Flying Ships and Children's Books

In honor of my acceptance into an MFA program for next fall*, I have made a number of writing related vows, one of which is to actually update this blog as frequently as I can. Lately, I've been feeling like a writer in want only, since I haven't actually finished anything since the essays that I wrote specifically for those applications. Partly, I think, it is because I am simply out of practice, or rather, that I have never had the practice in the first place. The less I write, the harder it is to make myself write without those pesky but oh-so-useful deadlines. The more I write, the more I want to do it.

In light of that, I've decided to work on a Young Adult fiction story that has been playing in the background on the movie screen of my brain for a while now. It first started just as an image, a picture of a ship, something from the Age of Sail - a period that I've always found extremely fascinating - flying through the air. I just closed my eyes one day, and there it was. The image has haunted me - I could, and still can see it so clearly. If I were a painter rather than a writer, I would simply put it on canvas. As it is, I have to let it germinate for a bit so that I can find a way of squeezing it into a story - or building a story around the image as the case may be.

Personally, I think that YA fiction is where some of the best stories have been written. Like comics, there are fewer rules and more freedom to write whatever imaginative story comes to you. Of course, you trade this for a lack of mainstream acceptance (especially in the case of comics). It's not that people won't accept and read your book, but they aren't very likely to treat it as "serious." Still, who cares? I'm not sure why I've never really thought about writing something like this before. I know that I'd be better at it than I would ever be at writing an adult fiction novel (though I think I'll still tackle the occasional short story). For a long time, I've wanted to be "great" and that has kept me from doing a lot of writing that I otherwise would have done. I wanted to be the next Dostoevsky (but seriously, let's face it, there will never be another Dostoevsky) or Faulkner, but I was ignoring the "greats" that made me want to tell stories in the first place. C.S. Lewis, Tolkien (not that LOtR is specifically YA fiction, but come on, most of us read it when we were 15), Lloyd Alexander (more for Westmark than Prydain, personally), Madeleine L'Engle, or even Robert Louis Stevenson. Stories by these authors are for "children" but they have had greater influence on my life than most books I've read. They taught me to love imagination and adventure, to believe in worlds outside and higher than my own, and in virtues higher and greater than self preservation.

To be honest, I'm a bit afraid of it, just as I would be of any major undertaking - its as hard a market as any other in the book world. And then there's the old fear - am I good enough? I can't write as well as these people. But that kind of thinking just keeps from doing anything. Who cares if its not as good, maybe it'll still be good, and maybe some kid somewhere will read it and be inspired.

So, to make a long story short - I'm slowly writing a YA book (I hope to have a rough draft by the end of the summer) and, yes, it'll have flying ships in it.

*Running tally - Accepted: George Mason University, Eastern Washington University
Rejected: University of Iowa, Notre Dame, Penn State, Hollins University
Have Yet To Hear From: University of North Carolina-Wilmington, University of San Francisco