Tag Archives: self confidence

Middle Grade fiction – Writing With a Voice

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Navigating though the literary world has been an interesting and at times a frustrating old-keysexperience.  One of the informative parts of this process was spirited by an agent I follow on twitter.  Jen Rofe of the Andrea Brown Literary Agency was discussing how important it is to write with a ‘Voice,’ a term that can be illusive and is often misunderstood.  Fortunately she listed a number of MG (Middle Grade) authors/books who she felt stood out with distinctive voices.  I found Wendy Mass’ Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life one of the most intriguing.

When Jeremy was eight his father died in an auto accident, the book begins when Jeremy is a month away from turning thirteen.  A mysterious package arrives in the mail about the size of a shoebox with the inscription THE MEANING OF LIFE for Jeremy Fink to be opened on his 13th birthday.  The problem is that there are four different keyholes locking it and it seems that the sender, his father’s lawyer, has not included the keys.  So Jeremy and his best friend Lizzy begin a quest to find the keys that will open the box.  With this platform the author has the kids dive into the world, sending them on an adventure where they encounter different types of experiences and individuals that reflect on the meaning/purpose of life.

While on an errand for a mysterious former pawnshop owner they make a delivery to an elderly gentleman.  As they are leaving while the conversation dances around the topic of the meaning of life the man gives Jeremy an apple and says, “A wise man once remarked that we can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed.”

A confused Jeremy looks on as the man continues, “Before an apple seed is planted, no one will know how many apples will one day sprout from it.  It’s all about potential, and potential is hidden from all of us until we embrace it, find our purpose, plant ourselves so we can grow,” with that he closes the door leaving Lizzy and Jeremy confused.  Jeremy slowly fades into an existential crisis and in the following days although they have other encounters with more insights I found none were as interesting than the man with the apple.

I found it fascinating how the author, Wendy Mass massaged and altered the original quote, “Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.”  part of a sermon from the evangelist Robert H. Schuller.  I’ve never been to Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Southern California but I respect how dynamic his ministry was and the monument that he built but I find Wendy Mass’ manipulation of the quote so much more interesting, insightful and instructive.

To grow we must allow ourselves to become immersed, to be planted, in the area of our passion and then the evolving mystery of our potential will ever so slowly be revealed.  In a society where we strive for acceptance we often tend to try to fit in by mimicking others at times covering, perhaps erasing our uniqueness.  We blend in rather than stand out.  That the meaning or purpose of life is life and living it, enjoying the essence of being.  Although there will be good times as well as bad, we need to allow the good ones, the positive ones, glow in our heart and stay alive.

The Old Dragon Sage in The Littlest Dragon and the Princess know how important self-image is and the importance of dwelling on the positive. When he first meets The Littlest Dragon the old dragon finds him sad and confused since his classmates have tried to convince him that because he is so small he is a nothing.  His encouragement turns The Littlest Dragon in a direction of positive thinking that eventually saves the Princess and the kingdom from the treacherous Prince Luan.

 

A positive way to deal with adversity

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The emperor and his council were stunned when Prince Luan presented the long lost contract that the emperor’s father had signed seventy-five years ago.  As they realized that they couldn’t repay the loan and Prince Luan would take Princess Leizu as payment they were paralyzed.  When the dragons saw that the emperor and his council couldn’t decide what to do the Dragon Council was assembled to address the situation.  They wanted to see if the legal dragons could find any discrepancy in the contract, unfortunately they couldn’t so they went home leaving The Littlest Dragon by himself.  At this point the Old Dragon Sage reenters the story and gives The Littlest Dragon some of the most important advice of his life.The Old Dragon Sage

It is times like this when all hope seems to vanish that we have the opportunity to learn about our character, our courage and our resolve.  The dilemma is used as an opportunity to reveal and reinforce the value of learning how to lead a positive optimistic approach to life.  To introduce and affirm one of the most important principles that Napoleon Hill ever taught, the insight “That with every failure and defeat comes with that situation a seed of equal or greater importance.”

I find that by taking this approach one can begin the process of stepping back from the tragedy rather than being swept away by the pain, shock and hopeless confusion that it can bring.  It allows us to switch from reacting subjectively to the situation to one where we can begin to evaluate it objectively.  It puts the mind in gear to look for some benefit from the horrific situation, at times there are many.  By looking at the information that we encounter and learning how to filter it by the possibilities that we can take rather than by necessities we begin to see that very rarely is there a situation without hope or benefit.

 

Leizu’s character flaw

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Perhaps it was because Princess Leizu was raised in such a poor land that she was so dedicated to her responsibilities.  Perhaps it was because she was so young when she was put in a position of authority that some of her youth melted into a compulsion to follow what seemed to be her duty.   Perhaps it was because of her karma that lead her in a direction where she blindly accepted her reality and her fate regardless of how dire it was.

When she faces a crisis in the middle of the story because she makes her decisions through what she feels she must do, by necessity rather than by opportunity, she eliminates any other possibilities that might set her free from the dilemma.  And as great as Leizu’s character is, kind, hard working, pleasant attitude, cheerful spirit this is her one unresourceful trait.

Fortunately because The Littlest Dragon had been just average in intelligence when he grew up that he had to develop self-discipline to be able to complete his classroom lessons at school.  It was this experience that lead him to deal with the crisis in a different way.  His ability to stay focused on a problem until he found a solution combined with the wise words of the Old Dragon Sage would spin the conflict in the middle of the story in a different direction.

It is common in today’s society to refer to this as the ability to think outside of the box. Too often we don’t know how to develop this ability and when we think we’ve identified the box and are outside of it we don’t realize that we’re just inside a larger box that surrounds the old box.

An essential approach in thinking outside the box is to understand how we make our decisions and of how our operating system works so that we can discard approaches in solving problems that don’t work.  The first step in this process is to understand how we make decisions, how we filter the external stimulus and what filters we use to help us make these decisions.

 

The importance of a positive mental attitude

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The advice that The Old Dragon Sage gave to The Littlest Dragon, to ignore the bulling and it will usually go away, is an important approach to this type of situation.  The harassment in this story was more like mean teasing and not as severe as some of the hurtful things that happens in our Nation’s schools each day.

After The Old Dragon Sage encourages The Littlest Dragon to ignore the mean teasing he moves on to a more important part of his advise to the little guy.  One of the most valuable aspects of our mental make up has to do with having a positive mental outlook about one’s self.   That would be hard to do if The Littlest Dragon believed he was a nobody so The Old Dragon Sage begins a conversation about self esteem and his beliefs about himself.

As we grow up not only do we create an operating system that kept us safe during the formative years of our life, during this time we also accumulated a great number of beliefs about ourselves.  One of the most common approaches of looking at these beliefs is to evaluate them as whether or not they are true or false.  Unfortunately we can always find evidence that support a belief even if that belief isn’t true.

I’m not suggesting that truth is relative and you can make up your own reality and set of rules about life.  To do so would be dangerously heading down a very slippery slope.  The type of belief that I refer to has nothing to do with topics like, “is there a God?” “Is man basically good or bad?” etc.  The beliefs I refer to are the ones that we hold to be true about ourselves, of those in relations to others and to the world.

Instead of looking at beliefs as whether they are true or false The Old Dragon Sage suggests that a better approach is to look at your beliefs about yourself as whether or not they are resourceful to you.  Thinking that you’re insignificant, a looser, unlovable or a misfit doesn’t do anything but bring unhappiness.  These types of beliefs should be discarded and replaced with ones that affirm uniqueness, success, talent and goodness.

I expect that some would feel that presenting this information to my target audience, 8 to 12 year olds might be a bit too soon, perhaps, but one of the driving forces behind this project is that I didn’t encounter the 12 Great Riches of Life or positive life coaching until much later in life.  The question “Why I was unaware of these insights” turned into “What can I do to interject this way of thinking to the youth of our society,” hence The Littlest Dragon and the Princess.

Problems with classmates

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Rarely does anyone grow up without encountering problems with classmates in some form or another.  Encounters with bullies or bullying at school are a common occurrence in childhood. Addressing this issue wasn’t my initial purpose in writing this book but it became the background story for the main story about Chinese dragon mythology and the discovery of silk.

I realized that while I desired to present an entertaining story for kids  I also desired to offer beneficial insights on how to build a positive, happy life.  I wanted a story that suggested ways for kids to build strong self-esteem.

I firmly believe that we all have the opportunity to live positive, happy lives but, quite often, we can’t seem to find our way because of bad habits and low self-esteem we’ve developed early in our childhood.   As a consequence, we often cultivate states of mind that are less than joyous.  We tend to believe that the decisions we make in response to life’s challenges are ultimately out of our control.  As adults, many of us find it difficult to discard unresourceful approaches to responding to life’s challenges.  I believe it advantageous to start teaching our young children resourceful approaches to responding to the challenges they encounter at school and in their environment in general so that by the time they reach adulthood they have established the foundation for a positive, happy life.  The goal is learning to turn negatives into positives.

Sadly there will always be individuals who pick on or bully those around them when the teacher’s back is turned but the incident can be used to turn the child’s attention in a positive way.  So, for example, instead of focusing on feelings of being hurt and alienated due to the emotional incident, direct the conversation toward what type of person does the child want to be.  Stressing the thoughts of not wanting to be mean to others like the bully.  Encourage the child to take control of the situation by taking an objective position.  One-way is to evaluate the situation from the outside as if the child was a bystander watching the incident.

In the story The Littlest Dragon and the Princess, the littlest dragon faces a great deal of teasing from his classmates and especially the class bully.  His classmates try to convince him that he is worthless because he is so very small.  He is so perplexed after weeks and months of taunting that he wanders high into the mountains after school one day to think and try to resolve his predicament.  It is in this wilderness that he meets an Old Dragon Sage who suggests alternate responses to these conventional situations. The Old Dragon Sages begins to teach the Littlest Dragon about The Twelve Great Riches of Life, which begin with having a positive mental attitude. This is a positive approach to thinking that starts by learning not to look at beliefs about ourselves in terms of whether they are true or false but rather whether or not they are resourceful.  The Old Dragon Sage encourages The Littlest Dragon to discard any beliefs that are not helpful to him.

The main objective of this part of the story is to present a positive learning situation on which kids can reflect and incorporate positive approaches into their lives that help them learn how to take control and not allow external situations to create negative beliefs about themselves.   Importantly, this teaches children to be proactive in their lives rather than victims.

A few more thoughts about the origins of this story

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The years between the initial story that was created for a presentation for J. Paul Getty’s Educational seminar and the final version were filled with turmoil, challenge and personal rebirth.  This rediscovery of what I was capable of came to be through the exploration of a number of personal growth books, lectures and meditation.  A great amount of this rediscovery was centered on the insights of Napoleon Hill.  I was enlightened by his knowledge shown in the “Twelve Great Riches of Life,” or The Magic Ladder to Success.  I was a little frustrated that I hadn’t come across this knowledge earlier in my life.  That thought turned into the question, “Why did it take so long to discover this knowledge and how can I change that for others?”

Until recently, I was an art teacher at Santa Monica High School.  During short art history lectures, many times I would weave in a life principle concept or some other insight from Hill.  The feedback was terrific. The value of these insights was enormous. When the story was rewritten, I decided to add the character of the Old Dragon Sage, who would introduce these personal growth concepts into the story and therefore introduce the reader to these valuable insights.

How successful individuals deal with adversity is a major part of this story.  If we let external situations create bad feelings about ourselves, we become victims; instead we can use negative situations as a reference point to stand back and look at our lives and ask the question, “Who do I want to be?”  “What must I do to I achieve it?”

As we grow up, we form an operating system that will keep us safe during our formative years.  If we had a safe, loving environment, this system would be normal and give us the results in life that we want.  when we face challenging situations we must overcome, we sometimes make decisions that don’t always work to our advantage.  The problem stems from the fact that this operating system works subconsciously, kind of like being on automatic pilot.  We can engage in behaviors that don’t serve us well. Such behaviors can be discarded but it’s not always an easy task.  By watching ourselves with awareness and facing the frustrations of life with courage, resolve and dignity, we can turn into the person that we want to become.

Please know that I don’t sit in some remote ivory tower untouched by human difficulties.  The observation about facing life’s difficulties was inspired during a religious ceremony that I attended at the end of the writing part of this project.  I was reading a passage in a Bible that talked about trials from above and how to face them.  I believe that God allows us to encounter difficulties with our own free will and how we respond to them defines our character.  I included this insight (how to face life’s challenges with courage, resolve and dignity) in the conclusion of the story.  Strangely as soon as I did so, I found myself entangled in difficult situations that tried my own resolve and patience.

I hope the challenging days are on the wane and i am looking forward to getting this story published.  The key illustrations are completed and will be displayed in later posts.

Some thoughts about stature

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I find it interesting that we as a society have a tendency to reject that which is different; those characteristics in others that are unfamiliar to us.  We seem to make fun of those who are unusual.  Rudolph was excluded and teased because of his nose but when Santa found a use for his difference his shallow reindeer friends reversed their scorn and loved him.

The background motivation for this story came in part from several sources and observations but primarily the idea that height and importance are not interrelated.

I’ve often been amazed at how society gives so much attention to the powerful and notable individuals.  Being tall and powerful is important if you’re playing for the Lakers or fighting the Minotaur but I wonder, does size always matter?  I know our civilization has historically found favor with those who are tall but could it be that some of our comments to young children make the situation worse.

Quite often when we encounter a friend or relative’s child that we haven’t seen for a while we comment on how much they’ve grown.  “Look at how big you’ve become,” we say.  Perhaps noticing how much they’ve grown creates a background situation, an unconscious mental process that works in a negative way with some children.   When they don’t grow as much as others especially compared to their classmates they could feel that they haven’t improved, that they’re not as important than the others because they’re short.

The main character in The Littlest Dragon and the Princess is excluded and teased at school due to his small size.  Fortunately he meets an Old Dragon Sage who is able to introduce him to alternate ways of thinking, of the importance of having a positive mental out look.