I recently returned from a fabulous writers’ retreat at one of the most beautiful places in North America.
Where: Alderbrook Resort in Union, Washington at the southern shore of the Hood Canal.
Who: Given by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators of Western Washington for fifty writers and illustrators.
The speakers were (and I quote from the website ):
“Arthur Levine, author, publisher of Arthur A. Levine Books, and a vice-president at Scholastic Inc., and Newbery Medal award-winning author Linda Sue Park.”

The weekend has been a life-changing experience for me.  Attending was  a selected group of dedicated and excited writers and illustrators. The atmosphere was friendly, positive and supportive. Jolie Stekly, Joni Sensel and Laurie Thompson and the rest of the staff from the SCBWI-WWA orchestrated everything perfectly.

And the speakers were wonderful.  Backing off the superlatives for a minute, Arthur really helped me understand the strengths and the weaknesses of the beginning of my manuscript.  Each of us sent him the first five pages of our story, plus a one-page synopsis.  He made a point of reading them and writing notes before he arrived. (Which was a feat considering the blackout he and the rest of the Mid-Atlantic had just been through.)  He said many kind things about the piece which I very much appreciated.  But even more important he gave me two ideas, I had considered but that my vanity had prevented me from embracing. Even then, I hesitated. What drove his points home, however, was the clever meeting format he chose. I got to listen to his critiques of twenty-four of my peers’ work, and I agreed with all of hs comments.  How could I possibly consider that his about mine was the only one that was wrong?

Linda Sue Park gave us hours of tips on the craft of writing. She is not just a Newberry Award winning author, but a true artist.  Without getting into the specifics, she uses many of the techniques that other artists use to explore and sharpen her pieces ways that are unique to each of them. Most importantly she taught us to challenge ourselves to write more originally.

Thanks to everyone.  I look forward to seeing the alumni from the conference at upcoming Puget Sound SCBWI events.

This is me and my favorite sailor (and granddaughter) this summer. We were on a sail on the Hawaiian Chieftain, doing research for the book I’m writing.  The Chieftain and the Lady Washington battled that day with guns blazing. Everything was real except for the cannonballs. I’ve got to  say we took the worst of it.  Had she more than paper wading, The Lady would clearly have shot our anchor away leaving us at her mercy. Fortunately we lived to play another day.

It was indeed a glorious day, for me especially, as you can tell from the photo above.

Here’s the dreaded enemy ship under full sail.  It’s the ship Johnny Depp was on in Pirates of the Caribbean.

I wrote a ten thousand word outline for the novel I’m working on. The benefits of such thorough planning cannot be exaggerated. Relative to the first book in the series which had no outline, I’m sailing through the story. Of course, knowing the situation and the characters well at the start of the second book has made writing an outline relatively easy.

Now, I’ve come to a spot where I need to alter the plan. One character talks another into doing something that seems out of character, and I have to find a motivation.Vanity was my first thought, since it is the universal motivator. The next step is to backfill the situations with the motivation.

It actually only took three small inserts to make the action believable. I snuck them into the outline for documentation purposes and am now massaging the changes into the text.

Voila.

Back to posting to this blog after our vacation to Santa Fe. Had a great time on very familiar ground.

Familiarity is one reason I go. As everything changes, we search for that which seems not to: old songs, old cars, old friends. I live two thousand miles from where I grew up. I go back to see if things have changed and of course they have.

But Santa Fe almost hasn’t. We were there for a fiesta that has been celebrated on the plaza for 299 years – since 1712! The plaza, the Governor’s Palace and the Plaza Hotel are the same. The tile on the hotel floor has the same luster it did in my childhood. The five and dime is half a block away – though it’s no longer Woolworth’s.

I visited Cow Creek, twelve miles of dirt roads beyond of Pecos NM, where a spent several summers with my boyhood friend George. The river is the same as are the road and the rocks. The trees – many scorched by a fire several years ago – are returning. It all lifts my heart.

And so does this children’s story I’m writing.  Twenty-thousand words so far.  I hope to finish it by Fiesta Santa Fe’s three-hundredth birthday, next fall.

[This scene occurs in Mr. Bingo’s sixth grade class at the Princess Blue Leaf School for Girls in Dream City.]

As the girls took their seats, Monique asked, “Did you show Mr. Bingo the scrimshaw?”
Erin had written Monique in Paris about the ivory carving that had stuck to Dr. Griffin when he fell in the meteorite hole.

“Not yet,” Erin said.

“I thought you were going to -”
“Sh-h, Let’s talk about it later,” Erin said looking intently at Mr. Bingo as he stood before his class.

Erin hadn’t hushed Monique out of respect for her teacher.  She didn’t want to talk to him – or anybody else about the carving.  The scrimshaw might be valuable or historical, and they would take it away.

She liked the cool smoothness of the ivory and the picture of the girl who looked a little like her. Dr. Griffin had discovered the object and given it to her. When she took it, she knew it wasn’t really hers, or even his. But the ivory had spoken to her somehow, and it felt like hers now. She kept it in the darkness of her pocket and took it with her wherever she went.

Here are the two books I’m currently reading as I write the second book in The Inventors Daughter series.

”The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization by Daniel Pinkwater.
This one is for sheer fun and to glean something from the wonderful Pinkwater’s direct and hilarious style.
Two Years Before the Mast by Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana.
I’m reading this for the perspective of a sailor. Though my story is set 120 years earlier, this is a superb book about the life of a hand on a sailing vessel.  Re-read this if you have the time.

Six weeks and forty-two pages into the new novel. Working for five weeks on a ten-thousand word outline certainly helps. I hope to avoid the initial plot pratfalls in the first one, which took much longer than to write. And in this second book, I know the characters and the setup very well.

I hope to be done with the draft next summer. We’ll see how that turns out.

Many years ago, when I began to write screenplays, I realized how precious little I knew about how the world works. I was reading the noir novels Raymond Chandler at that time. Chandler was a master at dressing his stories with what I judge to be the right amount of descriptive detail. He had the English taste for verbal economy. But he added to that a physicality he learned from his experience as a man of the world.

I had travelled some in my young life, lived in New York and California. But I hadn’t actually done much.  Most especially, I hadn’t built anything, and felt I needed to in order to write with authority.

My wife and I set our sites on building our own house, and in 1982 built a house in the hills of Vermont eleven miles northwest of Burlington. It was a simple house but a significant accomplish for the two of us. Since then, we’ve lived in two other houses, one in Ann Arbor and our current house in Seattle.  We made major improvements to both which we are quite proud of. The work isn’t master-level. But, with my naive optimism and her sense of designed, the work turned out well and added to the quality of our lives.

These experiences have helped me consider the world I place my characters in. I do not consider myself a great writer by any means, but I do write with enjoyment and consideration for the physical world of my stories.  In this effort, I’m trying to bring architectural elements into these tales from my travels as well as the various books and sites I study as part of the writing process.

The picture above is from a grand article about the remodel of Lakeview Airport in New Orleans.

Cutthroat Island

Who are you really writing for?

Every writer should ask herself that question because it matters in the marketplace. You can write a terrific tale, but your audience may be smaller than you imagined because your piece doesn’t speak to a large group.

If you become seriously concerned that your target audience is limited, you may decide to retool the work, or to press on and be faithful to your story.  You may, after all, be mistaken.  Your audience may turn out to be a broad one. And sometimes a story simply grabs the reader by the scruff of the neck and carries him away.

But that is not often the case.

To illustrate how a commercial venture may fail in this way, I offer this from Matt Gamble’s post* on the film Cutthroat Island, a film I thoroughly enjoyed but lost $88 million dollars for the studio that backed it.

“Cutthroat Island was directly competing with were Jumanji and Heat which were both action films. Now I’m not much a fan of either film, but I think it is safe to say that Jumanji is a comparable film in quality while Heat is clearly superior to both. Jumanji is a sort of swashbuckling adventure story told at a breakneck pace to young kids and it held a great deal of appeal to them, while Heat is a gritty and realistic action film for adults. Both these films highlight Cutthroat Island’s weaknesses; that it is far too stuffy for younger kids, and it seems positively childish when aimed at older audiences.”

Cutthroat Island was a ripping yarn, but had no audience. If it had kids in the cast or fantastical elements, it might have been a children’s classic.  Davis and Modine were fine in the film, but they didn’t have the sexy, romantic spark of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley or the swaggering, woozy charms of Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean films.

The writer would do well to imagine who will read and recommend the book to others.

* http://wherethelongtailends.com/archives/cutthroat-island