Talk. Write. Show. Don't Preach! Writing for Young People

 

The first play I saw in a theater as a child had a princess in it. Much as I wanted to like it, I was soon bored. I had already been fascinated by movies like The Wizard of Oz, shown every year on Thanksgiving. Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West were far more fascinating.

Other movies, plays and stories drew me in with dinosaurs, ghosts, horses and adventures. I wasn’t a writer then, but I knew that certain stories were thrilling — and others, not so much.

Safe stories with plots that appeared to go wrong for a minute or two and then righted themselves, seemed fake in ways I couldn’t have explained at six or seven years old. I knew when something happened that seemed genuine — and that is always what I look for, since.

I've written a number of plays for children, and each theater has its own, fairly large audiences. Subjects ranged from historical to folk tale adaptations with hints of magic and fantasy to a young teen satire. I also wrote a three-book, middle-grade historical series about the Beat Generation in 1958.

I decided to set the Beat Street series in the 1950s because I thought Beats sparked what we later called the hippie era and a new way of looking at art. I didn’t always know I wanted to be an artist, but I had a feeling that artists were more like me than doctors, lawyers, or CEOs. And part of me knew that, as someone who loved making up stories, I was headed for a creative life.

Early on, I learned that telling a story to children is like telling any other story: we need to show, not tell; share, not preach, and most of all, create stories and plot lines to captivate readers and audiences, no matter how old or young they are. Yes, there are things we don't want to show to a three-year-old. At the same time, we don't want the three-year-old to be so bored she wanders off--or worse, falls asleep.

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My Favorite Job Helped Me Connect With My Body

I had no reason to believe anything good would come out of my divorce — which happened when my son was three and a half years old. In fact, I was embarking on a major transformation that would change the way I lived in my body. It began with a new job, of all things — in a small eight-person office where the last thing I expected was positive change.

I first saw a posting about the job at a women’s center. The organization, called Melpomene Institute for Women’s Health Research, was a nonprofit. Its mission sounded fascinating: to bring cutting-edge health research to ordinary women and girls and to develop programs to engage them in leading healthy lives.

What that meant, from the organization’s point of view, was a profound commitment to helping women engage in physical activity — at a time when male sports/athletics were primary in every sense.

Melpomene was looking for a development assistant, and the pay seemed better than what I was seeing for other jobs. I had no clue what a development assistant was, but it said something about being a good writer and creating grant proposals, which I had done before. It was a part-time job, which I also liked because it would give me more time to be with my son.

At this point, I was a terrified human being, with nightmares of being homeless in waking and sleeping dreams. My son’s dad was paying child support and alimony, because I hadn’t worked outside home in many years, and was a stay-at-home parent and writer. I was grateful for the money, but it came with a time limit, and I didn’t want to be all that dependent on someone I wasn’t married to anymore.

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Photo: Property of Judy M. Lutter

Flying Dreams (poem)

 

They begin when I am eighteen, dreams
Refusing subtlety, rising from books that say
You can leave your body, it feels like flying.

I don’t believe it. Then it happens to me.

The first dreams take me up, not like wings,
But suddenly, without warning, slowly at first.
Then faster and higher than I’ve ever been or will be
Like a comet, flying high over the trees until

The clouds turn hazy and I swoop, like a bat, 
Past branches, moss, leaves, a sky bereft of animals
Speed is all I have to pull me forward, spiraling
Like rice paper, lifted by the wind.

See more in my post for Medium.

Photo by Look Up Look Down Photography on Unsplash

When You Fail/Die/Bomb Onstage, What Can You Do to Recover?

 

Have you ever had to perform a show without one of your cast or band members when no understudy was available? I have, and though I never want to do it again, I’ve never forgotten what happened.

I was in a punk-pop-rock band, working with a manager who found us college gigs. It was a Friday night, and I think we’d been advertised as more of a dance band than a concert. We’d have been better off with a seated audience, but a lot of colleges preferred dance bands at the time.

As it happened, our lead singer/songwriter/guitarist was really sick, and could hardly stand. He was willing to go with us anyway, but we couldn’t bear the thought of him falling over onstage and told him we could perform without him. I think we also wanted to show him we could function without him, if we had to — though in fact, it wasn’t true.

Once we arrived and started setting up the stage, I was feeling less and less confident. All we had was a bass player, a drummer, and a vocalist (me), whose signature songs consisted of harmonizing with the lead singer/founder. We tried playing the songs we were used to doing, but they sounded weird without either acoustic or electric guitar.

After a few songs, people in the audience began booing us and telling us we sucked.I hated to hear it, and at the same time, I couldn’t say I didn’t understand. In fact, I didn’t like how we sounded, either. After a few more tries, we ended up leaving and telling the staffer at the door that one of our members was sick and we should have canceled.  As you can probably guess, we didn’t get paid.

Of course, people bomb out for all kinds of reasons, but when it happens to you, it can feel like a monster squeezing his hands around your throat. Was there something we could have done? In hindsight, nearly everything.

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Seeing Family and Old Friends Made me Realize How Much I Miss Them: Because Careers and Friendship Shouldn't Compete

 

I tend to be ravenous about advancing my career. Every year, every opportunity I snatch or miss is always an occasion for obsessing about what I could have done better. And while I love my family and friends, I don’t always show them what they mean to me.

Now, I’m reaching an age where I think much more about who I want to be as much as what I want to do as an artist. Finding myself at dinner last week with friends as I reached my birthday, I had to think for a minute when a friend asked if I had any thoughts on where I’m going.

The first thing I thought about was that it’s been too long since I’ve seen the people I grew up with or who I became friends with during my twenties. The time I spent with everyone shows me how strong you can become when surrounded by people you’ve known for a while. In my usual day-to-day routines, I take walks, write, eat, talk on the phone, do errands, and send emails, but have to work harder to connect with people.

When I’m visiting good friends and family, we’re able to pick up where we left off instantly, and our lives reflect that closeness. I’m lucky to have a husband and even luckier to say we are happy after more than two decades together. Would life be perfect if I were nearer to other relatives and friends? No, because nothing is perfect. But it would be a whole lot closer to the kind of life I’m looking for.

What I discovered during the past two weeks about the people I love: When we are together, we share everything. We are braver, funnier, stronger, more perceptive.

Do they miss me as much as I miss them? I don’t really know. I can say it felt enormously good to be with them and made me second-guess my choice to move to the Midwest many years ago.

Read more on Medium.

Photo: Taken by a friend; property of the author

Did I Lose My Fearlessness?

I smoked Marlboros or Parliaments; drank Manhattans, stout and burgundy wine. I took risks of all kinds with my friends — including auditioning for parts we thought were right for us. When they didn’t happen, we dealt with rejection and heartbreak, pulled ourselves up and started over. Romantic relationships were pretty crazy, too— but they taught me so much, they were worth it. When all this happened, I was twenty.

Looking back on those days now, where did my courage and confidence go?

It seems to have vanished, and I need it now, more than ever. There are days life gets to you, and you know you’ll rebound. Today, there is no rebound — just a lot of fear where courage used to be.

I lived in Boston four years as an Emerson College student and then stayed one extra year in an administrative job for what may have been a community college. (I could never figure out what it really was.) What would academics do without newly minted graduates who neaten up their bosses’ lives?

I lived as I imagined people should live, if those people were twenty. Once, I set out with my laundry and ran into two castmates from a play who invited me to a friend’s wedding. Scooting home, I dumped the laundry and changed into a dress that was bought at a thrift store. After eleven glasses of champagne at the wedding, I came home sailing on a pink cloud, making my roommate laugh.

It was a time of fearlessness and confidence. The belief that while I was an unholy mess and the world was an even worse mess, I was going to triumph, one way or another. I couldn’t have told you what that way would be, except it would involve either acting or writing.

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All Grown Up and Reading Middle-School Books? Me, Too

Yes, I read fiction and nonfiction for adults all the time — but I’ve been reading middle school and young adult (YA) novels for a while. I started thinking about young readers after going to work at Scholastic Choices Magazine. It was one of the more fun jobs I had — and I loved meeting seventh and eighth graders and finding out what they thought about the world.

Still, as an adult, many people say you’re not supposed to read middle school or young-adult fiction. When I was in my twenties, it was unheard of — and if you did, you wouldn’t tell anyone for fear of them judging you as a reader and a person.

What people may not realize if they don’t read this genre is how spectacular some of the authors are — and how much you miss by not reading them. They also may not know that middle school and YA books can help us understand our kids better — if we have them.

My own situation led me to younger readers’ books after I had to leave Scholastic Magazine to move to the Midwest due to family job changes. Luckily, I was able to write articles for Scholastic as a freelancer. I wrote about budgets, cooking, teen marriage, and much more — along with expanding to another Scholastic magazine focused on current events. I didn’t think about middle school books, though, until my friend Tori became a copy editor in the book division.

Read more on Medium.