The need to play

Setting up play dates with other kids is getting to be a real challenge. Scheduling around tennis, swimming, art, music, and other activities makes it difficult to get two children together for an afternoon.  I'm referring to the activities of my child's friends.  Their parents ask when we're free, and I always have the same response: we're always free.

What? No tightly scheduled series of character-building activities designed to make my child the perfect candidate for Harvard when he's older? Well... no. So what on earth do we do every day, anyway? Most of the time we play. Legos, Play-doh, drawing, story-telling, pirates, train-set... you name it, we play it.  My oldest is allowed one structured activity through the kindergarten (we are in the process of switching from music to art), but beyond that, we don't "do" those kinds of things. Not yet.

I was feeling a bit guilty about not providing the opportunity to do more structured things until I came across an article in Scientific American Mind recently: The Serious Need for Play.  Okay, it's actually from Feb/March of last year, but I just read it.  Have I mentioned that we have a major time delay in getting our magazine subscriptions to Germany? We do.  So here's my new, old news: people need to play.

According to the article, unstructured play has been shown in a variety of studies to be extremely important in social and mental development. Playing a game that has set rules doesn't count. Neither does playing a musical instrument. We are talking about free play, about giving children time to let their imaginations take over, to explore unseen (previously unimagined) universes and to create worlds with rules of their own. Even better if they can do that with other children, as this helps them hone their social and communication skills.

Free play allows children to become more creative, to be better problem-solvers, and to reduce stress. It allows us greater flexibility, which can help us to feel comfortable when we encounter new situations.  Play is not just part of being a child, but an essential part of learning how to be an adult. Animals of all kinds play when they are young... there must be a reason for it.

That's all well and good, but does the lack of free play have detrimental effects on development?  It appears that the answer is yes. One study cited in the SciAm Mind article found that

...kids who enrolled in play-oriented preschools are more socially adjusted later in life than are kids who attended play-free preschools where they were constantly instructed by teachers. By age 23, more than one third of kids who had attended instruction-oriented preschools had been arrested for a felony as compared with fewer than one tenth of the kids who had been in play-oriented preschools.  And as adults, fewer than 7 percent of the play-oriented preschool attendees had ever been suspended from work, but more than a quarter of the directly instructed kids had. [emphasis added]

Powerful findings, to my mind.  And a good reason to continue limiting the amount of time our children spend in structured activities. Parents need to put aside their concerns regarding free play and, like a writer does with his/her writing time, schedule it into the week.  Doing so allows children to grow up into adults who can not only manage, but also thrive, in an unpredictable, complex world. And finding time for free play as adults is equally important, to reduce stress and enhance creativity.

As David Elkind (child development expert at Tufts University) says,

Play has to be reframed and seen not as an opposite to work but rather as a complement.  Curiosity, imagination and creativity are like muscles; if you don't use them, you lose them.

As someone trying to recover my creativity, this sounds like a wake-up call. Let's not allow our children to lose their imaginations as they grow up. Here's to finding a little time for free play each week....

Synesthesia

My world is color coded. This is something I never really realized until I read an article on synesthesia and discovered that I am a "synesthete." Synesthesia, which occurs in approximately one out of every 2,000 people, occurs when the brain connects two seemingly disparate things. The most common form involves color: days of the week, letters, numbers, or months may stimulate a particular color in someone's mind. Other forms link taste or smell with other things, such as the sense of touch or with musical notes. Quite often members of an immediate family will share a particular form of synesthesia, although the associations may not match up (e.g., the letter A is blue to one person but yellow to another).

For me, numbers are most vividly connected to color, with months less strongly so. Doing a Sudoku puzzle is easy when I can look at the puzzle and "see" which color is missing. A friend of mine sees the color-number association so strongly that she remembers phone numbers by remembering the way they "look" in her mind.

Each morning I write morning pages—three pages of free-association writing (I am working my way through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which I highly recommend)—and I write the date at the start of each session. I am continually amazed by the impact this small act has on my mood. A date associated with colors that I like makes me happy, one with dreary colors brings me down. And the colors stimulate other ideas in my mind, small nuggets that often develop into story ideas.

The impact of color has become even stronger of late, as we live in a snowy, monochromatic world of white and gray. I find myself craving color. Not just waiting for spring but thirsting for the bright yellows, purples and greens of early spring flowers and plants. In fact, I crave color so much it has determined the location of my next picture book adventure story: Scotland, a verdant world richly cloaked in every shade of green.

And for the times when I cannot escape into my colorful stories, I can gaze at the the multi-colored snowflakes the children and I made a few weeks back. Anything to keep me afloat until spring comes. I keep telling myself that each day brings us one day closer.

Finding time to write

Ah, winter, the season of the terminal sniffles, sneezes, coughs, and loss of productivity.  I have been trying to find a good way to organize my time... to ensure that I devote time to my work (the one that pays the bills), my family, and my writing (blogging and "real"), not to mention the assorted household chores that keep our family's chaos under control.

Since the writing (sadly) tends to fall by the wayside, I decided to try a new approach this month: two days are set aside for writing and nothing else. Naturally, this new beginning was blindsided by illness.  Both children home on my designated writing days, and I have sniffles, sneezing, and coughing of my own... but here I am.  I am determined to make this work.

How to find time to write is something many (most? all?) writers seem to struggle with. I have read advice from a variety of sources on how to deal with it.  The major piece of advice everyone seems to agree upon is that you need to reallocate your time, triage your activities, if you will, and do away with those that simply do not fit into your schedule.  Or if you cannot do away with them, at least put them off (or better yet, get someone else to do them!).

When I was in graduate school, I was taught to schedule writing and research time into my week and treat that time as sacred.  Would we allow someone to schedule a meeting during one of our classes?  Of course not!  So why allow our writing time to be parceled out to others?  It's a good rule and guides my efforts to devote two days a week to writing.  Now if only the kids didn't need to stay home, it might just be productive....

Another alternative is to make use of every available moment.  This approach, termed "The 5 Minute Writer" by Jane Choate, calls upon writers to literally make use of every spare moment.  Look up potential character names, brainstorm story ideas, back up files, send an email query, proof read a couple of pages of your WIP... these are all suggestions for activities that she has found useful in her efforts to find time to write, and each can be done in as few as five minutes.

They are good suggestions. My only problem is that I tend to get drawn into my work, once it gets going. Forcing myself to stop after five or ten minutes is painful and frustrating.  But perhaps when my current work is further along, those options will better serve my purposes. In the meantime, I hope they might benefit others—no matter what kind of writing you do, you can always find a way to get it done, as long as you make it a priority.  Happy writing, everyone!

Getting an agent

I'm still fairly new to blogging and am in the process of exploring other blogs, including older posts. So I was thrilled to find reasons why you should never submit unagented to publishing companies. Moonrat's Editorial Ass blog outlines the many reasons authors should try first to get an agent, then to submit their MS to publishers (via said agent), rather than the other way around.

Of course, finding a good, reputable agent is important, and Anne R. Allen's blog Beware Bogus Literary Agents has some terrific resources for checking out potential agents. (Thanks for reposting it, Anne. I did tiptoe over from Nathan Bransford's blog, and I loved your guest blog on his site!).

Time to start checking out Agent Query to find agents who accept picture book manuscripts!