Writing the Picture Book

Writing a picture book is not easy. Which is probably why I’ve always wanted to write one, kind of like wanting to climb Kilimanjaro or run a marathon—could I really do it?

For one thing, I’m wordy and I know it. Confining myself to the equivalent of writing child-friendly haiku to tell an entire story isn't my style. For another, I just don’t think I have the kind of whimsy that appeals to very young children. Not that I haven’t tried. My first attempt was a book based on an adorable litter of kittens. I called it This Little Cat and submitted it to about a dozen houses. To my astonishment, the book was taken seriously (I must have done something right!) and received personal rejections from all the head acquisitions editors I submitted to. But the letters were still rejections. Eventually This Little Cat went on to be rewritten and reworked as “The Cat Circus” a poem that was published in The Divine Feline, an anthology of cat stories, poetry, and artwork.

That project is quite a few years behind me now, but I’m thinking (uh-oh) of trying another one. I know a new manuscript is going to take a long time: getting those word choices “word perfect” is a challenge indeed. To help me get into picture book mode, every few months I like nothing better than going to the library to spend an afternoon reading my way through the children’s section (although they’ve just got to do something about those low shelves and pint-sized chairs…).

Several weeks ago while I was there I gathered up some of the books scattered on the tables. Right away two things struck me: most had been favorites of my own as a small child, and all were about animals; talking animals nonetheless. Among those I particularly enjoyed were Millions of Cats by Wanda Ga’g; The Story of Babar, The Little Elephant by Jean de Brunhoff, BunBun at Bedtime by Sharon Pierce McCullough, and Astro Bunnies by Christine Loomis. Like all good picture books, the stories were not only illustrated with care and imagination, but they held my interest from beginning to end as complete “plot lines” centered on charming and believable characters.

After several years of doing this kind of research, I’ve come to some conclusions about why so many picture book manuscripts are rejected:

1. Too many characters; side stories; subplots. Published picture books have page lengths that rarely, if ever, vary. Like all books, they’re printed in multiples of 4. Baby or board books can be as short as 12 “pages,” but the general rule for a picture book is 28 or 32 pages depending on end papers, etc. The longer, more text-driven “story book” can have 48 pages. Those pages have to be coherent and focused.

2. Too many words. The PB word count is short. 1500 words is really pushing it and heading for rejection. I suggest scaling back—way back. 250 to 500 words are about right. With picture book text, less is always more.

3. Don’t illustrate your own work even if you’re a professional artist. Simply send in your text typed in the exact same manuscript form as a 350-page novel. If you are a professional artist seeking to illustrate children’s books, submit your artwork to the publisher’s art director according to their guidelines.

4. At the same time, there is absolutely nothing wrong in making a “dummy” mock-up for your own purposes. In fact, you should! One quick way is to simply fold 8 pieces of paper in half, giving you a little booklet of 32 pages. Play, draw, write and see how your story and line breaks work against the pages. You can also get a good idea of where “double page spreads” will give an illustrator something to really illustrate.

5. Your words should always inspire your illustrator. With that in mind, you don’t need a whole lot of description, sometimes none at all. The pictures will take care of that for you. But your words you do choose must be picture-generators.

6. Should you rhyme? As a general rule, I know editors like to say “never,” but then you will see rhyming text everywhere picture books are sold or read. Like talking animals, it really “depends on what the animals are saying,” as one well-known editor once put it. I think this “rule” about discouraging rhyming text started because of the amount of doggerel coming over the transom. To create good, clever rhyme is an art, and a difficult one at that.

7. Stories about inanimate objects. Just—don’t.

8. Talking animals (again). Some editors say “no,” and I say “phooey!” with one exception: religious or praying animals. You have no idea how many manuscripts I have been given to critique or edit that have included religious animals. I find them weird and I think most editors do, too.

9. Moralizing. Would you like your next exciting romantic suspense to end with: “Okay folks, listen up: lying, cheating, stealing, and killing are bad things and will make your nose grow crooked…” You wouldn’t do it to an adult reader, so please don’t do it to a kid!

Tip of the day: Okay, go write the next great picture book and make me proud! Spend some time at the library re-reading your favorites and checking out new titles. If nothing else, you’ll have a wonderful “artist’s date” reliving some of the best moments of your childhood.

Next post: a special interview with picture book author Margo Candelario on her new book, Looking to the Clouds for Daddy.

All About Better Than Perfect (Sort of)

Good news: Better Than Perfect has now been officially released and is for sale on Amazon.com, my website, Barnes and Noble, and anywhere else that sells books.

From the back cover: Can anyone be ‘better than perfect’? That’s the question lonely teenager Elizabeth Haddon struggles to answer when she is sent from England to live with relatives in Auckland, New Zealand. Arriving in the dead of winter, Elizabeth soon falls under the spell of her beautiful, but enigmatic cousin Ravenna who insists the most important thing in life is to ‘fit in.’ Elizabeth, who wants only to be accepted by her new family and their affluent social circle does her best to comply until she starts to see the cracks; cracks that turn into virtual canyons when tragedy strikes.

Yep, it’s a New Zealand story all right: dark, satiric, and ultimately (I hope) redemptive.

For a long time I’ve battled with “what New Zealand means to me.” For those who don’t know my background, I emigrated there from California a few weeks after my seventeenth birthday when my father, a New Zealander, decided he wanted to return home. For years I suppose he had imagined happy family reunions with me and my little brother being best friends with our extended family. And for awhile I suppose we were. Then real life took over, kind of like when they say that wherever you go you take yourself with you. We might have been thousands of miles from home, but we were still Americans. My mother was angry and depressed by the move, my father did his best to put a good face on things, and my little brother grew up wild. I stayed for as long as I could, eight years, and to this day don’t know if they were the worst or best years of my life. During that time, I was a displaced Persephone; my journey truly one of descent. For a year before I went to the university I studied nursing, until I could no longer bear working with the child abuse victims passing through the hospital wards and I became ill myself. Things I witnessed in New Zealand continue to haunt me: acts of violence borne of frustration from people trapped by weather and circumstance “with nowhere to go.”

My escape during those years was to immerse myself in New Zealand art and literature which I still think is some of the best in the world; precisely, I believe, because of the restrictions living on a tiny island at the bottom of the world can bring. It all started when I was in my one and only year of NZ high school and the late poet James K. Baxter visited the school a few months before he died. There isn’t room here to adequately describe the impact that visit had on me, but Baxter remains one of my most important literary influences to this day. Barefoot, red-eyed, straggle-haired, and draped in an ancient gray thrift-store suit, Baxter was as different from anyone I had known back in the San Fernando Valley could be. He may have been sick and dying at the time, but he could still recite his poetry with the power and madness of some Biblical prophet whirled in from a demonic wilderness. John the Baptist without the favor of God comes to mind. Baxter’s words and images burnt themselves into my memory; it is impossible to forget him and his rendition of “Thoughts of a Remuera Housewife.” I had only been in the country a few months, but already I knew what he was writing about: a suburban world so precisely “New Zealand” and yet so universal in its theme of “going through the motions” that it seemed to contain the whole of human experience in its brief stream-of-consciousness stanzas. I never forgot it and eventually it became the inspiration for me to write Better Than Perfect. I start the book with a quote from the poem: "….No, it’s not/ a world at all, but Pluto’s/ iron-black star; the quiet planet furthest from the sun." A few brief lines that sum up everything living in New Zealand was like for me.

Several meetings ago my writer’s group experimented with a technique adapted from Judy Reeves's A Writer’s Book of Days: write a full page as one sentence. We used the suggested prompt of “It’s all you could expect.” This is the unedited, raw version of what I wrote:

It’s all you could expect, my father said when he carried the sheep carcass up the hill toward my parents’ house, the lights shining like a beacon for the shell-shocked stragglers who still managed to make their ragged way up from the beach below where glass littered the tide pools and my brother caught minnows the size of his small hands when no one was looking and my mother sat in her room all day and night, shutting her ears to the sheep screaming and my father preparing to play Abraham sacrificing his first-born because God had commanded him and it was his right, his role, his dignity that was on the line and not some sob-story about “Daddy please just listen, just give me this one last chance to find the path I’m supposed to take,” and when the tide came in and crashed against the tide pools full of tiny snails and one-legged octopus, when my brother ran outside to hear the commotion and when even my mother unplugged her ears to hear the waves, the crashing, the thunder, the shouts of the drunken tourists demanding their rights on their beach on their land, then it all seemed like a Greek tragedy caught in the wrong place and the wrong century and all I could think of was opening the sheep pens and calling out the animals one by one before there were any more deaths, any more blood sprinkling this holy night of my father’s anger and his wish to follow a jealous God’s commandments.

Is it true? Yes and no. As another writer, Eunice Scarfe, so wisely says, “Any story told twice is a fiction.” This and Better Than Perfect are my stories told twice.

Thought of the day: What are your stories "told twice"?

Remembering Hugh Cook

Here’s what I’m thinking: If I hadn’t jumped up on a hot spring day in Auckland, New Zealand in the middle of an interminable political studies tutorial and declared myself an anarchist because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I would never have met the late New Zealand author, Hugh Cook, and I would never have become a writer. Unraveling this tangle of clues I also know I would not be writing this blog, or publishing my new book, or even maintaining a Facebook page if it were not for Hugh.

Why I signed up for that dreadful class on Scandinavian politics is still a mystery to me. I was in my third year at Auckland University, majoring in Spanish (taught by Welsh professors who insisted we speak with a dithinct Barthelona acthent) and for some crazy reason thought political studies would make a nice fit with Marquez and Lorca. I think I had the misguided notion the professors would be showing Ingmar Bergman films all day, or serving smorgasbord for lunch—whatever, the class was a horrible mistake. Instead of “Wild Strawberries” we studied middle-class voting statistics. The class was sheer torture and for no good reason except that I was bored, I remember standing up, the lone American in a sea of Kiwis (long story for another post), and shouting to some fellow idiot, “I don’t care what you think because I’m an anarchist.” After the few seconds of stunned silence and airless horror, the class became quite animated. Within minutes I’d been invited to several sit-ins, a street march to protest student fees, and numerous action groups. Except for one very interesting woman sitting next to me that day and who had just returned from Viet Nam where she had been working in an orphanage, I thought they were all nuts. I was also highly embarrassed. Despite my red face, the interesting woman promptly invited me home for lunch to discuss anarchy in what turned out to be a very civil setting. We soon became good friends, and from there I met an entirely new set of creative and fascinating people, including a fun-loving girl who introduced me to her best friend who before any of us knew it had fallen in love with the up and coming young New Zealand writer, Hugh Cook. And that was a shock because Hugh at the time was known as an eccentric, irascible, unromantic curmudgeon who delighted in writing cynical poetry for Craccum, the university newspaper. He scared me to death and I hoped I’d never have to meet him.

Fast forward a couple of years to London where I was working as an executive secretary in Europe’s largest advertising agency (yes, it was a lot like Mad Men. A lot.). One day as I was walking home from work, taking my usual route via up Regent’s Street and about to stop in at the chemist’s for soap and toothpaste, suddenly right in front of me was Isla in brilliant Madras plaid on a glorious summer evening all blue and pink and gold like her dress. I remember the sun shining off Isla’s freshly hennaed hair and that she was wearing hot pink lipstick and she was just so sunny, nothing like her old New Zealand gray-cardigan-black-skirt self. She was dazzling. The surprise of meeting was overwhelming to both of us. I think we started screaming and jumping around and in a rush of words and unrelated phrases while she told me that she had married Hugh and that his first book, Plague Summer, had just been published. It was for sale in the New Zealand bookstore in the Strand and I had to see it, and, and, and. Our thoughts were all jumbled in the excitement of finding each other unexpectedly in London. Our adult lives were finally just starting out and there were so many stories to tell. But more than anything I will never forget the thrill I felt when I learned that someone I knew had actually written and published a book, a real book, and it was for sale in a bookstore.

Within hours that night my husband and I were having dinner and a nonstop conversation with Hugh and Isla that lasted for hours. For the next several months we stayed together as a tight group: tea at the Ritz; art exhibitions at the Royal Academy; drinking tequila on my birthday; Isla and I rowing in Hyde Park. And Hugh was so much fun. Kind, sweet, witty; he was nothing like his Craccum persona. When he learned that I harbored a desire to write, he invited me to afternoon tea because he wanted to help me.

Try as I might, I can’t remember if we went to Fortnum & Mason’s or some funny little place off Charing Cross Road. It was after all, a long time ago. But wherever it was we went, for me it was one of the best and most important afternoons of my life. Although we talked about many aspects of writing, the one thing that has always stuck with me was Hugh’s injunction that I buy a journal and “write every day.” He told me that if I did that I would be a writer and that he believed in me. I have never forgotten his words, and I have done my best to follow them.

At the end of that year my husband and I moved to San Francisco and Hugh and Isla left the UK to continue exploring the world before returning to NZ. And then one day out of the blue, Isla came to visit me in America on her own. When she arrived, she told me she and Hugh were too different from each other and they had grown apart. Eventually after she got a job and her own apartment, she admitted to me that she had decided not to go back to New Zealand. I was devastated. She and Hugh were the first couple in my immediate peer group to divorce and it frightened me. I didn’t know what to think or feel, but I was smart enough to know it wasn’t my place to interfere in their decision.

The last time I saw Hugh was at his home in Auckland. Isla had sent me to pick up her belongings: a box of clothes, books, and table linens. Hugh was glad to see me, glad I was writing, and especially glad to get rid of Isla’s stuff, but the visit was too loaded with emotional baggage to be as comfortable or as easy as our socializing had been in the past. While we parted on a friendly note, I knew that by representing Isla I had “taken sides” in their divorce and that I wouldn’t be seeing Hugh again. When I published my first book, a nonfiction book about New Zealand for young readers, I did my best to thank him by including mention of his acclaimed The Wizards and The Warriors series. After that I learned Hugh had moved to Japan, remarried, had a daughter, and of course continued to write his heart out. He also became very ill.

Last year, Hugh passed away from brain cancer. His memoir Cancer Patient details much of his thoughts, treatment, and grueling experiences with the disease. The other day on Twitter I saw someone had written, perhaps because of the approaching anniversary of his death: Hugh Cook was the best sci-fi writer ever! I wanted to add my own hearty “yes” to that. Yes, he was and I’m so glad his fans are still as prolific as his writing.

In a tragic side note, Isla also died far too young many years ago in California. She had also remarried, leaving behind two children. There rarely is a day that I haven’t thought of her or Hugh in one way or the other, especially now as I am preparing to release my next book. Every time I pick up my pen and journal, I hear Hugh telling me that to be a writer I must write. Although our lives circled in different orbits, the memories of those unique friendships continues to prod and inspire me. So I just wanted to say thank you, Hugh. And thank you, Isla. Thank you to everyone who has encouraged and helped me to be a writer. I hope I can pass the magic on.

Tip of the Day: List your mentors. How did they help you to become who you are today? Thank them by simply following their advice the best way you can.

You Gotta Love the Conflict!

Conflict. If you’re anything like me, the very word conjures up argument, avoidance, ‘peace at any cost.’ In real life, conflict is rarely fun or something I go looking for. But leave it out of our writing, and we can have some serious conflict with editors and readers.

The first step toward understanding conflict is to know what genuine artistic conflict is not. Compelling conflict rarely stems from:

* Slammed doors.
* Slapped faces.
* Misunderstood fragment of overheard dialogue.
* A spilled drink.
* Romance characters tormenting each other with “fake” lovers.
* Characters complaining they are never understood because
men and women can't communicate.

You get the picture. All of the above are actions and events; things that can certainly be the result of conflict and that can make characters angry, but conflict is much more than anger. Authentic conflict often begins long before your story opens and is the motivating spur behind every decision and action your characters will make. In order to uncover as many levels of conflict possible (and to make life near-impossible for your characters) it can be helpful to explore the following seven areas.

1) The World or Society at Large. This is the world your story characters inhabit. It can be as simple as a barren desert or as elaborate as a feudal realm set in the distant future. Whatever it is, it contains problems; problems that can disadvantage and hold your characters back from their goals in significant ways. For instance, a world at war can be set anywhere from ancient times to the present day, from Middle Earth to outer space, but no matter the weaponry used, war always involves great suffering.

At the opposite end, a peaceful, apparently beautiful society can be filled with social injustice or a devastating class structure. Characters caught up in a perfect life may be the most discontent of all. Consider the poor heroine who is engaged to the perfect man, has the perfect job, eats perfect dinners with her loving, supportive parents every Friday night. On the surface she seems happy, but she may be ready to strangle them all.

Including a backdrop of social turmoil to your work will provide your characters with either past negative experience to overcome, or an ongoing situation that creates constant hardship. “High society” with all its rules and traditions, vices and hypocrisies can be a terribly low place filled with dark secrets and psychoses.

2) The Immediate Professional Environment or Workplace. No matter the times they are born into, your characters all have to do something to make a living. Even if your heroine’s sole purpose in life is to be married off to a peer of the realm, this is still her “occupation.” No matter if your characters are nannies or rock stars, advertising executives or harried FBI agents; they will at some stage encounter the monster boss, rival co-worker(s), ruthless or incompetent employees. Sometimes the workplace itself harbors corruption and is a great source of conflict, such as an unethical law firm or a company cutting corners on its products.

3) The Family. Your characters’ families can provide some of the most interesting and complex levels of emotional and physical conflict for your readers. For instance, the vengeful ex-spouse; jealous or dysfunctional siblings; ill, difficult, or rebellious children; a dependent, needy parent. Keep in mind that even if your characters’ families fall into the warm and supportive category, there can be family conflicts that erupt between “good” and “bad” branches of extended families that can sometimes last for generations.

4) The Achilles Heel. Strong characters should each have an inherent weakness that trips them up precisely when they most need inner balance. You can find this weakness by writing character bios, but also by establishing both an outward goal and an inner goal per character. An outer goal is based on “what they want” while an inner goal is “what they really want.”

Your main character’s outward goal will provide much of the plot structure for the entire book. A good method for ensuring that you have filled this goal with conflict is to interview your character and ask what are his or her doubts, fears, and insecurities. For instance, a woman who wants to rescue abused children may in reality be seeking the nurturing and acceptance she never received from her own family. Her efforts to start a children’s shelter might reveal her own need to finally have a home where she, too, can belong.

5) The Hero and Heroine as a Pair. “Opposites attract” may seem to be your most obvious choice, but even if your hero and heroine are a match made in heaven, at some point you will want to make sure that their individual story goals conflict and send them reeling.

6) Secondary Characters. The problems and conflicts of secondary characters can often mirror those of the hero and heroine. Sometimes these problems can add more conflict for the hero and heroine to solve, especially when the efforts of secondary characters to “help” simply mess things up even further.

7) Villains. Villains can be found from any of the above categories and are one of your strongest sources of conflict for your characters. The job of the villain is to try everything possible to prevent the other characters from achieving their goals. The key to writing great villains is to keep them human with a mixture of both good and evil. Your readers and your other characters should continually be conflicted in their feelings toward villains—tricked, deceived, enraged, sympathetic, and horrified all at the same time. And villains should feel the exact same way about themselves.

More than anything, as you write keep in mind that conflict, at least on the page, is good. If you'd like to learn more about the subject, I've written an entire chapter on creative conflict in my book, The Essential Guide for New Writers, From Idea to Finished Manuscript.

Tip of the Day: Go for the jugular! Read some of your favorite books again and look for the different levels of conflict. While you're at it, go through your current WIP and see if you have used any of these seven conflict areas. What can you include or expand?

The Premios Dardo Award, Part III

The last few weeks have been crazy getting my new book Better Than Perfect off to the printer, learning all about Twitter, writing a new manuscript, working the day job. It's been a lot to juggle. The best way I can describe what's been going on is to quote/paraphrase from Sarah Ban Breathnach's Simple Abundance, "You can have it all, just not all at the same time." That pretty much sums up my life right now.

One happy escape I've had from the "all" is to search out new (to me, at least!) blogs and the people who write them. The following list comprises the last five blogs I've chosen for the Premios Dardo (Top Dart) Award. As before, my choices are to honor personal values and dedication in blog writing. The list is:

http://snowlikethought.blogspot.com/

http://nikperring.blogspot.com/

http://joaniewoodruff.blogspot.com/
http://lynnettelabelle.blogspot.com/

http://acatofimpossiblecolour.blogspot.com/

Recipients, the rules to accepting the award are simple: copy and paste the award onto your blog; pass the award on to fifteen other blogs and let them know they've been chosen; and link up to the blog that sent you the award. And take your time. I studied the web for awhile before I decided on all fifteen of my choices. To read about the other ten blogs that received the award, please go to my postings of 5/31/09 and 6/15/09. With that said, know that I truly enjoy all the blogs I've passed the award on to and hope you will find other sites that equally delight and inform you.

Tip of the Day: Go slow. Often as writers and creative people we can tend to rush, rush, rush to get a manuscript written or a pot into the kiln, always thinking of the next project without enjoying the current work. Take the time to savor every word, every moment. It only happens once.

Writing the Ghazal

One of the great pleasures of writing is to experiment with new forms and ideas. A few weeks ago I began investigating the “ghazal,” a poetic form that dates back to 6th century pre-Islamic Arabic verse. The idea for this was brought to our writer’s group by Elaine Soto, a gifted artist and writer whose current work concentrates on the Black Madonna. (You can see her wonderful paintings at http://www.elainesoto.com/.)

Elaine learned the following exercise in a poetry workshop she had taken at a writer’s conference the day before our second-to-last meeting:

1. Choose 10 images cut from magazines, personal photos, etc. Attach one image each to a separate sheet of paper. Number each page 1-10.
2. Now write a line for each image.
3. Now match the lines in this order: 8+2; 5+3; 1+9; 10+4; 7+6. Each of these “doubles” forms a couplet, giving you five couplets. If you like, title each couplet.
4. Go back over the lines. If you need a transition or any extra word(s), feel free to add them.
5. Now place the lines together and you have a version of the ghazal.

According to Wikipedia, a true ghazal has a definite form, meter, and refrain. Similar to writing a sonnet or any other structured poem, there are some real rules involved. So consider this version and exercise a very loose experiment and/or writing prompt that you can always re-work to follow the more usual order found in many how-to poetry books. What may surprise you, however, is that your ghazal will more than likely contain the essence of the original intention: “A ghazal may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of pain.”

Because I can never follow recipes or any kind of instruction without changing something, I decided to set up my images in 10 sets of 2. I took the theme of “doorways” as my starting point, giving me 10 pictures of doorways matched to 10 random images of all kinds of things: rivers, marketplaces, old churches. Next I wrote 2-3 lines per page of images. I then completed the exercise in the order stated above, but I repeated it with my extra lines so that I could have more “verses” within the same ghazal. Confused? So was I! But it was interesting how the lines fit together (or didn’t in some cases) and how I enjoyed the randomness of the piece as well as the overwhelming feeling of the surreal. Poetry to me doesn’t always have to “make sense,” at least not right away or on the surface. Often the peculiarity of a line or image is the very impetus a reader needs to make his or her own leap toward personal understanding and meaning.

So here goes:

Every Breath is a Doorway

The ancients believed the birds carried souls to heaven in their beaks.
My thoughts are never-ending portraits of the past, sepia colored and curling at the edges.
In spring, even the shadows are sacred.
I wear dark glasses to keep the past at bay.
The river is a scarf of green.
In the winter we light lamps, shell peas, share stories of what may not have ever happened.
The light like your smile becomes my touchstone.
Even kings and gilded carriages break down into the dust of decay.
Arches that lead to courtyards and courtyards that lead to only more questions.
A book is a rock I cling to.

A bird alone in winter wind, trusting nothing but life itself.
The thing we fear the most is the sun itself, shining into all the dark corners of our lives.
The church remembered from childhood was shaded by apple trees and superstition.
The sort of glasses I had longed for as a child; dark and mysterious, the kind that hid my tears.
I would never forget the scarves hanging in the marketplace, a reminder of when we had money and throats left to wrap the silk around.
The peas in their blue bowl; no one shells peas anymore, there isn’t the time or the patience.
“She could never grow up so vain,” you said, “as to wear a dead bird upon her head.”
In a house where it is always safe and you know you will always belong.
My dreams are riddled by the dead; the dead and their dark graves forever piling up.
They are columns of stone, carved and set in place by hands no different from my own.

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, and no good thing ever arrived.
Stones from the river are carved into houses, castles, dreams of the very poor.
Flowers cling to an adobe wall.
A flight of stairs to a room no one enters any more.
In winter I look for lighted windows and pretend they are lit for me.
Midnight and still the prince drives by.
I can still hear the children playing, long after they are grown.
“You could always depend on reading,” she said.
Unlike her family, a book could never let her down.
I am a tree at the end of the world.

Tip of the day: Try writing a ghazal. Think “fun and experimentation” rather than “tried and true.” That said, if you enjoy the exercise, do consider taking it to another level and writing a more customary and ordered piece following established ghazal guidelines.

I Love Polyvore!

Okay, I admit it. I’m addicted to Polyvore. Polyvore.com, that is, the combined on-line collage, social networking, and shopping site that has changed my life, my creativity, and my whole approach to using the computer and Internet. Here are my top five reasons for never giving up:

1. I can base stories on my "sets" (collages you make on your “create page"). Often I’m inspired to write a blog post after making a set.

2. Where else can I belong to a group that addresses everyone as “Girls!”? “Girls! Contest ends in three days.” “Girls! Remember to use pink!” “Girls! We have contest winners!”

3. Everyone is so NICE. Not just ho-hum-nice, I mean, super-sweet, super-kind, super-appreciative nice. Because Polyvore allows users to comment on each others’ sets, you get instant feedback and praise; something writers rarely get enough of.

4. Polyvore boosts flagging creativity. While I was editing my last manuscript, I needed scheduled breaks. It was a reward to go on-line (“five pages and then I can go look for shoes to go with that Paris set…”). I could clear out my clogged left brain and the mini-vacation gave me new ideas for future work.

5. Polyvore brings the world together through art. Because of our sets, I am in touch with both aspiring and professional artists in Croatia, Lithuania, Germany, Serbia, Australia, Ireland…the list goes on and on. They are students, Christians, Muslims, dreamers, mothers, factory workers. They are incredible and I can’t imagine what my life would be like without them.

Although I have only been on Polyvore for a year now, anyone who has been in one of my groups or classes knows that an important part of my writing process has always been to collect and collage various magazine cut-outs to illustrate my scenes and character bios. My clippings, culled from magazines as diverse as Architectural Digest to National Geographic and Ceramics Monthly, not to mention Gourmet and Cat Fancy, have gone so far as to inspire entire stories, novels, and poems. I have used my cut-outs to describe a villain’s bedroom; fill up my heroine’s wardrobe; symbolize an important event from my hero’s childhood; or simply be the launching point for when I can’t think of “what happens next.”

I especially like to match a random phrase or word, also cut out from magazine pages, to the picture(s) and then use the combination as a writing prompt to get the whole piece started. I find this to be one of the best and most imaginative ways there is to begin and continue a work in progress. The technique has helped me design cover art, envision potential book trailers, and create other marketing tools such as bookmarks and tote bags. Perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of my “playing with pictures” have been the participants in my workshops where collaging has encouraged new writers to take risks and explore the possibilities of connecting two or more seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts.

Exactly one year ago a member of my writer’s group emailed me the link to http://www.polyvore.com/ with only the message that I “would love it.” Ten minutes later I was on the site, signed up with a user name and a profile, and happily engaged making a virtual collage that beat scissors and glue hands down. Later I learned I could join various “groups” such as those where you must use a bracelet in every set, or illustrate a favorite book or author; plus I could enter contests displaying my sets. (Contests are REALLY fun!)

Polyvore is a community. I know that is an overworked term these days, but I can’t think of any other description. This may sound silly, but it’s like attending a secret and artistic boarding school somewhere in the Swiss Alps that can only exist in one of those wonderful YA novels full of midnight feasts, shopping sprees, and dances held at the neighboring boys’ school. I think the great success of the site is its unabashed girliness. Polyvore is a place of evening gowns, rock’n’roll, Twilight, Audrey Hepburn, haute couture, "High School Musical", vintage fashion, BoHo Chic, film noir, country kitchen, kittens, Klimt, motorcycles, resort travel, and cool leather boots. Whatever you can dream, you can make happen on Polyvore.

Democratic and much safer than running with scissors, Polyvore has improved my entire confidence level regarding art making and the skills required. At the moment I'm using my sets to illustrate my blog postings. (Please click on the link to the side of the page to see the credits for all the items I’ve used in my sets. The individual items are even for sale if you just happen to be in the mood to purchase a $4000 pair of earrings from Barney's...)

If it is true that a picture speaks a thousand words, the sets shared on Polyvore are at least to me a universal language of the soul, and the souls of these lovely Polyvore artists are more than beautiful. They inspire me, they entertain me, they make me think. And I'm not quitting. So if anyone thinks it’s time to set up an intervention to get me away from my Polyvore, well, do so at your own peril. I won’t be responsible for the consequences!

Tip of the Day: No, you don’t have to rush over and join Polyvore. But if you do, my user name is "Davabooks." Make a set, let me know, and I'll "fave it" for sure. In the meantime, try this: collect magazines and other ephemera. Start files of people, places, animals, words, and other neat “stuff.” Mix them up, put a few together, and see what happens. I have a feeling it will be pure magic.