On Tuesday, Doe Boyle, Leslie Bulion and I spoke to a great group of aspiring children’s books writers about the mechanics of getting published (and the awesome opportunity provided by the Tassy Walden Awards for Connecticut writers).* We discussed cover letters, finding a critique group, researching publishing houses, the dos and don’ts of the submissions process. Ultimately thought, after almost two hours of questions and answers, our advice boiled down to this:

1. Write the very best stories you can write, then do everything in your power to make them better.

2. Never, ever, give up.

And that’s the secret.

* Special thanks go to the staff of the West Hartford Barnes & Noble who gave us this opportunity and were wonderful, from beginning to end!

Just wanted to remind folks that I’ll be appearing tonight at 7:00 p.m. at the West Hartford Barnes & Noble with Leslie Bulion and Doe Boyle to discuss tips on getting started in children’s book writing and the Tassy Walden Awards.

Hope to see you there!

In the mid ‘80s, when I was in law school, I participated in a seminar about how American law has treated African-American women over history. One lively discussion that stuck with me concerned whether a white person could ever fully understand, let alone properly describe, the life of a black woman. A classmate, an African-American woman, categorically stated that it couldn’t be done. Sullenly, I maintained that it should be possible.

This conversation came back to me, years later, when I wrote No Castles Here. About half the important characters are African-American. The primary setting is the inner-city in an imaginary neighborhood of Camden, NJ, a city where the majority of residents are African-American. Could I, as a white person write about the African-American experience?

Many, like my colleague back in the 1980s, strongly believe it wasn’t possible for me to do it — as illustrated in this blog discussion about the blurb for the book. But that wasn’t what I had set out to do.

I wanted to portray a poor bullied loser who encounters a bit of magic in his life. Because the references were easier for me, I made him white. I based his character, his family’s character, the neighbors, and the neighborhood on the hundreds of people I met and on the neighborhoods I wandered over the years, in the New Haven area, Brooklyn, and during my short time in Camden and Philadelphia.

Whether I was successful in what I set out to do, others will have to decide. But regardless of the success, the effort taught me humility. It made me realize how much I didn’t know. Before spending time with my characters, I was often guilty of white default, which is choosing the color of my character’s skin the same way I might chose his or her eye color, and not paying attention to the details of the person’s life. Being faithful to those details required a lot of effort, and made me far more sensitive to how they can be gotten wrong. I wrote about this recently in an essay published in Anna Tambour’s wonderful website: It’s not like choosing the color of her hair. It’s a very personal essay, but it helped work out for me the wrongs of white default.