Author: beckylevine

Becky Levine is a children's book writer, working hard to strengthen her picture-books skills. She is the author of The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide, a book to help you get started with a critique group, learn to revise from a critique, and strengthen your own critiquing powers. She has also published two nonfiction children's books with Capstone Press. She is currently seeking representation. Becky lives in California's Santa Cruz mountains, where she spends a lot of time sitting on the couch, knitting needles in hand, thinking through the next revision. At her day job, she writes grants for a nonprofit healthcare organization.

Banned Books Week

Posted on 28 Sep 200928 Sep 2009 by beckylevine

As I said back here, I grew up on folk music, including The Weavers–Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman, & Lee Hays. Not quite so many years back, but enough, I watched the 1982 documentary “Wasn’t That a Time,” about their 1980 reunion. What’s the one thing I remember the most strongly?

Lee Hays saying this about their experiences during the McCarthy era:

“If it wasn’t for the honor, I’d just as soon not have been blacklisted.”

This week is Banned Books Week. You can read about it at the ALA website.

I think it’s an important week. My world is highly made up of writing blogs, like yours, and I’m pretty sure we all hear a lot about censorship, about parents deciding a book can’t be taught in a school, carried in a library, offered to students. That a writer can’t come and talk to their kids. And, yes, thank goodness, we hear a lot about the other parents and the teachers and the librarians and the school administrators who fight on the other side.

We also, I think, hear a lot of joking. Like Lee Hays, we know–writers know–that humor is a way of coping with pain, that it can diffuse a battle and, sometimes, get a few more people to listen. We talk about how censorship will get an author more readers; that if a book is banned, its numbers will probably go up on Amazon.

Except, really, it’s just not all that funny.

Here are a few posts & articles that I think are important to read:

Guess what, guys? It hurts. It hurts the writers & it hurts the kids. How many decades later, Lee Hays was still angry and bitter and sad. Rightly so.

When I was in high school, a teacher got reprimanded for having us read a book, and told he couldn’t teach the book in class. I think it was Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War. I was furious. At least I thought I was. I didn’t realize how much angrier I could get until the School Board president (at our request? Another teacher’s request?) came to “explain” their choice. That was probably the first time I truly realized how absolutely head-against-brick infuriating it can be for a kid to come up against an adult who just refuses to see or say the truth, to admit what they have done, to accept responsiblity–in full–for the choice they have made.

It was “not censorship.”

Yeah, right.

What changed in my life that day? Did I narrow my choices of books? Duh. No. Did I decide that I was going to take every chance I got to read a book an adult told me I shouldn’t? Sure. Did I decide that no authority figure would ever get automatic respect from me? Of course.

So, all in all, not a bad thing.

Except for the anger. The brick-wall fury. The helplessness.

Those feelings should not line the path that a kid takes to a book.

Read banned books. Read unbanned books. Give them to your kids. Give them to your friends’ kids. Give them to your schools.

And how’s about we do it 52 weeks a year!

Blogging, The Writing Path, WIP, Workshop, Writing Conferences, Writing Goals, Writing Projects

How Many Balls Should You Juggle…and Which?

Posted on 26 Sep 200926 Sep 2009 by beckylevine

Last year, I guest-posted over at Shrinking Violet Promotions about the pluses of saying Yes. I believe firmly that it’s a much better word than No. Especially when you’re talking to yourself.

But how many yes‘s can you handle? As you move further along your writing path, opportunities are going to multiply. Here are just a few things you may want to jump into as you get deeper into your writing and your writing community:

Writing on multiple WIPs
Taking writing classes
Going to some writing conferences
Volunteering at a writing club or conference
Writing a blog
Getting out onto Facebook and/or Twitter
Contributing to a newsletter
JOIN A CRITIQUE GROUP 🙂

And there are 24 hours in a day?

How many times can you say yes without feeling like those balls you have in the air are transforming into chainsaws and unhappy cats? How do you pick which things to say yes to, without a crystal ball to tell you how it will all work out.

You listen to your gut and accept that Baby Steps can win at “Mother May I” just as well as Giant Steps.

If something sounds fun or you really think it’ll help your writing (craft or career), say yes. If an opportunity has a sour “taste” to it, think twice. Or thrice. Either way, though, if you decide to go for it, remember you can go slowly. You can start with one class, not three. You can pick a local, one-day conference, not a four-day event that requires two days on a plane and another for recovery. Ask your conference coordinators if they can use another person at the registration desk, the day of the conference, instead of offering to handle catering for the entire event.

If you inch forward, even several inches at once, you get a chance to try things out, to test your gut with the reality, not just the picture your nervous imagination is painting. You’ll see what you enjoy, what you’re good at, and what makes you feel like you’re moving forward…versus hitting a dead-end.

You’ll be doing more and you’ll be enjoying it.

What about you? What yes’s are you considering this fall?

Deadlines, Getting Organized, Page Proofs

Deadlines, Revisited

Posted on 23 Sep 2009 by beckylevine

Way back here, almost a year ago, when I was just getting started with The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide, I posted about how I seriously dislike deadlines.

Boy, that feels a long time ago.

Since, then I’ve met several deadlines, and all of them have felt pretty good. Probably because, as I wrote more of the book, as my critique group did their wonderful slicing and dicing, and as the book started taking it’s true, whole form, the nervousness I was feeling about it died down. Which is good.

I didn’t expect, though, to find myself actually enjoying a deadline.

This week, I’ve been working on page proofs. In the “old” days, this would have meant the publisher mailing me (as in stuff envelope, apply stamps, drop in mail slot) the physical proofs, that I would have read through with red pen in hand.

Nope. My editor emailed me a PDF of the pages, with instructions for basically typing of a list of things I find that may need to be fixed. Because I can be slightly anal, I set up a table for this–just one column for the page number and another for “Change this to this.” (All dependent on my editor’s blessing, of course!)

This is what I’m doing for the next few days. This is all I’m doing.

And, you know, it’s kind of relaxing.

There’s something peaceful, for a small chunk of time, about having one project–one project only–asking for my attention. I’m not working on anything else, because this deadline takes priority. I take my laptop over to the comfy couch, get my tea, put the Internet on Pandora (wondering WHY The Rolling Stones are showing up on my Van Morrison station), and I read. I read, then stop, make a note, and read some more.

Soothing.

And, okay, it doesn’t hurt that I”m feeling a huge sense of relief and delight that–yes, many drafts after that first deadline–I’m still loving this book.

How do you feel about deadlines? What’s your favorite way to dig into the work that has to be done?

Thankful Thursday

Thankful Thursday: Mary Travers (and Peter & Paul)

Posted on 17 Sep 2009 by beckylevine

When I was growing up, the music in our house was folk music. Pete Seeger, The Weavers, Joan Baez, Woody and Arlo Guthrie, The Kingston Trio.

Peter, Paul, & Mary.

Mary Travers died yesterday. Here’s her obit in the NY Times. And here’s what Peter & Noel Paul say about her on her website.

I love folk music. It wasn’t albums by The Who or The Beatles that I held in my lap as a teen, memorizing the lyrics printed on the back covers. It was the folk musicians, the words from songs that had been around a hundred years and the new lyrics they were writing for the causes close to their own hearts, in their own eras. I still go back to their songs for comfort, inspiration, and–honestly–some of the best music and harmony I’ve ever found.

I saw Arlo Guthrie in concert in the eighties. Saw Joan Baez in Santa Cruz just a couple of years ago. To my loss, I never got to hear Peter, Paul, and Mary in person.

Thank goodness for recordings–albums, tapes, CDs, mp3s. Youtube.

Part of what I listened to this music for– a big part–was the lyrics. The poetry. And here’s the thing about me, listening to and singing those words.

As a child, I was a worrier. (Okay, okay, STILL a worrier!) And the lyrics of folk music–well, a lot of them did not paint such a pretty, happy picture of the world. A lot of them were filled with anger and frustration about the things happening around us. I knew, even as a kid, that the anger was important and good and necessary.

And, yet, it worried me. So I would listen to those songs, over and over, with inspiration and motivation and a little, hot core of anxiety inside me.

Except when Mary, with Peter & Paul, sang.

I don’t know why the anxiety wasn’t there, from their music. They sang about problems that needed to be changed, they sang about things we should all be doing to fix those problems, and they sang loud and strong and often. And yet, somehow, for me–in their singing was hope. That the world was, if not great, okay and definitely salvageable. That we could fix things and that, maybe, I could actually be one of the strong ones to help out on that path. They made me feel part of something possible, not worry so much about whether I could be, for instance…a Woody Guthrie. Watch some of their videos–they are smiling. Not blindly or blandly, but with confidence and strength and hope. Somehow that hope came to me off their albums, too, and let me sing along at the top of my lungs without doubt or worry or fear.

This is what Mary Travers did for me. Not to mention standing up on stage, herself, SO strong, SO confident, SO powerful and so obviously a true, absolute peer and friend of the two men on either side of her.

One of my favorite songs of Mary Travers was one I didn’t discover until I was older–Poem for Erika/For Baby. Take a listen:

http://www.rhapsody.com/peter-paul-and-mary/peter-paul-mommy-too

Thank you, Mary.

I’ll keep singing.

Critique Groups, Critiquing, First Drafts, The Writing Path

Getting a 1st Draft Critiqued…Yes or No?

Posted on 14 Sep 2009 by beckylevine

And of course, my answer is…it depends.

PJ Hoover, author of The Emerald Tablet, had this to say about her first drafts. It sounded very familiar, and it got me thinking.

I’m working on the first draft for my WIP and know, very firmly, that no eyes but mine shall see the actual words. I’ve finally realized that I have so much to figure out & understand about this story, that the draft is truly exploratory only. I chose this path, also, on my last book–the middle-grade mystery. That was the first draft I wrote via Book in a Week, the system I heard about from April Kihlstrom, and I was able to dive right into the second draft, with a lot more structure and a more active hero, and pass those chapters onto my critique group. At this point on my writing path, I’m just more aware of how rough these early stages truly are, and I have more confidence in my ability to do some of my own work with this mud clay I’m trying to shape.

For years, though, in my earlier writing and critiquing days, I did submit first-draft chapters to my critique group. There are days when I really miss doing things that way. And I think, depending on the writer, there are definite pluses to this kind of sharing.

You are not writing in a vacuum.
When you are writing a first draft, it’s just you and the computer. While this can help you keep a flow going, it can also leave you with plenty of doubts and worries about the progress you’re making. Okay, the computer isn’t going to tell you that your plot line (what plot line?) is weak or that you’re wrong about how a circus tent smells. But neither is that computer going to reach out and give you a pat on the back, tell you that a character is getting interesting, or hand you some dark chocolate for getting all the way to Chapter 10. The support of a critique group can be just the encouragement a writer needs to…keep writing.
You have a “soft” deadline.
A meeting every two weeks can be a great motivator. Sure, if a group’s critique schedule is too strongly enforced, that schedule can translate into nothing but pressure, which–if you’re like me–is about the greatest shut-down device ever invented. In a good group, though, a meeting on the calendar can be a reminder that you’re in this group because you want to write. Because you want to get some pages out. Two chapters a month for a year adds up to 24 chapters. Sounds like a first draft to me.
You may get some fodder for that learning curve.
In a first draft, you think while you write. Well, there’s nothing to say that a few other people thinking about that writing has to be a bad thing. Yes, your critiquers must remember (and they will, because you’ll remind them!) that this is a FIRST draft. They need NOT to be marking commas or rewriting your description of the Cannes Film Festival that they just happened to visit last month. They can, however, talk to you about that hero you’re developing and make suggestions about his or her strengths and flaws. They can point out the places where you’ve written tension to make them crawl out of their skins and the places where…you haven’t. You can look at this comparison with pieces of your own work and start to grow a skill.

Obviously, when you’re writing and when you’re critiquing, you need to make the decision about what stage is right for you to share your work. You need to recognize whether a critique will frighten you off from your own story, stalling you out, or whether it will help you give weight and value to that story, providing a supportive audience that is not the black hole of your CPU. You need to be very careful about going back and revising too much from this early feedback, rather than using it to propel you forward.

However, I hear a lot of authors saying, however, never to show a first draft, never to get it critiqued.

And I say, well…never say “never.” Sometimes, it’s more than a little okay to say “yes.”

Uncategorized

Friday Five

Posted on 11 Sep 2009 by beckylevine

1. I proved to myself (again) today that if you ask me to talk about something I like, well, you’ll get me talking! I did my first teleseminar this morning, with Linda Joy Myers of the National Association of Memoir Writers. This had been scheduled for a while and I did my homework and thought of possible questions that might come up and thought of possible answers I might make. (Okay, I TYPED UP those possible answers.) And then, of course, what happened was that Linda Joy had wonderful questions of her own, and I didn’t look at my notes once, and I just talked and talked and hopefully kept it interesting. We discussed lots of general critique stuff and, I think, managed to also make it specific to the problems & choices around critiquing memoir. Hey, I had fun. Linda Joy will be sending me the audio at some point, which means–yes, another WordPress challenge for me–figuring out how to put a link up to the audio on my website. More fun. 🙂

2. Today is one of those weird weather days we get in California, where it’s overcast and looks like it would be cool outside, but is actually very still and warm and muggy. I’m not going to put the actual word here, because why tempt the fates, but it definitely feels like ________ weather. Californians will know what I’m talking about. Hopefully, we’ll just get a bit of noisy thunder and this, too, shall pass. Peacefully.

3. Husband and I recently transferred to a new bank, and thus I recently purchased a new version of Quicken. Remiss does not begin to describe my finance-tracking habits of the past few years. But no more! Software is loaded, I’ll be putting in the basic data tonight, and then I…WILL BE GOOD. But, you know, there’s just no creativity to paying bills.

4. Wrote a new scene this week, based on all the railway station/immigrant research I’ve been doing. LOTS of description. LOTS of observing. SOME thinking. ACTION…um? From my MC? Thank the muses for revision. And, you know, revision.

5. Today is September 11. My son was, I think, in kindergarten all those years ago, and we wondered whether we should send him to school, way up here in our little mountains. We did, and I didn’t realistically worry, but it felt as though he was much further away than down one road and up another. And it felt as thought New York and Pennsylvania and Washington, DC were, also, very far away and yet so, so close. Someone else, probably many someone elses, said it today, but it doesnt’ matter what side of the political fence I’m on, that date is never going to be just any other day, ever again.

First Drafts, Plot, Scenes

Writing Out of Order

Posted on 10 Sep 2009 by beckylevine

Yesterday, I typed up a quick “summary” of my story, for a critique partner who’s coming up today to do some talking & brainstorming. Summary is in quotes there, because, well…there are lots of gaps and “I don’t know yets” along the way.

But what I really noticed missing is any real sequence to the events.

It’s not that my MC isn’t making choices. Much. The thing is, she just isn’t making them very well yet, and she’s not being really good about making them based on what’s going on around her.

Silly girl.

What’s the big thing about a synopsis? Cause and effect. Yep. This happens, SO the MC takes this action, which makes this happen, which causes her to do this. Etc, etc, etc… Also the big thing about the whole story plot.

Not there yet.

In my mystery, much as I love my character’s, the story–even the early drafts–was very plot driven. And it was a plot I knew before I started writing, the story of a crime, a need to solve, and steps to find clues, check out suspects, and–along the way–stay out of trouble with mom and dad. When I ended a scene, I could say, “Okay, what would he do NOW? Where does he need to go? Who does he need to talk to?” In this WIP, while I know my hero’s need, and I know the big choices she’ll face and make along the way, those questions aren’t quite working yet.

I’ve got a picture in my mind of a later draft, where I do use scene cards. I’ll write the main goal and action of each scene on a card, then think and sort and organize into a nice, tight path with just the right balance of action and character growth. It’ll look something like the perfect hand of gin rummy. Or poker.

Not so much like a game of 52-pickup. 🙂

What about you? How do you play with sequence? How much do you worry about getting it right in early drafts? Or do you step back later, work your magic, and get it all to fly into place?

Marketing, Promotion, The Writing Path

If it’s September, it Must be M…m…marketing?!

Posted on 8 Sep 20098 Sep 2009 by beckylevine

Well, not yet. For pete’s sake, people, the book doesn’t come out until January. But I’ve read enough about book promotion to know that you don’t wait for the book release to get started. And the one date that has been floating in my head for a while is October—the month I’m supposed to talk with the manager at Books Inc in Palo Alto about my launch party. He sends a newsletter out in November, so he/I/we want it on the calendar by then.

And October isn’t that far away.

I’m not diving in deep yet. But I do want to at least start work on a list of to-dos and check that list for my Comfort Level Inventory, as the brilliant ladies at Shrinking Violet Promotions call it. Because we can’t do everything we want, or even everything we think we’re supposed to. And I want to have as much fun as I can with this part of the writing path, not spend all my energy on all the “shoulds” so very accessible to all us worriers.

So this week I start on the list. I’m going through ALL the blog post headers over at SVP, browsing for the helpful tips I’ve read before. And I’m going back to BubbleStampede, too, for all the great ideas Laura and Fiona put up in their year of blogging. You remember, the ones Laura talked about in her interview.

There are some things that I pretty much know won’t show up on the list right away. Like a trailer. I had some ideas, and I may get to them further into 2010, but I know that the visual is not my strength and there are a whole lot of twists and turns down that path that will take some serious quiet time for me to figure out. (I can hear you all now, Oh, come on, Becky, you can TOTALLY do a trailer. And I say back to you, Maybe. We’ll see. Now go away.) Some promotion I’ll be doing through Writer’s Digest, and I think it’s better not to overlap much on that stuff.

But things like:

Local launch party
Blog interviews
Review copies
Bookmarks (Are these still a good giveaway, with all the e-readers out there? I mean, think about that.)
Updating my profiles on different sites
Stockpiling chocolate

Yes, those will all be on the list. And more. Hopefully, you guys will find this part of the journey interesting, because I’m pretty sure I’ll be blogging about it now and again. And again. As the panic rises.

It’s sure to be quite a ride. 🙂

Character, First Drafts, Heroes

Keeping My Hero’s Story HER Story

Posted on 5 Sep 2009 by beckylevine

So I’ve been doing a lot of research this week. Finding out more about the world my MC lives in–the places she’ll go and the things, and people, that she’ll see. It’s helping, I think, as I hone in on problems she’ll face and scenes she’ll act out & through.

It does, however, keep bringing up the biggest challenge I think I face with this book–and that is how to keep my MC’s story at the fore, with the history playing an important background to her choices and paths. This is very important to me, because one of the frustrating things to me about some historical fiction is when the hero’s story is secondary, or worse, lost.

What’s happening, at least at this point in the draft, is that my MC is taking the first steps that will, I think, turn her into a true hero—the rescuing kind, not just the protagonist kind. She is going to have to make some big choices for herself, but along the way, she’s going to make some big choices for others. Which is good. She needs to do that. But it can’t be ALL for everybody else. The choices she does make for her own path have to, in the most important way, be for HER–her growth, her change, her life. Otherwise, I don’t see it as her story.

So what I’m trying to keep in mind is:

What mistakes/negative choices my MC could make that risk hurting/do hurt those others around her
What selfish choices my hero can make for herself, before the big choice and–maybe–mixed in with that big choice
How to show those choices–as truly wrong, bad–not just accidental or innocent
How to have her recovery from those bad choices not be simple or perfect or completely redeeming. How to have that recovery be part of the true, flawed person she has to be

I swear, at this point, my MC goes back and forth between being just a selfish teenager and being too good to be true. First draft, I keep telling myself. First draft.

History, Research

Five Historic Tidbits on a Friday

Posted on 5 Sep 2009 by beckylevine

Been deep in lovely research all week. Here are a few things I’ve learned about being an immigrant on your way to Chicago in the early twentieth century

You might not make it. The Immigrants’ Protective League kept stats on how many girls were supposedly put on a train to Chicago, from their port of entry, and didn’t get there. Some they found. Some they didn’t.
The address you had for your family might not be real, might be wrong, or might have had a change of residents three times over since you got it.
You were very likely to have lost track of your luggage, including the feather bed you’d brought with you.
You were put on a train to be “fair” to the railways, even if it meant a few extra days of travel. Say there were 10 railways with trains leaving your port of entry and going to Chicago, with various and sundry stops along the way. Say there were 500 immigrants that day on their ways to Chicago. 50 immigrants went on each train, even if it meant heading down to Norfolk, Virginia, then back up to Chicago. If you didn’t bring enough food for the extra legs of the journey, oh, well.
If you were one of the lucky ones, someone from the Immigrant Protective League was at the station, or across the street in their offices, to greet you in your own language and help you find your way through the maze of confusion to your new home. With a bed to stay in for a few days, if needed, while they tracked down that address or that family. And found you a job.

Because, at that point, the government sure wasn’t going to help you.