When you are a teacher, or a writer for that matter, and you are at the beginning of your career, you have to think outside the box when it comes to building a library of resources from which to create. Resources are expensive. To that end, when I started my career, I joined a professional organization and signed up for the big, annual conference, knowing that attending would most likely end up in me scoring free stuff.
That year, the National Counsel of the Teachers of English invited middle-grade novelist, R.L. Stine, to present the keynote address. I taught middle school for nearly two decades, so I am aware of his work, but I didn’t really know his work except that many of my developing readers were engaged when the Goosebumps series came up in conversation. All this is to say, I didn’t know what to expect when he began his speech. What I remember of it is a parable he shared about his path towards publishing.
He said that one day when he was home after work (he was a teacher too), he got to wondering what his dogs did all day while he was gone. As he was flipping through the TV Guide, he saw an advertisement for a new, proposed station catering to pets. He looked over the description, his earlier wonderings returning to the fore front, and noticed that the two main shows for dogs involved a continuous loop of a video containing birds and squirrels. Curious, he tested out the station on his captive audience, who were immediately engaged.
And that’s when it clicked: birds and squirrels. When you are working on developing a commercially viable story, you have to have a sense of your audience’s version of birds and squirrels. That idea cliqued for me too – I needed to find out what my birds and squirrels were as both a reader and a writer. Here, if you follow my blog, you will start to see what I have figured out so far. With that in mind, I invite you to join me in this work.
Before you commit to a longform project, a novel or a book, consider your own birds and squirrels. What lights you up? What or who could you think about for days, spend your free time researching that idea or that person, and then share what new insights come up as a result?
All these years later, as I keep pushing through the writing process for a fiction novel, working on it through graduate school, through big life changes, and through a global pandemic, I think I’ve finally figured out what, and who, my birds and squirrels are.
In this blog, I hope to share some of what I’ve learned with you, and because we are all connected, even if that connection is brief, I hope you’ll share a bit of what you’ve learned along the way, too.
Lover of words, beaches, mountains, and dogs, I am an essayist and poet who is currently working through the revision of a literary fiction novel. You can find my writing in Hippocampus Magazine, Spark Anthology IX, Pennsylvania Bards Northeast Poetry Review 2020, The Write Life and Revise This! at Wilkes University, and most recently in the debut issue of the Lehigh Valley Literature Magazine.
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