Just finished reading an ARC of a new transitional reader called "Magical Ms. Plum," and I really admired it. Go buy it for your kids! Right now! At the same time it made me feel depressed because I figured something I wrote in the same vein could never be as good. BUT I'M NOT JEALOUS. (Because I'm a big person these days.)
Here's what the author, Bonny Becker, does--she has more than one thing going on. Each chapter has its own story arc, but then there's an over reaching story arc running throughout the whole narrative about a smartypants boy named Carlos. And it's that over reaching story arc I would have failed to provide. I would have just stopped with the clever individual chapters.
Lesson for today: having more than one something going on is a good idea.
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4 comments:
I would love to be a writer. But this is just one of the reasons I can't. So I blog instead. :)
this sounds very interesting, I must say.
Re: this is something I would have failed to provide:
1. get a beverage and take a deep drink. Sigh. Breathe for a couple of minutes. Swear if you must (I would have to).
2. think about how it would work when you totally appropriate that structure for your very own.
Because that's why "other writers" exist, at some level, for any writer--to make things you can appropriate for your very own.
You go, girl.
Jimi Hendrix said:
Sometimes you want to give up the guitar, you'll hate the guitar. But if you stick with it, you're gonna be rewarded.
Lucinda Felix said:
We don't always get it, until the right person says it.
There are those who wait for what you have to say, because you're the right person.
Once at a conference, some writer person said "you don't have an idea until you have two ideas." (okay, I really know who said it. But that's not the point.)
It's such good advice that it sits on a sticky-note in my brain waiting for me to embrace it.
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