Day #243: SO Many Topic Options and NONE of them are the Election AKA James My Co-Writer

Tomorrow is election day and that's all I intend to say about that here.

I do have a lot of possible topics for today...I went to the doctor (I'm fine,) so I can talk about adventures in pandemic medical care. James and I are co-writing a picture book, so I can talk about that, or I can expand on yesterday's conversation about poetry and talk about how I came to be a poetry nerd.

It's interesting...I ran yesterday's blog post through the free wordcounter I use because I am counting words written here towards my NaNoWriMo total and the software lists your top used words and their frequency, etc. Usually it's pretty boring, like my top words are things like "the" and "but," but last night's was interesting. I don't know if they've just changed the algorithm to filter those out or what but I felt very literary...the top used words were things like "poetry" and "laureate." Maybe writing about writing will up my literary content and make my blog more highbrow and less pandemic whiny, who knows? Also, apparently my writing last night was at the 9th-10th grade reading level, which made me feel smart. (As a librarian I know that most "general" writing is in the 6th-7th grade level, which sounds bad until you realize that that is the level at which you kind of reach fluency, meaning from that point on you are reading less to learn to read and more to absorb content. Librarian soapbox over.)

I think I'm gonna talk about doing NaNoWriMo with James because it was the highlight of my day and also because I think for better or for worse during November this is probably going to become a writing and bookish things blog.

So writing a picture book is HARD. It seems like the kind of thing that should be easy...aren't they just for little kids and don't you just throw some words around? But if you've never tried it, it's actually incredibly difficult to do well. You have a finite space in which to tell a story that still needs to function as a story with a beginning, middle, and end and be surprising and original...and if you're not an illustrator you are doing half of the work and doing it blind. 99% of the time if the author and illustrator are different what happens is someone writes text, sends it to the publisher, and the publisher chooses the illustrator to do the illustrations and create the finished content. An author I heard once giving a workshop talked about it as "writing the empty cup," meaning you have to do your job well and completely but leave room for your yet-to-be-named creative partner to fill in the rest of the project.

I've tried to write picture books in the past and I feel like I've been close to the mark but never actually gotten there, however I've had this idea for a Christmas themed picture book in my head for awhile now and I decided to try to tinker with it during NaNoWriMo. Well, this is the WRONG way to write picture books, but fairly recently I decided to make James my illustrator. So we are going to work on it together, with me providing the text and him providing the illustrations. And I had zero, I mean NO plan for this. No outline, no ideas blocked out, no nothing except an idea in my head.

Did I mention how tricky and carefully planned picture books are? I mean, really, you get 32 pages to work with. And not even, because there are end papers and the title page and sometimes there's a dedication so in reality you get somewhere between 26 and 29 pages to work with. And about 500-1,000 words, give or take. It's NOT easy.

So today we started...and having no idea how to start or a plan I just wrote some text for the first page and asked him to draw an illustration to go with it.

A couple of things you should know about James. First of all, he HATES all school writing assignments. (I would, too, the directions are dumb. But you didn't hear that from me.) And his creativity is exponential.

I don't know why I thought writing with James would be as simple as, hey, here's a piece of story, will you draw a picture for me?

Probably, dealing with professional illustrators isn't that simple either. There may be very good reasons the publishers don't really want them to interact. 

First of all, he will tell you what's going to be in the picture and what's not. Scene 1 is two kids describing something that's happening. He wasn't interested in drawing the two kids. He wanted to draw the something.

This is probably a good instinct. He is probably making me a better writer.

He's endlessly confused about my plan for how we are going to lay this out, with the result that his paper is NEVER oriented correctly. Would that I had done a dummy, this is how we are going to bind our book. Best laid plans.

He also has strong feelings about characters. He wants everyone in the book to wear glasses. (He wears glasses, as do most of the members of the family.) The book has an historical setting, which means glasses wearing would not be as prominent, especially for kids. I've told him this. He doesn't care. 

But what is different about this and school assignments is...we didn't fight.

We shared opinions. We tried to convince each other. We did drafts and then we gave each other notes and did them again.

But we didn't fight. 

There was none of the oh my God please just finish the math worksheet the way you were told to so I can send it in and we can be done. There was none of the this is the right way to do it and this is the wrong way...because we are more or less on equal footing here. I mean, I have to drive the project or it won't get done and I understand the process more than he does...but not by much. And our knowledge of picture books is probably on par. 

Day 1 finished with me having written 2 blocks of text and him having done one illustration plus a drawing of the character that he wants to make a cardboard cutout of and I am letting him because why not? I'm hoping he can draw a similar version of the character tomorrow to put alongside text, but who knows? I am hoping to make it to the drug store to get supplies to at least show him kind of how I plan to bind the thing, but again...who knows? It's an adventure. And we are doing it together.

Tomorrow is Day #2. We'll see how I feel then.

Media consumption: Today I've been reading a young middle grade (for roughly ages 8+) book called The Campaign about a girl who decides to coordinate a mayoral campaign when the unopposed candidate says she is going to gut arts education funding. I was on the fence as to whether this was going to be a good choice for me today (it was drawn at random from my To Be Read box,) but it is actually uplifting and the perfect antidote to...everything that isn't. And I'm almost done with Ally McBeal and still undecided about tomorrow's TV.

Today I'm grateful for health, writing, James, creativity, books, literacy, stories, distractions, my family, fall leaves, and NaNoWriMo.