I got to meet a children’s book author tonight, Sue Stauffacher, who came to speak at my school and read from her works. She’s a CMU alumna and she’s very active within her community doing lots of book reviewing and community outreach. She’s cool. She’s pretty much on her way up to gaining fame in the children’s book world. (E. L. Koningsburg was also a CMU alumna, if anyone’s read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler or the like…)

Anyway! I was invited to a private dinner with 4 professors and her — but I was the only student. I was personally invited by the professors because I’ve always, always, always told them my first love is children’s/YA lit. They remembered, and now have shifted stances from nodding and smiling blankly to actually looking at me with considerable respect. It was noticeable. Thanks in a big part to Sue, they now consider it a challenging field rather than a mediocre “genre”! They even admitted — these are professors who have published novels — that they tried and failed at writing kids’ books, and that their kids like these books and those books and such… and they asked me a dozen questions about my novels. The ones I haven’t shown anyone in the department, for fear of being dismissed as a “genre” writer. But they took me seriously. And were amazed that I am so committed. They were complimentary and encouraging.

The reason this is huge is that most creative writing departments — for undergraduates AND graduate students — emphasize writing in more of the “mainstream” instead of the “genre” because they believe you FIRST master the craft of writing itself, THEN apply that mastery, once gained, to the “genre”. Hence why no undergraduate is really “allowed’ to write a short story version of The Eye of the World for a class. It’s highly discouraged. Novels, of course, are usually no-nos, because they’re so long, unless you’re in an MFA program, but then it’s a toss-up.

For instance, a story between a mother and daughter, they say, should be richly drawn and characterized and believable so it is universal no matter if it’s set on Mars or in Kentucky. By their logic, mastery of the Kentucky story means you can automatically master the Mars story later. Of course, we people who love “genre” fiction — meaning “historical,” “fantasy,” “children’s,” etc., anything “type”-able — understand that the “world” of the story is intensely important, though admittedly not its focus, but it can influence character, behavior, mannerisms, voice, etc, and shouldn’t be so easily discounted. (Imagine a novel set in 1600 with a 12 year old narrator. How different is that from Hemingway?!) I admit, logically, professors have a point. There are a LOT of kids who come into writing class trying to write the next Tolkien epic, only to have shown to them their characters are flat stereotypes, their plot makes no sense, and there’s no conflict. So if you take out their Tolkien world, their story is only empty air. (Ever read a bad fantasy novel? Or, well, a bad novel? Same thing.) I do see the logic in teaching how to write well first, then how to incorporate the other stuff later, but the writing I’ve had to produce to convince the professors I’ve mastered the basics has bored me. Really, really bored me.

I am not, at this point in my life, very interested in whiny angst-y stories about parents and grandparents and alcoholism and marriages falling apart, when there’s no interesting mystery or fantasy or twist of narrator or history to pull me out of this reality and into another. I still routinely read to escape my world. I’m simply not at the point in my life where I enjoy writing stories that I can read in The New Yorker magazine. Meh. I appreciate reading them, but I’m not interested in writing them.

What I know and love now is children’s stuff. What I know is fantasy. Fairy tales. Folklore. Conflicts between siblings and parents and teachers. First loves, high school crushes, being the nerd in the sixth grade class everyone laughs at. That’s what I know, and that’s what matters to me. And I haven’t been able to write any of those conflicts and stories in workshop — until now. *grins madly* It’s as if I’ve finally been given commercial and intellectual justification by a successful outside source (who happens to be a CMU alumna) and I can do what I want, at last, without feeling guilty for handing in something that’s not set in a bar or a nursing home, but in the middle of the woods in 1750 Massachusetts, or somewhere in a parallel dimension.

Well, it also might help that because I’m graduating in 4 months, I’ve earned validity because I’ve been writing well for the last 3.5 years. Maybe the having to live through the rough writing patches and classes is what got me to this point. I think I’m a better writer than I was in high school when I first started drafting novels. I’m not really less optimistic but I am more, well, realistic. I know I won’t get published without a lot of work and an honest idea of the publishing industry, which I’ve been garnering. I think I’m getting there, and that at long last, I’ve really earned this ability to write what I want.

I’m excited for this semester. *grins*