Some of you have expressed interest in my
fiction writing, but I really have never completed a single piece of …
anything. I don’t even like reading fiction. All those unnecessary adjectives
and long descriptions about people’s movements. I’m a plot and dialogue girl. Just
say it and move on. But sometimes it’s fun to just write from the imagination.
Since my retirement from full-time
journalism, I’ve even gone to two writing workshops held at the library on
fiction writing. I enjoyed them because they were sort of a pep talk for closeted
writers, and I guess I’m a closeted fiction writer. Or maybe even a step back from
that. I’m like those people who stand around watching a game of pool and keep
telling the players how they should have hit it, but never pick up the cue
themselves. OK, but hopefully I’m not that annoying.
I also enjoyed these talks because I like
being around other writers. There’s this undercurrent of wanting to create
something, to put your thoughts on paper and have other people agree and
approve, but then never really living up to your own standards or expectations.
With that in mind, I can’t imagine being a full-time fiction writer. Even when
I was a full-time journalist, I felt like that was just half of my life. If writing
was my full life, I think it would be a depressing life. Unless I was one of
those super wealthy full-time writers who lives at a beach house and writes in
front of a window facing the ocean while drinking a gin and tonic or some other
delicious beverage while writing one hour per day. That, I think I could get
into.
Despite my inability to really flesh out a
whole story, there’s one area of fiction that I’m still drawn to—children’s
books. And I don’t mean pre-teen melodramas or even anything that comes in a
paperback, I’m talking about board books. For those who don’t know what I’m
talking about, board books are printed on cardboard so they’re easy to flip
pages and you can’t rip them out or bite off part of a page or smear the ink by
drooling on them. Rye still reads board books almost exclusively, because he
gets frustrated with paper pages, but so many board books are terrible. We have
about a dozen good ones that we own, but when I try to get more out of the
library, I usually only find one good one per week. And almost none of them are
good enough to want to buy and expand our collection.
Which leads me to believe that it must be
pretty darn easy to get published in this field. Not that getting published is
something I’m really shooting for; I almost see this as an act of public
service, improving the reading options for toddlers (and their parents) everywhere.
I’m currently reading a biography of my
favorite children’s author, Margaret Wise Brown, called “Awakened by the Moon.”
If that name doesn’t sound familiar, you would recognize it immediately once you
saw the cover of this book, because it has part of the picture of the “great
green room” from her most famous book, “Goodnight Moon.” She actually wrote
over 100 books, 40 of which are still in publication. I’m only familiar with a
half dozen of them, but they all have this alluring, poetic quality to them.
Others you might be aware of are “The Runaway Bunny,” “The Little Fur Family,” “The
Big Red Barn,” and one that my mom gave us when Rye was born because my dad was
a mailman, “The Seven Little Postmen.”
So far I’m still in the childhood part of
the biography, but supposedly she drew a lot of her stories and scenes from her
early memories, which is perhaps why they all have a sort of dream-like quality
to them. I might try to track more of them down, because I have a habit of unconsciously
altering my writing style to whoever I’m reading, and if I could be the next
Margaret Wise Brown, that would be amazing. Except for the part about how she
died at 42.
When I saw that in the introduction, I was
freaked out that she had committed suicide or had a drug overdose or something,
but rest assured, she died of a blood clot after a routine operation. So these ethereal
stories, which sort of have a non-sad melancholy to them (if that makes any
sense), were not the work of someone who took her own life. I don’t think I’d
want Rye reading them so much if that was the case.
So in honor of Margaret Wise Brown, here
is my first finished attempt at children’s fiction/board book writing. This is
a first draft, mind you, and I’m no artist so the publisher would have to hire
an illustrator, but I think I’ve given them plenty to work with.
“The House on the Hill”
Inside the front door, there was a blue
mat where the children left their shoes. Sometimes the cat would lay on the rug
and smell its fibers, snooping out what adventures her family had been on while
she had stayed home curled up on the bed.
In the living room, there was a big
fireplace, where the father would stack loads of wood to keep the house warm
day and night. The fire glowed orange and made the house smell like the
campsite where the family would stay in the forest for a week each summer.
The dog liked to lay by the fire, but the
dog could also be found in the dining room, under the walnut table, waiting for
the youngest child to slip him her beef when it was too chewy. The girl had to
keep a napkin in her lap so she could wipe the dog’s saliva off her fingers
before reaching back up to her plate.
In the kitchen, the cupboards were filled
with sacks of flour and sugar and chocolate chips, and every Sunday, the mother
would bake delicious cookies for all of the children.
Upstairs, there were four bedrooms, each
with one bed. Mother and father had the biggest bed, which sat very high,
stacked with pillows in a mix of yellow, blue and gray.
In the oldest boy’s room, there was a
picture of an eagle on the wall that he had painted in school. The eagle looked
very powerful, and it scared the younger brother from coming into his room.
The younger boy’s room had orange walls
and a striped rug. The younger boy liked to pretend the stripes were roads and
sidewalks and he drove his cars in between the lines.
And the girl’s room was filled with
purple. Purple walls, purple blankets, purple curtains, and even a purple
elephant where she stored her toys. The cat found this room the most favorable,
and thought the purple was purr-fect.
The house on the hill was very high, and
from the highest window in the attic, the children could see all the way to the
next town. Sometimes they would see their friends playing in their yards down
the street and they would try to yell to them and wave, but they were too high
up to be heard.
It was a good house, nice and warm and
filled with laughter and love. Whenever the children stayed at a friend’s house
for too long, they would start to miss their home and their family. Sometimes
the girl would call her mother and ask her if she could be picked up early
because she was so homesick.
At night, the moon shined through their
windows, and the stars felt closer because they were so high on the hill.
In the summer, they would look out the
attic window and watch for a shooting star before they would go to bed. They
always saw one. And then it was time to go to sleep and dream about their house
on the hill.
The End
And that’s just my first idea, which I thought
up and wrote in 15 minutes. You might not be impressed, but I think it’s better
than at least 80 percent of the board books at the library. Do any of you
readers want to be my illustrator? I think I’ve got something here.
This must get published! I've read a lot of children's books and for the most part, they are terrible. This is great and it doesn't even have pictures yet. I'm lining up illustrators!
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