Jeannine Atkins

Becky beckylevine recently asked some questions about how writing a picture book biography is different from writing a longer book, and I thought I’d elaborate on some of my answers to her. Or reflections more than answers: who really knows? As Eudora Welty pointed out, every story and book has different needs and calls for a different process.



Writing Aani and the Tree Huggers, I had a character – one of the girls who were part of the Chipko movement in 1970s India – and I had a plot and crisis – she would hug a tree to stop the loggers from cutting it down. So a lot of my writing time was spent doing research (gazing at Time-Life books to learn more about the plants, clothing, and weather in the southern Himalayas) to get details that would make the book convincing and authentic.



I decided to write about Mary Anning after seeing a postage-sized stamp of a woman wearing a long skirt, straw bonnet, and with a hammer in her hands in one of my husband’s dinosaur books. I learned that at about age ten Mary found her first fossil, and is generally credited as the first person to make a living selling them. Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon was one of several picture books that came out in 1999, the year that marked the 200th anniversary of her birth, and we all chose different shapes. I chose to focus on her first discovery and offered information about the rest of her life in the afterword. (Love those afterwords!) The particular shape came to me after some long gazing at the one picture that was made of her when she was alive: a drawing of a woman in long heavy skirt, big jacket, and wearing a top hat, which she wore to protect her head from falling rocks. At the beginning of my book, Mary is annoyed by her mother’s insistence that she wear the hat – it’s embarrassing! At the end of the book, when she accepts and is proud of her vocation as a young paleontologist (not that she had that word, which wasn’t yet coined) she wears the hat with pride. Her different feelings about the hat lent the book a structure.



I’d been long fascinated by Anne Hutchinson, but how do you write about the Puritan period and faith for a young reader without getting wordy or preachy? The book finally came together for me when I realized that not Anne, but one of her eighteen children, needed to be at the center. This not only gave me a child narrator, but added a layer about both the pride and hardships of having a heroic renegade for a mom.

Once you have your point of view (and with Anne Hutchinson, I ended up starting with one daughter, and ending with another), once you have a shape, you’re in a good position to accumulate, then cut, details. In picture book biographies, I like to have at least two themes: one may be the person we’re writing about, suggesting why she or he should be known, and the other relate to a side subject. In Aani and the Tree Huggers, I could appeal to those looking for female heroes as well as those looking for specifically environmentalist ones. Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon shows a ten year who helped care for her poor family financially, and who connects with her dead father by following her own dream. The book also appeals to those who will read anything about dinosaurs or fossils. And Anne Hutchinson is someone in the curriculum who gives more of a female point of view to the Puritan period, while also being a story of the courage of a mother and her daughters.

For you lovers of historical fiction, I hope you’ll read the lovely review of Joyce Moyer Hostetter’s book Healing Water at http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1790000379/post/1580038558.html Not just to celebrate well-deserved praise for Joyce’s novel, but I think Betsy Bird articulates some of the important things she looks for in historical fiction. For instance, she writes, “This title works because if you set out to write a book about a historical moment and the main character walks around thinking, "Gee, what a significant time I live in," you have yourself a pretty dull piece of work. Healing Water, on the other hand, focuses on something a lot of kids can identify with; Friendship, betrayal, loneliness, and moral complicity.”

I’ll want to look at this again, but now I need to get ready to walk the paths of history instead of writing about it. At least that’s why I’m going to Rome, and my girls, too, (Steph calls me Mama J.) though they’re more about the fashion and boy-on-Vespa fantasy than ancientness. I guess some of that collides, and all three of us are about the pasta. So here’s hoping for fun pulling together the joy and cool companions and many layers of the past. I hope to post some pictures to make my husband happy (no boys on Vespas, honey, I’ll keep them on leashes). Everyone on LJ seems so on all roll with good resolutions, I kind of hate to take a break, but I’ll be joining you in writerliness next week! And lifting a cappuccino to you all where maybe Keats wrote a few poems near the Spanish Steps.

Joyce moyer_girl just wrote about liking to write historical fiction, because history can suggest a plot, at least after you’ve moved through many pages or papers. Like Joyce, I feel like plot isn’t my strong point, and I’m happy to take any help I can get. History may offer action with a shape, but we still sometimes have to, and sometimes want to, play with how we structure events. In Wings and Rockets: The Story of Women in Air and Space, I wrote about many risk-taking pilots over a period of a hundred years, so there were more than a few deaths. I didn’t want to end chapters with -- and then her plane crashed – so devised ways to conclude chapters with triumphs. There are all kinds of ways to structure events, with birth to death being only the most obvious, and often least interesting.

Joyce writes about forging ahead with an outline while she waits for some important research material to arrive. I can’t speak for what works for her and her wonderful books, but that sounds like a good strategy for me. When writing fiction based on history, sometimes what happens can take too big a hold, when what I need is to move around in my imagination. The big events loom, when I need to focus on one character. I’m currently revising a historical novel, which some readers said seemed to keep too great a distant from my main character. While I know his actions in relation to a historical moment, I need to imagine more of his interior growth, and stumbles. While I know what he survived, and the blocks to that, I think I’ve been too taken with his courage. I’m backing up to think more about his flaws, his just-human aspects, the kinds of things I deal with day to day. Messing up and mysteries.

When my daughter started school, I started using that nine to three time to focus on writing. Or, you know, try to focus on writing. To say I was focusing on writing. In any event, some writing got done.

At that time, about 15 years ago, the Internet wasn’t part of my life, but research was, since most of my books draw on history. Research meant going to the various wonderful libraries in our community and plunking myself down at certain sections, wiling away an hour or two before making choices that could fit in a big canvas bag. It was kind of dusty work, not that the libraries weren’t clean, but those floors I ended up on aren’t really meant as seats. I loved it. Reading other peoples’ words is generally easier than writing my own.

Once I took my precious haul home, of course those books cried out to be read. I needed details for my books! I needed information! I ended up making a rule for myself: no research until after 3 p.m. The earlier hours were for writing. When my mind was a bit sharper and I could count on more uninterrupted time.

Once I started using the internet, research changed, though I still favor old books with their less edited, less culled-over lore, their surprises. But if I’ve got a question say, about a year, or what people might have eaten or been wearing at that time, answers might be a few taps, and many detours away. Did someone just mention teal in the 1980s, Linda lurban? Then a particular type of sweater, and is it available, and who have I forgotten for the holidays… etc. etc. that’s the nature of the mind. Who doesn’t love a distraction? And research can turn on a dime into distraction.

So though my daughter no longer comes home at three, I still try to keep that hour which at this point is kind of wired into me as much as the dogs’ know their time to go for a walk. I don’t want to say no research, no distractions: I’d self destruct. But a little time limit helps me to keep the mornings more intact.

And in current good news. My daughter’s on the plane home!

Not long after I first learned to read, when visiting the library I habitually headed to two shelves near the floor of books with tattered orange covers. These were biographies that fictionalized the childhoods of famous Americans, and though there weren’t as many girls as I would have liked, I loved them. They were illustrated with cut-paper black silouhettes which seemed to help me dream my way into their lives. And provided fodder for games played in the woods behind my house.

And these are a version of the books I like to write today, though I try to include more detail and grit and lengthen the list of girls and women. I start by reading biographies for adults and getting smitten, like a student who came by my office on Monday to pick up project. She’d brought along the embroidery she’d done of Clara Barton, which I’d asked to see after a conversation about being obsessed with her as a child. Fran wrote and illustrated a biography for children as a project. With class over, I don’t know if she’ll go on with this project, but here would be a beginning: obsession. If you’re going to spend a long time reading and writing about a person, it had better be someone you love, are obsessed with, or both. I know some people write about villains or various kinds of low lifes who may shape history as much as heroes do. Personally, I wouldn’t want that kind of company for long in my room.

Fran based the short book she wrote on letters Barton wrote to children who wanted to know more about her childhood. I think the underlying question for some of these children was: can I grow up to be a little like you? Barton replied, conveying some impatience, almost bristliness, at people “wont to dwell upon my courage.” She wrote “in the earlier years of my life I remember nothing but fear.” Of course I want to know what she feared, and how she overcame it, which Fran’s small book didn’t have the space to explore. And there’s a shape of many a biography, the arc from fear to courage.

Another approach would be to expand from the person to the larger scope of history. A book about Clara Barton might certainly be much about founding the Red Cross, and one might follow the organization’s history to the present. Children might like to know not only more about women in the Civil War era, but the history of nursing. Now it’s a female dominated role, though with more room than it had when I was growing up, when it was one of the few or popular choices, along with teacher and secretary. Clara Barton fought to break into the field, back in a time when women’s legs, sometimes obliquely referred to as limbs, were well covered by skirts, and the idea of the virtuous getting corrupted by male anatomy, no matter how in need of healing, meant that most nurses were men, and scarce.

All kinds of directions are possible. When I get lost in my research, I go back to the first moments of falling in love: what snagged my attention? What made my heart beat harder? That’s got to be at the center of the book, and often suggests its shape.

I’ve borrowed the title of this entry from the name of a graduate course at UMass-Amherst that I visited Tuesday to talk about some of the many ways biographies are written for children. I felt so comfortable looking at the small group around a long table while unloading piles of books (Bonnie Christenson’s woodcuts for her picture book about Woody Guthrie and Mary Azarians’s for Snowflake Bentley seemed to get the most “Oooohhhs.”) Then Professor Maria Miller introduced me as someone they’d been looking forward to hearing, as holding some sort of key to financial glory. Um, me? Writing for children isn’t the usual road to riches, and my nonfiction and historical fiction lane would be even rockier. Maria explained something along the lines that, well, children’s books do sell, and looking around, I got the picture. These were graduate students writing theses about obscure people often doing pretty obscure things because they fascinated them. No wonder I felt so immediately at home with them, but also perhaps they would face even greater publication challenges than me as they tried to move their work beyond dissertation committees.

One scholar remembered reading American Girl books and said that they were probably the beginning of her journey as a history major. We wondered about where those readers go in between young girls and adults: what are the equivalents for those of high school age? Some were considering reframing their work for a young audience, and I talked some about looking into state education requirements to see if there was a match. They spoke of biography as micro history, and we looked at some books that use one person as a way into a whole period, such as Albert Marrin’s The Great Adventure: Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of Modern America.

I mentioned the December 5 entry on Marc Aronson’s blog, Nonfiction Matters, http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1880000388.html about how changing a work for adults for one for children or teens is about much more than changing the book’s length and vocabulary. Maria was familiar with Aronson’s writing, which she called brilliant, and said how the challenges for authors for young people were in many ways greater than those in academia. “We can just add material and put another footnote, but writers for the young have to synthesize everything.” For every line we write, we have to ask things like: what does this add to the story? Is it absolutely necessary? Is there something else the reader may need to know to understand this? The answers to these questions should give the narrative some shape, and if they don’t, maybe you just wrote something else that should be cut. This is not a field for those who can’t stand to kill their darlings.

We discussed various ways to structure a book. Some people seemed to find the idea of ending a biography with anything but death daunting, while others gave examples of films that broke chronology in interesting ways. Since the number of words we can use is less, we have to let things like the shape of a book speak for our themes. Some people were intrigued by my mention of those who mix history with poetry. Natasha Tretheway in Native Guard (for adults, but as a UMass grad I wanted to mention her) and Marliyn Nelson, who wrote the astonishing Carver and the recent The Freedom Business, which puts poems on one page facing parts of an original document from 1798, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa.

In preparation for this class, I read a few of the books on the syllabus, one of which was Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography. In the gorgeous introduction, Lee
quotes Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote about Charlotte Bronte. Her advice: “Get as many anecdotes as possible. If you love your reader and want to be read, get anecdotes!”

Yes. And when I was asked how I pare, I said that as I work my way through source material, I’m waiting for what wakes me up. I may not know why just then, but I’ll jot down what startles me, often something involving the five senses: so it can look mundane. But somewhere down the line I may be glad to know someone picked blueberries on a certain ordinary or not day in history.

In the past two days, by coincidence, I spoke at two college classes where I’d been invited to talk about writing nonfiction for children. Which I guess is what I write. Sort of. But not in a straight arrow kind of way.

I spoke of how I grew up reading biographies, often of girls in a day when there weren’t that many. So I reread (if you want to know anything about Florence Nightingale or Dolley Madison, let me know). And like many, I came as an adult to write what I loved as a child – and still love. I’ve chosen to stay somewhat with the tradition of the fictionalized biographies I adored, the main problem often being one for critics and librarians who want to know where this book belongs. I loved the approach of a librarian in Jo’s class who simply takes the time, which fortunately she has, to figure out where the book is likeliest to find its readers.

What I read and inspires me makes a circle; the libraries in my head are divided down the middle. There are magnificent facts which I can count on and often inspire me to write or reading historical fiction. I can go further and the balance shifts from more history, to less fiction. I might go further – when does history become the present? -- and we’ll pretty much call it plain old fiction. And that moves me to want to find more sturdy, stalwart facts. It’s never about choosing one part of the library or the other.

For a another perhaps clearer and certainly beautiful look at the research process, please read Gail Gauthier and Susanna Reich talking about Susanna’s book Painting the Wild Frontier: The Art and Adventures of George Catlin. http://www.gailgauthier.com/blogger.html (November 6) There are some fascinating thoughts about history as setting, the ways the biography of one person reflects an era’s history, and a picture of the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library, which in itself will make you want to be a researcher.

Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out came out from Candlewick Press this month and has been garnering great reviews, including ones with pretty stars from School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and the Horn Book. Also just out is a companion website where readers can learn more about the White House and the country, as well as a bit of background on contributors. You can read mine, which tells some of how I came to love writing about history at: http://www.ourwhitehouse.org/contribbios/atkins.html

I had fun researching Woodrow and Edith Wilson for my piece in this book. Woodrow Wilson, like most presidents, okay, like all of us, had his flaws, but there’s also much to admire. His career went from teaching at Princeton to being governor to being president. I liked writing about an era when it was considered a good thing to call a leader of our country “professorial.” I like my presidents to be smart. Since a few hundred years are covered, none of the contributors had much space, so I could only suggest some of the reasons why Edith was called the first woman president. These were interesting times.

When I agreed to write the essay, I didn’t know who would illustrate it. Not too long before the book was ready to go to press, I got a package with a copy of a gorgeous painting done by Jerry Pinkney. Wow.
http://www.ourwhitehouse.org/contribbios/pinkney.html I loved the way he showed Woodrow Wilson’s sensitive side in his portrait, with his wife Edith standing beside and over him as she did through most of his last years.