Creating a Critique Group: Part Three Clarifying Questions and the Reader's Gaze

Asking Your Critique Parnter Clarifying Questions:

When you work with your critique partners, you can mark simple errors in their manuscripts with easy notes, e.g., in paragraph one they were eating breakfast, but here you're calling it dinner - there's no need to tiptoe around those notes. 

However, when you wonder if an author made a stylistic choice (but you're unsure) it's important to ask. Maybe you suspect the writer's goal is to enhance poetic delivery, or nod at a secret, or reveal character in a clever way, or something else. Regardless the reason, the author needs to know you've paused reading. The choice unintentionally interrupted your reading process (your suspension of disbelief). This feels like a great spot for a clarifying question.

When you are early in the critique process, you are discovering the nuances of the story, so you might mark with a comment bubble (stylistic choice?). If it is, the author will move on, or the author will think - yes, stylistic, but did I go too far, or how can I finesse? When you ask clarifying questions, you provide the author with valuable information about the reader's gaze and where you were potentially pulled out of the story.  

Wordless Picture Books

 Whenever anyone talks about wordless picture books, Linda Ashman comes to my mind. She used to have a "how to" link on writing wordless pbs, so I wrote to her to ask for that link. Instead, she sent back a great example of her book Rain! Illustrated by Christian Robinson. These links are rich with material! 

Here's the link to Linda Ashman's page: LINDA ASHMAN

Here is what she submitted: Submission  

Here is her storyboard:  Storyboard  

Creating a Critiquing Group: Part Two

A healthy critiquing group establishes agreed upon guidelines.

Workshop Guidelines:

Here are some guidelines you might consider: First, understand the author's goal(s). From there, your goal should be to provide useful, specific, and authentic feedback in a kind and respectful manner. During the critique session, I urge you to employ the sandwich method: 

• discuss the specific positive aspects of a person’s work
• discuss the specific questions you have for the author or the opportunities for clarity or improvement within that work
• use craft language whenever possible
• don't spend a lot of time polishing the turds (fixing commas, etc.), focus on the content
• answer the questions the author might have included with their piece

  

On reading and implicit bias: In a workshop I attended in 2018 lead by executive editor Tiff Liao, she explained that most readers (including PB-YA) assume they are reading a white, straight, cisgender, able character, and she challenged that we need to de-center the norms in publishing. Think R.O.A.R.S., she said, which stands for race, orientation, ability, religion, sexual identity. 

According to Jennifer Eberhardt, MacArthur, psychology professor at Stanford University, “…you don’t have to have a moral failing to act on an implicit bias.”(Time Magazine, March 2019). Please pause and notice any implicit bias you might have when you read. According to AAWW’s interview with Virginia Poet Laureate, Luisa A. Igloria, she was “…someone who didn’t cut her teeth in the North American writing workshop model, [and] feels ‘liberated by the idea that I have seen other ways of doing things, other models from global literary traditions that we can draw from.”

 

IDEAS FOR POSSIBLE GUIDELINES ON RECEIVING AND GIVING A CRITIQUE:

1. The writer will present the work with a brief description of their intent. What was the goal of the piece? What questions does the writer have about the piece?
2. The readers will answer these questions about the piece:
1. What do you think this piece is trying to do?
2. What specific elements of the piece surprised you or excited you and what did the author do well?
3. How did the writer deliver a scene or use a specific craft elements well?
4. What questions do you have for this piece?
5. Where specifically did you find opportunities to strengthen this piece and why?
6. Provide responses to the writer's questions.
3. During the critique, the writer can engage with feedback and ask questions or the writer can choose to be silent/invisible until the end. This can be the writer's choice.

I suggest you work in a paradox! That means that you work in an atmosphere where you don’t interrupt one another, but you also leave space for engagement.

Note to the receiver: The person receiving does not have to take anyone’s advice, nor do they have to agree. Let the feedback marinate and decide what to do with it when you are ready—you might toss out the ideas; you might incorporate some of the notes, none of the notes, or all of the notes. That is up to you! You might even use the ideas to unlock a door that neither you nor the critique members considered. Embrace the possibility of being surprised!

   

EXAMPLE of giving positive feedback:

☹Unhelpful positive feedback might sound like, “Your story sounded nice. I really liked it.” You can absolutely tell someone that you liked their manuscript, but please follow up with something useful and specific. Please note that we authors often question ourselves, so it’s nice to know what specifically works, otherwise if nobody comments on it, we might second guess ourselves and delete it!

😊Effective/Helpful positive feedback includes something specific that identifies what the author did well in their craft, for example if I had been in Traci N. Todd’s critiquing group and had given her feedback on her beautiful book Nina, I would have told her that I enjoyed her various uses of poetry, like her use of consonance and alliteration in this line, “…it was deep in the woods and a world away.” Why? Because that line has a lovely read-aloud quality, it is delightfully lyrical, and it enhances the showing of how far the character walked.  I’d also use this moment to mention other places that her poetry made my heart soar.

EXAMPLE of discussing an opportunity for an author to improve their manuscript:

Discussing opportunities might feel uncomfortable, but it doesn’t have to. Once you understand how to talk about craft, you remove the pressure of discussing work in a way that might feel like a personal insult. Discussing questions in terms of craft choices treats the author and their work with professionalism and respect.

☹ Unhelpful feedback regarding a writer’s work and an opportunity for improvement within their manuscript might sound like, “I don’t like this. Nothing happens.” If I heard that feedback, I wouldn’t know where to begin, and it comes across as mean. Providing quality feedback is hard work. It requires combining your knowledge and instinct—instinct for noticing that something sounds off and then knowledge of craft skills to understand why something doesn’t seem to work. This takes time, care, and effort. 

😊Effective/Helpful feedback is centered on an opportunity the author could consider. It might sound like, “Although battling the dragon and dueling with the pirate were both fun beats, they both felt like the same beat/same note. To me that means the plot didn’t move forward by repeating this beat. Is there a way to raise the tension in one beat or the other to differentiate the beats and elevate the pace and plot experience for the reader?” Please notice that this feedback is specific, it is not prescriptive, and it even poses a question that gives the author something to think about.

 

Creating a Critiquing Group with Healthy Rules and Boundaries: Part One

Healthy and successful critiquing groups aren't made up of people who just want to be kind to one another. Your goal is to critically address the glows and grows in your groups' manuscripts, and you want to do that in an environment that promotes encouragement, growth, honesty, and productivity.  Hopefully, your critique group feels invigorating. But it won't if someone's deliver gets under your skin. Creating healthy boundaries is a great way to plan for a group's success.   

Establish a set of rules:

I don't know about you, but I love clear boundaries. Last summer, Lysa TerKeurst came to Scottsdale, and I attended her lecture on how good boundaries help establish healthy relationships. The principle of healthy boundaries can be applied to working with and establishing rules for critiquing groups. Perhaps you establish rules for a critique, noting what might be useful to help your group members stretch their skills.

Sticky situations that can show up during in-person critique groups: I've walked into a new critiquing group where one person hijacked the entire meeting by doing all the talking. I've been in a group where a person recentered the discussion on their work rather than on the manuscript in hand. I've been in a group where an individual waxed on about the proper use of commas (also eloquently called polishing the turds), when the author was really hoping to discuss her protagonist's motives. Through these uncomfortable experiences, I've learned to manage expectations and outcomes by discussing and designing the rules in advance with my groups. 

Remember, without having clear and established boundaries, a critiquing group can get hijacked, dominated, or weave left when you were hoping to turn right. Setting yourself up for success is a matter of agreeing in advance to a few (or many) rules.

An Inside Look at a Debut Deal

 

When I first entered the publishing world, I was surprised to discover that editors are regular human beings 😊. They eat, they sleep, they have personalized likes and dislikes. I know. I know. I was excited and intimidated, but I learned a lot with my debut sale. By the way, the above photo is a picture of me (wearing the orange scarf), my editor (next to me and in the center), and the HarperCollins marketing team all wearing the cat ears (a gift I brought to the office). 

My debut novel was sold on pre-empt, and no, I didn’t know what that meant when it was happening. I like this definition from Poets & Writers  magazine, “When a publisher wants to preempt [it means] they are choosing to make an offer that will persuade the author’s agent to take a project off the table early. The publisher is grabbing a project they love and avoiding having to compete with other publishers."

In my situation, my agent submitted my novel to a handful of editors, including Maria Barbo of Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins. When Maria said she wanted to make an offer, my agent invited her to sweeten the deal in a pre-empt to avoid an auction (an auction is when more than one house bids to buy a manuscript). But before anything was agreed upon, my agent asked me to get on the phone with Maria to see if I thought she would be someone with whom I’d like to work.

 As you can imagine, my head was spinning. I was suddenly in the driver’s seat. Long story short, this was a wise move. Making sure an author and editor have good communication chemistry is key to producing a great book. I asked Maria to tell me about her vision for the manuscript's edits, and since Maria is a genius, I was intrigued and excited about her ideas. As the cliché goes, it was match made in heaven, and we moved forward with the deal.

That's my perspective as the author. But did you notice that Maria's job as the editor was to communicate a clear vision for her editorial direction of my manuscript? If you take a job as an editor with a publisher, you'll have times when you have to compete with other publishing houses in order to acquire a manuscript. Sure, money will play a role in the bidding process but so will your editorial skills and the ability to communicate your vision. Honing these skills now will benefit you as a writer, book doctor, critiquing partner, coach, and as an editor. Even if you decide a career in editing is not for you, as an author you will have a clear understanding of the editor's role which will make you an ideal client to work with. 

Happy writing and editing!

Cheers,

Kim 

 P.S.   Writer Beware is a fantastic website. It's sponsored by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. Here you will find a wealth of information including insights on editors and editing, writer’s services, how to avoid schmagents (fake literary agents), and more.

Your Story's Interstitials

If you've ever hear me toss about a fancy-pants word, I probably learned the vocab from the brilliant Elana K. Arnold. She's so smart! In fact, if you're intersted in taking a master class, you should check out her revision season. 

Onward to interstitials - one of the many words Elana taught me.

Interstitials sounds highfalutin, but we’re simply talking about the connective tissue within your manuscript. It’s what ties the story and the character’s choices together in a meaningful way (plot!). 

Why are interstitials important?

With interstitials in place, you have an interwoven story that is knitted together by character choices🤩👍.  Without interstitials, you have a bunch of stuff happening that's without meaningful connections.  Perhaps you'll want to add "check interstitials" to your revision checklist.

More on Why:

You probably want to write compelling manuscripts and/or guide your critique partners to develop page-turning, satisfying stories.  To do so means that things don't just “happen” to a character. If a story is going to captivate readers, the protagonist can’t be a passenger

flowing along in the current of life. The character must make choices that drive the plot. And each choice has a consequence that causes the character to make the next choice and then the next and so on.

Benefits: With solid interstitials/connective tissue, you’ll see how:

• the character drives the plot
• the story draws the reader in deeper
• the readers comes to trust that everything matters and therefore will want to know what happens next!

I created this chart below so you can see how the interstitials track in Beauty and the Beast.

CHARACTER	ACTION	AND THEN...        (or)	THEREFORE...
Belle's father Maurice	heads to the fair but gets lost and is chased by wolves		therefore, he illegally takes refuge in the Beast's castle
			because of that: the Beast holds Maurice prisoner.
Because Maurice is missing,	Belle goes looking for her father		BUT the Beast won't let Maurice go, THEREFORE Belle tells the beast that she will be the prisoner in her father's stead. (THEREFORE she stays)
The Beast	is a jerk		THEREFORE Belle won't have dinner with him
			and BECAUSE OF THAT the cups, saucers, teapots etc. server her dinner (kindly singing Be Our Guest)
			and BECAUSE OF THAT Belle is comfortable and THEREFORE moves about the castle
			and THEREFORE discovers the enchanted rose
			and because of that she THEREFORE gets a glimpse of the beast's true and good self.

As you know, the story goes on from there.

Notice that there are compelling reasons (character motivations) for Belle's choices, and each choice/action catapults into the next choice. Remove the choices and the plot unravels or hinges too much on coincidence. If a moment is followed by an "and then" the plot can stall or fall into a pattern of stuff happening to the character rather than the character making action choices (i.e. the action of Belle looking for her father, rather than Belle coincidentally meeting the Beast).  

Want more? Check out what the makers of South Park have to say about "because of this then that" in this two minute video:

Top Four Things to Ensure Your Successful Publishing Path!

 

Connecting with other writers is critical to your success. 

Straight talk - My creative writing skills 🌻blossomed once I joined a critiquing group. In fact, I don't believe I would have ever reached publication without a critiquing group. 

Why Join a Critiquing Group: 

As I participated and prepared to give my colleagues feedback, I had to critically and professionally think through the specifics of what worked and what didn't in my critique partners' manuscripts.  I had to intelligently articulate the specifics of why these elements did or didn't work, and I had to use craft-centered language. 

Here's the surprise - It was easier for me to notice what felt delightful or what didn't land in someone else's work than in my own - even when I had the same successes or errors. But as I continued to critique with others, my editing and revising neural pathways grew. I had developed skills to see from new angles. 

Now, when I look back at my work, you guessed it—I'm able to find heaping piles of opportunities, and I still work with my critiquing partners who artfully point out my blind spots. 

Top four. I did four things that I believe were critical to my publishing success:

1. Read. Read. Read books in my genre
2. Joined a critiquing group (joined two!)
3. Joined a professional organization within my genre. For me, that was the SCBWI, a professional writing organization that focuses on the craft of writing and the business of publishing children's books. For you, it might be the Science Fiction Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, or some other group. 
4. Engaged with a community of writers on social media (you can find me on Instagram @kimtomsic ).

Good Luck!

Cheers,

Kim

P.S. Check out Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses for ideas to use within your critique group.

15 Ways to be a Great Literary Citizen

 

Literary citizenship goes beyond just wanting a literary career. It’s about being an active, supportive participant in the writing community.

Don’t worry! You don’t have to have a big budget to be a great literary citizen. In fact, most of us cannot run to our favorite bookstores every week (or every month!) to buy the latest book we're excited about. Fortunately, there are many free ways to partake in serving as a stellar literary citizen. That's right! No matter your background or socioeconomic situation ★ you belong to this community ★ and you can engage. Here is a list of both big-budget, budget-crunching, and free ways to participate. Find what fits for you!

1.       Check out and review books from your library

2.      Read, read, read!

3.      Request that your library purchase a book for their collection. Most libraries have a “purchase request” or “suggest a purchase” form for members to fill out. All you need to do is google is your library’s name along with the words, “suggest a purchase.” Here’s more advice from EverydayReading.

4.      Shop indie! Indie bookstores and your local Barnes and Noble are packed with employees who love reading and will guide you to your next great book. Frommers created this fun list of indiebookstores across America. Bookstores I particularly love include TheWandering Jellyfish in Niwot, Colorado; Boulder Bookstore in Boulder, Colorado, BookBar Denver, Tattered Cover, and Second Star to the Right in Denver, Colorado, and Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix and Tempe, Arizona. Please support indies by telling me about your favorite bookstore in the comment section below!

5.     
Attend a book launch party, reading, or signing! Your bookstore probably has a monthly list featuring author events. Even if you can’t buy a book, please consider attending the launch party. You’d be surprised how often I’ve seen award-winning, best-selling authors speak to a room of only five people. Please fill those seats, say hello to the author, and then go to your library and request the book!
 

   6.      Celebrate authors and illustrators on their awards, lists, launches, book-birthdays and/or good news! If you have Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or any other social media account please help celebrate and spread the word!

   7.      Subscribe to free blog sites. In September 2021, Writer’s Digest published their 101 Best Websites for Writers

8.     Talk to event organizers about hosting inclusive events with diverse representation, perhaps even serve as an event volunteer! 

9.      Ask your local school and library to host an author or illustrator presentation. There are public and private funds for such purposes—don’t let them go unused!

10.  Subscribe to literary magazines such as Writer’s Digest , The Horn Book, or Poets & Writers

11.   Share articles or Op-eds written by your favorite authors. For example, last Sunday Meg Medina had an Op-ed in The Los Angeles Times titled: Want to shape your bicultural child’s sense of self before society does?  Lead them to books

12.  Join a critiquing group

13.  Write a Goodreads review

14.  Give Books as Gifts!

15.  Post an Amazon review

And remember to stay informed, stay active, and READ READ READ!

 

 

Heart in Children's Literature by Kim Tomsic

Any writer trying to tackle the art of composing a children’s story will agree—it’s tough work. Whether writing a 500-word picture book or a 75,000-word novel, writers face a juggling act of theme (without being didactic), character (without being overly cutesy), story (with the perfect pace), and more all in effort to create that sweet balance of delight, entertainment, meaning, and connection.     But what makes a story good? In

Celebrating Children's Books: Essays on Children's Literature, Arnold Lobel says, “A good picture book should be true. That is to say, it should rise out of the lives and passions of its creators.” Perhaps this statement could be pushed a step further, so it reads: A good children’s book (picture book through young adult novel) should be true. That is to say it should rise out of the lives and passions of its creators and have a placeholder for a child to insert themselves and their emotions. A good book should have heart.

In author Kate DiCamillo’s 2014 Newbery speech, she said, “…[those] working on stories, bookmaking, and art are given the sacred task of making hearts larger through story.” But what is heart and how does an author write it into a story? To figure this out, I asked three experts for their thoughts on heart in children’s books: Author Beth Anderson, Senior Editor at Chronicle Books, Melissa Manlove, and Senior Editor at HarperCollins, Maria Barbo.

First meet Beth. Not only is Beth Anderson the author of several picture books, she also writes about emotional resonance in her blog, “Mining for Heart.” Beth says, “Heart” is the treasure I’m after whenever I start a new manuscript. What will make this story more than a reporting of events? What will make the child reader think about the world a little bit differently? What will bring emotional resonance? To me, heart is not the theme or focus nugget but is much deeper and more personal. It emerges when you process the research or story through your own life experiences and passions to find a unique angle or thread. “Heart” can be nebulous, elusive, downright torture to tackle, but it’s what makes a manuscript sing!”

            Beth’s statement screams many truths, (the torture!). She also wonders, “What will

make a child reader think about the world a bit differently?” 

Kimberly Reynolds, author of Children’s Literature: A Very Short Introduction, says, “Because children’s literature is one of the earliest ways in which the young encounter stories, it plays a powerful role in shaping how we think about and understand the world.” Reynolds’ statement echoes Kate DiCamillo. In essence, they are both saying that books play a powerful role that might affect the way children understand and think about race, religion, ableism, neurodiversity, gender identity and more. No wonder DiCamillo calls it a “sacred” task.

Helping a child think about the world a bit differently happens when an author succeeds at writing a story that gets under their skin. There, inside the pulse of the story is the opportunity for a child or young adult to connect, beyond mere amusement, so that the story seeps into their pores and stays long after the last page is read. To jump-start a pulse that pushes a story beyond entertaining-but-forgettable, a book must have 💙heart💙, and to achieve heart the writer must make the reader feel something.

            The Horn Book Magazine also covers the need for children’s stories to have heart and feeling-points. In a November 2012 article titled “Making Picture Books: The Words” by Charlotte Zolotow, Zolotow emphasizes how an emotional impulse to write for children should come out of a real place and says, “Many fine writers can write about children but are unable to write for them.” She says, “The writers writing about children are looking back. The writers writing for children are feeling back into childhood.” It is the feeling-points that writers must tap into if they want to reach a child’s heart.

             The next step in my mission to understand heart took me to Senior Editor Melissa Manlove from Chronicle Books. I knew Melissa would be the perfect person to talk to, because she made me work to uncover the heart of The Elephants Come Home (Chronicle Books, 2021). Back in 2012, I approached Melissa with a true story about a man named Lawrence Anthony who rescued a herd of seven elephants in Zululand, South Africa--the elephants had broken out of every other wildlife sanctuary they'd lived at and had thus frightened many townfolk with their destruction. Now they had to be relocated again, otherwise they would be shot! Melissa and I were both captivated by the many details of this story, but something was missing—that nebulous “something” was the heart. It sat in the outskirts of my writing, but the heart was too buried to actually feel it. I had to work, to dig, to revise until I was able to identify the true piece of me that I was bringing to the story (for me, it was growing up as a military brat and being made to move from home to home, like the elephants).  Once I identified the heart I felt when I thought about this story, I knew I couldn’t shove it front and center because then the story would feel forced. Melissa says heart can’t be in the reader’s face. It needs to be like a treasure chest the reader works to uncover.

Actually, she says it more eloquently. Melissa says, “The writers I admire most tend to be ones that, as they draft, are following a feeling, a hunch, a question. They’re feeling out what seems right and what the story seems to want to be. And THEN from that, later, in the revision process, they figure out what that part of us that lives on story but doesn’t have words of its own to speak was trying to say. And when you let the story come first, and let it show you by feel where the heart is, then the heart is truly buried in it, like buried treasure, and your story becomes a map for those who will follow you.”

The Elephants Come Home written by me and with gorgeous illustrations by Hadley Hooper, released in 2021 with Chronicle Books. Melissa pushed me to dig deep so that I could leave a treasure for readers to find.

Melissa is a master of theme and thesis and if you ever have the opportunity to attend one of her lectures, it will be the best gift you ever give yourself. For this article, I asked Melissa to expand on feeling points, and she explained that, “Many [stories are] disposable. And that’s because they’re entertaining in the moment, but they don’t mean anything. There’s nothing that stays with you afterward, nothing that nibbles at your imagination and pulls you back to them.” Even if a story is fiction, Melissa says a good story makes us “feel it is true.” Melissa explains that feeling in story is “the language-brain articulating what the story-brain had already known in feeling. A storyteller must evoke a universal feeling.” Melissa says for a story to go deeper, there needs to be “a human experience at the heart of that story that we all can relate to…and a truth about that human experience in the story.”

A great example of a human experience at the heart of a story we can relate to is Charlie and Mouse, edited by Melissa Manlove, written by Laurel Snyder, and illustrated by Emily Hughes. The starred review written by Elizabeth Bird in School Library Journal starts out with a negative tone, “Only the jaded should write reviews of children’s books.” The reviewer goes on to say, “If I am a parent and there is any danger AT ALL that my child is going to ask me to read and reread and reread again a piece of tripe that calls itself a children’s book, I at least want some forewarning. I have great love for the sardonic stripe of reviewer. Anyone who has honed their teeth on the literary darlings of sweetness & light.” Elizabeth Bird says she is sick and tired of reading overly-sweet books and goes on to add, “So I sometimes wonder if having my own kids has made me more inclined towards books with a glint of true emotion amidst the adorableness. With that in mind, I guess I could be forgiven for initially thinking that Charlie & Mouse wouldn’t work for me. Heck the eyeballs of these kids take up half their heads as it is. Yet when I read this story what I found was a quietly subversive, infinitely charming, eerily rereadable early chapter book not just worth reading but worth owning.” Though Bird set out to dislike Charlie and Mouse, she felt the heart and says, “my tolerance for the cutesy is distinctly low. So it was with great pleasure that I discovered that while the characters of Charlie and Mouse are undeniably cute, they are not cloying. They are not vying for your love. They are living their lives, doing what they want to do, and if what they do happens to be cute, so be it, but that is not their prerogative.”  Heart won the day.   

            I circle back to Kate DiCamillo, because Flora and Ulysses is a great example of a book with heart, and it was a very human and universal experience that led DiCamillo to write this Newbery Award winning book—the experience of love, grief, and loss. DiCamillo says her truth rose out of her deep love for her mother who often asked who would take care of her Electrolux vacuum cleaner when she passed away. In January 2009, her 86-year-old mother fell, broke her hip, and died less than a week later. DiCamillo’s heart ached, and she grieved as painfully and deeply as anyone who loses a loved one grieves. In her 2014 Newbery speech, she says she wrote Flora and Ulysses because she “wanted to excavate that grief.” She says, “I wanted and needed to find my way to joy.” This was her truth, but she doesn’t lay it on the page so literally. The truth takes on new forms and shows up in her book through characters that would have made her mother laugh—Flora, the squirrel, the giant donut, and a vacuum cleaner (remember the Electrolux), and it’s not just any vacuum cleaner, but one that gives the squirrel superpowers!

The Newbery committee called Flora and Ulysses a story of hope, joy, and love. Through this book, readers experience real feelings filtered through DiCamillo’s characters while originating from her authentic human experience—her love and grief and also her hope to regain laughter and joy. This echoes back to what Melissa Manlove said, “there needs to be “a human experience at the heart of story that we all can relate to…and a truth about that human experience in the story.” In the end of Flora and Ulysses, readers discover that Flora’s father, George Buckman, has a capacious heart. One that is very large and “capable of containing much joy and much sorrow.” And this is parallel to the truth of DiCamillo’s heart, joy, and sorrow in her mourning process. Authentic feelings that showed up on the pages.

Senior Editor Maria Barbo from HarperCollins says, “Authenticity is key for emotional resonance. That thing you do in private that you think nobody else does—someone does it. A writer or artist has to make themselves vulnerable in that way—to share the secret, raw parts of themselves because relatability stems, in part, from specificity.” She adds a reminder, “The reader’s heart isn’t going to be in it if yours isn’t.” Maria is the editor for Bubbles...Up! a love poem to swimming, written by Jacqueline Davies illustrated by Sonia Sánchez. Each reader might find a different pulse point as they read, but without a doubt this story has heart.💙 

The experts agree—a good book should have heart. Melissa Manlove says, a “good story must feel true.” Maria Barbo says that a reader’s heart can’t be in it unless the writer’s heart shows up first. Beth Anderson challenges authors to find what will cause the child reader to think about their world view. Children’s Literature: A Very Short Introduction says, “Children’s literature can also be a literature of contestation, offering alternative views and providing the kind of information and approaches that can inspire new ways of thinking about the world and how it could be shaped in other, potentially better ways.”  Heart shows up when we process stories through life and literature experiences. Writers all have something that is deeply personal to share. We have something that, as Arnold Lobel says, “…can rise out of [our] lives and passions.” The real question is: are we willing to be vulnerable and write from an authentic place and share our feeling-points so the story can come alive for a child.

At the end of Kate DiCamillo’s Newbery speech, she said that as a child, she sat with books in her tree-house and could, “Feel the stories I read pushing against the walls of my heart.” For her, those stories traveled beyond the boundaries of mere entertainment and had a lasting pulse. Again, DiCamillo says those, “…working on stories, bookmaking, and art are given the sacred task of making hearts larger through story.” Writers can only do this if they dig deep and give of themselves so authentically that a book develops a pulse—a story that not only entertains but also has a placeholder for the child to insert themselves and their emotions. Children deserve stories that have heart.