Writing Words for Nerds #AtoZChallenge--U is for Unique

“My book is fantastic!” he said. “And it’s unique! There’s no way anyone has ever written anything like it.”

I rolled my eyes, which was okay, because no one can hear you roll your eyes over the telephone. I think.

This was a friend of my husband, and he needed to talk to me because he had just written a children’s book, and he wanted someone to publish it.

Unlike me, he didn’t have a literature degree and he wasn’t published even once in some local magazine, forget about having years of experience as a newspaper and magazine writer and illustrator. He was just a dad who had made up a story that entertained his kid. But in his heart he knew it was the best thing since The Cat in the Hat, only better.

Too bad he wasn’t a celebrity. Then maybe his story would have had a shot.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “How many picture books have you read?”

“I don’t need to read any picture books,” he said. “I just need to you to tell me how you get a publisher.”

“It doesn’t work like that.” I sighed. “You have to read children’s books to make sure it hasn’t been done before.”

“I know it hasn’t, because it’s unique.” There he went again.

I wasn’t about to ask him what made it unique. The way he skirted the subject, I could tell he was afraid that I was going to steal his fantastic and unique idea.

Yeah, it doesn’t work like that, either. Real writers like me have more ideas than we know what to do with. We don’t go around stealing them.

Eventually, I gave up and told him to buy a copy of the latest Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market guide. I felt bad about helping someone add to the world’s slush piles. Stuff like that gives the rest of us a bad name. It makes publishers close their doors to submissions, which makes everything harder for those of us who know what we’re doing. Sometimes we even give up on the submission process, which means the slush piles get worse and worse, and the door openings get narrower and narrower.  

But there wasn’t anything else I could do. In his eyes, his story was amazing. He said so, so it had to be true! Why couldn’t I just take his word for it? And why was I standing in the way of his obviously brilliant idea? So I didn’t. I gave in. I wasn’t about to destroy his day-old dream of publishing a picture book and becoming richer than J.K. Rowling all because of his brilliant and unique idea that took him all of five minutes to come up with. I left that up to the publishers.

So I how do I know his story wasn’t all that he thought it was?

Because he made it clear that he didn’t read children’s books.

That means his story had either been written a hundred times before, or it actually WAS unique—but only because there was something so horrible wrong with it that no decent editor would allow it to be published. 

This isn’t to say that it’s impossible to write something unique and worthy of publication. It certainly IS possible, and it’s something every writer should aim for.

But the way to get there isn’t by refusing to read the books that already exist in your intended genre.

No, the way to get there is by reading and reading and reading some more in your chosen genre. It’s by analyzing those books to figure out what works and what doesn’t and why. It’s by reading nonfiction books that show you how to analyze and understand your chosen genre. It’s by reading until you discover there’s a book you need to read in that genre but can’t because it hasn’t been written yet. Only once you’ve made that discovery, will you have truly found the seed of something unique.

But that’s just the seed.

To help it grow into a beautiful and unique flower, you’re going to have to plant it in good soil, water it, feed it, and nurture it.

Because a story isn’t just an idea. That’s why you can’t copyright an idea. A story is an idea expressed in a unique way. Only the way the idea is expressed can be copyrighted. 

J.K. Rowling wasn’t the first person to write a kids’ book about a school of wizardry, but she was the first person to create Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley and all the things that make Harry Potter one of the most popular series of all time.

So how do you come up with a unique way of expressing a story idea?

It starts by reading and reading and reading some more. By analyzing those books to figure out what works and what doesn’t and why.  By looking for the things you can say that no one else has said—not because they’re horribly wrong, but because no one with your unique way of looking at the world and expressing what you see has ever tried it before.

That’s how you develop the one thing every editor and every agent says he or she is looking for: a unique voice.

All of this takes time. If you just decided to be a children’s book writer yesterday, trust me, you’re nowhere close. Pick up a bunch of children’s books are start reading.  Analyze what you read. How many pages are there? How many words are on a page? How much of the story is told through the text, and how much through the illustrations? Is there dialogue? Who’s the main character? What age? Is there something on the right-hand page that makes you want to turn the page to find out what happens next? To quote Mem Fox, “Writing a picture book is like writing War and Peace in haiku.” This job is a lot harder than it looks.

Or as Pablo Picasso put it, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”

You first need to learn what a voice is before you can develop one that’s unique to you. You need to understand the rules before you can break them, or at least make them your own.

So what exactly is a writer’s voice? More on that in my next blog post. 

Is It Possible to Make Your Childhood Dreams Come True?

When I was little, the thing I enjoy doing most of all was creating worlds with my older sister and younger brothers. Our building blocks were made of wood, plastic, and pretty much anything else we could get our hands on. We made pirate ships out of Tinker Toys, and cities out of blocks and plastic tracks for toy cars. We populated them with plastic soldiers and plastic animals. But these weren’t just toys in my mind. Assembling these worlds was only the first step. When everything was ready, the stories began. A zebra could be a queen, a soldier a king. And the stories that could grow out of them were as endless as childhood days.

Already back then, I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up: I wanted to create worlds.

Of course, I soon discovered that THAT job was already taken. (And what a fine job the Creator doing, too. I particularly love the Many World theory. If I could, I would also create an infinite number of worlds.)

The next best thing in my mind then was to create worlds by making movies or TV shows. After all, filmmakers get to create worlds that have a physical reality. You can see a movie. You can hear it. And what you see and what you hear are determined by the creators of that movie. I wanted to be one of those creators.

And then I grew up.

I discovered that to the most part filmmaking is a collaborative process. I might have a vision of this world that I want to create, but if I try to turn that into a movie I’ll have to deal with many other people who will want to impose their vision of what this world should be. And I didn’t want to have to deal with people like that. Sure, collaborating was fun when my sister and my brothers generally agreed about the rules of the stories we were creating. But it wouldn’t have been at all fun if someone had grabbed the toy zebra and said, “Don’t be ridiculous. A zebra can’t be a queen!

So for a while, I locked the part of myself that wanted to create worlds away. It’s not that I stopped creating stories; I could no more do that than a singer could give up singing or a dancer could give up dancing. Creating stories is a part of who I am. I do it from the time I wake up to time I fall asleep. But I gave up on the idea of sharing my stories with others. I watched them play on the little screen in my mind.  My characters made me laugh and cry and smile, and that was enough.

Life went on. Writing and drawing turned into things I did for newspapers and magazines, things I did for a living. And I loved it, until I had to quit when we moved back to the USA so that we could find a better school for my autistic son.

Without a job, I had to ask myself what I wanted to do.

And then I remembered how I felt when I was a little kid building worlds out of wooden blocks and plastic toys. I remembered wanting to create worlds. And I thought about all those worlds that were already a part of me. Those characters had given me so much. What if there were others who needed these stories and these characters as much as I did? So I decided to write those stories down and share them with the world.

I love writing stories. It makes me happy. I love spending time with Toren the Teller, Gilbert and Amber from the Legend of Gilbert the Fixer, and most of my other characters. I also love sharing them with you. When Gilbert says something that makes me laugh, I get a second smile on my face, just thinking about how it’s going to make you laugh, too. There’s no way I’m giving that up.

But lately, I’ve been thinking about that dream that I gave up on, my dream of being a filmmaker.

Times have changed.

When I was a teenager, there was no such thing as YouTube. My sister, my younger brothers and I sometimes made short videos. We lip-synched “We Are the World.” (My sister did a great Bob Dylan.) We played with perspective, so my brother could stand on my hand. We used stop motion to make a Play-Doh snake swallow a plastic tank after the tank ran over it. I remember one stop-motion piece I made on my own with scissors dancing in what looked like a ballet. These videos were so much fun to make, but probably not more than a dozen people got to see any of them, and I have no idea where they are now.

Nowadays, though, anyone can make a video and share it with the world. I couldn’t make my dream come true back then, but is there really anything stopping me now?

So I went out and bought the equipment. I’ve got a brand-new video camera, and even a teleprompter. And I’m excited! I’m going to be making videos, and I have so many ideas for them.

I plan to create a channel where I talk about the things I love: movies, tech, TV shows, books, games, and more. Too often great things disappear because not enough people hear about them. I want to try to make a difference, and I want to use video to do it.

I know it’s not the same thing as creating worlds, but the worlds I create are still too big for the kind of budget an amateur like me can afford to produce on video. That’s okay, though. Like I said, there’s no limit to how big a world I can create on paper, and I plan to continue doing just that.  

Is there something you loved doing when you were little or something you wanted to do when you grew up? If so, what’s stopping you from doing it now?   

It doesn’t have to be big.  Just take a small step in the right direction.

Make a video and post it on YouTube. Publish a short book with CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing. Go to one of those studios that let you take home a painting you’ve made yourself. (I’ve done that, and it’s fun.)

The painting I made at Make Me, Take Me. It's not a fine work of art, but it was fun to make and I like it.

If you have the chance to rediscover something that once brought you so much joy, why wouldn’t you take it?