Mel Rosenberg | Writing for Kids (While Raising Them)

by Mel Rosenberg

As an aspiring children’s author, I’ve worked on hundreds of ideas for stories, but so far only one has broken through. EMILY SAW A DOOR (magnificently illustrated by Orit Magia) will launch with Random House Studio on February 24th. The original version (in Hebrew) has been extremely successful, and the book will soon be published in multiple languages (including Arabic!). How in the world did that happen?

Similarly, in my previous career as a researcher, I had hundreds of ideas for experiments and inventions, but only a couple led to noteworthy papers and inventions.

Where do those rare, successful ideas come from?

This question weighed on my mind as I prepared to teach an academic course on multidisciplinary creative thinking some twenty years ago. What I learned is that successful ideas across various disciplines often share a common characteristic—they appear, at least initially, to be silly and childish. Perhaps that’s because they often come from the meeting of two minds—both of them ours.

Norman Podhoretz put it best:

“Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.”

Great ideas can sprout from the connection between our adult mind and our playful, inner child mind. When this happens, we can come up with unanticipated, wacky, weird and whimsical ideas (you may recognize most or all of these), such as…

A squash becoming a girl’s pet.
School, worrying about its first day at school.
A bear who is attached to a small hat.
A crack on the ceiling with the habit, of sometimes looking like a rabbit.
NOT eating one’s classmates, even though they are yummy.
A rather large animal going unnoticed in the house.
A careful bull in a china shop.
Seven eating nine.

Has your adult mind been cultivating your relationship with your child mind?

Here are a few ways to invite it to “come out to play.” Please feel free to create your own versions and variations.

Just before you sit down to write, do something ridiculous. Bark. Dance a silly jig. Put on a funny hat. If you have a couple of youngsters around the house, invite them to join in! After all, they are the ones who invented silliness.
Warm up by inventing silly nonsense words. You can check out some of mine here.
Doodle, if you are so inclined.
Make up a ‘Silly Mary’ rhyme. Here is one of myme: Mary has an autograph/Of someone rich and famous/but it is difficult to read/exactly what the name is.
Make a list of ten things you can do with porridge. THEN make a list of ten things you CAN’T do with it. Oh, and it could be chocolate. Or a very ripe banana. Or practically anything.
Write ten things that are ridiculously and hilariously untrue about an object, such as a fish. Not as easy at sounds.
Do routine stuff, thinking about nothing in particular. Great, silly ideas can pop out when we are washing dishes or taking a shower. Be sure to keep a waterproof notebook handy.
Try to disregard serious adult thoughts, such as “Who will be interested in reading/buying/selling my story,” “What if people think I’m silly (“You should be so lucky),” or “Shouldn’t I be doing something more constructive now like answering emails?”

In writing “Emily Saw a Door,” I was lucky to have my child mind on board. It’s the story of a young girl who shows up out of nowhere and traverses a strange landscape of strange doors in her search for a place that is right. One door has endless stairs. Another is only for liars. A third for those who are blue “through and through.” Does that sound silly and implausible? If it does, then I only have my child mind to thank for it. And I do.

Mel Rosenberg is a Canadian-born author, scientist and inventor. He hosts the Children’s Literature channel of the New Books Network [Host, Children’s Literature Channel, NBN ], and is co-founder of Ourboox.