Note: This post is older, and, therefore, some of the links may no longer be current.
Who got a story written last week? I’m grateful to all of you, because I feel like, as the organizer of this project, I have to write a manuscript each week. I know if I skipped a week, you’d all be ok with it. But I want to write one each week, to do it alongside you.
I decided to write in response to “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” since I love it and the tone of it is frankly astonishing. But also, I went into it performatively, like, “sure, fine, I’ll just write something, it won’t matter what.”
I wrote some notes on what the picture book could be, and ran myself into some corners before realizing that, even in the spirit of playing around and seeing what happened, I absolutely did not want to write a story with violence in it. And then, just like that, I started writing, and wrote through to the end, and the manuscript I wrote, while still far from perfect, is by far the best of the three I wrote.
The lesson here is that regular practice, even if I drag myself to my notebook, still counts, and it adds up. It’s like, sure yes, it’s better to lift weights with gusto and proper form, but if you lift weights really slowly while yelling, “this sucks!” you are still lifting weights.
Surprise! This week we’re doing poems! Ok, ok, I KNOW that poetry is not short story. But I was thinking about novels in verse, and then (stupidly) googled “short stories in verse” before realizing that, uh, that’s just a poem.
Which led me to the poetry textbook I used the one summer I co-taught a literature class, An Introduction to Poetry, Seventh Edition by X.J. Kennedy.
Listen. I have to confess that much of the time I don’t “get” poetry. Or…I feel like I don’t have time for it? Because I know a great deal of the “getting” comes from reading it aloud, and I somehow never find the time to sit on my couch and read poetry out loud to myself. (Also I am scarred from too many terribly-read poems at college open mic nights to venture out to a public reading.)
It is undeniable, though, that picture books are often poems, or at least, poetic. I spent days wading through An Introduction to Poetry (for fun!), remembering that sometimes the language of a poem, or the story it conveys, are transporting. And while yes, I know this is not The Poetry Project, I think you’ll like approaching these poems as we have been approaching the short stories. Picture books, like poems, are meant to be read aloud, so if we think of that magical music that is story language spoken to someone else, we can borrow a lot from poetry.
Fully all of these were in An Introduction to Poetry, the seventh edition, which was published in 1990. Mostly because I would never finish this newsletter if I started searching through every available poem. So there is nothing from the past 35 years. Nothing against modern poetry! I just needed some fences in place so I didn’t list 300 poems.
In the same way we can write picture books in response to short stories, we can view poetry and poetic language as a seed that might blossom outward into a new flower of a story, one that is not a direct copy, but is inspired by, that original seed.
Poetry offers beauty read aloud, it offers a shard of a day, it offers a life or a moment or an ode to something you love, boiled down to its essence. Picture books do this too.
If you’ve been doing the work of the Short Story Project these past three weeks, you have at least one manuscript, and hopefully three. So you have some story bones, even if they’re playful ones that you’d never send to anyone. The process of writing a picture book manuscript in response to a short story is a sort of copy→ paste thing, where instead of copying the short story exactly, you rip it into pieces, crumple the pieces into balls, and see what you get.
The process of writing in response to a poem might need to be a bit different. Or it might not. You can, as you’ve been doing with the short stories, think about what you like or don’t like, and grow your manuscript outward from there. (I chose some of these poems for the story, the subject, or the structure, just like I choose the short stories.) But if you’re thinking about the language specifically, about a sound effect or some alliteration you love, you’re going to have to then work backward from there, to see what story you can build that supports that. If you want to have the sound of a car horn, or a line that sounds like it’s whispered, what is the story that goes with that?
Often the line between picture book and poem is blurred or nonexistent. There’s Lee Wardlaw’s haiku picture book, Won Ton. There are any number of picture books constructed around Langston Hughes poems (That is My Dream!, Sail Away, An Earth Song, Lullaby (for a Black Mother)). There are picture books by Amanda Gorman and Joy Harjo. There is Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Boy and This is Just to Say. And, of course, thousands of picture books told in verse, not to mention the many picture books about poetry (like Daniel Finds a Poem and Nine, to name only two).
Maybe you’re a rhymer. I’m not someone who writes in rhyme. And yet, I remember when someone brought up Snappsy the Alligator (Did Not Ask to Be in This Book) in a blog post about rhyming books. It confused me for a hot second, until I realized, uh, yeah, the first page of Snappsy absolutely rhymes. And part of that was me playing around with the expectation that a picture book should rhyme, but part of that also was that, despite myself, poetry sunk in. I still don’t always understand it, but I try, at least, to make a stab at reading it, because I do think it’s important to understand the rhythms and the sound of the words in order to write a good picture book.
And so! Here are:
The Poems
“Night Driving” by Dick Allen. Scroll down a little past the intro. This reads like so many picture book images to me.
“Digging” by Seamus Heaney. That link includes audio of Heaney reading the poem, which I recommend. Also, I once barn danced with Seamus Heaney; feel free to have that add some flavor to your inspiration.
“To Autumn” by John Keats. It’s sweater weather! Pumpkin Spice Lattes! “summer has o'er-brimm'd!” Hang out by the “cyder-press!” Don’t worry about those songs of spring, you’re the one we love, Autumn. An Introduction to Poetry says that, three days after he wrote “To Autumn,” Keats wrote a letter to a friend talking about how much, for real, he loved Autumn. So much.
“Home is So Sad” by Philip Larkin. I love stories about houses and the home that is made in them.
“Filling Station” by Elizabeth Bishop. This poem has always seemed to me like it’s written from the POV of the child in the car. I recommend the audio of Bishop reading it (though it kills me to hear her saying the ending is no good!).
“The One Girl at the Boys Party” by Sharon Olds. Identity and expectation told through the language of math. So good.
“The Dirty Word” by Karl Shapiro. A prose poem about the curse word you love as a kid, and how it changes when you’re an adult (make sure you click through to the second page, to get the last few lines of the poem).
“For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry” by Christopher Smart. This is a wild long list basically about how devoted to God his cat Jeoffry is, written in 1759ish while Smart was, alas, in “confinement for insanity.” Though it seems perhaps extremely sane to write things like “For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he’s a good Cat.” (There is also a Walt Whitman poem, “To a Locomotive in Winter,” which is similarly exultant, though about a locomotive instead of a cat. There is something lovely and relatable about a poem or story praising one specific thing. Like, it is clear Whitman really was a train guy.)
“Yield” by Ronald Gross. This feels so much like a picture book to me.
“The Writer” by Richard Wilbur. I really, really love this poem.
“Metamorphosis” by Wallace Stevens. What a read-aloud! Another poem that seems to fit this time of year, all dying husks and also silliness.
“Image” by T.E. Hulme. A poem that is short on words but bursting with story and imagery, which is just what I want my picture books to do.
“Rain” by Emanuel di Pasquale. Another very short poem, with language that is music.
“On My Boat on Lake Cayuga” by William Cole. And here we are. More than 30 years after I used this textbook to teach poetry one summer, this is the poem I remember more than any other. Part of that is that it’s effortlessly memorizable, but also it’s hilarious.
Your first assignment this week is either to write a picture book inspired by one of these poems, or to take an idea from one of these poems and incorporate it into an existing manuscript of yours.
Your second assignment is to start thinking about how you might want to incorporate the Short Story Project into your writing process throughout the year (although if you only do it once a year here on Do the Work, that’s great too!).
After my experience this past week with flowingly writing a picture book that I ended up really liking, I am committing (to myself) to keep going with the Short Story Project on a regular basis. Weekly structured playful manuscript-writing is, it turns out, excellent for my writing in general.
With that in mind, here are some bonus assignments. These are all ways to find stories out in the world and write in response to them. I especially encourage you to approach these assignments as you’ve been approaching all of the assignments in the Short Story Project: as a way to play with stories and writing, and less as a means to get a perfect and submittable manuscript. I want you to write a perfect and submittable manuscript! But I also know that the way to get there is by playing around with stories.
Bonus assignments
Go find a story for free somewhere, in a book in a Little Free Library, in a magazine, at the library. Write a picture book based on it.
Sit in the park for 30 minutes, taking notes on all you see. Write a picture book based on your notes.
Google “Billboard Chart Number 1” and your birth date, and then look up the lyrics to that song, and write a picture book based on that.
Go on a walk and write down all the words you see. Graffiti, gum wrappers, the sides of trucks, street signs. Write it all down. Write something from that.
Tell us in the comments how this project has gone for you so far!
Ah, so many great ones: thank you for sharing! I think my favorites were The Writer, and, yes, On my boat on Lake Cayuga... (which made me laugh aloud), but Digging gave me genuine goosebumps! (In a good way.)