Ballet drives me berserk. There. I said it. I have to go lie down now.

I’m back. Ballet drives me berserk because all I truly care about in this life is story, and when you go to a ballet, the story is constantly interrupted by the dancing. Take The Nutcracker for instance. When I see The Nutcracker, I want that rotten brother to get spanked. I want the rats and the nutcracker to duke it out for a good long time. I want the wacky old toymaker to come back and scare the heck out of everyone. But none of that happens. What happens is a bunch of candies dance around while Clara watches them. It is the most boring thing in the world.

When I sat down to write the sixth Ivy and Bean book, I didn’t know that it was going to be about ballet. I thought it was going to be about squid. I had a great squid idea. A fabulous idea! Unfortunately, I called the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute to check my facts and discovered that—get this!—you can’t put a squid in an aquarium, because squids poison the water! This put a real crimp in my story (the moral, by the way, is don’t check your facts), and I had to switch things around. I needed Ivy and Bean to have a new obsession.

Ballet. 

Ballet!

Just the thing!

And, at that point, I broke into a sweat. Why? Because if, after four decades of taboo-busting books, there is one dogma left alive in the world of children’s literature, it is this: Ballet Is Great. There are roughly 9,000 kids’ books featuring happy ballet-dancing children. There are zero featuring unhappy ballet-dancing children. There are maybe four featuring children who are unhappy at the beginning of their ballet class, and then learn to love it, but those don’t count.

At first glance, the survival of balletophilia seems odd. Ballet is pink and archaic and promotes a contorted body image. It seems as though feminism would have swept the happy ballerinas away, but it hasn’t, and there is a good reason for that. Ballet rewards perseverance and patience. In ballet, everyone starts out looking dorky, and if they work hard, they become graceful and successful. Also, ballet is pretty and appealing. Parents adore perseverance and patience and process, and they’re wracking their brains to figure out how to inculcate these virtues in their children. Unfortunately, most lessons in perseverance et al. involve an unattractive amount of hoeing, slopping pigs and trudging through the snow (Hello, Honest Abe!), but the appurtenances of ballet are the stuff that girls’ dreams are made on—which is why the shelves of libraries and bookstores continue to groan under happy ballerina books.

This has been going on for years—I myself succumbed to the allure of ballet upon reading The Royal Book of the Ballet. It was the Good Swan that got me. The Good Swan had a tutu made out of swan feathers, and she had the Prince. What a deal. “I want that!” I said to my mom, and before the sun was over the yardarm, I found myself enrolled at the Gladys Melman Luters School of the Dance. (You got that? The Dance.)

It was terrible. Partly it was terrible because of Gladys Melman Luters, who was 105 and despised children. She looked like a pillowcase with a head and she shuffled around the dance floor with a long wooden stick in her shriveled hand. If you pliéd with your bottom out or failed to bend your elbows in second position, she walloped you with the stick. Not hard, but still.

At least Gladys Melman Luters was exciting, in an anxiety-producing way. The rest of ballet was terrible because it was so utterly boring. To me, that is. Other little girls—girls with arches—adored ballet. They simply loved barre work, and they lived for floor work. They’d happily, determinedly arabesque again and again and again, aiming towards perfect and getting a tiny bit better with each lesson. I hated that. Perfect was impossible and incremental was boring. What was the point?

Obviously, I was not cut out for ballet success. I am not, in general, patient enough to like process, and I’ve never cared about perfect. I felt bad about this when I was a kid. All the books I read indicated that heroines loved ballet. Therefore, hating ballet was a sign of a depraved character. Oh dear. It was really kind of worrying. Sometimes I still feel bad about not liking process (artists are supposed to) and not caring about perfection (ditto). I felt bad about it when I was writing Ivy and Bean: Doomed to Dance. Process and patience and perfection are so clearly, palpably good, that as an adult, it was hard for me to allow Ivy and Bean to be unhappy ballerinas.

Then I realized what had happened. It was the same thing that sends me off my nut when I go to see a ballet: the dancing had interrupted the story. The story of Ivy and Bean is the story of two idealists. Neither one of them has much interest in reality. Of course Ivy and Bean would hate ballet—incremental, phooey! They want Giselle and they want it fast! When faced with a failed experiment, Ivy and Bean don’t try to find a way to make their goals a reality—they cut their losses and think of something new. The fun is in the idea, not the laborious attainment of the goal. And best of all, Ivy and Bean aren’t ashamed of what they want. They don’t like ballet—so what? They move on and make a new story.

An author can really learn a lot from a couple of kids like that.

Annie Barrows is the author of The Magic Half and the Ivy and Bean series for children, as well as co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society for adults.

Photo credit: Brook McCormick.

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Growing up in Vienna during the Great Sausage Famine, it was out of pure necessity that my family developed a very strong tradition of telling stories around the fire. And, because we did not have a fireplace, most of those stories were about how to escape a burning building.

Still, it’s a rather substantive leap from coughing out a narrative as you crawl on your hands and knees toward the nearest exit to actually writing a book. And, thus, it took me years before I would finally get around to doing just that. I would first need both a good story to tell and the motivation to tell it.

The latter would come as I was lounging around my luxurious mansion taking account of what items I might like to purchase that day with some of the many millions of dollars I’ve earned over the years as founder and president of the National Center for Unsolicited Advice. I compiled a list of goods that included a pound of peanut butter nougat-flavored coffee beans, a new Mayan swimsuit calendar, and a boxed set featuring the best of Celtic banjo music. And where would I find all these items? Why at a bookstore, of course.

It was while strolling through my friendly neighborhood bookstore, searching through the calendar section, that I spied, high upon one of the many shelves of books, a very conspicuous empty slot. Needless to say I was appalled and it occurred to me rather immediately that someone needed to write something quickly in order to fill that awful black hole of booklessness. And that person, I decided, should be Nathaniel Hawthorne. I then remembered that Nathaniel Hawthorne is dead, so I quickly undecided and then redecided that I would be the one to step up and do all that was necessary to rid that poor shelf of its awful void.

I had my motivation but did I have a story to tell and, more importantly, would my story be worthy of that coveted slot between War and Peace and Wart Removal For Dummies? After all, the last thing I wanted was to write a book that would find itself lying on a table beneath a sign reading, “Books for under three dollars” or” Books: twelve cents a pound” or “Free kindling.” Actually the last thing I wanted was to be eaten alive by a swarm of larger-than-average ants. Still, authoring an uninteresting book was fairly high on the list of things I did not want to happen.

Before writing a single word I would have to make certain that I had a story that would grab readers by the throat and . . . shake them vigorously resulting in an arrest for assault and a lengthy prison sentence during which time it would learn a trade (metallurgy, let’s say) and eventually be released on parole and become a productive member of society and perhaps write a book of its own, which it would promote on talk shows all over the country. That’s the kind of story I needed. But where would I find such a tale?

Well, as fate would have it, fate intervened on that fateful day. I drove home from the bookstore, the delightful aroma of peanut butter nougat filling the car as Celtic banjo music tested the very limits of the sound system. Upon my arrival, I opened my mailbox. Tucked between yet another request for money from Rutherford, my evil step twin, and a coupon for $1 off on a pizza made entirely of cheese, I was delighted to find a postcard featuring a photo of the World’s Largest Hat. Flipping the postcard over to its non-giant-hat side, I saw that it was from my good friend, Ethan Cheeseman.

An old college chum from Southwestern North Dakota State University, I hadn’t heard from Ethan in many years. While I was building an empire of unsolicited advice, he and his lovely wife, Olivia, were busy having children and working on perfecting his many brilliant inventions.

As I read his words I soon realized that my good fortune was Ethan’s worst nightmare. I was shocked and devastated to learn that Olivia had been murdered by evil villains (for my money, the worst kind of villains), forcing Ethan and his three smart, polite, attractive and relatively odor-free children to go on the run. If something should happen to him or to the children, he wanted to make sure his story was told. I was honored that he had entrusted that duty to his old friend, Bertie, as I was known in those heady days at good old SWNDSU.

I began receiving postcards on a regular basis, sometimes as many as four or five per week, each one relaying in detail Ethan’s desperate attempt to stay one step ahead of an ever-growing number of pursuers while he worked to perfect his greatest invention; one he hoped could be used to save the life of the woman he and his children loved so dearly.

And so I began the arduous task of turning a ton of postcards and letters (which may weigh the same as a ton of bricks but takes up a lot more room) into A Whole Nother Story. My progress was slow. You see, unlike most writers today, I do not use a computer. I write the old fashioned way; on the walls of caves. (Unlike computers, they rarely crash.) Using a blend of seven different berries smooshed together, the end result is, perhaps, the only book you will ever read that is made with 10% real fruit juice. In addition to being rich in vitamins A and C, it is my hope that it is also the story I had been looking for; one that will grab readers by the throat or, at the very least, tap them on the shoulder and say, “Psst, up here.”

Dr. Cuthbert Soup was born in Vienna, Austria at the height of the Great Sausage Famine. At 23 he dropped out of high school and moved to New York City where he landed a gig playing elevator music. He was soon fired, however, as his trombone kept smacking other people in the elevator. Six years later, with not a penny to his name, his changed his name to Delvin but quickly changed it back again and opened the National Center for Unsolicited Advice. Since then, he has served as an unofficial advisor to CEOs, religious leaders and heads of state and has given countless inspirational lectures to unsuspecting crowds. In his spare time he enjoys cajoling, sneering and practicing the trombone in crowded areas. Dr. Soup currently resides in a semi-secret location somewhere in the United States. A Whole Nother Story is his first book; its companion, A Whole Nother Whole Nother Story, will be released in January 2011. www.awholenotherbook.com

In 1962 I turned 14. It was the year that West Side Story won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the Beatles’ first record was released in England, astronaut Scott Carpenter orbited the earth three times in a space capsule, Marilyn Monroe died from an overdose of sleeping pills and James Meredith became the first black person to register at the University of Mississippi.

But for me, more than anything else, 1962 was about the Cuban missile crisis. On October 14 a U.S. spy plane flying over Cuba took photos of the installation of Soviet nuclear weapons. The United States demanded they be removed immediately; the Soviet Union would not back down. The administration of President John F. Kennedy did not make this news public until the evening of October 22, when JFK himself went on television to announce to the nation that warheads were being built in Cuba that could reach as far as Canada. In other words, the world was on the brink of a nuclear war.

For seven days we lived in a state of panic, listening for the sound of planes from nearby Scott Air Force Base, discussing who had bomb shelters and whether a hole in the ground would really protect you, picking at our dinners while watching somber television newscasters who seemed scared to death themselves. Finally, on Sunday morning we could breathe again: A deal had been brokered with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and the missiles were being dismantled. Looking back, I think of that week as the end of my childhood.

We were certain that the nuclear age meant we were the end of the line, the last children on earth.

One of my strongest memories from those days is walking downtown with two girlfriends after school. We had lost our usual interest in checking out record albums or new lipstick shades at Kresge’s and were just wandering aimlessly, talking about the bizarre fact that we no longer expected to grow up. We would not, we firmly believed, live to be old enough to marry and have children as the generations before us had done. We were certain that the nuclear age meant we were the end of the line, the last children on earth.

We spoke of it as a fait accompli, and I don’t think we were particularly emotional about it. Certainly there were no tears. But I remember feeling as if my head would explode with this new information I was being forced to accept. The possibilities that lay ahead were so terrible that I couldn’t claim them for myself. I couldn’t weep for my own loss when there might be no future for anyone.

There are moments like this for all of us when the knowledge of how brief and unpredictable human life is seems unbearable. We begin to ask ourselves, What is life for? As a teenager, my thoughts were more along the lines of, “Why did I spend every night this week studying for that algebra test? What difference does it make whether I go to bed at nine o’clock or stay up until midnight? I might as well eat as much ice cream as I want because nothing matters anymore!”

But the world did not end. A few weeks later my friends and I were once again practicing the Twist in our bedrooms, trying on lipsticks and giggling over boys we were afraid to speak to. And yet, as I recall it, our laughter was no longer so deep or so satisfying; it was loud and forced and sassy because we were no longer sure why we were laughing. The world didn’t belong to us anymore. We could pretend it did, but we knew the truth now, whether we wanted to or not. It was all beyond our control.

Growing up means understanding that the world affects you more than you affect the world. It’s not an agreeable lesson to learn, but if we are to leave behind the self-centeredness of childhood, it is a necessary lesson. After the Cuban missile crisis I began to question my parents, and then to question science, and then to question God. Because if 14-year-olds can be annihilated in the blink of an eye, they want to know why.

I had been thinking for a while that I wanted to write a novel that took place in the early 1960s, during the years I was in high school. Those years were full of poignancy for me: the missile crisis, the assassination of JFK, my own first disastrous attempt to fall in love. I wanted to set the novel in the very place I remembered, a small town in southern Illinois, near the Air Force base, behind the neighborhood grocery store that my parents owned.

But my best memories of life at the store seemed to be about my earlier years there, when a pack of neighborhood kids ran up and down the alley, played ball on the side street and rode bikes out into the countryside. Ten had been a perfect age for me. Boys could be friends, I could eat as many Fudgsicles as I wanted, and the highlight of the month was the day my new Mad magazine arrived.

So I decided that for This Means War! I would be both ages. Juliet, the main character, would be sort-of-me at age 10, and her sister Caroline would be sort-of-me at age 14. In fact, I lifted many truths from that old neighborhood, right down to the name of Mrs. Shepard’s dog, Boneguard. My father was a butcher and he did forbid me ever to go into a supermarket, and his store did eventually go out of business due to the competition down the block. My parents both worked long hours in the store and I resented it and felt lonely, but I loved being able to raid that candy counter as I walked out the door.

In my neighborhood there were often boys-against-the-girls spats, and that seemed useful to my story in terms of a metaphor for the larger war that threatened. The kids whose parents worked at Scott Air Force Base cycled in and out of our school system, staying only a year or two at a time, but bringing with them the mystery of foreign places and the slightly sad romance of having no real home. I had a friend like Juliet’s friend Patsy who I worshiped for her strength and confidence during the year she lived in town, and who I’ve never forgotten, though once she moved I never saw her again.

I am 62 now and my parents are gone. I don’t go back to Belleville, Illinois, much anymore. But I loved visiting it in the book, the alley owned by the neighborhood kids and their bicycles, the old dog pen where we kept the returnable soda bottles, the customers just the other side of the screen door from our house. I even liked remembering how real life sneaked up on us in our little town and made us part of a larger world. It was the beginning for me of looking life straight in the eye and not taking any of it for granted.

This book started out with a story my mom liked to tell about her childhood. She grew up in New Jersey with her mother and maternal grandparents. Her grandmother (Nana) was from Key West, Florida. During the summers, Nana would take my mom to Key West to visit relatives there. My mom didn’t really like going to Key West. It was a long drive by car, and Key West in July is hot and sticky and people didn’t have air conditioning back then like they do now. But strangest of all to my mom was what her mother told her to do in Key West: she was to “shake out her shoes” before she put them on. My mom didn’t know why her mother wanted her to do this, but she did it anyway. And then one day, she shook her shoes and out popped… a scorpion!

Writing Turtle in Paradise was a wonderful way to reconnect with my Key West heritage. My great-grandmother, Jennie Lewin Peck, emigrated from the Bahamas to Key West at the turn of the century. She considered herself a “Conch,” what the local Key West folks called themselves, after the native mollusk that so many fished for in the Bahamas. Nana was always talking about how she missed sugar apple ice cream and Spanish limes. When my editor, Shana Corey, started asking me about Nana and my Key West family, I just knew that there was a story somewhere in there.

Researching this book was also an interesting way to experience a different side of living through the Great Depression. While Key West suffered significant economic hardship (the town went bankrupt and the majority of the citizens were on economic relief), it didn’t have the same sort of feel as most of the depression stories I was used to hearing—soup lines, tent cities and the Dust Bowl. Key West was warm for one thing, and there was plenty of free food, courtesy of the sea; one man told me he ate lobster during the Depression! Key West was a freewheeling town full of characters and bygone industries—sponge fishing, rumrunners and, of course, pirates! It had all the ingredients for a fabulous setting.

The main character, Turtle, grew out of my fascination with Shirley Temple. To be blunt, I never really liked Shirley Temple, even when I was a kid. She was so perfect—those ringlet curls! That smile! And she could tap-dance! (Have I mentioned I was “asked” to leave ballet class when I was six?). Needless to say, Turtle shares my opinion of Shirley Temple. She’s tough and scrappy and has seen it all with her single mother.

Turtle’s mom gets a job as a live-in housekeeper and the new boss doesn’t like kids, so poor Turtle is sent to Key West to live with family she’s never met. Suddenly, Turtle is thrust into a hot, strange place full of rumors of pirate treasure and ornery boy cousins with funny nicknames. Does Turtle get a Hollywood ending like Shirley Temple? Well, you’ll have to read Turtle in Paradise to find out.

And if you happen to go to Key West, take my advice: shake out your shoes!