Advice to an Aspiring Writer

Caroline's First 100 Books

I often get asked for advice from people who want to publish a children's book.  In many cases, writers worry that they will have to find an illustrator for their story before they submit it to a publisher. My first piece of advice is that you don't need to worry about an illustrator.  This is taken care of by the publisher.  If an editor wants to publish your story, then he or she will choose an illustrator whose style is appropriate to the story.  My second piece of advice is, go to a library or bookstore and look at other books in the same general category as your story.  Make a list of the books that seem closest to yours.  Those are the publishers most likely to be interested in your story.  When you are in the library or bookstore you can also look at books about writing for the children's market.  These books will give you guidelines about how to submit your manuscript.  You can also look online at the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators site (www.scbwi.org ).  It isn't easy to have a children's book published, but if you do your homework and you have a good story, it can happen!

StoryFaire, Santa Barbara

Authors Jody Fickes, Caroline Arnold and Joan Graham at StoryFaire, Santa Barbara, April 30, 2011

On a sunny Saturday two weeks ago, along with about a dozen other authors, I participated in StoryFaire, a day long celebration of books and the arts for families and children in Santa Barbara.  Kids could do crafts, art projects, get free books, buy books and have them autographed, and watch performances on stage.  Authors each had 12 minutes to perform on stage.  The challenge was to attract and keep an audience in the free flowing outdoor venue!  The key was to offer kids the chance to participate, whether in helping to tell the story (as Alexis O’Neill did when reading her book The Recess Queen), holding props (as Ann Paul did while reading her book Tortuga in Trouble) or interacting with the audience (as Erica Silverman did while reading her book Big Pumpkin.)  I talked about my book Birds: Nature’s Magnificent Flying Machines and invited children to come up to the stage and have their “wingspans” measured.  (Most kids were red-tailed hawks.)  Then I read the first two chapters of Wiggle and Waggle while two children acted out the story with my Wiggle and Waggle sock puppets.  You can see a sample of my performance in this video.  Enjoy!

New Travel Blog

Caroline and Jennifer in Uganda, 1971

After years of thinking that I should share some of my travel articles, I have decided to launch a blog devoted exclusively to my travel writing. I call it The Intrepid Tourist. I have chosen to start with a piece about the reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg as we begin a four year retrospective on the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Other current posts include a walking trip through Cornwall and a week in the Scilly Islands. Next week I will take a look back on a trip to Africa with my husband and one-year-old daughter Jennifer (pictured above with me on the equator in Uganda in 1971.) While some of my pieces will be about trips I took a few years ago, all links will be up-to-date. My plan is to post new blogs weekly. My goal is to share some of my travel experiences with the idea that there may be people out there who might want a more personal view of various travel destinations than you can get in a travel guidebook. I plan to post once a week. If you want to get an email announcing new posts, you can sign up as a follower.

As I go through my files collecting material for the blog, it is fun reliving our various trips. One reason that I started the blog is that I have a vast store of unused material that has never seen the light of day. I will also use the blog to report on current travel. The two trips we have coming up are a family reunion in Atlanta in August and a trip to Sardinia in September (where Art has a meeting.)
Hope you enjoy reading The Intrepid Tourist!

Wiggle and Waggle Stick Puppets

Recently, I visited my granddaughter’s kindergarten class and read my book Wiggle and Waggle. The children all loved singing the “Digging Song” and afterward we made Wiggle and Waggle stick puppets. I was impressed by the creativity of the children in coloring the worms. Although a few of them made the worms brown (as I did in my samples, and the artist, Mary Peterson, did in the book), the rest made them all colors of the rainbow and a number of children chose to do stripes and patterns! I did the same project last weekend at StoryFaire in Santa Barbara, a wonderful day out-of-doors for children and their families celebrating books and the arts. You can download the stick puppet project and other fun activities (including a song, word search, coloring page, recipes and games for a wormy party, and more) HERE. Have fun making your own worm puppets and acting out the story! This activity is perfect for preschool and kindergarten age children.

Turning a Jumble of Facts into an Idea

When I was a child, my favorite lunch was Campbell’s alphabet soup. I loved to fish out the noodle letters and arrange them on my plate until they spelled a word. Writing and illustrating a book is a little bit like that. I take a jumble of facts and put them together so they make sense. Just as the letters in my soup could be made into a variety of different words, facts can be arranged to tell a variety of different stories.

In my book A Penguin’s World, I followed two Adelie penguin chicks through a year of their life. The organizing principle is time sequence. In this book, I illustrated each step with my own cut paper art.
In Australian Animals, I grouped the animals by the places where they live. The organizing principle is a common space. This book is illustrated with photographs, many of them taken by me on my several trips to Australia.
In Birds: Nature’s Magnificent Flying Machines, I showed how each part of a bird’s body helps it to fly. The organizing principle is the physical act of flying. This book is illustrated with beautiful, scientifically accurate art by Patricia Wynne.

Each of these books is organized in a different way, but by the end of each one, all the pieces fit together in logical order to make a unified whole.

Books Give You Someplace to Go

I don’t read the comics on a regular basis, but last week I opened the newspaper (I still get an actual paper newspaper!) to the comics page and saw a wonderful cartoon. Dennis the Menace is seated under a tree with his pal Joey listening with rapt attention to Gina reading a book. This in itself caught my attention because Dennis is usually pictured getting into some kind of trouble. Instead, he is caught up in the magic of books. The caption reads, “Reading is fun. It gives you someplace to go when you can’t go anywhere.” I couldn’t agree more. Books can transport us to far away places both real and imaginative. We can run with zebras in Africa, float high in the clouds, or encounter magical creatures with Harry Potter. As a child, I traveled vicariously to France with children whose professor father was spending a year in Paris as I read the book Family Sabbatical by Carol Ryrie Brink. Books expand our world through both words and pictures. Books helped me dream that someday I could go someplace and see for myself some of the things I had first encountered through reading. A few years ago, I did go to France and climbed the Eiffel tower just as the children did in the book I read long ago.

How Do We Get Ideas?

How do we get ideas? On occasion, they come full blown in a sudden flash of insight. More often, though, they evolve a little bit at a time. My recent book, Global Warming and the Dinosaurs: Fossil Discoveries at the Poles, was a project that developed slowly. At first, all I had were random bits of information. These facts, fascinating though they were, did not make a book. I did not have enough and I still needed an organizing principle. But by keeping all those interesting bits floating around in my mind, over time, an idea for a book on polar dinosaurs began to gel.

This is the opening paragraph of my article Evolution of a Book Idea: From Percolation to Publication published in the Spring 2011 issue of Kite Tales, the newsletter of SCBWI-Los Angeles. In the article I discuss how the book grew out of my natural interests in fossils and dinosaurs, how conversations with librarians gave me valuable new material, how other book research added to what I already knew, how experts in the field helped answer questions, and finally, how a chance encounter propelled me to start writing and finishing the book. Click here to read the full article on page 31.

Global Warming and the Dinosaurs is illustrated with beautiful watercolor paintings by Laurie Caple. Laurie has illustrated five other books of mine about prehistoric animals and has done a fantastic job on all of them. Her naturalistic style is perfect for these books. She does as much research as I do to make sure that everything she draws is as scientifically accurate as possible. This is a challenge when most of what she draws has been extinct for millions of years. By creating whole environments for the animals, she truly brings them to life.

I am often asked, why don’t I illustrate all my own books? After all, I’m trained as an artist. The truth is that I don’t want to illustrate all my books. My style does not necessarily always suit the subject matter I write about. I am delighted that artists like Laurie Caple can illustrate my books. It takes just as much time to illustrate a book as it does to write it. If I did all my own illustrations, I wouldn’t have as much time to write. I enjoy illustrating my own books, but only when the concept of the writing and the art work together for me.