A little over a year ago when my then three-year-old granddaughter painted a series of striking freeform pictures. I framed three of them for the mantel. Her uncle Scott, father of two little girls himself, was so taken with them that he asked her to paint one for him.
He was too late. his little niece fell under the guidance of a preschool teacher who taught her to draw outlines, then carefully color inside the lines. Unhappily, her pictures are now so similar to those everyone else in the class creates it’s lucky they put their names on the back.
This morning, I looked at those early, joyful paintings on my mantel, enjoying surprising matches of colors and shapes. They somehow draw the eye again and again to see something new each time. This dark area suggests a cliff. That splash of white and blue might be crashing surf. Or they might be something else entirely.
I’m sorry my little granddaughter lost that vibrant free expression in her paintings. And I wonder about myself and fellow writers. When we attend conferences, seminars and talks, when we study articles and books on writing, are we teaching ourselves to write within the lines?
The alpha hero is in…or out. Kickass heroines or forget it. Sex, sex, and more of it. Or was that yesterday?
We all protest in a fury (and rightly so) the merest suggestion that women’s fiction fits any kind of formula. Is there a more objectionable word in our writer’s lexicon? A speaker can make no greater mistake than to tell a group of published writers (as happened to everyone’s astonishment at the last Novelist’s Inc. conference) that the most important thing to do is to “write the best book you can.”
As if we weren’t knocking ourselves out doing exactly that.
Genre books are wonderful, with imaginative characters, humor, sorrow, all the emotions of the human race. I love them. There is no formula, but there are editorial and marketing preferences and we not only listen to them, we seek them out, hoping to see the next trend coming before it’s overloaded and sinks.
This may not be conscious, but when we see paranormal (for example) beginning to fly, how can we help but wonder if we shouldn’t be following that bright trail?
Maybe it’s because I’m currently writing children’s books that I’m becoming conscious again of do’s and don’t and wondering if we limit ourselves by following them.
I’d head that rhymed picture books were becoming frowned on by publishers, but hadn’t yet seen articles flatly warning against them when I wrote Bears on Chairs. I’m looking for a new agent and considered one my editor recommended until I read an interview where the woman flatly stated, “No rhymes and no anthropomorphic animals.”
My rhymed book with anthropomorphic teddy bears will be published next year by Candlewick Press. When I visited the publishing house in Boston in March, I saw a lot of smiles when the book was mentioned. Of course, that may be due to the artist’s “unbearably cute” (as my editor put it) illustrations, not the fact that the book rhymes. Or features anthropomorphic animals.
There are a lot of rules in writing for children, especially younger ones. Don’t overcomplicate. Limit the number of characters. Remember, children prefer shorter lengths.
It seems we no longer commit such rules to memory than the Harry Potter series comes along and every child we know is happily reading hundreds of pages. With a complicated story. And lots of characters. And eventually, a main character gets killed! In Philip Pullman’s earlier trilogy, His Dark Materials, made into the movie, the Golden Compass, a major child character is killed.
Where is the answer? Should we stop reading and listening to suggestions on how to make our work captivate today’s readers and instead write outside the lines, letting the colors and shapes and impressions flow? If we do, will our work be displayed on the mantel, rather than joining similar creations slipped between the covers of grandma’s scrapbook?
I’m just wondering.
