Coaching KidLit Episode 35: Handling Research with Guest Laurie Calkhoven

In this episode of Coaching KidLit, hosts Sharon Skinner and Christy Yaros discuss key aspects handling research with returning guest Laurie Calkhoven.

Laurie, an Author Accelerator Certified Book Coach, shares her extensive experience in writing over 50 books for young readers, including tips on conducting effective and organized research for both fiction and nonfiction.

She emphasizes the importance of using trusted sources, primary resources, and libraries, while also sharing practical advice on managing research time and avoiding rabbit holes. Laurie also provides insights into structuring research, drawing inspiration, and repurposing research for different audiences.

Key Topics Covered:

01:50 Diving into Research
05:41 The Importance of Primary Sources
13:48 Organizing Your Research
16:58 Balancing Research and Writing
22:05 Repurposing Research
29:21 Action Items and Resources

Books and Resources Mentioned:

Five Points by Tyler Anbinder
Packing for Mars by Mary Roach
Packing for Mars for Kids by Mary Roach
Daniel at the Siege of Boston by Laurie Calkhoven
You Should Meet Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Laurie Calkhoven
I Ship by Kelly Rice Schmitt, Illustrated by Jam Dong
Butt Or Face by Kari Lavelle
Wombats are Pretty Weird by Abi Cushman

The Smithsonian
Library of Congress

Laurie’s Research Resource Files

Listen:

Where to Find Laurie Online:

www.lauriecalkhoven.com

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Sharon Skinner: Welcome to Coaching KidLit, a podcast about writing and publishing good KidLit.

[00:00:07] Christy Yaros: We dig into various aspects of writing craft through a KidLit lens and provide inspiration and clear actionable items to help writers like you move forward on their KidLit writing journeys.

[00:00:19] Sharon Skinner: I’m Sharon Skinner, author accelerator, certified book coach, and author of speculative fiction and KidLit, including picture books, middle grade, and young adult.

[00:00:31] Christy Yaros: And I’m Christy Yaros, author accelerator certified book coach and story editor, focusing on KidLit, including middle grade and young adult.

Hey Sharon,

[00:00:41] Sharon Skinner: Hey, Christy, how are you?

[00:00:43] Christy Yaros: I am good, I hear we have another guest returning to us today.

[00:00:47] Sharon Skinner: Yes, we had so much fun with Laurie Calkhoven the last time that she was on that we decided that we had to bring her back.

Laurie Calkhoven is a colleague of ours. She’s an Author Accelerator Certified Book Coach. She loves capturing young readers and inspiring them to love books, reading, and writing. As much as she does. She’s the author of more than 50 books for children and teens, ranging from beginning readers and chapter books to middle grade and YA.

She’s had experience with all genres of children’s fiction, including mysteries, fantasies, thrillers, and historical novels. She’s also created non-fiction titles for children just learning to read, established middle grade readers, and teenagers. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Laurie spent many years working in book publishing.

She was the founding editor of the Teen People Book Club and was an executive editor with the Scholastic Book Clubs. You can visit her online at www. LaurieCalkhoven.Com and we’ll put that in the notes. But today, I think we’re going to be talking about something a little different with Laurie.

[00:01:50] Christy Yaros: Let’s talk with Laurie about research and non-fiction.

[00:01:54] Sharon Skinner: I think that’s going to be great. Welcome back, Laurie. We’re so happy to have you again.

[00:01:59] Laurie Calkhoven: I am very happy to be here. I love talking about research, I’ve written historical fiction, so I do research for both fiction and non-fiction, and it’s a big topic, so I’m excited that we’re going to be talking about it.

[00:02:10] Christy Yaros: Yeah, we love when we can have a guest who knows something that we don’t, that we can give to our listeners. So, this is your jam. You tell us, where do we start?

[00:02:21] Laurie Calkhoven: It can be really hard to know how to get started with research, and when I first started writing seriously, I had no idea how to do research. My research was really haphazard, and since then, I’ve sort of formed a system for myself. But it can be really hard to know how to get started with research. And, even when I visit kids in schools, I always tell them the easiest way to get started with doing research is to go on the internet. We all know it’s fast and easy. We all know how to do that.

But we all know, or we should know you have to be really careful with the research you’re doing on the internet, because you don’t know that you can trust everything that you read, certainly. So, you want to go to trusted sources, and you want to be, really careful about the facts you’re picking up on the internet and making sure that you have confirmation from other sources.

For instance, I’ve written, Biographies at the second-grade level for Simon Schuster’s Ready to Read program. So, when I was writing about Misty Copeland, I was able to go online and find a lot of interviews she did with news sources. I found videos of her dancing, things like that.

I wrote a biography of the Hawaiian surfer, Duke Kahanamoku, and I learned how to say his name. From the internet. And I even found on YouTube an old, TV show called “This Is Your Life,” where a host would surprise a guest and they would present them, people and events from throughout their life.

And I was able to find His episode of “This is Your Life, Duke Kahanamoku.” So, the internet is a really great place to get started because it’s fast and easy, but it can’t be your only source of information, no matter what you’re writing. And I am lucky enough to live in New York City and have access to the New York Public Library, but even if you don’t, librarians are the most helpful people on the planet, I think, and they will bend over backwards to help you.

If you live in New York, at the New York Public Library when you’re starting a research project, you can make an appointment with a research librarian, and they will help you lead you in the right direction. But even if you live in a small town, your small-town library probably has access to university libraries, they have interlibrary loan systems, they have, information you have access to, through your library, through their databases.

For instance, I’m writing a novel about a group of newsboys in New York City who started their own theater in 1873 in the Five Points neighborhood. And I’m, able to go online, my libraries. website and access newspapers from that day newspapers like the New York Sun, who my newsboys would have sold, or Frank Lezzi’s illustrated newspaper, things like that.

So, you’re able to find a lot of that stuff through the library, books and magazines. I found primary sources, books written by newsboys about their lives, the non-fiction book Gangs of New York, that was the basis for Martin Scorsese’s movie about the five points, Tyler Anbinder’s book about the Five Points, which is where I first read about this Newsboys Theater.

So, there’s a lot that’s available in the library, both through databases, old newspapers, diaries, letters, And non-fiction books. So, the library is another really good source of information. And I always tell writers when you find a really good non-fiction source whether you’re writing about a person or a time, whether you’re writing fiction is to go through the bibliography at the back of the book and find what sources they used, and that is a really helpful thing to do.

When I read Tyler Anbinder’s book about the five points. He literally wrote two sentences about the Newsboys Theater, but I was able to go into his sources and find the two primary sources he had. And I was able to find those at the library. So, that bibliography was really, really helpful to me.

So, bibliographies of other books are very important.

[00:05:41] Sharon Skinner: You just said something that I think is key with non-fiction is primary sources. Wherever possible, you really want to get to those primary sources. You don’t want to use those two sentences that you read in a book by someone else about your topic, you want to dig deeper and find those primary sources.

And like you were saying, the newspaper articles, the autobiographies, and the This Is Your Life videos and stuff, those are primary sources of where the people were actually participating, I just wanted to highlight that. Out of what you said, because I think that is so critical.

[00:06:14] Laurie Calkhoven: Yeah, primary sources are vital, and that’s where you find out interesting things, like I wrote a novel set in the Battle of Gettysburg, and it was through primary source material that I discovered that ice cream cost 10 cents around the time of the Battle of Gettysburg, which was expensive, because, they had that old fashioned cranking system, or, P. D. Wilson’s store was the place to go for penny candy in Gettysburg. So, just that, sort of juicy material that kids would really enjoy. You find that in primary sources. You don’t find that in non-fiction books about the Battle of Gettysburg. You find out what army was where and who won what skirmish and all of that.

But you don’t find out the place to go for penny candy.

[00:06:49] Christy Yaros: Because that person who’s writing that other non-fiction book had a lens through which they were looking at the research. And that’s not necessarily the lens that you need to look at to find what you’re trying to find.

[00:07:00] Laurie Calkhoven: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:07:02] Sharon Skinner: Especially when you’re writing for kids, or younger readers, you need to look at it through a different lens than what you would be if it was non-fiction for adult readers. A really good example of the difference of that, that our listeners could, take a look at is Mary Roach is a science writer.

She’s a great science writer. I love her approach and her attitude, but she wrote Packing for Mars for adults. And then she wrote, Packing for Mars for Kids, using the same source material, and all the same research, because she’s a super deep researcher. But the way that she wrote it for kids, she focused more on the things that would be interesting or fun for kids to read about. Including space toilets.

[00:07:42] Laurie Calkhoven: Yes. Space toilets are really important to kids. I worked with Leland Melvin he’s an astronaut adapting his adult memoir for kids. And there was nothing in his adult memoir about going to the bathroom in space. And we had to have a long talk about that because it needed to be in his middle grade book.

When he talks to kids, he always says that’s the question he gets asked often is about going to the bathroom in space. So. We’re off topic now,

[00:08:04] Christy Yaros: not at all, because I think that’s exactly the thing, right? That’s the fun I mean, how many times and this is an honest question, have you gone to look at a primary source for something but found something else that sent you in a different direction than where you were?

[00:08:18] Laurie Calkhoven: That is a really good point. And I think that’s really important in research is to when you find something interesting and serendipitous That delights you is to follow that path, even if it’s off your original research path. I wrote a novel called Daniel at the Siege of Boston about the early days of the American Revolution.

And while I was doing my research, I came across this bizarre story about a broken egg. And I thought, well, this can’t be true. A broken egg could not have changed the course of the American Revolution. And I did a little bit more digging.

I didn’t find anything more about this broken egg, but I was in Boston. I was taking a walking tour with an historian, and I asked him about this broken egg, and he said, “Oh yes.” And he pointed me to a diary written by a man who was in Boston, during the siege. And he mentioned the broken egg. And then there was another source, so my novel opens with this broken egg story about this, soldier going to a meeting to throw an egg at the speaker, which the British thought would start a riot.

And they were going to arrest all of the leaders of the Sons of Liberty, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, Dr. Warren, John Hancock, and ship them to England to stand trial for starting a riot. But the soldier fell on his way to the meeting, and he broke the egg. So, he wasn’t there to throw the egg at the speaker to create that big insult that was going to start a riot.

[00:09:31] Sharon Skinner: That is a fun and fascinating story.

[00:09:33] Laurie Calkhoven: Yeah,

[00:09:34] Christy Yaros: well, I think especially because we’re writing for kids, we have again, that, lens that we’re looking at things like what would be interesting to a kid? What is something that helps with their wonder and their curiosity? And so, if you’re looking for stuff that. Maybe non-fiction books written for adults would not cover because that’s not relevant.

You can find something that no one would ever think was relevant but can spin you into an angle that might bring a kid in that no one else has brought them in through.

[00:10:01] Laurie Calkhoven: Yeah, yeah. Adults don’t care where do you go for penny candy in Gettysburg in 1863,

[00:10:06] Sharon Skinner: Or going to the bathroom in space. I mean, I think it’s fascinating, but not all adults will.

[00:10:12] Laurie Calkhoven: But kids do.

[00:10:13] Christy Yaros: and that’s something that sets you apart now from any other story about that time period or that person or that event, right? Because you found something that other people didn’t focus on.

[00:10:22] Laurie Calkhoven: Right. Yeah. So those big important adult tomes about whatever time period or place you’re writing about are important, but you really need to dig into the primary sources to find the fun stuff that kids are going to really want to read about. And going to the source is really important as well.

Going to Gettysburg, going to Boston when I was writing that novel. Now, for the Newsboys novel I’m writing, I’m sort of haunting the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and taking all of their tours because, just seeing how people lived, what they wore, what they ate, what they cooked on, that kind of thing is really important.

So going to the source whenever you can. It’s really helpful. For this novel I’m working on now, I went to Ellis Island. My characters would have come in early enough, they would have come through Castle Gardens before Ellis Island opened, but I toured both of those places.

And interviewing historians. historians love to talk. In the same way that librarians love to help you do your research, they love to talk about their topics. And so, anyone who shows up who is interested. They tend to be happy to talk to them.

[00:11:17] Christy Yaros: Yeah. And they’ll probably give you that little nugget of information that most people would gloss over, but you’re like that. I want to know more about that.

[00:11:25] Sharon Skinner: And subject matter experts too, as you said, going to the source, someone who’s really studied that particular thing. Like the tour guide who knows really deeply what they were talking about, who was able to send you to the sources that gave you confirmation of that egg story, that’s a big deal.

[00:11:42] Laurie Calkhoven: That is a big deal. I just want to caution your listeners that if you are planning to interview an expert in any subject, you just have to be really mindful of their time. And you have to show up having done some research already and with a list of questions and, allow them to go down different paths if they really want to.

But you have to be really mindful of their time and respectful of that. And I read this recently and I thought, my gosh, what a good idea to let them know ahead of time that you’re planning to record and ask their permission to record the interview, rather than surprise them with it in the moment, because some people are thrown off by that.

So that’s not something I’ve ever done. I’ve always just showed up and said, oh, can I record this? But I think it makes sense to ask them a week ahead of time when you’re, shoring up details.

[00:12:24] Sharon Skinner: And to be respectful and if no is the answer because they don’t have the time or they’re not interested in sharing what they know, then no is the answer, and you go to another source.

[00:12:35] Laurie Calkhoven: Good point, Yeah, some people are going to say no. I have to say I haven’t experienced that, but some people are going to say no.

[00:12:41] Sharon Skinner: I think most people are willing to share what they know because it’s their passion. It’s the thing that they’ve studied. It’s the thing that brings them joy and they want to share it. And when they find out that you’re going to then share it with kids, I think they really are on board with that for the most part.

Then again, it’s hard to say what their schedules are like or what’s going on in their world. So always to be respectful in all of our communications with people, especially subject matter experts, because you’re asking them a favor, you’re asking them for time and information that you’re going to then use to put in a book and you want to also be respectful of how you present that.

[00:13:15] Laurie Calkhoven: Yes,

[00:13:15] Christy Yaros: So then here’s a question. have you paid people who have given you their time for research?

[00:13:21] Laurie Calkhoven: I have not, I’ve never been asked by anyone to pay them, and I have never offered that. I think people are excited because you’re writing a children’s book. I mean, that draws people in, but I think they also know that means that you probably don’t have a lot of money.

[00:13:33] Christy Yaros: But you’re including them in your acknowledgements and you’re, giving them credit for the information that they’ve given you, not that we work for credit, but it is important to give it where it’s due.

[00:13:42] Laurie Calkhoven: yes, I think that’s true. So yeah, going to the source, talking to experts, that can be really important. I thought it would be useful to talk a little bit about the nitty gritty of how to organize research. I am an old-fashioned notebook and, pen person.

I use those black and white composition books, and I keep very careful notes. I put a table of contents in the front. I number my pages. I’m very organized in that way. I’m not that, technical. But other people use the programs like Scrivener to keep track of their research or, OneNote or Evernote.

I just think it’s important to decide in the beginning how you’re going to organize your research and to stick with that. Otherwise, if you’ve got little pieces of paper all over the place or, recordings on your phone and, other stuff you’ve typed on your computer, I think you just really want to have it in one place and you want to know where it is, and you want to be able to find it easily.

I wrote a biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the book was about to go to press and my editor, called and said, what year did she graduate high school? We can’t find that anywhere. And I pulled out my notebook and I found the page on her high school years, and I was able to find the date.

But you need to be organized. You need to be able to respond to kinds of questions.

[00:14:47] Christy Yaros: So, before you can even make a table of contents or something like that, how do you decide when in the process doing research? And then to that point, how do you keep yourself from only doing research? Would you stop in the middle if you were writing and you were like, oh, I don’t know what Year Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated high school. Is that a note you leave for yourself, and you set aside time later and say I’m going to do all of this research at one time?

[00:15:11] Laurie Calkhoven: That’s a good question. I move back and forth. When I write these early reader biographies for Simon and Schuster, I generally have probably three months to write them, and I might spend two months doing research, or let’s say seven weeks doing research, and then two weeks writing my first draft, and another two weeks revising that.

So, I do a lot of my research up front. And while I’m researching, I might have ideas, like for these early reader biographies, I know they have an introduction and five chapters. So, I put a rough outline on my computer, and I might go in and type sentences here and there if I know I’m going to want to cover a particular thing in a particular chapter, but I do most of my research up front, and, for fiction the same.

I do a lot of my research up front and, I’ll keep a timeline of events. So, for instance, for the Battle of Gettysburg, that was a complicated three-day battle, but my novel covers about a two-week period. So, I had a timeline of events of what was really happening in the world and then what my character would have been doing at the time.

So, I keep that going, while I’m doing research. Another thing that I think is important is to start a bibliography right away. Because otherwise it gets overwhelming. I use Easy Bib. There are other free bibliography programs online, and I just keep a running list of sources.

Articles, books, documentaries, interviews, if there are interviews involved. and I do often start with a research plan, and that will be my action item at the end of this discussion, I have one for the Newsboys novel, we can post in your show notes.

But I usually begin with a research plan of, Books I want to read, primary sources I know are available, documentaries places to visit, things like that. And then, my bibliography for the Newsboys novel now, I think it’s like six pages. Long, this is just a one pager. This is how I’m gonna get started doing my research. It helps to start with that. And then you’re gonna find more and more sources as you go along.

[00:16:58] Christy Yaros: How do you keep yourself from falling into a rabbit hole?

[00:17:01] Laurie Calkhoven: I fall into Rabbit Holes, yeah. I do it. And it’s also hard to know when to stop researching and start writing, I went to a talk by Richard Peck once. And he said, you know that you are avoiding writing when you start finding the same facts over and over again in your research, that’s when you know that you have really let yourself go on too long and it’s time to start writing.

But it can be very easy to spend way more time on research than you need to, and it can also be easy to fall into those rabbit holes. That broken egg story could have been a rabbit hole for me. It turned out to be gold in the end, I can’t think of any right now, but I’m sure there’s just as many, bizarre facts I’ve come across in my research that I’ve decided to dig a little deeper into that turned out to be nothing or nothing interesting. Rabbit holes they happen.

[00:17:44] Christy Yaros: Yeah, I fall daily about anything where, you get where you’re like, why am I looking at this?

[00:17:48] Laurie Calkhoven: I spent five hours trying to figure out the cost of a pair of secondhand shoes in 1873 in New York City. And I did eventually find out it was a quarter, but it took a long, long time. And I’m not sure that adds much of anything

[00:17:59] Christy Yaros: that leads to a good question. Then now there’s obviously a difference between you doing research for a specific. chapter book biography that you know that this is what the publisher asked you to do, your formula has to go into that, and so you have a container easier to stick to than writing a historical fiction novel where You can for sure get bogged down in every single that you might not need later.

[00:18:24] Laurie Calkhoven: There are times in the writing where, I’ll be in the middle of a chapter and I’ll say, oh, need to find out how much a coal stove cost. in 1873, or something like that And I might just throw that in and keep writing. And then other times I think it depends on how well the writing is going honestly, if their writing’s not going well, I’m going to stop writing and I’m going to spend five hours trying to figure out the cost of a pair of shoes.

[00:18:44] Sharon Skinner: I loved hearing that there, is a structure knowing that in the biographies that, you’re writing that there are five chapters and an opening. For non-fiction structure can be really important and how you tell the story and the perspective, the viewpoint from which you are telling the story can really matter whether it’s a biography or Historical fiction or anything else that requires you to have non-fiction elements in there. I was reading some picture books recently that are all non-fiction and the variety of you can approach a topic is just, it’s wonderful especially in picture book, because you have Everything from I Ship, told from the point of view of a container ship, going on a journey, to Butt Or Face or Wombats are Pretty Weird, wherein they used a snake part of the storytelling narrative. So, how do you decide? In your approach, what viewpoint that you’re going to tell the story from? What is it that jumpstarts that for you?

[00:19:45] Laurie Calkhoven: Certainly, in a historical fiction, like any other novel, you want to tell the story the point of view of the character who is, has the most at stake, in that arc of change. But the non-fiction I’ve written has all been narrative, and it’s all been pretty straightforward.

As a narrator, I’m telling the story of Misty Copeland’s life, or Mae Jemison’s life, or Duke Kahanamoku’s life. So, I don’t really have to think about point of view that much. I haven’t written sort of that experimental non-fiction like a picture book in which a snake tells the story of a wombat. I just haven’t done that. I am primarily a fiction writer, and I’ve published a lot of non-fiction because publishers have come to me and asked me to write non-fiction, but I’m not a natural non-fiction writer. When I’m writing my own books, they are all, fiction, but for the non-fiction I’ve written, I haven’t had to choose a narrator

[00:20:31] Sharon Skinner: Because of the nature of what you’re doing.

[00:20:34] Laurie Calkhoven: Yes. I could see though how; you can tell a non-fiction story from the point of view of a ship that would be really fun. I just haven’t done that. So yeah, if you’re gonna be writing about container shipping, that would be a thing to think about. whose narrative voice is going to tell this story. All the while knowing you have to stick to the facts.

[00:20:49] Christy Yaros: So, for your historical fiction, what usually sparks it or, can you talk about one of the specific ones that you’ve done? Like what is it that first sparked you to choose that time period?

[00:21:00] Laurie Calkhoven: Sure. I wrote a series called Boys of Wartime, but I got the idea for the first book in the series, Daniel at the Siege of Boston, which is the only one that’s still in print. I was writing a biography of George Washington for Sterling as part of their biography series. And I, read a lot about Washington as a spymaster.

He was a really expert spymaster, which is one of the reasons why we won the American Revolution. And most of his spies were ordinary people. And some of them were kids. so that gave me the idea to write a book about a boy who became a spy for General Washington. And when I submitted it to an editor, he wanted a series. So that’s how that series came to be. The Newsboys novel I’m working on now, I’ve always been fascinated by New York City History. And I was reading Tyler Anbinder’s book about the Five Points, when I came across those two sentences about the Newsboys Theater and I thought, wow, that would make a fun story.

And because there’s only those two primary sources, I get to make a lot up. I get to make a lot of stuff up, but I still have to know what a pair of shoes cost in 1873.

[00:21:57] Christy Yaros: That’s really fascinating. So, your non-fiction work for hire work feeds your fiction in a way.

[00:22:03] Laurie Calkhoven: It does. It has actually. Yeah.

[00:22:05] Sharon Skinner: And that brings me to another question that we’ve gotten from people back to the idea of Mary Roach writing for two different audiences. When and how can you take all that research? Because you’re spending seven, eight weeks, couple of months deep diving into a topic.

Are there ways that you can then repackage that research in other ways or for other categories. How does that work for you? Or how do you think it would work for a publisher?

[00:22:32] Laurie Calkhoven: That’s an interesting question. If I’m writing a biography for Simon and Schuster, and they’re paying me to do that, and I’m, spending seven to eight weeks doing that research, then, technically they own the book. They own the copyright. I’m paid in advance.

I do get a royalty, but it’s their book and they own the copyright. So, for me to take that information and to write a book about Misty Copeland, say for instance for someone else, I would be violating my contract. And not only would Simon Schuster not work with me again, but other publishers would not work with me again either.

So, you have to be really careful about that. If you sell a non-fiction book, for instance my, American Revolution novel. I didn’t really feel the need to talk to Sterling. The publisher of my George Washington biography about the fact that I was writing a novel because it was so different, and Washington plays a very small part in that novel.

But if a big part of that book piggybacked on my Washington research, I feel like I would have had to have talked to my editor about that and made sure the publisher was okay with that or ran it by my agent. To see if there were any pitfalls I wasn’t seeing. I think it depends on how much of the material you are rehashing.

For instance, like the Newsboys novel, I’ve done a lot more than seven or eight. Weeks of research on that. I’ve done more like seven or eight months, and it’s possible that there could be a non-fiction idea that grows out of that research. It has a yet, but I’m certainly open to that and would love to have another way to exploit all that research.

That would actually be fun for me, and in that case, since it’s mine, it’s my novel, I think that would be okay. I would still run it by my agent. Or give my editor a head up just to be sure that I’m not stepping into any minefields I’m not aware of.

[00:24:03] Christy Yaros: Well, even the broken egg story could be an article or maybe a picture book depending on the angle that you took from it. Is that something that you would ever think about? Like repurposing some things into, like it’s almost like when you’re writing fiction and you create this random side character who’s supposed to be there for like two sentences and now like they’re so interesting that you’re like, I can do a whole book just on this one thing that was one sentence.

[00:24:32] Laurie Calkhoven: I haven’t really thought about taking that broken egg story and I love that story, and I tell it at school visits all the time and kids are fascinated too. And you’re right, that might make an interesting picture book or an article. And actually the 250th anniversary of America is coming up in two short years. So, thank you, Christy. That’s a good idea.

[00:24:49] Christy Yaros: Well, you know, I remember being at, I think it was a New England SCBWI conference and it was for magazine writing, because so much non-fiction in KidLit is work for hire, And it’s not necessarily an idea that you come up with, but it’s someone coming to you and saying, we want you to write this book.

And so, there’s parameters that you stick within. But then, depending on how much research, you do come across other things. And I’ve had that happen when I’ve done my passages and stuff. I’m like, oh, I’m not using this, for this work for hire, because this is so fascinating that I would love to do something else with it.

But then you’re also looking at something specific, you know, you wrote that book for second graders, but maybe there’s something else in there that you’re like, I couldn’t use this for second graders because it’s too complicated, but this would be really fascinating to explore for something else. And they looked at me like I was crazy when I asked that. I’m thinking, well, I’ve done all this research, why am I not writing an article for Highlights and, a picture book. If it’s alligators, the picture book is about this one aspect and maybe the other thing is about another to repurpose, the work, that you’ve already put into the research.

[00:25:54] Laurie Calkhoven: Yeah, there’s certainly no reason why you can’t do that, especially if it’s your original work, as opposed to part of a publisher’s series. But certainly, if it’s different enough, it’s a fact that you’ve discovered about Alligators that isn’t going to fit into your Work for Hire piece, then there’s no reason why you couldn’t create a separate picture book or article about that.

[00:26:10] Christy Yaros: or much like in our last episode that we did with you when we spoke about the ghost stories and how you would level that, maybe there’s things you find in your research, it’s just not appropriate to for that audience, but would be fascinating for a higher-level audience. Like the way that, Steve Sheinkin and his, novel length non-fiction work. He finds these super fascinating angles into things that, nobody else is going to find.

[00:26:37] Laurie Calkhoven: Yeah.

[00:26:38] Christy Yaros: And then I look at his books and those are written, for teenagers. and upper middle grade. And I’m like, there’s got to be a picture book in here somewhere. There’s got to be something to ease your audience up and as they grow, they get to your longer pieces and they’re like, I need to know more about this.

[00:26:50] Sharon Skinner: that’s one of the nice things about writing across categories is that you can, hook them early and then they’ll come back to you for more books later.

[00:26:58] Laurie Calkhoven: That’s true.

[00:26:58] Sharon Skinner: So, was there anything else that, you wanted to touch on today, Laurie?

[00:27:03] Laurie Calkhoven: I can’t stress the importance of just allowing yourself to be surprised and fascinated and to follow those threads. That’s really important. And just being open to what might come up in research that might change the course of your idea, I think it’s good to start out with the idea of what your point is going to be when you’re writing, but sometimes your research doesn’t support that. And you need to either do more research or you need to go back and change your point, change your point of view. So yeah, just allowing yourself to be surprised.

[00:27:30] Christy Yaros: Primary resources really are a great way to do that because you find things that someone else overlooked, and now you’re finding something in it that someone else didn’t. When I was in grad school, we had to take an author who was published a while ago and pretend as though we were trying to publish that book today and write them an editorial letter saying I need you to change these things. So, I had done, Lloyd Anderson And, I found at UConn, they have a children’s literature archive, and they have letters that authors wrote to agents or, someone will submit their collection of their own ephemera, from their lifetime.

And you find out something so fascinating. I found the original print run of his book that no one else had found before. And then my professor was doing a book and it ended up. In her book from my paper, right? Because nowhere else was this documented except in this letter that he had written with someone else. I am such a rabbit hole person though. I would love to hear more about your organization method that you’re going to give as your action item for our listeners on how for those of us who tend to do too much, what kind of container can we keep ourselves in here?

[00:28:36] Laurie Calkhoven: Certainly, with my biographies, it helps to have a deadline. So, my, research has an end at a certain point. So that helps. With the novels, it’s really hard. I try and remember that Richard Peck advice, that when you’re finding the same fact three or four or five times, then you are avoiding the writing. You are using the research to avoid the writing, and that’s very easy to do. And certainly, having the blueprint. We’re all trained by Author Accelerator, and the blueprint method for writing a novel I’m evangelical about almost, because I think it’s so useful. So doing that blueprint actually before you do the research, I think, is really helpful too, because you know, the shape you want your story to take, and then you’re sort of massaging it and changing it as you learn things in your research. But, yeah, I think when you get to the point where you are using the research to avoid the writing, you have to really sit down and start writing.

[00:29:21] Sharon Skinner: This has been fascinating, Laurie, but it’s time that we gave our listeners some action items.

[00:29:27] Laurie Calkhoven: Okay, I think that if they’re working on a project that involves research that they need to sit down and set up a preliminary research plan, and I’m going to give you one for your show notes. Actually, I could give you two. I could give you one for fiction and one for non-fiction that might be helpful for people to see. So, I would say if you’re doing anything that involves research, begin with a beginning research plan, and then you’re going to add things to it as you go.

[00:29:49] Sharon Skinner: Christy?

[00:29:49] Christy Yaros: All right, I’m going to use some self-reflection here, because like I said, I know that I was such a rabbit hole person, so I feel like if I was going to do research and it didn’t have a deadline that was set by somebody else, I would need to put some parameters in place for myself, so I think that a good action item would be to know who you are and put Maybe some rules in place for you.

Like I’m allowed to look up these things or before I start, this is what I need to know before I can confidently start. And then anything that I need to know later, I’m just going to make a note and I’m going to put it aside and I’m going to set aside another time because even when you’re writing fiction that’s not historical, there are things that you do have to look up that you need to think about further or research.

And one of the things I tell my clients is to have a list of those things, because there are times when your energy doesn’t match What you need to get done that day. So, if you maybe only have five minutes or your low energy, go to that list and like research that one quick little thing. So have a plan, give yourself a container and some limits. Some people set Pomodoros of like, I’m going to write for 25 minutes. I’m the person who sets one and says you’re only allowed 25 minutes to do this. And then you have to move on.

Sharon, what d’you got?

[00:31:01] Sharon Skinner: You know what? I am all about primary sources and this is basically an action item, but it’s also a resource. It’s something that a lot of people don’t know is available to them, and that’s the Smithsonian. If you go online, the Smithsonian has now put a ton of information and archives and photographs and newspaper articles and the ephemera that you talked about that you can access online, and you have free access to that because the Smithsonian belongs to all of us. So, I highly encourage you to become a patron of the Smithsonian. And use their system to do deep research. So much of our U. S. history and so much information is contained in that one resource. And it’s not going to be your one go to, of course. But it’s a resource that I think a lot of people aren’t aware is available to them online now. You don’t have to go to D. C. to research the Smithsonian. There’s a ton of stuff that’s available to you. And sadly, we are losing that ephemera. I mean, everything’s email, it’s digital. We’re no longer seeing people write longhand letters. So being able to dig into more, contemporary people is a little harder, but you can still Find links and resources at the Smithsonian like what you found on YouTube, Laurie, for, “This Is Your Life”, which, by the way, I used to watch as a kid So that is my action item to you.

Go get familiar with the Smithsonian as a resource.

[00:32:28] Laurie Calkhoven: If I could just piggyback on that, the Library of Congress website also, especially for photographs. It’s great.

[00:32:33] Sharon Skinner: Yeah. True.

[00:32:34] Christy Yaros: Great. And we will put those in the show notes for you.

Laurie, where can we find you?

[00:32:39] Laurie Calkhoven: On my website, it’s, www. lauriecalkhoven. com,

I primarily work with, middle grade and YA writers.

[00:32:47] Christy Yaros: Thank you, Laurie, for sharing all of your, information and tricks with us. And we are done for today. So, thank you everybody.

[00:32:58] Laurie Calkhoven: thank you It was really fun.

[00:32:59] Christy Yaros: Bye.

[00:33:00] Laurie Calkhoven: Bye.

[00:33:01] Sharon Skinner: Bye for now.

[00:33:01] Christy Yaros: We hope you enjoyed this episode of Coaching KidLit, a writing and book coaching podcast for writers who want to level up their KidLit writing game.

[00:33:09] Sharon Skinner: For more about us and to discover what a book coach can do for you, check out coachingkidlit. com and follow us on social media.

***

For more information about Sharon Skinner, visit bookcoachingbysharon.com or follow her on Instagram @sharon_skinner_author_bookcoach and Twitter @SharonSkinner56.

For more information about Christy Yaros, visit christyyaros.com or follow her on Instagram and Twitter @ChristyYaros.

***

Want to know more about working with a Book Coach on your KidLit book? Check out my KidLit Coaching Page or fill out my inquiry form for a FREE Consult call and let’s get started!