The Age Of Wonder

I love writing for a middle grade audience.

There are no hard and fast rules, but generally speaking a middle grade audience falls between the ages of 8-12. Personally, I call this the age of wonder.

Readers in these ages have one foot in the magical world of childhood, and the other in the “real world” of growing up. Generally speaking, middle grade readers might:

·      Check under their bed for monsters

·      Have a pair of lucky underpants

·      Wonder if their parents are secretly superheroes

·      Suspect they are likely the world’s best (fill in the blank)

·      Believe they can soar into the sky, if only they try hard enough 

To me, this is fertile soil for storytellers. It’s thrilling to see the excitement in a young reader’s eyes as they describe to you something they find amazing. And the wonderful thing is, they find almost everything amazing. It might be a stick they found in a gutter or a string they discovered in their belly button. It might be a fact they read in a book, or a character in a movie. So many things in the world are new to them, and there is unabashed excitement and wonder in all of it.

At this age, readers are grappling with two things: the world around them, and their place in that world. And the best part? They’re teachable. A good story can point them in the right direction. A good story can help them uncover a vital truth. They can experience joy and despair, victory and defeat, pain and happiness, all vicariously through a fearless protagonist. They can learn, without having to make the mistakes themselves.

Some feel that writing for middle grade readers means you must use small words or make it “simple” for the reader. This is not the case. You can deal with many, topics—even very difficult ones—and still have the book suitable for middle grade readers. The thing to keep in mind is you must be true to the age. Middle grade readers don’t care about love triangles. They don’t care about budgets or bosses. They do care about friendship. And bullies. Justice and injustice. Fear and weakness and death. What it means to be brave. All of these topics can be addressed in a middle grade book, as long as you view them through the lens of the reader.

I tried to capture a young reader’s dream in my book Almost Super. It’s the story of two boys born into a superhero family. They are destined for great things once they get their super powers. But  things don’t go quite as planned. The brothers must discover who their true friends are, and ultimately what it means to be super.

Wonder, excitement, adventure. I hope my story offers all of these for readers who secretly know that at any minute, the same thing is bound to happen to them. 

2013!

The 2013 news roundup- congrats to all on a great year for the nest!

DR. BIRD'S ADVICE FOR SAD POETS by Evan Roskos is a Morris Award Finalist 2014, a Kirkus Best Teen Book of 2013, on the TAYSHAS 2014 list, a CYBILS Finalist, and received a starred Kirkus review.

PICKLE by Kim Baker is on the 2014-2015 Texas Bluebonnet Award master list, won a Crystal Kite from the SCBWI, and a 2013 Children's Choice Book awards finalist.

THE WATER CASTLE by Megan Frazer Blakemore is a Kirkus Best Children's Book 2013, on the NYPL Books for Reading and Sharing List 2013 and one of Fuse 8's 100 Magnificent Children's Books of 2013.

MONSTROUS BEAUTY by Elizabeth Fama is on the YALSA BFYA 2013 list, and an Odyssey Award Honor book.

LOVELY, DARK AND DEEP by Amy McNamara won the 2013 IRA Children's and YA Book Award for YA fiction.

PLUNKED by Michael Northrop was the NPR Backseat Bookclub pick for November 2013, was named one of the Best Children's Books of the Year by the Bank Street College of Education, is a 2013-14 Iowa Children's Choice Award nominee and a 2014-15 Young Hoosiers Book Award nominee.

A GIRL CALLED PROBLEM by Katie Quirk is on NYPL Books for Reading and Sharing List 2013 and is a Fuse 8's 100 Magnificent Children's Books of 2013.

Both THE WATER CASTLE and A GIRL CALLED PROBLEM were reviewed in the New York Times here and here, and both received starred Kirkus reviews.

ENTANGLED by Amy Rose Capetta was a BEA Buzz Book 2013 and received a starred PW.

NANTUCKET BLUE by Leila Howland was also reviewed in the New York Times here and received a PW Starred review.

BLACKOUT by Robison Wells and TIDES by Betsy Cornwell also got PW stars, and Kelly Barson's 45 POUNDS starred reviews from VOYA and LMC.

SKY JUMPERS by Peggy Eddleman is on NYPL Books for Reading and Sharing List 2013 and on the on the 2013 Indies Next list.

Adding to the many state lists it is already on, ROT AND RUIN by Jonathan Maberry is a Children's Book Review Best Kids Series Books of 2013, the winner of the 2013 Missouri Gateway Readers Award and the 2013 Teen Nutmeg Book Award.

FLESH & BONE by Jonathan Maberry won the YA Bram Stoker Award 2013.

DUST AND DECAY by Jonathan Maberry is the winner of the Westchester Fiction Award 2013.

The EXTINCTION MACHINE by Jonathan Maberry got a starred Booklist review.

THE DISENCHANTMENTS by Nina LaCour is on the BFYA 2013 list, and a Northern California Independent Booksellers Book of the Year Award Winner.

TRAPPED by Michael Northrop is a YALSA Popular Paperback for Young Adults 2013.
 
 
AND, this neglected blog will soon be filled with posts again. Marion Jensen is up next, talking about his MG debut, ALMOST SUPER (Harper, February). Looking forward to making more news in 2014!

Sara

Dianne: When Research Turns Up Nothing – And It’s a Good Thing

Caerleon, Wales -- a Roman amphitheater

It’s tough when you travel to another continent for research and don’t get what you want.

That’s what I thought when my trip to the U.K. this summer didn’t give me the results I expected. My husband had hired a private tour guide to drive me around southern Wales, visiting places related to King Arthur so I could gather information for my MG fantasy series, THE EIGHTH DAY.

The tour guide contacted me by email beforehand, asking specifically what Arthurian sites I wanted to see, but I had none in mind. So I replied that I was looking for inspiration. This research would be applied to a future book in the series, and I was open to ideas.

Ogmore-by-the-Sea, Wales -- a 12th century castle

I thought he was going to take me to 5^th century ruins. Instead, he took me to sites that were obviously dated long before or after Arthur’s time – an excavated 1^st century Roman fort and amphitheater and the ruins of a 12^th century Norman castle. When I asked the guide what connections these had with Arthur, his answers were vague. Legend said that Arthur moved into the fort after the Romans were gone. Legend said that Arthur fought a battle on this plain before Normans built the castle.

But when the guide saw that I was serious enough to hear the truth, he leveled with me. “There are hundreds of places from Scotland to southern England and even into Normandy, France that claim an association with Arthur. Not a single one can be proven. There’s more negative proof than anything else.” He referred me to a book he’d recently read, The Camelot Inquisition by John F. Wake, which I promptly downloaded on my Kindle.

Sadly, I came to the same conclusion as my guide. There’s no credible evidence for a historical King Arthur. In fact there’s a lot of evidence that weighs against him. Most notably: no historians from his time period mention him at all.

Disappointment was followed rather quickly by a feeling of freedom. If Arthur wasn’t real, then I was free to use Arthurian legends however I wanted. I had already been questioned by a copy-editor about the historical accuracy of using the name Arthur Pendragon when Pendragon was associated only with his father Uther until sometime in the 17^th century. That caused me some worry … but if there was no historical Arthur, then the historical accuracy of his name isn’t really in question, is it?

If the tour guide had told me in advance he was taking me to the ruins of a Roman amphitheater with only the shakiest connection to Arthurian legend, I might have nixed the trip and gone elsewhere. And that would have been a shame. Because what I thought was nothing was actually full of the potential of everything – including the placement of Arthur’s court in a centuries-old Roman fortress with an amphitheater for his Knights to practice in – if that’s how I choose to write the story.

I told my guide I wanted inspiration, and he delivered what I asked for – just not in the way I expected.

Frances: The Origins of THE MISADVENTURES OF THE MAGICIAN'S DOG

Last spring, when my editor at Holiday House asked me how I came to write The Misadventures of the Magician’s Dog, I thought I knew how to answer.  The seed of the novel dates back more than a decade, to when a dear friend’s daughter adopted a dog named Anatole.  He in no way lived up to his dignified name:  he was a scruffy mutt who liked to jump the fence and frequently peed on the furniture.  Still, he adored my friend’s daughter—which became very important when she was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at the age of five.  At a moment when her life was falling apart, he was a best friend who never left her side.  Perhaps for that reason, when she asked me where Anatole lived before he came to her, I explained that he used to belong to a magician and that he could talk and do magic.  After all, isn’t there something magic about a dog who can make a child feel that loved?    

For years after that, I thought about writing a novel about a dog who used to belong to a magician.  But I couldn’t quite figure out the rest of the novel—who would adopt the dog and what would happen next.  And then our country went to war, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the kids of deployed service people:  it seemed to me that these children were carrying an enormous burden, one that they hadn’t chosen and that my own children and their friends knew nothing about.  So I wrote the story of Peter Lubinsky, the son of a deployed air force pilot who adopts a dog that used to belong to a magician.  The dog offers to teach Peter magic so that he can bring his father home—but only if Peter first helps the dog rescue his former master, who has accidentally turned himself into a rock.

This is what I told my editor when she asked about the origins of my book.  However, in reflecting back, I think my answer only skims the surface of why I wrote this particular story—just like most answers to the question of where stories come from only skim the surface.  We write the books we write because of who we are in our deepest cores, because of the questions that drive us, the desires we haven’t resolved.  These are hard issues to talk about—at least for me!—but I think there’s value in understanding a story’s unconscious undercurrents. So I thought I’d use this blog post to try to examine some of the deeper reasons I wrote the novel I wrote.  

In my case, one of my obsessions is the complex nature of love, with all of the push and pull of emotion that accompanies it.  Love isn’t black and white:  it’s full of ambivalence, one moment a source of happiness and well-being; the next, of frustration, anger, hurt.  This is true, I think, regardless of age—but for children in particular, this sort of ambivalence can be very difficult to deal with.  Children whose parents are deployed have more reasons than most to struggle with conflicting emotions.  On one hand, they may adore and even idolize their parents.  On the other, they may also feel fear, betrayal, and anger too at their parents for being gone.  That’s a lot for any child to carry.  Peter’s father is in a wonderful and loving man, and yet he’s also left his children and put himself at risk.  All Peter wants is for his father to come home—but his father would have to be a different person in order to return.  

I’m also obsessed with how anger affects people.  When the dog in my book teaches Peter how to do magic, he tells Peter that power is channeled through strong negative emotions, like anger—and the more magic Peter does, the more angry (and evil!) he’ll become.   When a friend read the first few chapters of an early draft, he wondered if magic done through anger might be too dark for a middle grade novel.  But every instinct in me recoiled from changing this particular aspect of the story.  As every parent can attest, anger is a powerful—and often scary—emotion for kids.  I wanted to write about how anger that isn’t acknowledged can fester, changing everything about how one sees the world. Yet I didn’t want to say anger is “bad.”  In the course of my story, Peter struggles to acknowledge and make peace the anger he feels, to understand that he can be angry with his father and still love him deeply.  This, to me, is the emotional heart of my story, the part of it that matters.

Of course, in writing about Peter’s attempts to reconcile his conflicting emotions about his father, I was really writing about my own struggles to understand love, anger, and the places where those two meet.  I didn’t know this when I wrote my initial draft, but I came to understand it as I revised.  And I think that this understanding helped me to make the choices I needed to make as a writer.

 

So here’s my advice for writers who are beginning the process of trying to tell their stories.  Write something that excites you:  whatever sort of story it is, just make sure it will keep you glued to your laptop, pouring the pages out.  Have fun, and let your imagination run wild.  But when you revise, go back and find the emotions that are driving your story—the undercurrents that caused you to write this book and no other.  Once you understand your story’s heart, polish it.  Refine it.  Make it true.  Your story’s emotional core may not take up much space in terms of the words in your book, which could be about dinosaurs and talking mice and crazy carnivals (mine is).  But make sure that the words, no matter how few, are right. 

And then send your story out into the world, knowing that it carries with it a little bit of your soul.

Peggy: The origins of SKY JUMPERS

Sky Jumpers began in an airplane in 2009. My family and I were flying home from Disney World, on a day when most of the country was covered in clouds. I sat by the window, staring out at the clouds below us, and imagining how much fun it would be to jump out of the airplane and have the clouds catch me. To slow my fall. (Just for the record: clouds will not slow your fall. I recommend you not trying this just to be sure.) The thoughts of what that would be like if it were possible were so exhilarating, that I couldn’t shake them.

(Now you're really wanting to test the clouds-slowing-your-fall theory, aren't you?)

And since clouds can’t actually catch you (sigh), I started thinking about what properties of air could change that would make it more dense feeling, and to give it enough substance that it would be able to slow the fall of a person jumping into it. And then once that dense air— the deadly Bomb’s Breath— came into existence, I had to figure out what happened to our world that would’ve caused something as big as that to happen to our environment. The answer was bombs large enough to destroy almost everything, without destroying the land itself. The “green” bombs of WWIII came to be.

From there, I had to pick a location for my story to take place. I have always lived in a valley teeming with life and surrounded by towering mountains.

Beautiful, no? I'm kind of in love with my mountains.

They are such a massive force in themselves, and have always made me feel protected. Safe. For my book, I wanted it to take place somewhere open and desolate, since it mirrored how the population of the world was— sparse. So I chose Nebraska. An area that’s as flat and open as I could imagine. But for the Bomb’s Breath to be both an asset and a danger, as well as a strong source of conflict, my characters and the town they lived in needed to be at a higher elevation so they could reach it.

So I thought, what could be a more fascinating and ironic place for a town to thrive, than in one of the giant craters left behind by the very bombs that wiped out most of the population?

The diameter of the crater is ten miles wide from mountaintop to mountaintop, so plenty big enough to house an entire town. And just like the valley I’ve grown up in, the crater that the town of White Rock lives in is teeming with life, and those mountains surrounding them, along with the Bomb’s Breath that covers the crater, gives them a level of protection unparalleled for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

And of course, if they’re somewhere that feels so safe, something has to come along to threaten that safety. And it helps if the only way to counter that threat is by going through something invisible and extremely deadly— the Bomb’s Breath.

Sky Jumpers releases in less than six weeks. I am so excited for readers to be able to experience this world that feels so very real in my head, and that I love so much.

If you would like to learn more about Sky Jumpers (and check out some of the extras), go to peggyeddleman.com.

Kelly: Origins / 45 POUNDS (MORE OR LESS)

45 POUNDS (MORE OR LESS) essentially evolved from a character. I imagined a girl who struggled with her weight and her place in the world. She’s from a typical American family, and by typical I mean atypical. Families today are likely to include step-parents and single parents and gay parents, so I wanted my character’s family to reflect that, too. I envisioned the mother/daughter dynamic to be one of the central conflicts. However, I wanted the main conflict to be within the girl herself. Probably because growing up, most of my conflict was internal.

Here’s where the evolution begins: I have this character, and I feel connected to her. I know her. I've seen her in my classroom, in the park, and in the mirror. But when I started the book around 2005, technology was quite different. In my first draft, my main character spends time in a chat room. (Groan, I know, but hey, it was 2005.) The title of the book was actually her user name: ANN_ONYMOUS. At the time, I thought I was being clever. She felt invisible, and her name, I discovered, was Ann.

My beloved grandmother had recently died, and I’d witnessed her decline from strong matriarch to frail patient needing around-the-clock care. What better way to process those feelings than to have my main character experience them, too? So, in my first draft, Ann’s grandmother suffers a stroke in chapter one, and by chapter three, she’s moved in with the family. It was a chubby-girl-takes-care-of-elderly-grandma story. The more I wrote, the more I fell in love with the characters.

Then I got feedback. A paid critique from an editor at a SCBWI conference commented, “Why should we care about this grandmother who had a stroke? We need to see her first so we can feel Ann’s devastation.” So I start writing back story with Ann and her Gram to get to know them myself. A few years later, I went to Vermont College of Fine Arts, and I got more feedback in workshop. “Does the grandma have to have a stroke? Please don’t tell me she’s going to die. Hasn't that been done already—a lot?” (Keep mind, the feedback isn't verbatim, but that was the gist.) My brilliant advisor, Martine Leavitt, challenged me to ask Ann what she wants. Martine had me write a letter from Ann to her exploring both concrete and abstract desires. That forced me to re-vision the focus of the story.

I spent my second semester at VCFA weeding out old technology, resurrecting a sick grandma, and mining for the heart of the story. The only things that didn’t change were the basic characters. (Well, except for Gram—she got a make-over and a new lease on life.) I revised the manuscript for fourth semester as my creative thesis, and Sara sold it later that year.

Exactly one month from today—on July 11—45 POUNDS (MORE OR LESS) releases from Viking Children’s (Penguin). I can’t wait to introduce you to Ann and her wacky, yet normal, family. I hope you love them as much as I do.  

Betsy: The Isles of Shoals (Where TIDES Lives)

This is where my imaginary friends live.

No—real people live here, actually, in the real house on White Island, at the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire.  But this house, and this lighthouse, are where the main characters in my first novel, Tides (click the link!), live, too.

I grew up in coastal New Hampshire, and I regularly went fishing and duck hunting at the Shoals with my dad, his best friend, Mike, and Mike’s son Corey (to whom Tides is dedicated).  Then, a few summers ago, I got a job on a tour boat that goes through Portsmouth Harbor to the Isles of Shoals twice a day.

Three-hour tours.  The uniform was a red polo shirt and khakis.  I was basically Gilligan.

My job was actually giving the tour: I would yammer into a microphone about the lighthouses and forts and whatnot in Portsmouth, the history of the area, and I’d tell stories about the many eccentric residents the Shoals have seen over the years.  (Notably: the poet Celia Thaxter and the pirate Blackbeard.  No kidding.)

This is the Oceanic Hotel on Star Island.  Lots of shenanigans in the book take place here, notably a dance put on by the hotel staff for all the islands’ residents.   (Tragically, I don’t think this is a real thing.)  Until recently, you had to be participating in a conference or retreat to stay at the Oceanic, but now I believe they take individual reservations.  Who wants to take me there?

The tower toward the left of this photo belongs to the Shoals Marine Lab on Appledore Island, just across Gosport Harbor from Star.  I always tell people that if I weren’t a writer, I would be a marine biologist or an oceanographer, and I have long wished I had the kind of credentials to get an internship here.  (I don’t think they take creative writers.)  A fictionalized version of the lab is very important in Tides, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Of course, Tides is really about selkies, and there are real ones at the Shoals.

Well, real harbor seals.  I suppose whether they’re really selkies is up for debate.  But I like to think so.

Can you see them in this picture?  We couldn’t get any closer to the island because of the underwater rocks (or shoals, hey now!  You may have just learned a new word!), so they are small here.

And just for good measure, another picture of Noah’s grandmother’s house and the White Island light.  Every time I’m away from the Shoals for a while, I start getting afraid that I’ve misremembered everything, that it’s not quite as beautiful as the way I see it in my head.  But it is.  I really do love the Shoals, and one of the things I most wish for Tides is that it will help other people love them, too.  But I’ll have to wait and see what you think about that.