Children's Writing: Where Do You Find Your Inspiration?

I've often been asked what got me started writing children's books. My short answer is grandchildren.

Generalizing from my own experience, it seems to me when grandchildren come along, they must make grandparents think, say and do things we never thought, said or did before. Or maybe, more accurately, no one ever paid much attention to us in our thinking, saying and doing. Then we come face to face with the world's best audience and our lot is cast.

Oh, sure, the seeds are often sewn when our children are born. Yes, many parents, too, are authors of child-inspired stories. After all, everything is brand new and babies may fall into a fit of giggling at the strangest faces and noises that parents sometimes stumble upon purely by accident. Who wouldn't feel compelled to take advantage of those brief moments of bliss during what seems like years of endless ... manic... sleepless... nights.

OK. So, that part only lasts for a few weeks or months. But at the time, let's say 3:00 a.m. midway through two weeks of collic or thrush or unexplained fever, it feels like years. If inspiration eludes you during those heady days and nights, worry not. Before you know it, your kids are bringing their kids home for baby sitting or sleep-overs or summer vacations. And now you have the time to collect all the bits and pieces of material just made for the writing of stories.

What do you use as grist for your writing mill? Are you a new parent, a grandparent, a teacher, a librarian, a coach, a pediatric nurse? Lots of possibilities for tale telling in the midst of all that life experience going on around you.

What's your inspiration? Inquiring authors want to know! Besides, the suspense is killing me....

Busy, Busy, Busy....

I suppose there's got to be just the right balance between pathos and vanity---needing to be not just seen but recognized without having to make a scene just to be recognized.

Are writers any different? Especially in the early stages, how many times are we told to get a website up and running, start a blog (or two or three), hook up with as many social networs as possible, all to get name (nay, brand) recognition started. And then wait.... For supposedly nothing much happens for at least the first year---I mean besides the one or two or five daily visits to your website or blog. Getting more visits that? You may be on the verge of superstardom!

One year is supposedly the minimum necessary elapsed time for cyber maturation. Somehow, after about a year, the web crawlers have apparently crept over, under, around and through your cyber identity enough times to for your site to reach some measure of critical mass for the number of visits and visit frequency to start to pick up. At least that's the theory.

But while you are waiting, don't forget to update your website with interesting tidbits and keep your blog(s) current. And, whatever you do, the remember the three "Ss": socialize, socialize, socialize. Just think of all the blogs there are to read and comment on, networking pages to visit, connections to establish, mailing lists to build, quizzes to take, photos to send and causes to join.

Depending on what "generation" we may find outselves in (I'm talking cyber generations here), you may be doing all these things with technology that runs the gammut from a plain old ordinary computer with regular old ordinary Internet access, all the way to the fastest, most compact, app-intensive and interconnected hand held device on the market. Of course, the more technologically current one is, the more there is to do. Why, it's enough to leave one breathless from the doing or even just the thinking about it....

Now where is that story I was planning to work on today, anyway? Guess it may have to wait until tomorrow after all. Time for my weekly podcast....

To Blog Or Not To Blog?

As the saying goes, there's a first time for everything---this is my first official blog post to my first official blog.

Admitedly, blogs scare me---I just don't get it. I mean really, why are so many people blogging away out there anyway ? It's as if no one has anything else to do (he says as he keeps typing into his own blog). Truthfully, I never thought there was any particular utility to blogging. But now, by virtue of being here, I have a blog and I am a blogger. By now someone must have said, "I blog, therefore I am." If not, you saw it first here.

You can find a blog on pretty much any subject, with hundreds of people sharing their views and opinions. If I had more time, I might spend it browsing the blogosphere, seeking validation of my own views or challenging those of others. But with only so much time in the day, this blog will focus instead on the question, To write or not to write? And I will hope there may be a few other writers out there willing to share their thoughts on the question.

For me, the answer is there is no question. Writing is what brings me both joy and frustration. But in the end the joy I find in the writing itself always seems to win out.

In this blog, the common thread will be writing in whatever form or aspect that seems to interest me on a particular day, in a particular moment. Sometimes you may find a snippet of rhyme; other times a piece of a humorous story line from times past; a slice out of a Suttertown News story I wrote 15 years ago or something more recent.

From time to time, there may also be a bit of grousing about my muse having taken her leave---no doubt a common experience shared by almost anyone who has struggled to find the thinnest thread of an idea for a story.

If anything strikes a resonant chord, please feel free to leave a comment. Opinions from all stripes are both solicited and welcomed. That's it for this Starlog entry. I'll look for you around the water cooler.

Kirk, Out!