I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Slate has a letter from Rose Wilder Lane to Laura Ingalls Wilder about the Little House books, and it’s amazing.

You must take into account the actual distinction between truth and fact…. Facts are infinite in number. The truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by selecting the facts which illustrate that.
… Maybe it is a fact that you girls lived a whole summer within easy walking distance of your cousins, out on an empty prairie where there were no other neighbors, and had nothing to do with them, but such a thing absolutely can not happen in fiction. You will just have to take my word for it. Not once in a thousand million times will such a thing happen among actual human beings actually living, and a writer can’t make it happen in fiction without providing some terrific motive for it. The mere fact that you did it has no bearing whatever upon the question. I can not imagine why you did it. Neither can any reader, and I tell you that … in fiction you have to explain them. You have the brief scene in which Laura threatens to kill Charley with a knife, but that has to be cut out. A 12-year-old girl whose cousin wants to kiss her does not normally threaten him with a knife; she laughs and kisses him, he’s her cousin. Or if she’s shy or doesn’t like him she just escapes, and the incident is not important enough to mention. Here you have a young girl, a girl 12 years old, who’s led rather an isolated life with father, mother, sisters in the country, and you can not have her suddenly acting like a slum child who has protected her virginity from street gangs since she was seven or eight. Maybe you did it, but you can not do it in fiction; you can not make it credible in under ten or twelve thousand words, and if you do make it credible it’s not a child’s book.

Eliza Rickman, Pretty Little Head: second great song I’ve discovered thanks to WTNV.

( technopeasants, parenting, fandom )