If the wine is sour…

Hi everyone,

Last week I decided it was time to get a new story going. I’ve been talking lately about the need for more children’s stories. I wrote an article about it for a reading journal. I’m been reminded of the power of stories in young lives by some recent fan letters about books I wrote decades ago. Got another one three days ago, from a woman who loved The Huffin Puff Express when her dad read it to her 39 years ago and is now reading it to young ones in her family. But I didn’t have an idea for a new story. What to do?

I had a thought. Many of my poems are small stories. It’s my nature. MARY JO FRESCH and I have a title coming out later this year that features 101 of my poems. I would scroll through them in search of a story-starter for a new picture book. When I finished, I had three candidates. The most promising was about a dancing pig. “Hot diggity-dig, I see a dancing pig, he isn’t very big, hot diggity-dig.” I seem to have an affinity for feisty pigs a la Piggy Wiglet and the Great Adventure. I started roughing in a story inspired by the hot diggity-dig pig but stopped after a bit. It didn’t feel right to pull from material that will soon be in the new book. I started over by making a list of words that rhymed with tail, hoping that approach might produce a different telling about a dancing pig. But I would still be plagiarizing myself.

One of the words in the tail-rhyming list was mail. A totally new idea. I went whistling off down a new road about a boy who finds mysterious messages in his mailbox. Great! Except that I really didn’t have a convincing beginning, kids probably don’t pay much attention to their mailbox, and the ending was, frankly, weak. I started over, switching from mailbox to phone (technology don’t you know) improved on the first and last of the story, salvaged most of the middle pages, and what did I have? A boring, weak, trite, who-would-ever-want-to-read-this story. I showed it to Sandy. If she reads this, I think she will agree with what I am saying. Over the course of a week I’d gone from a dancing pig to a boy receiving strange messages on his cellphone, and a beginning that telegraphed the ending.

As a sweaty, wined-up Michelangelo, played by Charlton Heston, epiphanized on a problem he was having with the Sistine Chapel, “If the wine is sour, pour it out.” Simple advice that writers as well as artists should take to heart. I have symbolically poured the story out. It’s time to write one that tastes sweeter.