Weaver Birds Aren't My Area of Expertise

Just a bit of writing I did for fun. I feel like I hit my best stride when writing fiction for children, even though I've never pursued that avenue farther than "just for fun." I've been pecking away at this the past few days as the mood strikes me and I figured I would share it with you to help you, in turn, pass the time. Happy Monday, darlings!

An Untitled Story (With Birds)

by Rachel Heffington

“The world, my dear, is very full of things you shouldn't touch.” Miss Crust's voice curled back on itself, purring. She pulled her crotchety old fingers through Maribelle's hair.

“Ow!” Maribelle yowled. She didn't think Miss Crust pulled her hair on purpose, but she certainly didn't not pull it on purpose. That was the point on which Maribelle took issue with her nurse.

“Is it my fault if you got half a jar of molasses stuck in it? Your hair's more tangled than a weaver-bird's nest.”

Maribelle wouldn't know. Weaver birds weren't her area of expertise, though they were her father's and Miss Crust's. Her father and Miss Crust were very well-known ornithologists – bird people. They were the sort of important people other important people came to if they had questions about puffin migration (“Do puffins migrate?”) or parrot-speech (“Just how many words can the average parrot learn in its lifetime?”) or the habits of displaced bluebirds. How Miss Crust went from studying birds to untangling Maribelle's hair, Maribelle didn't know. She wasn't quite sure where her father had picked up Miss Crust. Miss Crust just had always been. Maribelle couldn't remember a time when Miss Crust hadn't been part of life at 34 Bleaking Street. In her earliest memories there was sunlight, plenty of dust-motes swirling glitter-like through the beams, and Miss Crust. Funny enough, there was never a memory of a mother. Just Miss Crust, Assisting. She was very good at Assistance – Assisting Father with bird-work and Maribelle with tangled hair and grammar-work and stains on the fronts of her dresses. Sometimes Maribelle thought she might like to do with a bit less Assistance. Maybe only on Tuesdays, because Tuesdays generally weren't the best day of the week. Miss Crust could be on-call the rest of the time and only Assist when Maribelle really wanted her.

“What happened to my mother?” Maribelle asked suddenly. Miss Crust's finger twitched through Maribelle's hair, not in a surprised way but in a “Dear heavens, this again?” way.

“Died,” Miss Crust answered.

“From what?” Of course she knew – galloping consumption – but it was needful to hear it again, just to remind her that there had been a mother once upon a time. It bothered Maribelle sometimes, how often she nearly forgot most kids had two parents.

Here it came -

“Galloping consumption,” Miss Crust said.

There it was.

“Now you,” she pulled Maribelle upright off the stool and smacked her bottom, “get downstairs. Your father wants to speak with you before he leaves.”

Glad to be free of the dreadful hairbrush, Maribelle skibbled out the nursery door and wandered down their great big staircase, pausing on her favorite steps as she went. Her favorite steps were as follows:

twentieth,

sixteenth,

eighth.

The reasons why were these:

The twentieth was the step at the landing with a peculiar, round window looking out onto a bit of scrappy yard and a trashcan that always had a cat of some color turned upside down, fishing for something inside it.

The sixteenth step was exactly halfway which, as anyone can tell you, is a special place.

And the eighth step was the step whereupon Maribelle's front teeth had been knocked out when she tripped on it two years ago. There had been no other six year old girls missing both their front teeth that year so though it had given her a bit of lisp, Maribelle thought the distinction quite worth the trouble of pronouncing “stork,” “sausage,” and other like words.

Maribelle tromped into Father's study without knocking. She never knocked, on principle. People seemed to stop doing interesting things when you knocked first. It was much more gratifying to throw open a door and see someone look like they'd seen a ghost. Maybe you'd see where they hid those scrumptious chocolates, or maybe you'd hear things they wouldn't otherwise have told a little girl. And Maribelle did very much like to know. Knowing was probably the thing she liked most in the world, besides maybe chocolate ice cream and splashing in puddles barefoot when she ought to have worn boots.

Father sat at his desk, balding head between his bird-claw hands. He looked up as she came in. Pale gray daylight flashed at her off the little round lenses of his glasses.

“Hi,” Maribelle offered.

“Oh. Hello, Maribelle.”

“Miss Crust said you wanted me?”

Father perked up a little and ran his fingers through his hair. Two grayish-black puffs of it stuck out on either side of his head and made him look like a ruffled owl. The top of his head was utterly bald. “Just so, my dearling.”

When he put out his hand, she walked to him and settled her little palm in his bigger one. Hot. Dry. Shaky. That was Father's hand. Not liking to keep hers there very long, Maribelle gave Father a quick smile and put her hand in her pocket where he wouldn't think to ask for it again.

“Been studyin' birds?” she inquired.

“Oh, hrm. Birds, birds. Is there anything like birds in the world?” Father's lenses flashed again and his smile was a little less hampered than usual. He did so like birds.

Maribelle wanted to help him in any way she could to not seem so picked-over and trembly. “Well, Miss Crust says there was a sort of dinosaur way back in the dinosaur-days that flew like a bird.” It mightn't help much but Father might find it interesting, and that would at least distract him from whatever it was he worried over.

“Oh, ha!” Father chortled. “Ha! Ha!”

Like a jay, Maribelle thought. Crisp and short and unaccustomed. She liked to think of Father as all sorts of birds. He laughed like a jay and looked like an owl. He walked like a heron and spoke like a wren in terse, tentative chirps. She liked to watch him and he liked to watch birds. It helped to pass the time in the few months of the year when they weren't bopping around the Congo or Peru or someplace.

Positive Jealousy: When Comparison Helps

You've heard it said that comparison is the thief of joy. In many ways, I feel that I could look in the corners of the Antipodes and not find a truer saying. When I give in to comparing my life to other peoples' lives, my body type to that of other women, my income to others' income, my relationship status to someone else's, my indie-publishing to that blogging-friend's big-publisher book contract, the joy ebbs like a low-tide. But there is one way in which comparison has served as a catalyst for inspiration. See, the amusing burden of being a reader and a writer is this: one spends half one's time thinking:

"Golly, what a phrase. Wish I'd thought of it first."

My most common thought while reading is not, "Oh, what a lovely book! I'd like to read more like it." Rather, it's much more of a, "What a killing plot. I'd like to write something like this in my genre before anyone else does." I am only halfway in jest. My best ideas are always already in the works. Isn't that terrible? Two days before hearing about Liam Nisson's film, Non-Stop, I said to a friend while crossing a downtown city street:

"You know what'd make a great mystery? A murderer committing his crimes on a plane."

Well thank you, Hollywood, for stealing my thunder. So although I still appreciate a good book for a good book's sake, I try to harness that honest enjoyment and make it work for me. Wild horses may not be able to drag secrets, but they can certainly drag me a few miles before giving it up as a bad job. I have learned to use this "positive jealousy" to understand more about a given genre. I keep a list when reading mystery novels to note what tactics this author seems to be using to reveal clues, corral suspects, and work out the denouement. By this, I hope to learn how to write a better mystery novel.
Obviously I don't intend to copy any author wholesale but I see nothing wrong in learning where their road went right and benefitting from the general trailblazing spirit. What a stupid lot the pioneers would have been if they insisted on cutting their own Oregon Trail. Rather, the whole group worked off of their own and others' prior experiences, wisdom, and knowledge of the way. The ruts of their wagon-wheels can still be seen in some parts of the prairies today. That's called teamwork. Avail yourself of it.

Perhaps the best moments of this useful jealousy come to me when I am standing in the children's section of Barnes & Noble or other bookstores like it. Try as I might to be a grown-up, there is something about children's books that I find utterly irresistible. I never walk down the contemporary fiction aisle. I skip science fiction entirely. Romance? I wouldn't know where to begin with all the covers that look identical and promise hunky heroes and willowy heroines who, no matter the direness of their circumstances, always inherit a dukedom and the arrogant duke to go along with it. Of course the heiress ditches the duke in favor of a humble peasant who, after the suitably humble wedding, realizes he is a marquis in real life. Bad luck, Duke-y darling. Anyway. Groping my way to the children's section via P.G. Wodehouse, Georgette Heyer, and the mysteries, I stand strangely dry-mouthed in the presence of my childhood incarnate. The feeling that my creative and artistic breakthrough which, like the Fountain of Youth or Eldorado, must be just around the next cape or continent or end-cap, is nearly palpable. Have you never felt it? It thrums around me...
The sense that I could write The Book With No Pictures if BJ Novak hadn't done it first.
That Harv Tullet simply beat me to the fingerpaints with his Press Here.
That Lemony Snicket's wit is only my own, rather scalded by life and choosing to laugh through the pain.
That A.A. Milne is my kinsman.
That Newberry Honor Medals are handed out like gold stars for participation.
Of course I soon realize that success is not quite as even-handed as indie publishing would have me believe. The Book With No Pictures is brilliant because BJ Novak did the nearly-impossible and made accessible to millions something so obvious none of us could see it. A way to teach children to adore the written word for mental pictures it can conjure: show them a good time with not a single picture by putting the adult on display and pointing out the fact for the kid's edification: "You just had a blast without asking once to see the pictures. Get it now?"
Making an obvious abstract tangible for the laymen and children among us is a terrific and talented effort. I applaud Novak and Tullet and Mo Willems and so many other authors of the children's books coming out today for their creativity in story-telling, art, and an understanding of children. Their work reminds me that there are authors as talented and inspiring as Margaret Wise Brown, or Margaret and H.A. Rey, or Ludwig Bemelmens, or Kay Thompson in the present day. And more to come. We are still going strong, we race of authors. Not all of us will gain a place in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of children...not all of us will so impact someone's childhood that they stand in that section Barnes & Noble reliving their childhood through the dear book-faces on the shelf. But some of us will. Some of us will....and I could be one of those.
That is why I say comparison is not always the thief of joy. I am given a gift when jealous inspiration thinks, "You know, if I just keep working, I can do that too." Harness it. Follow it. Let it drag you across genres and art mediums and indie publishing and query letters and rejections and contract offers. Let it have you. Experiment. Enter contests you'll never win. Write in a tone that is unlike anything you've used before. Choose a chancey subject and write it well. Or try. Fail and try again. And again. You never know when you'll find that Eldorado. The brain has so many, many trails to blaze.

So here's to standing gape-mouthed in book stores. Here's to relentlessly pursuing creativity. Here's to blazing the trails together. And here's to applauding those who have written the literature that has affected our lives from the moment we realized what stories were. May we all try our hardest to be like them and add to the beauty of literature.

they know not for what they listen

"It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this earth; and many of the children of the Iluvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen." -J.R.R. Tolkien

It can be hard to write emotions in any sort of fiction. Emotion is so colorful and yet unseen. So gossamer-threaded and yet shadowed. But it is seldom harder to write than in children's fiction. Because, let's be frank: children can't put words to their grief or anger. They only know that it hurts and it aches and tears momentarily cool the burning passion raging in their breast. But often children find expression for their emotions by other means, and it is up to the writer of children's fiction to familiarize themselves with the ways a child may view the world, and to write their emotional scenes in this way so that the children reading the novel may identify with the characters.
Take Nicodemus Murdoch, nine years old, and hero of Scuppernong Days. His mother died of the fever, and his father at sea. How does he process it all?
First in memories...

But now that he had arrived at the real site of it all, he felt very much ten years old. Never had the tall-ships seemed so massive—hull and masts and yardarms penciled insidious black against the grey morning fog. When Nick had visited the docks as a younger lad he’d felt king of all Salem, seated as he was on Father’s shoulder. The sailors had looked up at him then, their jovial, sun-crisped faces tilted at Father—six feet tall—with jolly recognition.
“What say you to a pint of rum, Sam?” they might ask. Or, if the day were fine: “How ‘bouts we row out to the harbor and see what the India Queen brung in?” And Father would laugh down his briny, brawny laugh and shake his head. “I’m spending the day with my first mate.” First Mate. That’s what Nick had been to Father in those happier times before.

....then in association.

It must be a very great and powerful God who had made the oceans. Nick wondered what language they spoke—what words the Lord had used to tell them this far they could come, but no farther, and here their proud waves must stop. It was a great thought—so great it made Nick feel too small and insignificant, so that he had to whistle his jaunty tune again to remember himself by. Still the sea kissed green against the dark bulwarks and Nick could see it down the cracks in the dock from his vantage of the coil of rope. That same water that slapped quietly against the piling might have come from China. It might have come from China or beyond, perhaps to a place yet uncharted. It might have come from father, from the place it had burbled around his head and shoulders and finally swallowed him up.
Then Nick knew why he had never taken Imperia to the harbor, and why even now he drew his feet closer to him, high up on the coil of cordage far as he could from any latent spray of the brine.

Too difficult for adults.

*This is why I write children's fiction*:

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. If the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, you write it for children." -Madeleine L'Engle

Writing Children: The To-Do's, and Not To-Do's. :)

“I don’t want to write for adults. I want to write for readers who can perform miracles. Only children perform miracles when they read.”

—Astrid Lindgren

I do not feel equipped to speak with authority on many angles of writing--I am not a published author, I make a hash of comma usage, I tend to use unpopular POV's (such as narrative), and my plot lines are not exactly Dickensian in intricacy. However of all the criticisms I got in the critique group that I was a part of (and that shaped me immensely) there was one consistent compliment. 

Apparently, I can write children well. Nearly all the members of the group commented on how realistic the children were in their personalities, their relationships, etc. I'm not saying that to boast, only to let you know why I'm hashing this topic out. 

I suppose the thing is, I am immersed in Children-Culture. With seven younger siblings (and eight cousins across the field) I have a 15-person study-group below my nose at all times. Okay. Let's face it. In my lap at all times. It was not three days ago that my five-month old Levi punched a random series of keys while I was writing and botched up the formatting of my entire manuscript. :D (thankfully I was able to fix it)

Being that I am so constantly involved in child-culture, it's a good thing some of that has translated into my writing. I'd be worried otherwise, for isn't it a maxim of all writing that your life flavors the way you write? If it isn't, it ought to be. That being said, I thought I'd give you a few tips on how to write fully-rounded, fully-fleshed children characters:

Point One: Children are not that simple:

 “You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it’s going to be too difficult for grownups, you write it for children.”

—Madeleine L’Engle

Children have far more to them than meets the eye. They are people, after all, with hopes, dreams, aspirations...and they have more soul than we often realize. My little sister Gracie sat, dejected, at our dining room table this afternoon, having discovered a chicken that had succumbed to a cruelly enforced pecking-order, and died.

"He suffered, Rachie!" she cried, and the tears welled up in her eyes. "Can we pray for him?" (In fact, on a side-note, she keeps a running list of deceased pets that she prays for routinely. :P)

You cannot write a child-character as a named clown that walks around providing comic relief with his lisp and hope to captivate your audience. Especially if you write for children. They know their own kind, and they are quick to detect flaws in your characterization of one of them. So how do you write a child? Provide plenty of soul and depth. Children have a thought-process, deep emotions, and everything that makes an adult-character tick, only it is precious and unspoilt. Watch children and see how they interact with one another. I promise, you'll learn much from them.

“Grown-up people find it difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof. But children will believe almost anything, and grown-ups know this. That is why they tell you that the earth is round like an orange, when you can see perfectly well that it is flat and lumpy; and why they say that the earth goes round the sun, when you can see for yourself any day that the sun gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night like a good sun as it is, and the earth knows its place, and lies as still as a mouse. Yet I daresay you believe all that about the earth and the sun, and if so you will find it quite easy to believe that before Anthea and Cyril and the others had been a week in the country they had found a fairy.”  ~Edith Nesbit

Point Two: Get out of the cliche-box:

Not every child has a lisp. Not every child drops "r"s. Not that you can't use those characteristics, but your child must have more to him than a clumsy tongue. Children are so much fun, that it is a pity to limit them to a speech impediment. Think outside the box. Does she like to dress up? Is she flamboyant? Would she march up to a stranger and demand a kiss, or is she quiet and reserved, having to be coaxed to speak?

Perhaps the most fun is writing The Little Boy. Frogs and snails and puppy-dog tails! ;) I have a weakness for naughty little boys....Dill, Darby, Tucker...oh yes. What is it that makes them so adorable? It could be something as small as freckles, a pug-nose, dirt around his fingernails. Just watch a little boy for five minutes and you'll have a host of actions to use in describing that character of yours. :)

Point Three: Pay Attention:

The Mistress of this third point, in my humble opinion, was Edith Nesbit. Even the narration of her books reflects the elaborate, illogical, perfect charm of a child's thinking. This is a task that takes some doing, for the older we grow, the easier it is to forget how sensible a childish thought once seemed to us, and how we came across that thought in the first place. You must cast aside all adult-ish thinking when you write for children. You must approach them on their own footing, thinking how they think, dealing with crisis the way they do. Sometimes it requires a kyniption fit. Sometimes it requires a fist-fight. But bet upon it. Something unexpected and not quite well-behaved is always the right way for a child. :) After all, social-grace and politics are not a large part of the average child's diet. Scapegraces are darlings, in my opinion. :) 

Point Four: Have Fun:

This is the last, and perhaps most important point. Children are fun. They have not yet learned that life expects more of you than smiles and giggles, delicious frights, more smiles, and a little dirt thrown in. Let your pen play for awhile instead of work. You characters can, on occasion, even serve as your alter-egos. I dare you to try to forget you are nearly grown-up, or even grown-up, or even Very Ancient. Try writing in a childish way. You'll find it refreshing, unusual, and so addicting you'll want to come back for more. :) 

“It is all very wonderful and mysterious, as all life is apt to be if you go a little below the crust, and are not content just to read newspapers and go by the Tube Railway, and buy your clothes ready-made, and think nothing can be true unless it is uninteresting.” 

~Edith Nesbit