Writing for Young Readers - by Eugie Foster

October 2007
An Interview with Author Dallas Woodburn

Dallas Woodburn, author of two collections of short stories, 3 a.m. and There’s a Huge Pimple On My Nose, is a student at the University of Southern California and maintains a nonprofit foundation, Write On!, to "encourage children to gain knowledge and have fun reading and writing." Her publication credits include a column for Family Circle and works in Writer's Digest, Justine, Writing, and Cicada magazines as well as in books Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul IV, Chicken Soup for the Girl's Soul, and So, You Wanna Be a Writer?, among others. She was a featured guest at the first annual Jack London Children's Writing Camp, chosen as Cosmo Girl! magazine's "Girl of the Month," and was awarded the Jackie Kennedy-Onassis/Jefferson Award and a Congressional Award Gold Medal for working to increase literacy awareness through her "Write On!" foundation. She received a silver medal in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and won first place in both Byline magazine's "New Talent Short Story Contest" and the Gulf Coast Writers Association's "Let's Write" literary contest. Dallas was also recently a moderator on a panel discussing young writers at the 2007 Santa Barbara Writers Conference.

This is a great question, because I think that especially in today’s extremely fast-paced world, our schedules tend to be so full-to-bursting that it can be overwhelming to think of adding something else to the mix. When I give talks to kids, I encourage them to find their passion--find what they love to do--and run with it. Do it every single day, every chance you get. For me this means writing every day, taking a book with me everywhere I go and reading voraciously, and being organized and disciplined in sending out my work to editors. I try to keep very organized and have separate three-ring binders with tabs for each story and magazine piece I am working on. I use this system to store ideas when I am working on a story, and later to keep track of where and when I have sent the piece out to publications. I have a separate binder containing all my publicity and promotion materials for my books, and another binder with potential markets organized by audience and subject matter. To-do lists are also hugely helpful to me.

Schoolwork is obviously a high priority--I was fortunate enough to receive a full-tuition merit scholarship from USC, and I consider it my duty to make the very most of

my four years as an undergrad. I am a Creative Writing major with a double-minor in Entrepreneurship and Leadership, and I have found most of my classes highly enjoyable and interesting. I feel lucky to be able to take Creative Writing workshop classes where the homework assignments are to write short stories--to me, that doesn’t feel like real work! But as for making time to write, I find that even if it is the middle of exam time and I only have ten minutes to jot down a quick scene idea or character sketch, I feel so much better when I close my eyes at night having written something that day. I think it is very true that if you love something enough, you will make time for it no matter how busy you are.

I love giving talks to kids at schools and youth groups about reading and writing. At the beginning I always ask, "How many of you like to write?" Usually, only a few shy hands raise. After my talk, I ask the same question, and nearly always more than twice the number of hands raise. Kids tell me, "I’ve always liked to write, but I didn’t know someone my age could be a writer." I tell them you can be a writer--an AUTHOR--at any age. What I don’t think these kids realize is that they are the ones who inspire me to keep pursuing my own dreams, because they believe in me and their unabashed enthusiasm reminds me why I love writing so much and why I started writing in the first place.

I actually created a nonprofit organization called Write On seven years ago to encourage kids to discover the joy, self-confidence, and a means of self-expression and connection with others through reading and writing. My website http://www.zest.net/writeon features author interviews, book reviews, writing prompts, opportunities for young writers to publish their work, and more. I also hold an annual Holiday Book Drive and in the past six years have collected and donated 8,342 new books to underprivileged kids. My goal this year is to surpass 10,000 books total! I also publish a free monthly Write On e-newsletter--to sign up, simply send your e-mail address to me at dallaswoodburn@aol.com.

Yes, I do think it is very important to set daily goals for yourself, because otherwise life can get in the way. I try to write for at least twenty minutes every day, no matter how busy I am--I will get up twenty minutes earlier, go to bed twenty minutes later, or squeeze in a twenty-minute writing break before dinner. People sometimes tell me they want to write but are too busy and don’t have time. The thing is, you’d be surprised how much just ten or twenty minutes a day can add up. That’s a couple hours every week. And I often end up writing for more than just twenty minutes a day--twenty minutes is just a small number to get me started. If I were to tell myself, "I’m going to write for two hours tonight," I might get intimidated and not want to do it. But if I tell myself twenty minutes is all I need to do--if I’m tired or stressed and don’t feel like writing--forcing myself to write for just twenty minutes will often lead to much longer writing sessions because I get into my "writing mode." During the summer and winter breaks from school, and on weekends when I don’t have too much homework, I’m able to devote larger chunks of time to writing, typically a stretch of two or three hours in a sitting. I am a night owl and feel most inspired at night--hence the title of my latest short story collection, 3 a.m.--so I will typically stay up and write after the rest of my family has gone to bed, when the house is quiet and I can mull over the creative gifts the day has given me. Other writers prefer to write in the morning. It’s whatever works for you. When you get down to it, it doesn’t matter when you write--all that matters is that you sit in front of that keyboard and put your fingers on those keys and do it.

Like every writer I’ve met, I certainly have days when it is very difficult to make myself sit in front of my keyboard and put my fingers on the keys. The truth is, while writing thrills me, it can also be terrifying sometimes. I fear I will run out of words, or spend weeks on a story that does not blossom. And yes, I worry about "writer’s block"--I swear, wrestling alligators must be less daunting. But I think writing is a lot like running. It is hard, certainly--but, as I learned when I was forced to sit out two high school cross-country seasons because of leg injuries that required surgery--for me, not running is harder. The same goes with writing. Writing is hard--tortuous, tedious, boring, scary. But, for me at least, not writing is harder.

So, I overcome writer’s block the only way I know how: I force myself to write. I don’t worry if what I’m writing is good or not. All I care about is getting words down on the page, getting the story moving and the writing flowing again. I’ve found that I may not always enjoy the sometimes-tedious, sometimes-dull, sometimes-terrifying process of writing--but I love the sweet satisfaction of having written. And soon the ideas will start coming again. I get ideas everywhere--from articles I read in the newspaper, conversations I overhear waiting in line, personal experiences that happen to me or to my friends. Every character I create has bits and pieces of me inside of him or her. I like to keep a pad of paper in my backpack and another one beside my bed to jot down ideas or quotes when I think of them--often if I don’t write them down right away, I lose them.

Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favorite authors, put it perfectly: "There is no perfect time to write. There’s only now." I have that quotation taped above my computer, and I look to it for inspiration whenever I am feeling down or discouraged. Writing really is a joyous act, and I feel so privileged to be able to share my words with others.

What an insightful question! I think there are some wonderful adult writers of teenage/young adult books--some of my favorites are Joan Bauer, Laurie Stolarz, and Ellen Wittlinger--but I also think that there can definitely be a disconnect between today’s teenagers and older generations. Adult writers can write very effectively and movingly and truthfully about young people because they remember what it was like to be a teenager themselves--at the same time, however, many of my adult-writer friends who are writing for younger audiences like to have a few teenagers read over their work and give them feedback, which they say is the most helpful editorial move they could make.

What bothers me is when editors, agents, and even other writers have a stigma against young writers simply because we are young. I am Coordinator of the Young Writers Program at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, and the talent and creativity of these young writers is unbelievable. Nothing irks me more than when I witness older writers "talking down" to these incredibly insightful and gifted high schoolers. I encourage young writers to think of their age as not a disadvantage, but rather as an advantage--many young people write for similarly young audiences, and I tell them, "Who better knows teenagers than a teenager herself?" S.E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders when she was sixteen, and when I heard her speak last year at the L.A. Times Book Festival she said she thinks part of what made the book so powerful was the raw honesty of it; she wrote the book as she was experiencing it in her daily life. I also use this strategy when writing magazine pieces--for example, I wrote a year-long column for Family Circle magazine called "Teen Talk" based on the premise of helping parents form better relationships with their teenagers by hearing what a teenager’s life is really like in the 21st Century. Everyone, I think, has to face what some may call "disadvantages"--I challenge you to find ways to turn those disadvantages around and use them to your advantage.

I tend to put a lot of myself and my real-life experiences into my writing, but that’s just me. There is certainly no single right way to do it. I do encourage young writers, however, to see their young age as an advantage rather than a disadvantage. Even if you are writing a fantasy story with zero grounding in real life, your audience is most likely kids around your age. We tend to write what we would enjoy reading ourselves. So in that regard I think it is helpful to write not necessarily what you know, but to write for who you know. I tend to write for teen audiences, and I use my young age as an advantage because I know what teens like and I therefore have a good idea of what they want to read and characters they will find interesting and relatable. I believe young people have voices that deserve to be heard and ideas that are just as important and vital in the world today as adults’ ideas and views. It’s our job to get our voices out into the world through our writing.

Never let anyone stop you from pursuing what you love. When my dad was in college, he wrote a fan letter to sports columnist Jim Murray asking the Pulitizer-Prize winner for advice. In the first of many letters of correspondence between them, Murray wrote: "Nobody can stop a writer from writing. Not even Hitler could do that." A rejection letter seems pretty feeble in such a light, doesn’t it? Remember that every "no" is one step closer to a "yes"; every failure is a new beginning that could lead to success. Fall down six times, get up a seventh time! I could paper my wall--all four walls!--with the rejection letters I have received, but I keep persevering and eventually that acceptance letter comes.

Sometimes I think the idea of writing can be intimidating and scary--much more so than the act of writing itself. My trick is to incorporate writing into my daily routine--no different from brushing my teeth, eating lunch, taking a shower. I mean, can you imagine not finding time to take a shower? I write every single day, even if only for ten minutes. You can always find ten minutes in your day to write--whether than means waking up ten minutes earlier, going to bed ten minutes later, taking ten minutes out of television time to write, etc. Often, if I don't feel like writing when I first begin, after the first ten minutes I'll get into it and the next thing I know, I'll look at the clock and a couple of hours will have passed. But even ten minutes of writing each day can really add up to pages and pages of writing, if you are dedicated and persistent. Ten minutes a day adds up to more than an hour a week, which adds up to five hours a month, and sixty hours over the course of a year--can you imagine how many words you could write in sixty hours?

I tell kids not to worry about self-editing during the first draft--the important thing is just to get the words down on paper. I find that if I let the critic in me pipe up during the first draft, she stifles my creativity, and the result is most certainly always writer’s block. Instead, wait to edit your writing until the first draft is done; then, print it out, let it sit in your desk drawer for a few days or weeks, and then go back with a red pen and a fresh eye and make it better. Usually I go through this process for three or four drafts until I feel ready to send it out into the world for possible publication, and often I have my dad or a writer friend look at a piece before submitting it to get another person's perspective--and to make sure I didn’t let any grammar mistakes or spelling errors slip by!

Great question! I think a writer simply needs to tell a compelling and engaging story, with characters young people will relate to and care about. I guess it’s really not all that simple, is it? But I think it comes down to good writing and good storytelling. I agree that video games and television and the Internet are all competitors for kids’ interest and time--but I also have witnessed firsthand the excitement on a boy’s face when he receives a new book from the Write On Holiday Book Drive, or the enraptured gazes of a classroom of students as I read them a story during a classroom talk, and these things give me hope and confidence that reading still has a very solid place in the lives of young people. I mean, take the Harry Potter phenomenon--how amazing to witness such worldwide excitement and connection and joy over a series of books!

I’ve completed my first novel manuscript and am currently shopping it for an agent; in the meantime, I have started to write a second novel. I'm also writing a monthly comic strip and advice column for Listen magazine, a publication that encourages kids to make smart choices and stay away from drugs and alcohol that is distributed through schools nationwide. In addition, I'm writing various freelance pieces and sending out queries to magazines. I'm also having fun working on a play script to hopefully be produced as part of my school's One Act Play Festival this fall. Another one of my major goals for the year is to expand my Write On foundation; I am starting a chapter at USC, and I am also printing up "tips and troubleshooting" brochures to send to interested volunteers who would like to start up a chapter in their hometown. My ultimate goal is to have a chapter of Write On in all fifty states!

My dream future career is to make a living writing novels and short stories and magazine pieces and plays, and also to start a publishing company specially focused on giving young, passionate writers their "big breaks."

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