Country singers, Brooks & Dunn, sang a song called, "Put a Girl In It." Its basic message implies a guy can own tons of toys, yet his life is not complete without a gal in it. For the purpose of this post, let's substitute the word, girl, for child. There are many couples who yearn for children, and feel their lives are not whole without at least one child. Others consider children a curse. Readers' tastes also follow on differing lines. Some enjoy reading books, no matter the genre, as long as a child is mentioned somewhere. Others feel children just get in the way of a story. I'd say, that depends on the story. Throwing a child character into the mix, with no real purpose, doesn't make sense. Every character, no matter what age, should move a plot forward in some way. Then we come to authors, like yours truly. I usually write romances and thrillers, but happened to fall in love with a stock photo of a baby. Suddenly I was inspired to write a ...

Years ago, I traveled to a library to talk about storytelling with a group of children. It was my first time, and I was so nervous. Why? Because children can be brutally honest. Unlike adults, they haven't had time to develop a filter to which they feed their opinions before spewing them out (though these days, a lot of adults have forgotten their filters, but I digress). I was worried the children would be bored or rude or want to be anywhere but in a library--on a Saturday afternoon no less. But I was wrong. As I approached a long conference table, I was met with a full house of children with wide eyes, stacks of paper, and pencils and pens at the ready. After I introduced myself, I went around the table and had the children introduce themselves. Many talked about why they loved writing. Some of them even wanted to be writers. We talked about their favorite stories, favorite characters. We talked about setting, plot, conflict, and other storytelling elements, and I...

Many writers refer to their books as their children, so why not treat your manuscript like a child? 1. FOOD. A child must be fed and so must a manuscript. Food = words written. 2. PLAY. A child needs to play and so does a manuscript - or more precisely, its writer. Anyone who has read some of my posts about writing, knows I’m a planner, but I also advocate giving yourself the freedom to wander off that carefully-laid path occasionally. Remember, without that crucial question of ‘What if…’ nothing happens. 3. SLEEP. A child needs to sleep. So does your manuscript. Once you finish that first draft, let it sleep in a drawer. Time away is good. Think of it as recharging your batteries before the next round - just like those naps your toddler takes give you precious time to find your sanity. 4. FRIENDS. A child needs friends. So does your manuscript - but we call them beta/first readers and editors. 5. RULES. A child needs to know who’s boss - and it’s not them. Yes, it’s tr...

When I first began moodling the main characters in my murder mystery series  - a high-powered attorney who is a partner in the family law firm, and his new bride, a child psychologist and writer - they were mostly just the perfect couple on whom I could hang my social justice plots. But the two of them had different ideas about how their relationship, and their life together, would develop. First, both developed a strong focus toward building their rural kingdom (it's just a setting, damnit!), and before long, having children and raising a family became a huge issue, especially for my heroine. How do characters take over like that? Soon I found myself searching for photos of the perfect redheaded boy to enter the story (perhaps in book #3 after the heroine suffers some fertility anguish?), instead of teaching readers about the dangers of GMO crops, fracking, and other really important stuff. Children add elements to fiction that completely change the dynamics of a story...

When she was around four, my granddaughter Ellie once stayed with me for a weekend while her parents were off gallivanting. What a great time we had! Ellie is into making up stories, so my grandmotherly ambitions went soaring – another writer in the family! She told me her stories while I scribbled them down. We wrote quite a few about Rapunzel, Tinkerbell, MuLan, and other heroines. (My favorite was the one in which Rapunzel went to San Francisco to buy a pretty dress and finally have her hair cut, leaving the Prince behind.) We also wrote a “round robin” story in which Ellie told a piece of a story, then I told a piece, then Ellie, then me, and so on. We called it “The Chicken Story” and here it is: Ellie: The chicken went to the park and he slid on a bumpy slide. Grandma: Then he fell off the slide and hit his head on the ground at the end of the slide. Ellie: Then he goes on a tire swing, and he fell off and he bumped his head again. Grandma: The chicken sai...

The Poor Poet by C arl Spitzweg I have a four-year-old grandson who I think is musically talented. In fact, I think he is gifted, although I suppose it is remotely possible that I am a tiny bit prejudiced. But what is my grandson doing in a blog post about writing?   He’s here because I want my grandson to live a happy and fulfilled life, and I fear that he will begin to hear those voices in his head shooting him the very same line of BS that I got when I first knew I wanted to be a writer. These voices are familiar to all American artists, whatever their art form. Art is just a hobby, not a profession. You can’t make money at music, writing, acting, painting, etc.   – unless you are really really lucky and become Beyonce or Dan Brown or Judy Chicago – you have about the same chance of becoming rich in the arts as you do of winning the lottery. Make sure you train for something else to fall back on, because you will need it. People who try to become artists are immature P...

Ghostwriting is all about encouraging people to take what is inside them – their thoughts, ideas, and stories – and get them “out there” so they can enrich or illuminate the lives of others. But many people don’t believe that what’s inside them is worth anything. It is part of my job to convince them that this is not so. We all have something to contribute. I know this is true because my mother showed me it was. When I was about 4 years old, I wrote a poem about a bumblebee that my mother thought was the best poem any child had ever written. She copied it out in her prettiest handwriting, using a pen with thick black ink, and adding many flourishes and curlicues. She used her best white stationary, not the newsprint I originally wrote it on. And then she illustrated it with her own fabulous drawings (I thought they were fabulous because her bumblebees really looked like bees, not dots, and her flower like flowers, not smudges.) She hung this creation inside a real frame, on the livi...