Dan Koboldt joined me today to talk about two wonderful resources for writers - Putting the Science in Fiction & Putting the Fact in Fantasy - both of which edited. Originally published to help genre writers, these collections are a great addition to any writer's shelf, covering topics as broad as mental illness, to moving through the woods.
Double the Recipe for Poetry
by Colleen Alles
The Recipe from The Binnacle Boy
The year I was born, Newberry Medal winner Paul Fleischman published a collection of three long, short stories—one of which features a deaf girl who reads the lips of fellow townspeople as they whisper confessions to a statue of a binnacle boy. This is how she discovers how the entire crew of the Orion was murdered.
The story was impossibly imaginative to me the first time I read it in 5th grade—so much so that years later, I sought out a copy of Graven Images (Candlewick Press). In the book’s afterward—published nearly 25 years later—Fleischman, who writes for young people, does something amazing: he explains where he got the idea.
Or rather, how.
In biology, Fleischman writes in the Afterward, fertilization usually takes two parties; I’ve often found it to be the same with books.
Here’s how it happened: Fleischman had been researching sealers—men who sailed the South Atlantic in the 1800s hunting seals. One detail—a photograph of a boy carved from wood who held a ship’s compass—stayed in his mind. These ornate statues were called binnacle boys. Around the same time, he happened to catch a television program about South America in which a long line of people waited to approach a statue of a saint to pray. He was also reading the Old Testament at the time, thinking about judgmental or pious characters. Lastly, a few memories from his own life bubbled to the surface of his mind—in particular, the time he spent living across the street from a school for the deaf.
This is the magic from which The Binnacle Boy emerged. Devouring Fleischman’s explanation, I was in awe. This is how you do it, I thought. He’s given away the recipe for writing:
¼ cup random facts you find fascinating—the ones that perch on your shoulder and won’t leave you alone, even as you’re falling asleep
¼ cup what you are reading
¼ cup what happened to you this week
¼ cup your most pertinent memories
Double the Recipe for Poetry
So, how does Fleischman’s generous recipe sharing connect to the world of poetry? I think the same recipe can be used to create meaningful and impactful poems—that the poems we feel in our bones come, in part, from this recipe. The more a reader connects with the key ingredients, the more he or she will remember the poem, read it again later, share it with someone else.
Which is what we’ve seen happening lately with a bit of a resurgence of interest in poetry as of late—everything from the influx of Rupi Kaur poems dominating my social media feed to Amanda Gorman’s unforgettable reading at President Biden’s inauguration. My home state is (finally) taking steps to create an official position for a Poet Laureate. When war broke out in Ukraine in late February (rather, when the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine re-escalated in late February of 2022), amidst news articles and opinion pieces, I encountered more than once loved ones sharing the Ilya Kaminsky poem We Lived Happily During the War.
How we heal
Last week, in West Michigan, there was one afternoon when it felt nice to be outside on the back deck, despite the wind and 52-degree temperature. The sun was out. Spring had sprung—kind of. My daughter remembered we’d bought popsicles on our last adventure to the grocery store, and jubilantly licked at her grape treat, insisting she didn’t need a coat.
I sat next to my dog on the deck, idly running my fingers over his ears. I’d learned a few days ago that he would likely need surgery, which didn’t come as a surprise. He’d been struggling for weeks—an injured cruciate ligament. Not life-threatening, but not easy either to watch him limp along on our evening walks—particularly as I use that time to catch up on news podcasts detailing the horrors of Putin initiating attacks on Ukrainian civilians.
At one point, I looked up and saw a cardinal in a high branch of a nearby tree. I watched it hop three times toward a nest I had never noticed. Cardinals make me think of my father—a native of Southern Illinois and lifelong Cardinals stan. He was due to have surgery as well at the end of the month, and while there was no reason to capital-w Worry, I had been thinking about his heart, which doctors had recently noted may need a pacemaker down the line. I’d also been letting go of a friendship that meant a lot to me, yet had grown too threadbare to continue, and I’d had to learn how to let it go, as much as I had wanted to keep holding on.
All of this is to say, suddenly, as the cardinal chirped out, as my daughter grinned at me with purple all over her lips, I wrote a poem in one moment in my head about how when we are hurting, there is always something we can do to take steps away from the depths of our uncertainty and into a place of more optimism, more light, more hope.
I pecked how we heal into my phone in the forty-five seconds before I heard my husband’s truck pull into the driveway, which made the dog bark, and Mara desperately needed to wash her sticky hands, and I was sure it was time to start making dinner—even as I looked forward, later, to taking a longer look at my quickly-drafted lines to see if there was anything in what I’d written worth sharing.
Colleen Alles is an award-winning writer living in West Michigan. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of literary magazines. Her first full-length poetry collection, After the 8-Ball, is available now from Cornerstone Press (the University of Wisconsin, Steven’s Point). Colleen is a graduate of Michigan State University and Wayne State University, and a contributing editor for short fiction at Barren Magazine. When she isn’t reading or writing, she enjoys distance running and spending time with her family, including her beloved hound, Charlie. You can find her online at www.colleenalles.com, on Instagram at ColleenAlles_author, and on Twitter at @ColleenAlles.
The Saturday Slash
Don't be afraid to ask for help with the most critical first step of your writing journey - the query.
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My thoughts are in blue, words to delete are in red, suggested rephrasing is in orange.
Eleven-year-old Frederick David Jones is bored of school and routine and boredom. In general, having a main character who is bored can be a hard sell. Reading about someone else's boredom is... boring. You've also got an echo here (repeated use of the word). Instead, find a synonym - unfullfilled, dissatsified.. etc His solution: wander into the woods. When he accidentally drifts off, What does this mean? Floats away? Falls asleep? he wakes up Aha! Fell asleep - but you need to say as much to find the trees have grown about a hundred feet tall and look about a million years old. But did they, actually? Is he in a different place or in a Rip Van Winkle situation? A spirit lady warns that the world is fading and he must strive to “remember.” What does this mean? What world is fading? What does he need to remember? How does he feel about this? Back home, after months of trying to reconcile the two worlds, a failed attempt to run away, from what / who? and a whole lot of magically skipping through time, this is potentially confusing - is he skipping through time in our world? Their world? What is the connection to the plot? What is he trying to remember? Which world is fading and what is at stake? he meets Sage Namid Luna, a weird, home-schooled kid who just moved from the countryside and who has no qualms about holding hands. They venture into the woods and pass into the other realm, but everything has turned monochrome and misty, and the spirit has become a monster. They flee, but when Frederick emerges from the fog, Sage is gone. I don't really understand how all of these things form together to create the plot.
Frederick must resist an ever-strengthening time-skipping curse, gather his friends, escape the authoritarian adults, and charge into the woods (now crawling with cops) to find Sage and stop the insatiable spirit-turned-monster even as the greyness seeps into the eyes of the people around him and the fog leaks between worlds, throwing into question the separation of the two places and threatening to blanket everything and everyone in mindless, colorless, everlasting nothing.
Why is time skipping a curse? He was bored to begin with, now time skipping is a curse, not fun? Was it fun in the first place? What is he trying to remember and why will that stop the grayness? You say he has friends, but they're not mentioned. He sounds like a loner. Why are the adults authoritarian? Why did he try to run away? If the spirit is now the monster, was her warning bad... or good? Should the places be separate? Is that bad or good? you can see that right now I have a lot of questions about how these disparate elemeents tie together to create the actual plot, and the query will need to do more work to illustrate that.
FREDERICK AND THE WOODLANDS is a 51,000-word YA If he's 11, it's definitely more MG novel somewhere between urban fantasy and magical realism. Its primary audience is 12-18, but it will appeal to a wide range of ages. That may be true, but they want to market it to a certain age group, and kids tend to want to read UP - by that I mean, about kids older than them. They don't want to read about younger kids. With your protag being 11, this is definitely in the MG realm The novel uses magic as a means to explore such relevant themes as coming of age, conformity, expectations, belonging, consumerism, ontology, and the human-environment relationship in today’s dynamic world. It very well could, but I don't see those reflected in the description above.
Elements of the story and voice evoke books like Colin Meloy’s WILDWOOD, Katherine Paterson’s BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA and Brandon Mull’s FABLEHAVEN; movies like Wes Anderson’s MOONRISE KINGDOM, Hayao Miyazaki’s MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO, and Guillermo Del Toro's PAN’S LABYRINTH; and shows like Patrick McHale’s OVER THE GARDEN WALL and the Duffer brothers’ STRANGER THINGS. Good comps, but too many - pick two!
I am a young writer living in Fort Collins, Colorado, where I study political economy and environment in graduate school. I have been published in a local magazine and a college literary journal, and I have a minor in creative writing. This project—hopefully—will be my first published novel. Name your college journal and don't bother mentioning that you don't have any novel credits yet - it's assumed.
I hope you will consider FREDERICK AND THE WOODLANDS for representation. Please find the first [] pages below. Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing from you.