Lighthouse Travel Research--Mapping the Station

 

As mentioned in my last post, my recent lighthouse research trip provided insight into the isolation and loneliness my protagonist would feel at a remote location. But it also helped me map my fictional setting and put the buildings in likely spots. After all, I don’t want the buildings to move to different locations in the middle of the book.

Besides the tower and the keepers’ house, each lighthouse station had several outbuildings. In the days before automated lighthouses, all stations had a fuel building that was located away from the other structures because of the volatile nature of its contents. Most stations had either a fog bell or a foghorn, also separate from the light and the keepers’ dwelling, possibly in the futile hope that it wouldn’t disturb the keepers’ families during the night.

Then there was the outhouse, which was a necessity well into the twentieth century for some of the more isolated lighthouse stations. The outhouse was often built of brick, and a typical one had two holes for adults and a smaller one for children.

It was also common for a lighthouse station to have a barn and a boathouse. Some also had a tramway, which wasn’t a building as much as an elevator designed to haul supplies up a cliff from the dock below.

Before we went on our trip, I tried to draw a preliminary map of my fictional Lonely Rock Lighthouse station, but I knew it was incomplete. After returning, I drew the one at the head of this post. As I write the story, I may discover the need to add additional topographical features, but at least I know where the buildings are.

A map keeps buildings from moving around unexpectedly or characters from walking in the wrong direction to reach them, and location research can help develop that map even for a fictional setting.

And that’s especially important when the setting is a character in the story.

Lighthouse Travel Research--How Lonely is Lonely?

 

I recently returned from a trip to New England to research lighthouses for my next book. My protagonist will be living in an isolated lighthouse in 1924, and I’ll have to create the atmosphere. Although my lighthouse is fictional, it will be a composite of several historical lighthouses located offshore in very lonely settings. So it was helpful to know exactly how isolated some of these lighthouses are.

We didn’t have time to see each of the hundreds of lighthouses along the New England coast, or even to sample some from each New England state, so we selected a few in Rhode Island and Maine. Unfortunately, things are much different now than they were in 1924, and many lighthouses that used to be almost inaccessible are now easy to reach by car or ferry. That also meant there were lots of tourists to interfere with the isolated feeling. Even more problematic for doing research, the loneliest ones are not open to the public and can be viewed only from the water.

The Portland Head Light in Maine isn’t really as isolated as it looks in the photo at the head of this post. It was lonely in the sense that it probably had no near neighbors, but it’s on the mainland and not too far from a village—at least close enough to go into town whenever supplies ran low. The same is true of the nearby Cape Elizabeth Lights (two twin lights, only one of which can be seen in the second photo), Pemaquid Point Light (Photo 3), and West Quoddy Head Light (Photo 4), all in Maine.

The Southeast Block Island Light in Rhode Island (Photo 5) was probably the remotest one we saw in terms of distance from the mainland. It took us thirty minutes to get there by high-speed ferry and would have taken three hours by the slower car ferry. Even so, the Southeast light was only a few miles from a tourist town that was probably thriving during most of the years the lighthouse was inhabited.

There was a more isolated lighthouse on the island, but it turned out to be too isolated for us. It would have cost too much to take the car on the ferry, so we planned on renting bikes. Unfortunately, I hadn’t ridden in years, and even Roland, who rides almost every day, was having trouble controlling his rental bike. So we gave up and walked to the closer lighthouse with the idea of taking a taxi to the more isolated North Block Island Light. But we discovered—in time, fortunately—that the road ended short of the lighthouse and we would still have had a twenty minute walk over sand to reach it. Aside from the fact that our legs were already tired from walking to the other lighthouse, we would never have made it back in time to catch the return ferry.

The sixth photo shows the North Block Island Light taken from the ferry. It was quite a distance away and I was fortunate to get even this poor-quality shot.

Beavertail Lighthouse in Rhode Island (Photo 7) and Bass Harbor Head Light in Maine are both located on populated islands. Bass Harbor Light is in Arcadia National Park and actually felt the most isolated because we had to wait thirty minutes in a traffic backlog to get a spot in the small parking lot. The lighthouse itself was a disappointment, though, because the area around it was too tight to get the entire complex in a single picture. As you can see from Photo 8, which was taken from the rocks below the lighthouse, the fog was also a problem at Bass Harbor.

We saw one other lighthouse on an island, also in Rhode Island. The final picture shows the Rose Island Light, which is on a small island close to the mainland. It shared Rose Island with a military installation in the days when families lived there. Actually, it doesn’t seem to have been a regular military base, but some officers were lodged on the island with their families. So that wasn’t as isolated as I wanted, either.

Still, I did get a peak at the loneliness the keepers and their families might have felt.

And it’s always good to feel the atmosphere before writing it.

A Tribute to Beverly Cleary

 

Beverly Cleary died in March, just short of her 105^th birthday. She was a classic children’s author who made it her mission to write about ordinary children with ordinary lives—and make everyone want to read those stories. That’s a real talent.

A professional children’s librarian, Beverly’s fiction was shaped by comments she heard from reluctant patrons. The boys, who were brought in by their teacher during school hours, weren’t interested in what the library had to offer. Instead, they asked where the books were “for kids like us.”  So when Beverly wrote her first book, Henry Huggins, she remembered incidents that had happened to boys she knew and changed them to fit the book.

Beverly’s second book was Ellen Tebbits. Today it is one of her lesser-known works, but not to me. Ellen Tebbits was one of the first books I owned as a child, purchasing it through the Scholastic Book Club at school. I loved it then, and I love it now.

Ellen Tebbits is a good example of how well Beverly fulfilled her mission. Ellen and I shared a similar experience, although mine occurred several years after I first read the book. In the first chapter, Ellen is desperate to keep her friends from finding out that her mother makes her wear woolen underwear. When I was in junior high, somebody noticed there were three straps under my blouse. The bra and slip straps were okay (many girls wore slips back then), but the third strap was an undershirt and the girls in my class laughed over it.

I just finished reading Beverly Cleary’s two memoirs, A Girl from Yamhill (through high school) and On My Own Two Feet (from college through marriage and the publication of her first book). Like with her fiction, she takes what was a relatively ordinary life and makes it interesting.

One amusing fact is her attitude towards reading at home. Her mother frequently read aloud to her, but Beverly refused to read to herself outside school. Because of a sub-par first-grade teacher and days missed due to illness, she could barely read when she started second grade. Her second-grade teacher quickly changed that, but Beverly still didn’t read at home.

Thanks to Miss Marius, I could read, but I refused to read outside of school.

“Everyone in our family has always loved to read,” said my puzzled mother. “I can’t understand why you won’t.”

Neither could I, but I felt reading should be confined to school and only when required.

Fortunately, she got bored one rainy Sunday afternoon during third grade, so she picked up a book and was hooked.

But I’m going to concentrate on several of the lessons that I and other writers can learn from her experience.

First was her determination to always try. In fourth grade, a store across from her school announced an essay contest, and many of her classmates said they were going to enter. I’m guessing Beverly’s essay was good, but that wasn’t the reason she won. Nobody else had even tried.

Similarly, she entered a Camp Fire Girls contest for a bulletin cover, and she “produced a cover of sorts. Once again I won a prize, not because my cover had any artistic merit, but because no one else entered the contest.”

As Beverly wrote after telling about the essay contest, “This incident was one of the most valuable lessons in writing I ever learned. Try! Others will talk about writing but may never get around to trying.”

During the writing process, Beverly tried to follow her mother’s advice to make it funny and keep it simple. And after her first book was published, she resolved to ignore all trends and not be influenced by money.

Anyone who is interested in writing for children, or simply wants to learn about children’s authors, should read A Girl from Yamhill and On My Own Two Feet. The last chapter of On My Own Two Feet, which talks about the process she used when writing Henry Huggins, is especially helpful for aspiring children’s authors.

So get out and read before you write.

Writing Middle-Grade Fiction

 

Five weeks ago I used a post discussing Madeleine L’Engle’s philosophy about writing for children. This week I’m giving you a laundry list of techniques that work with her ideas, making these two posts the perfect book-ends for a series on writing for children. Today’s post was published on the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog on March 14, 2018.

Writing Middle-Grade Fiction

As mentioned in my May 31, 2021 post, middle-grade fiction is adult fiction written for a younger audience. In other words, middle-grade readers expect the same tightly written story, gripping plot, and believable characters that adults do. So don’t attempt to write middle-grade fiction unless you are willing to learn the techniques used by respected authors who write for grown-ups.

What are these techniques? Here is a partial list.

·       Hook the reader at the very beginning (the first sentence, paragraph, or page).

·       Use a consistent point-of-view. Even if there are several POV characters, make the POV consistent within a scene.

·       Show, don’t tell.

·       Give the protagonist and other major players distinctive personalities and individual character arcs.

·       Ensure that your main plot has rising stakes and plenty of conflict and tension. Middle-grade readers can handle a lot of bad news (think Harry Potter).

·       Write natural-sounding dialogue that doesn’t copy actual speech (e.g., avoid words like “um,” pauses, and meaningless words and phrases unless they convey something about the character or the action).

·       Eliminate unnecessary description, dialogue, and action. If it doesn’t add something vital to the story, cut it out.

·       Write with strong nouns and verbs (avoiding most adjectives and adverbs).

·       Trust your readers (e.g., don’t tell readers what they can figure out for themselves).

·       Provide a satisfying ending. Surprises are good, and the reader doesn’t have to see it coming. But the reader should be able to look back with hindsight and say, “of course.”

Look for writers’ conferences and online classes that teach these principles. And since they are the same for older audiences, you aren’t limited to conferences and classes geared to middle-grade authors.

Obviously, there are a few differences between adult and middle-grade fiction, and I discussed those in earlier posts. But the actual techniques are the same.  

As Madeleine L’Engle said, “a children’s book must be, first and foremost, a good book, a book with a young protagonist with whom the reader can identify, and a book which says yes to life.”¹

So if you want to write one, first learn the basics of writing fiction for adults.

__________

¹ Walking on Water

Age It Right: Part III

 

This last of the “Age It Right” series was posted on the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog on August 16, 2017. There will, however, be another post on writing for children next week.

Age It Right: Part III

Vocabulary is an important part of aging a children’s book. There are several resources to guide you on vocabulary level, including Children’s Writers’ Word Book by Alihandra Mogilner and online vocabulary and spelling lists for parents and teachers arranged by grade. Use them.

But don’t rely on them.

First, these lists can’t cover every word in a child’s vocabulary. Just because a word isn’t on the list doesn’t mean your readers won’t know it.

Second, readers want to be challenged. For each of the middle-grade books I have completed so far, I used between six and nine beta readers spread over four grades. I asked them to complete a questionnaire, and here are two of the questions I asked:

Were there any words you didn’t know before but could figure out from the story? If so, write them here.

Were there any words that you didn’t understand unless you looked them up in a dictionary or asked someone older? If so, write them here.

Even though I frequently used words from the fifth and sixth grade lists, the third and fourth grade beta readers listed them in response to the first question rather than the second, indicating that they got the meaning from the text. So don’t let these lists limit you.

While it is important to challenge your readers, it is equally important not to frustrate them. If they have to make frequent trips to the dictionary (or to the kitchen to ask their parents), they’ll put the book down and leave it there.

So how can you challenge without frustrating? The best approach is to use context clues. In my first middle-grade book, Desert Jewels, Emi’s parents tell her to come to the parlor after she finishes washing the dishes. I don’t come right out and tell readers that “parlor” was a common word for living room or what we might now call the family room, but when she got there she found Papa reading a newspaper and Mama knitting a sock and she sat on a piano stool to talk to them (implying the presence of a piano). Other passages explicitly mention the piano in the room and a fancy clock that sits on top of it. The piano and Emi’s parents’ activities while in the parlor help today’s readers understand what the room is.

Then there is the word “spews,” which occurs in a tanka (a type of Japanese poem) that begins the book. It was on one beta reader’s list of words that she had never heard before but could figure out from the context. In this case, it is the words immediately around it that provide the clues:

Hate spews from your lips,
Calling me a “Dirty Jap.”
I don’t understand.
Although I don’t look like you,
I am an American.

Although context clues are the best way to increase a child’s vocabulary, there are rare times when they are not sufficient or when using them makes the passage convoluted or clunky. Desert Jewels tells the story of a Japanese American girl caught up in the anti-Japanese sentiment of World War II. I used some Japanese words for authenticity, but I couldn’t define them by context alone. In some cases the solution was simple—my protagonist didn’t understand them either, so she asked what they meant, and the reader learned along with her. But that approach won’t work if the person asking would already know, so use it sparingly.  

“Oh,” you may say, “I’ll just use a glossary.” Personally, I think that’s a copout. Expecting your readers to leaf back and forth between the story and a glossary is only a little better than sending them to the dictionary. Rely on context clues and a rare question instead.

That said, I did add a short glossary to Desert Jewels because of the Japanese words and some important but now mostly archaic English words and terms used at the time. But it is there to reinforce what the reader learns through context clues and the occasional question, not to replace it.

So when choosing vocabulary, write your story to challenge your readers without frustrating them.

Age It Right--Part II

 

This is a reprint of my August 9, 2017 post from the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog.

Age It Right: Part II

When writing for children, the subject matter must be suitable for the age level. That doesn’t mean you can’t deal with tough issues, but you must do it appropriately.

I’ll use death as an example.

Even the youngest children can be faced with the death of a loved one, so it makes sense to cover the issue in picture books. Some tell a story using animals as characters. Others talk about the death of a pet. Then there are books like Tomie dePaola’s Nana Upstairs & Nana Downstairs, which emphasizes the memories that remain after a boy’s great-grandmother dies. Regardless of the approach, the purpose at this age is always to comfort and never to frighten.

In picture books, the death usually occurs by natural causes, such as sickness or old age. There is no violence.

Although violence is still unusual, middle-grade books treat death differently. Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia is the classic middle-grade novel on the subject. It begins by developing the friendship between the protagonist, Jess, and the new girl, Leslie. We come to love both characters, and when Leslie dies in an accident we cry with Jess over his (and our) loss. But the death takes place off-stage, and Jess learns to live with it. If you want to know more, you’ll have the read the book for yourself.

Bridge to Terabithia doesn’t treat death as gently as picture books do, but it still has a lighter touch than most young adult fiction. In fact, YA books can be quite dark. Two World War II novels by Ruta Sepetys illustrate this.

In between shades of gray, fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and her brother are arrested by the Soviets and sent to Siberia. Salt to the Sea follows four young people, three of whom are fleeing through East Prussia to escape the Soviets. Both books contain multiple deaths. Many are onstage, and all result from cruelty. As readers, we never come to terms with those deaths, and that’s how it should be.

As you can see, the age of the audience doesn’t necessarily limit the subject matter, but it does dictate how the writer treats it.

So tread carefully.

Age It Right: Part I

 

The next three posts are from a series I wrote for the Indiana Writers’ Consortium in 2017, with minor modifications to update some of the material. This particular article was published on August 2, 2017.

Age It Right: Part I

One of the most important—and difficult—aspects of writing for children is getting the age level right. Unfortunately, aging books appropriately is more of an art than a science. The best advice I can give you is to read recently written, currently popular books aimed at your audience. If you don’t know what they are, go to a physical bookstore and see what it carries on its shelves, then take them home and read them. Or you can get them at the library (or for your e-book) after you’ve complied a list of titles, but don’t do your original research there. A brick and mortar bookstore gives you a better idea of what today’s children are actually reading.

Years ago, I decided to write a series of early chapter books. I read books in that category, studied length and vocabulary levels, and wrote my first two masterpieces. Then I submitted them to publishers and my dream collapsed. I’m particularly grateful to the one publisher who gave me detailed comments that helped me see that I didn’t understand what was appropriate for my audience.

I shelved that project and turned to writing for adults. But eventually I gave children’s books another try, this time at the middle-grade level. I have published two middle-grade historical novels (Desert Jewels and Creating Esther) as Kaye Page and have written several more that are currently circulating among publishers and agents.

Although the general process is more art than science, there are some guidelines you should be familiar with when writing for children, and these guidelines are more science than art. They aren’t rules, and if you are J.K. Rowling or have an established following, you may be able to ignore them without serious consequences. But most of us are better off sticking to the guidelines.

The guidelines vary from publisher to publisher and few people are in complete agreement about what they are, but the following chart is representative. The categories come from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and I referred to several sources when preparing the actual guidelines.

 In general, children prefer to read about main characters who are just slightly older than the reader. As for length, when writing middle grade and young adult fiction, the longer lengths listed in the chart are for fantasy and science fiction, which tend to be longer than other genres. And don’t confuse category and genre. Children’s books—especially at the middle grade and YA levels—cover the same range of genres as adult books do, from historical to humorous to fantasy to YA romance. The “type” in the chart is a category, not a genre.

Although the guidelines are helpful, the hardest part of aging your book is finding the right subject matter and sensitivity level. That is the topic of next week’s blog post.