THE UNSELFCONSCIOUS WRITER

Rediscovering, and then rediscovering and then rediscovering again:

THE UNSELFCONSCIOUS WRITER

Tuning out the voices is a constant fight for me—most days I succeed and the manuscript keeps chugging along. But the battle itself is hard won and sometimes exhausting.

I took a detour there (oh, say, like two years or so) working really, really hard on writing for the market, my perception of the market, my sense of what would sell, and what certainly would not.

And this very detour is what led me away from my own writing and right into the heart of unauthenticity (is that a word? disauthenticity?) A kind of writing that was good enough but not full of my heart and soul.

So what's a writer to do when it turns out that their lusty passion for writing is very very different from what "the market" knows and loves. If you're me, you, um, avoid writing what you love. For way too long.

I can't speak for you, but part of the appeal of writing for young people is to give my characters some of the confidence I lacked as a child, some of the adventure I longed for, to sympathize with their feelings of angst and disconnect from the world. And so, being highly tuned to this time in my life, I also sometimes feel like I AM still a middle school kid.

And this feeling, this need to fit in led me away from the real meaning of my art.

I was at the annual SCBWI conference this previous week and had the AMAZING. AMAZING. opportunity to hear MT Anderson speak. I went to a session on experimentation in children's literature and the first thing MT said was that there is nothing original in this experimentation: it's all been done before. But with kid lit—we as writers have much more freedom to make use of these devices than if we were writing for adults.

According to MT, none of what I'm doing is new, or innovative—some of it just hasn't been seen in a long long time and some of it not in children's literature.

My new goal? Buck the trend. Write what I love. And wait to see if that passion is what sells books . . . not being just good enough to follow the trends.