hear them.

The winner of a copy of Myra Wolfe's Charlotte Jane Battles Bedtime is . . . . . Maggie Desruisseaux  who posted on my WordPress blog saying: "I love the line, “formidable oomph!” Find myself searching for my own oomph sometimes."

Well, Maggie, this should put a little oomph in your day!



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Send me your address and this little pirate will be sailing her way to you!

photo credit:  Julio Thompson, 2011

Whew!  The last of the big reviews is in for Hound Dog True and HOORAY! It received a star!
Here's a link if you want to read the review in its entirety.  Otherwise, how about just enjoying this bit:

Do you know how my heart sings?  Not just for the nice things said about my own book -- but because I have a passion for quiet books about small things.   And I know that the way only way those books will find their perfect readers is if librarians and booksellers and passionate reviewers make them known and give them space amongst their fabulous big plot, high concept peers.  So thank you, SLJ.  Thank you Kirkus and Horn Book and Booklist and Publishers Weekly.  Thank you teachers, librarians, moms, dads, bloggers and big mouths, for all you do to get the small books into the hands of their just-right-readers.



PS:  If you haven't entered THIS DRAWING for Myra Wolfe's less-than-quiet, rip-roaring new picture book CHARLOTTE JANE BATTLES BEDTIME then hop to it, matey!

Okay people. I'm not going to sugar coat this. Hound Dog True was hard to write. It took two and a half years before it was good enough to send to my editor. During that time, entire characters were created, then disposed of. Plot lines appeared and got ditched. Scenes got written dozens of times -- sometimes because they needed it, sometimes because I had no idea what came next.

I didn't start keeping a notebook until late 2008, so the early days of HDT are hard to recreate -- but I know my last submission of the Promising the Moon picture book (click here if you haven't read it yet) was in January 2007. The first fragment of the novel I can find is dated 5.17.2007.

By that point, I had already determined that Uncle Potluck had a neighbor -- Miss Sweet (whose name was Ona at the time) -- and that Miss Sweet had a niece, Quincy. I had written already about Mattie's first fearful encounter with Quincy, though other than a vague notion of "shyness" I hadn't given much thought to what was behind it. I had also, apparently, decided that Mattie and Quincy would be forced into a sleepover.

What I'm about to share with you is my first attempts at thinking about that sleepover. I will warn you, it isn't pretty. This is true, raw, rough draft, people. Typos. Spelling errors. Sentences that just plain stop. Ready? Okay. Early Bits of Hound Dog True

If you have a copy of Hound Dog True around, you can compare this with what is on pages 51-53. Some elements are there. The sleeping bags. Uncle Potluck playing cards in an adjoining room. Mattie's discomfort. But there's no scene yet. No momentum. I was just trying to figure out What Happens.

My best drafting days are a little neater. Those days, scenes emerge -- usually in the character or narrators voice. While I don't outline, on my best days I seem to be directed by my knowledge of the character and confidence that she will tell me her story.

At this point in the writing of Hound Dog True, I didn't have that confidence. I wasn't sure yet why Mattie felt the things she did. It would take much more drafting and imagining before I would know.

But we'll talk about that next time.

Meanwhile: I want to remind you that you can win a copy of Myra Wolfe's swashbuckling picture book Charlotte Jane Battles Bedtime by leaving your name in the comments section on my Word Press blog here or at LiveJournal here.

So, yesterday I told you about a special treat and here it is:


I know!  It's crazy adorable, isn't it? I love these illustrations by Maria Monescillo -- but I loved this story even before it was illustrated. 

This is the story of Charlotte Jane who "came howling into the world with the sunrise." 
            "Arr.  She's finer than a ship full of jewels," said her mother, smiling.
            "Arr," agreed her father.

Arr, agree I.  And don't you love it?  All that pirate talk and yet a cozy wonderful warmth of family right from the start.  Arr.

            "Also," said her mother, "she's got oomph."
            "Formidable oomph," said her father.

Charlotte Jane's oomph leads her to want to get the most juice out of her days.  She swashbuckles, she hunts for treasure, she performs Fantastic Feats of Daring -- but she is determined not to go to sleep at bedtime.  "Bedtime was not juicy."   But soon she finds that "her oomph seems to have gone to sleep without her."

Things do work out, ultimately -- though you'll have to get a copy of the book to find out how.  I'm no spoiler.  But I'll give you a hint:



Okay.  And do you not want to crawl into that bed right now?  I know.  Me, too.

So, in celebration with Myra Wolfe and Charlotte Jane, I'd like to send a copy of this book to one of you.  Do this: leave a comment below or on my wordpress site (in case LJ is acting up during its "technical upgrade") and I'll have one my resident pirates randomly select a winner next Thursday, okay?  Grand.

In the meantime, if you'll like to see a few more of the illustrations in this book, you can take a gander here.  And I can't leave you without a link to a fabulous Publisher's Weekly review.  One of the highlights of that review? 
Monescillo's detailed and gently textured watercolors are full of insouciant pirate energy (Charlotte Jane's bravado is matched by that of her surly teddy bear, who wears an eye patch), and Wolfe's text has as much charm and verve as her heroine.

Now THAT is juicy.

Long ago, in a rental house a few miles from here, a young(er) picture book writer was having doubts.  She had been encouraged to try her hand at novel writing -- but novels seemed so LONG, so complicated, so impossible.

Long ago, in another house clear on the opposite coast, an even younger writer was bubbling up with language and story and brilliant voice.  She, too, was a picture book writer.  Her name was (is) Myra.  And she was one of those encouraging her friend to write a novel.

The two struck a deal.  Every Friday they would exchange words.  Not a lot.  Nothing daunting.  Five hundred words.  They made a vow.  A pact. A blood oath (sans blood).

And they kept it.

It was that oath that kept them both writing -- even when the task seemed impossible.  The younger writer produced some awesome picture books, a young chapter book, and a few other delights.  The older writer produced a manuscript that would become A Crooked Kind of Perfect.  The older writer knows she could not have written that book without Myra expecting those 500 words every week.

So, here's what I'm asking you now:  Is there a book you want to write?  A challenge you want to face? Something important you want to put on paper, but have been procrastinating about?  You might need a Myra.

Right now, I'm being a Myra to a writer I greatly admire.  She's well published and brilliant -- but there was something getting in the way of the words landing on the page.  (Have you felt this?  Maybe you have written and rewritten the first seven pages of that novel but can't get farther?  Or you've got just one more bit of research to do first?)  Every week, this writer is sending me 500 words.  "Dear Myra," she says, "here you go."

As a Myra, my only job is to read those words and say: YAY!  Keep Going! -- just like my Myra did for me.  This is not a critique gig.  Not a coaching thing.  It's easy -- and delightful.  I get to enjoy this novel as it emerges. YAY!  Keep Going! Is easy to say -- because I want to read more! 

So, could you use a Myra?
Can you be a Myra to someone else?


Tomorrow, a super treat.  Myra's picture book, Charlotte Jane Battles Bedtime.  Want to win one?  Meet me here tomorrow for your chance.


Meanwhile, think about this:  would you write differently if you knew someone was waiting to read your words?  Could you use a Myra?  Could you be a Myra to someone else?

Recently Grier Jewell at Fizzwhizzing Flushbunker reviewed Hound Dog True and said this:

"Hound Dog True had me at the first sentence and held me in its enchanting grip until the very last page. (As I read this, I kept thinking, did Barbara O'Connor change her name to Linda Urban?)"

Could a person be paid a higher compliment?

I love Barbara O'Connor's writing.  Each book is a gem (I'm particularly fond of The Small Adventure of Popeye and Elvis -- but you know how I feel about small things.) and each sentence in each story is so carefully crafted.  There's a rhythm to what Barbara writes, and an attention to detail.  Have you read any of her posts about the line edit stage of her novel writing? Read these.  You'll see what I mean.

Anyway, I thought that Grier's kind words were as good as it gets, but this morning I read THIS.  Yes.  Barbara O'Connor picking out a few sentences she liked from Hound Dog True.  I am, Dear Reader, aflutter.

If you link up to read them, you might notice that some of them are rather oddly constructed.  Some are fragments.  Some seem to interrupt themselves.  That's Mattie's voice.  And in the next few weeks, as we talk about how Hound Dog True became a novel, we'll talk about that voice and how it came to be.  (If you missed yesterday's post and are interested, you can click here to read an early picture book version of the story.)

Until then, go read Barbara's notes on her revisions.  Eye opening stuff.

Like my first novel, A Crooked Kind of Perfect, Hound Dog True began as a picture book. It started with the characters: shy Mattie, gregarious Uncle Potluck, a Mama who seemed not to understand her daughter entirely. The moon was there from the beginning, too. But not much else.

Over the next few weeks, I thought I'd talk a little bit about the evolution of Hound Dog True, from picture book to published novel. It seems like the best place to start is with that picture book. Want to see it?

Now remember, this is an early draft, okay? Okay. Here it is: Promising the Moon Early Draft


Seasoned picture book writers are guffawing right now. Yes, the manuscript feels long. The character is a little old for most modern picture books. It doesn't have that bouncy picture book oomph. It is what many would call "a mood piece". (For the unseasoned: mood piece=kiss of death.)

I sent a later draft out to a few editors and got supportive feedback. They liked the characters. They liked the writing. One or two wondered about the back story and suggested there might be more there.

We'll talk more about "more there" next time. Meanwhile, if you've got any questions about this process or issues you'd like to address, leave them in the comments section. Ready? Let's discuss.