List of Questions
- How long did it take you to write Juan Bobo? Egg-napped?
- How many rejections did each book get before acceptance?
- How long had you been writing before your first book was accepted?
- How do you plot your picture books? Do you outline or do you just write and then revise?
- Did your characters become more developed upon revision? In what way?
- Do you work on one project at a time or several?
- Do you have someone in mind when you write, an audience, or do you write what flows without thinking about a reader?
- How much research do you do for settings?
- In what ways did you use critique readers? Please include, in-person groups, online groups, friends, children's class rooms where you or a teacher read your stories, family members, agents, early publishers (of short stories or whatever you did at first) who gave you insights. What were the three most important insights you learned in your early writing? In what ways, if ever, were critiques groups some type of interference to your professional growth and why?
How long did it take you to write Juan Bobo? Egg-napped?
It's kind of embarrassing to admit, but it doesn't take me very long to write a first draft. It doesn't matter whether I'm writing a picture book or a novel, I try to write a minimum of two pages or two hours a day on whichever book I'm working on, and that makes the writing go more quickly. I've written all my novels in at least 2 1/2 to 3 months by just writing 2 pages a day. GATOS BLACK ON HALLOWEEN, my third picture book to be published (fall 2005, by Henry Holt), took me a day or two to write, maybe 5 or 6 hours total. It was accepted without revisions.
JUAN BOBO: I can't remember exactly how long it took to write Juan Bobo Goes to Work. It couldn't have been more than 3 or 4 hours for the first draft. But once the draft is done, I spend a lot of time we reading yet, polishing yet, tightening yet, reading it out loud to see how it sounds. At the time I wrote Juan Bobo Goes to Work, I was writing retellings of all the Juan Bobo stories that I could get my hands on and that would translate well. I finally wrote 13 Juan Bobo stories. And each took about a day or two to write, but I didn't work more than 4 or 5 hours per day on actual writing. It took me maybe 2 months to research the stories, read them in Spanish, decide which ones to retell, and actually write them. I was also translating and writing a few other Puerto Rican folktales at the same time. I was intending to write a collection of Puerto Rican folktales and a collection of one Bobo stories. But there were about three Juan Bobo stories that could stand on their own as picture books. This was in the spring of 1995. But of all the folktales I wrote that spring, Juan Bobo Goes to Work was the only one that was ultimately published, despite the fact that several editors did want many of my folktales. The problem was that in the late '80s and early '90s the market was glutted by folktales, and folktales were nearly impossible to sell. They still are.
EGG-NAPPED!: It only took me one weekend to write the first draft of egg napped. I think I came up with the idea of an a growing through the forest on Wednesday or Thursday, and I kept asking myself questions about the egg (What kind of egg was it? Why was it rolling through the forest? How did it start to roll through the forest?). Then on Friday nights I could barely sleep with all the ideas that were going to my head. And I came up with the first stanza that night, which was not the first dancer of the story. The stanza I came up with was: "There was Horace the Tortoise/ as big as a cow,/ sitting next to the egg/ with a wrinkled up brow." (Later, someone wanted me to change Horace to another name, I can't remember if it was my editor or my critique group. So Horace became Doris. I like internal rhyme, but I don't like alliteration for names, in general. It's too overdone in children's literature.) Next morning, I put on some background music, and began to write up everything I thought about the night before. I didn't make an outline, I just had the idea and parts of plot in my head. And I wrote it directly in rhyme. Once I was on a roll, like the egg, the words just poured out from my subconscious and onto the keyboard. The plot developed as I wrote. The original draft was about 22 stanzas long, and my editor wanted it to be no more than 16 stanzas. Revisions can be difficult, when an editor once a plot change. But they're doubly difficult when the story is told in rhyme. So, although it took me only two days to write the first draft, it took many revisions and several weeks to get it to wear it is now.
Another thing that took awhile, was that my editor wanted me to revise the ending to the story. As usual for me, the ending of a picture book is always the hardest. The original ending that I came up with was that Doris the tortoise caught the egg in her mouth inadvertently and was a reluctant hero and later became the egg's godmother. I thought it was pretty funny the way I did it (Doris had opened her mouth, screaming in terror because she thought that the mother goose was coming after her for stealing the egg, after she had given Hector Hawk good taste of what's what, and the egg fell plop! right to her open mouth.) But my editor thought that catching something in one's mouth was kind of yucky (she didn't like the idea of tortoise slobber) and was really against the idea. She thought the egg should fall on a fluffy pile of cute fuzzy animals. I thought that was too predictable. So it took me a while to come up with something clever and unpredictable and that also gave my editor something that she wanted, the pile of fuzzy animals. There's an important lesson to be learned here: If you really want to be published you have to be willing to be flexible and give the editor what she wants, but also be clever enough to be true to yourself as a writer. There are ways to tell the story the way you want to tell it and yet give the editor something, too. You stick rigidly to the one way that you've written your story, you may have to stick rigidly with it unpublished.
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How many rejections did each book get before acceptance?
The first of my books to be published got very few rejections. The books that have gotten the most rejections are still being rejected. Most of those, I have no doubt, need more revisions. But several of the books that are still being rejected simply haven't found the right editor (this was the case with GATOS BLACK ON HALLOWEEN, which was rejected about eight times). It used to be common to hear that books had been rejected anywhere from 16 to 72 times before getting accepted. Some very famous books were rejected at least that many times. But now we barely have 16 publishers in the entire children's book industry. And many of the publishers are imprints of another large company that has a policy that if a manuscript is accepted by one of the imprints, it's rejected by all.
JUAN BOBO: In 1996, I sold a combination of three Juan Bobo stories and three Puerto Rican folktales to Fulcrum Kids for a collection in their World Stories series on the first try. But the series was canceled, and my collection was never published. Later in 1996, I met Rosemary Brosnan, who was Executive Editor of Lodestar Books at the time. She loved Juan Bobo stories and immediately bought the only one I showed her at the time, which was Juan Bobo Goes to Work. I was holding the others for Fulcrum Kids because I thought they would publish another collection. Then, in 1997, Fulcrum canceled my collection. I called Rosemary and she said, "I'll buy them, all of them!" without even seeing the stories. I sent all the Juan Bobo stories to her immediately, but before she could get me a contract, Putnam bought Penguin and downsized the company, dissolving Lodestar Books. Rosemary was out of a job, but was quickly hired at Morrow Junior Books as Executive Editor. She was able to take all her books with her, which meant that Juan Bobo Goes to Work would be published by Morrow. But Morrow didn't want any more folktales. When Morrow was bought by HarperCollins, Juan Bobo Goes to Work was published under the HarperCollins label. After that, we tried two years in a row to get my Juan Bobo collection published by Harper, but each time they said that folktales weren't selling.
EGG-NAPPED! got one rejection and two acceptances. Victoria Wells, when she was at Putnam, rejected Egg-Napped saying it was not special enough. I met her later, after she was at Bloomsbury, and she saw it in published form and said she loved it. And I was naughty enough to embarrass her by telling her that she had rejected it while she was a Putnam, then I gave her signed copy. About Harper and Gulliver books wanted to take napped at the same time. But Liz Van Doren, at Gulliver, wanted too many changes that I didn't think I could make. My editor at Harper wanted me to shorten it and change the ending. I felt I could do that, so I went with Harper.
SOMETHING WICKED'S IN THOSE WOODS: Rosemary Brosnan rejected Something Wicked because she doesn't like ghost stories or mysteries. Deborah Brodie, when she was at Viking, also rejected it. But because I multiple submitted, the person I really wanted as my editor for this book, Karen Grove at Harcourt, was still holding onto it and finally did accept it. It was accepted with no revisions, and during the editing process there was only one minor plot revision.
A CIRCLE OF TIME: This novel was also rejected twice. Once by Rosemary Brosnan—again because she doesn't like mysteries or ghost stories and because she had thought it was a bit melodramatic and over the top. Alex Reid at HarperCollins asked to see the complete manuscript after she saw the first 50 pages in a writing contest which she judged. But after presenting it to a few other editors at Harper, despite the fact that she loved the characters, the other editors felt that it was melodramatic and over the top. (Interestingly, two of the main characteristics of adults bestsellers are that they are melodramatic and over the top.) Once Karen Grove had accepted my first novel, I asked her if she would look at the manuscript for this book. Before I had sent it to Rosemary and Alix, I had queried Karen about it. She said that she had just finished editing a book about the 1906 earthquake and therefore couldn't publish another one, so she didn't ask to see the complete manuscript. But when I asked her again, and explain that it really didn't have much to do with the 1906 earthquake, she agreed to look at it. What she did, she bought it immediately. Again, this one was accepted with no revisions. At the editorial stage, Karen had very minor changes.
GATOS BLACK ON HALLOWEEN: This is a rhyming, bilingual picture book about Halloween. It's a hard book to sell because its seasonal, bilingual, and most editors tell you they don't like rhyme. I sent it out 4 times without success, and my agent sent it out 4 times to different publishers. But my agent never got a response back from 2 of the 4 publishers. One of those that never replied was Henry Holt. That's where I finally sold it on my own. I met the editor, Reka Simonsen, at a conference and after hearing her speak, I knew it would be the perfect book for her. I was right. But even though they've never bought a bilingual book and she doesn't usually by rhyme, she loved my words and said they had to have the book.
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How long had you been writing before your first book was accepted?
I started writing for children in the fall of 1988. But I was an attorney, and I worked as a writer and editor at a legal publishing company for 10 years. I sold my first children's book, a collection of Puerto Rican folktales, to Fulcrum Kids in April 1996. But as I mentioned above, that book was canceled. The next book I sold, JUAN BOBO GOES TO WORK, was accepted in November 1996, went through 3 publishing houses, and was finally published in fall 2000. My first novel, SOMETHING WICKED'S IN THOSE WOODS, was accepted in January 1999 and published in fall 2000. It was the fifth children's novel I had written since I started writing in the fall of 1988. The fourth children's novel I wrote, A CIRCLE OF TIME, was the second novel to be published and was published in spring 2002.
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How do you plot your picture books? Do you outline or do you just write and then revise?
I never make up a complete outline, whether it's a novel or a picture book. With a picture book, I usually start with an idea or character then I try to come up with a story in my head. If I'm lucky when I start writing, I already know the ending. I usually do have a strong idea for the ending is in a novel, sometimes I have the last line already written before I start writing. But sometimes it isn't until I've gotten into the story and really started mucking about that I come up with an ending. With EGG-NAPPED, I knew I had to come up with three mini adventures, the last one being the climax or the black moment. But I didn't know what they were until I got into the story. Then of course, I had to come up with a satisfying ending. Like I mentioned above, I had to rewrite the ending anyway.
GATOS BLACK ON HALLOWEEN is more of a concept book with a very loose plot. But there is a twist at the end, and I came up with that when I was in the middle of writing the book.
In my new third-grade chapter book series for Scholastic, GET READY FOR GABI, they would prefer for me to write an outline for each of the four books. But so far, I've finished the first three books without giving them a complete outline. But because they want the four books to have a story arc to them, we had to have an idea of where we were going with the first four books. So my editor and I brainstormed about my ideas and her ideas, and we managed to break up the four main ideas into the four books. But it changed a lot as I went along. In fact, my first draft for Book 1 actually had several of the chapters moved to Book 2 because it was a strong enough subplot to be pulled out and made the main plot of the second book. By the time I got to book 3, although I brainstormed the main plot with my editor, I didn't have a strong subplot. But when I started thinking about the ideas on my own, I came up with such a strong subplot at I was able to outline the whole thing before I wrote it out. So Book 3 of this series, is the only book I've ever written with an outline. But it was kind of a sketchy outline that listed all the plot points that I wanted to include in the book and the order in which they would appear.
When I am writing a novel, I always have a journal document in which I brainstorm on my own. That journal also is where I jot down my mini outlines. These mini outlines are plot points that I want to include in the next few chapters and I want to write and down so I won't forget them. Usually by the time I'm halfway through the book, I'm able to outline ahead in this sketchy way most of the rest of the book. When the plot is really complicated, usually because of the chronology, I've had to go back and create a formal outline of the whole book so that I can keep track of what went on. I did that when I wrote A CIRCLE OF TIME. It's a very complicated time-travel mystery, and I couldn't keep track of what happened when, and who was where at what time. I kept having to go back and refer to my outline when I was revising.
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Did your characters become more developed upon revision? In what way?
Usually my characters become very developed in the first draft. I create them and they grow and develop almost before my eyes while I am writing the first draft. I found that for me, if the characters aren't fully developed by the time I finish the first draft, either I never get the character quite right, or it's very difficult to do so. But that's just me. I've heard of a lot of authors who developed their characters much better on revision. But that wasn't the case in the first book of my series for Scholastic, GET READY FOR GABÍ. Even though I had made a detailed character sketch in my journal and had it approved by my editor, and I thought I knew my main character really well when I started writing the first draft, the character didn't develop fully until the final draft, which was something like four or five revisions later. There were several reasons for this: First, I was using the first person narrative and because of that, the voice had to be that of a third grader. Well, I wasn't familiar with third graders because I'm always writing in the voice of a child who is eight or older. So I had to interview several third graders and commit their voices to memory, which I finally managed to do. Second, she was coming across as a very serious child and this was supposed to be a fun, lighthearted series. So, even though I had a good understanding of third graders and had the third-grade voice down pat, the main character was not lighthearted enough. Once the editors figured that out, I had to go back through the entire first book and revise its so that she was lighthearted, bouncy, and cheery. Now, this comes across strongly. And the reviews I've gotten all seem to agree that I've captured the third-grade voice and Gabí is a happy, bouncy, dynamic series. But it took weeks of revision to get her there. But by the second and third books her voice and character came naturally to me.
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Do you work on one project at a time or several?
Picture books that I feel strongly about I can usually finish within a day or two. Since they take so little time, I can fit them in between longer projects. Usually takes me a few days to feel like I've polished and tightened the text, then I send it on to my critique group. While it's with them, I usually start something new or finish something that I been working on before. Some picture book ideas never go anywhere so I make a few notes about them in an idea document that I have but if they don't pull very strongly at me, I may never go back to that idea. But when looking for new picture book idea, I often go back to that document and see if there's something there were fleshing out.
I have a similar idea document for novels. As I get more ideas for the particular novel, while I'm working on other projects, I make quick note in the document and date it. When I start getting a lot of entries for one particular book, I move those entries to a new document that becomes the journal for that book. I may have entries that span three or four years, and if the book keeps calling back to me, that book will be my next project. When I'm really dying to write a particular book, I start seriously making notes in the journal, brainstorming, making character sketches, noting plot points that I want to include. Once I feel I'm ready, I start writing a minimum of two pages or two hours per day (I keep the schedule of exactly how many words and pages per day I write during that period. It's very intimidating, but it motivates me. I don't recommend it for the weak of heart.). I'm so intent on finishing the first draft as quickly as possible, because I'm always afraid I'll lose my motivation and not finish the book, that I don't want to work on any other serious project. But I still do things in my office, like tracking my manuscripts, writing letters or sending e-mails to editors, cleaning my office, keeping up with my monthly newsletters and periodicals, continuing to plow my way through the stacks of books that I want to read. Reading other books while I'm writing a novel helps motivate me and gives me more ideas. If I'm stumped on the plot, I can usually get over it by reading another book in the genre in which I'm writing and clearing my mind. Within a day or two an idea will hit me and I'm back on track. But if I start a different project, I'm afraid that I will lose motivation for the book I'm working on. Although, when I was working on A CIRCLE OF TIME, I had to take a three-month break because of an intensive writing class I was taking in which I was revising two of my old novels and writing some picture books. The moment the class was over, I finished the book. So I have done other things in between books, but I try not to. It's just a superstition or something like that that I have the drives me to want to finish a novel as quickly as possible once I officially start it.
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Do you have someone in mind when you write, an audience, or do you write what flows without thinking about a reader?
In most of my books, I write for myself. That is why my novels can be read and enjoyed by adults as well as children. I write a story that I want to tell and that I would like to read. It just happens to have a child protagonist. But my series for Scholastic is intended as a third-grade chapter book. It's a step up from an early reader, but still, the words, the topics, the general language, and the sentence structure and paragraph length have to be for children who are just starting to read a long book. I first book was constantly censored and edited, and it was drummed into my head that I had to write for third-grade audience. Now I don't have to think about it has much. I find I'm editing myself and censoring myself in this series. When I'm writing a book that is not for a series, I rarely, if ever, sensor myself. But I do always try to write the best sentence possible and place the words in the best order possible. But I don't worry about whether a child can understand a particular word. If I can understand it, my reader will be able to understand it because here she can figured out from the context.
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How much research do you do for settings?
I do as much research is necessary to make the setting believable and come alive. My time-travel mystery romance, A CIRCLE OF TIME, place in Napa in 1906, just before and during the San Francisco earthquake. I did a great deal of research to make sure that the earthquake had in fact reached Napa, and to find out how much of the geography in the Napa area had actually changed because of the earthquake. I also researched what happened in San Francisco so that I could use interesting tidbits in the plot. I visit the Napa area frequently, so I have a good sense of what it is like now and a good idea of what used to be like in 1906.
My supernatural mystery, SOMETHING WICKED'S IN THOSE WOODS, takes place in Orinda, CA, a town near where I live. In the early '80s, our real estate agent took us to several houses in the Orinda woods. The house I write about in the story is based on a real house that we saw while we were looking to buy a house in the area. It's the same house, the same kitchen with an indoor barbecue, the same backyard surrounded by the woods and with a tiny creek at the edge of the woods and a small arched bridge that goes over the creek. The moment I saw that backyard, it occurred to me that it would be a perfect place for a ghost. Almost 15 years later, I wrote the book. The setting impressed me so much, and is such as strong part of the book, that is almost another character. It was the atmosphere and the setting that intrigued my editor, Karen Grove at Harcourt, and prompted her to ask to see the entire manuscript. I had center the first three chapters and query letter.
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In what ways did you use critique readers?
I've been using critique readers since I first started writing fiction. To be completely honest, I write not for the joy of writing, since writing is not always a joy, but rather is often painful. I write because I have stories to tell, and emotions that need to come out and to be written down, and I want to share all of this with someone. And I'm usually so excited about what I write that I need to share it with someone right now. The first person who read my work was my husband because he was the only person available. And while he always enjoyed what I wrote, and always complimented me, I began not to trust his opinion because he was always too complimentary. Also, I wanted to improve my writing and I knew I needed feedback from someone who knew more than I did.
When I wrote my first novel, a fantasy that will never see print a fantasy that will never see print, I was working at a legal publishing company. I asked a legal writer friend there to read my novel and tell me what he thought. He thought it was "pretty good," but he couldn't really give me any substantive feedback. I continued in search of someone who could help me, and I discovered the SCBWI. The local regional adviser at the time charged me $30 and gave me a thorough critique of my manuscript. It was the best $30 I ever spent. I learned all the horrible, embarrassing mistakes I had made because I had no idea how to write for children. I then began reading all the children's books I could get my hands on and reading books on the craft of writing. I also attended SCBWI conferences and seminars, including the annual Asilomar retreat, and at which we had a full afternoon of critique groups. At these sessions, you broke up into critique groups of made up of people you didn't necessarily know, and you read your work aloud.
For me, there are two problems with this type of critique group: First, most of the people in these groups knew even less about writing than I did. So I wound up giving them more help than I received. Now that's not all bad. I learned a great deal by critiquing other people's work, and I still do. But I needed to find people who could give me valuable feedback as well as receive it. Second, when you read your manuscript aloud, people's minds tend to wander. Therefore, they don't hear everything you've read, and the critique you get is not as valuable as if they took your manuscript home, spent time looking at it and working on it on their own, and gave you a critique later on. This was the type of critique group that I was looking for. I quickly grew out of the type of critique group held at conferences where no one knows each other and where you read aloud. They're a great way to begin, but I would caution that sometimes people can get nasty in those groups and can hurt each other's feelings. That happened to me, and it took me a long time to get over it. I was pretty sensitive in my beginning writing days.
A since many critique groups are made up of people who only want to receive moral support (I call these the "tea party" groups), and are happy reading their manuscript aloud, I decided to start my own critique group. That way I could hold it in my home according to my own rules. My critique groups have always been no larger than 4 people, and usually just 3 people. We pass out our manuscripts to each other and take them home. Then on the day of the meeting, each person gives their critiques aloud and there is discussion, agreement or disagreement, or other commentary by the whole group. We go in a circle until each person's manuscript has been critiqued by everyone and everyone has had a chance to comment on each manuscript.
I learn a great deal by critiquing other people's manuscripts as well as by having mine critiqued. I prefer to have a serious honest, critique rather than a pat on the back if I don't deserve it. Of course, I like to get compliments on the parts that are well written. But I also want to know where the weak areas are in my manuscript and how I can improve the character or plot, etc. Even now, I rarely send out a manuscript without having someone else read it first. This is especially true when I am unsure of the manuscript.
But one time, after I had been in my second critique group for about a year, I wrote a short story that I felt was strong. I also had a strong feeling that at least one of the members in my critique group was going to rip it apart and make me lose confidence in it. So I submitted it to a children's writing contest without showing at anyone first. It was my first contest and my first First Prize.
After that, I began to gain more confidence. But I still felt that I needed someone else's feedback before I submitted a manuscript to a publisher. Then, about three years ago, when I was in another critique group, I wrote a bilingual Halloween rhyming picture book. I knew the members of my critique group would say was too scary for little kids. So instead of sending it to them, before I submitted it to an editor, I entered it in another writing contest. I won First Prize again, and that was enough of a critique for me. I began submitting it to publishers. It took a while, but last year Henry Holt bought it (it's GATOS BLACK ON HALLOWEEN).
In terms of receiving valuable critiques, if you ever have the opportunity and can afford a professional critique from an editor or a well published author, I highly recommend it. Early in my career, I paid for a couple of critiques that weren't very helpful. Then I discovered my two mentors both of whom (at different times) gave me one-on-one correspondence courses that involved in-depth critiquing of my work. Each cost me $500, but they were better than college courses. I highly recommend a one-on-one mentorship with an established, published author. But it's also important to find an author who is also a writing teacher or professor at a college or university or who has worked as a professional editor. Both of my mentors teach in colleges. I give professional critiques, and although I have never taught writing at a college, I was an editor for 10 years. You may find information on my critique service on this website.
When I worked with my mentors, I already had a knack for creating characters and developing plot. But I had and still have a tendency to be long-winded, as you can see by the length of the answers to your questions. Yet when writing for children, your work needs to be tight. I also had a tendency to repeat things and to overwrite because wanted to drive the point home. One of my mentors taught me to take different colored highlighters and highlight the areas of repetition with one color, areas of introspection with another color, areas of description with yet another color, etc. That helped me to go back and focus on those areas and delete the repetition and tighten the areas with too much exposition and narration, etc. Working with my editor at Scholastic has also been very helpful toward developing a tight writing style for younger readers.
I now have 2 "virtual" critique groups. One is for novels and the other for PBs. I email or fax the mss to different writer friends and they give me comments. When they have something for me to read, they send it to me. It's not a formal "group." I just send the ms out to different friends until I have enough comments that I'm happy with. That is, if I have a problem I keep sending it to friends until someone can help me solve it.