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Writing Fiction for Young People
By Kerry Madden
Back when I was a freshman at UT and everything ran on the quarter system, I made an A in my 1010 English composition class with a teacher who got my writing and even encouraged me to pursue writing professionally. When she had to fail me on one paper for my consistently moronic and incorrect use of the semicolon, she wrote, THIS HURTS ME MORE THAN IT HURTS YOU. The next quarter, my 1020 English composition class was a different story. This particular teacher didn’t like my style or story analyses. Each paper was returned marked with a bright red C. I was ashamed and embarrassed every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon that icy winter in the Humanities Building. How could one teacher love my work but another be so callously indifferent to my prose? It is a lesson that I carry to this day as a published writer with a sea of anonymous “Dear Author” rejection letters stuffed in a drawer.
What can I tell you about writing for children or writing at all for that matter? Develop a thick skin? Stick to a disciplined writing schedule? Learn to think like a kid? I believe Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak) and Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write) say it best. I heard Anderson speak at an SCWBI (Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) conference and she had this great advice for people who want to write children’s literature:
1. Find the stories hiding in your heart and write them down.
2. Polish your stories with the tools of our craft.
3. Submit your work intelligently and professionally.
4. Lather.
5. Rinse.
6. Repeat.
Brenda Ueland published If You Want to Write in 1937, and it is still in print today. Carl Sandburg recommended it as one of the best books he’d ever read about creative writing. Euland writes that when she was drinking tons of coffee and smoking packs of cigarettes, she was writing a tremendous amount, but none of it was very good. She encourages writers to slow down, observe, and take long, “idle” walks so that ideas for stories can begin to brew.
Stories began to brew for me with an article I wrote for the Daily Beacon during my sophomore year. I had ulterior motives when I pitched this particular story about students who studied abroad. I was longing to see more than Clement Hall and all its Big Orange surroundings, so after the interview with Dr. John Pearson at the international department, I asked him, “How can I go too?” After a lengthy application process and interview, I was selected to attend Manchester University.
That year in England changed my life. I dropped my journalism cold, because the British students told me it was a “grotty trade-school occupation,” and so I began the elevated study of “playwriting” at Manchester’s drama department. I also became a listener in England and studied the Manchester accent and practiced it whenever I could. For fashion, I exchanged my add-a-bead necklace and turtlenecks for petticoats and bloomers and actually began to pass for British. I hung out with drama students who took it upon themselves to teach me how to rid myself of all things American. It was like My Fair Lady with a Knoxville–-Manchester theme. I never wanted the year to end, because for the first time in my life, I’d met people who’d never heard of UT football and, as scandalous as this sounds, didn’t care. (My father coached UT football, so I’d spent many years with it.)
But after my year in England and hitchhiking all of Ireland over Christmas, I had to come home to Tennessee to graduate. So I made up my mind to treat Tennessee like it was another exchange year, and I threw myself into the theater and English departments. I also fell in love with Southern writers, and I wound up staying in Knoxville to study under Dr. Faye Julian [now acting dean of Communication and Information] and do an M.F.A. in playwriting. My last acting role in a professional production was playing Great-Great-Grandmaw in All the Way Home at the Bijou Theatre in Knoxville. I loved living in Fort Sanders and imagined the ghosts of the Agee family still in the neighborhood. A great makeup artist used McDonald’s napkins and latex to make me look 103 years old at the age of 23.
When I finished my M.F.A., I still had no clue what to do besides write and see the world, but how? Dr. Julian sent me away with a kind of blessing on graduation day when she whispered in my ear, “You’re going to do us proud.”
I went back to the international department with my boyfriend, Kiffen, and we inquired about jobs overseas. There were two English teaching positions available at Ningbo University in China, but the Chinese would not accept an unmarried couple. This next part is going to sound very fast, but I was in a Flannery O’Connor frame of mind, so after much discussion, we eloped to the courthouse and returned to the international department. Legal. We got jobs at Ningbo University, where 18 years ago we spent our first year of marriage teaching English.
After China we decided to live in Los Angeles, where I would have a chance to make a living as a writer, and Kiffen would have a chance to make a living as an actor. He gave up acting when our first child (Flannery) was born to pursue teaching. And to this day, I have never made a living as a TV or film writer other than during a stint writing shadow episodes for a now-defunct soap called Port Charles. My first novel, Offsides, about growing up in the world of football, was published by William Morrow, praised by the New York Public Library, and optioned again and again by Hollywood, but the project lingered in development and the book went out of print. It was thrilling to go to meetings with Diane Keaton and hear the words, “It’s The Great Santini meets The Wonder Years, only from a girl’s POV.” I liked imagining my novel as a film, then as an hour television drama, then as a half-hour comedy, and then as a single-camera dramady (sad but true) before the phone calls stopped altogether. My second book, Writing Smarts, was published by American Girl Library, and it’s a book that encourages kids to write their own stories.
After Offsides, I wrote a few bad novels that I wanted to sell fast (they did not sell at all), and I did a lot of journalism and some ghostwriting. It was ultimately soul-killing, and I knew that if I did not write Gentle’s Holler, a children’s novel set in the Smoky Mountains, I would go out of my mind. Our own kids, Flannery, Lucy, and Norah, were tough editors and inspirations for the stories in the book, as was Kiffen, who grew up one of 13 children. In writing Gentle’s Holler, I’ve returned to the place I love the most—the Smokies.
And I think that’s what we all have to do as writers—go to the places and people that matter the most and capture those people and places with careful attention to detail and much love and respect for those characters and their stories. Most of all, try not to take the rejection personally (and this is excruciatingly hard to do), but what’s even more important, do not take no for an answer. My 1010 English composition teacher said yes, but my 1020 teacher said no. I have had many people say no since then—crushing rejections—but what is the alternative? To quit? Not a chance.
Gentle’s Holler, $15.99, hardback. Order at Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.
Advice from the Pros
If you want to write children’s books, Kerry Madden suggests some resources:
• www.scbwi.org
• www.authorsguild.org
• www.youngpens.org
• If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland
• The Eye of the Story by Eudora Welty
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
• The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner
• Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
• Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
• The Synonym Finder by Rodale
• Immediate Fiction by Jerry Cleaver
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