The way we view children in this country has evolved over a period of a hundred and fifty years . My grandfather had to quit school and go to work when he was ten years old. He had to help support his family. Today, child-labor laws don’t allow this. Hiring a child is illegal for the most part, and education is mandatory.

Mandatory education is a good thing, we probably all agree.

Except….

When you make education mandatory, children are apt to no longer see it is a privilege. Instead they might think of it as an intrusion on their time. They’d rather be playing video games. (Or are my children different from other kids?)

So it’s not just society’s view toward children that has changed over the last hundred years. Children’s view of society, and their place in it, has changed. We hear about an entitlement mentality and I can see some of this in the teens I know. Many of them seem to see themselves as people who should be served, rather than as members of the family who need to work hard and contribute to the welfare of the family.

We don’t see boys and girls delivering newspapers and babysitting very much anymore. Our children are busy with homework or organized sports. Or with video games, and texting.

And even for older children…it seems that work is being delayed longer and longer I hear more these days about parents putting their children through college or about student loans than I hear of children working night jobs to put themselves through college.

Now, I don’t mean to bemoan the loss of the good old days. There is much about those days that wasn’t good. I’ve read the horrific stories of the children forced to work in the cotton mills or the coal mines. I know that children are vulnerable members of society and they need advocates to speak for them.

And I don’t mean to tell you that I’m a good mother and my children have learned to work hard and I have done things right. That simply isn’t true. There is a huge gap between what I believe and what I do, and my children are paying the price for my lame parenting practices.

But what I’d like to ask you is this: Have we, as a society, overcorrected when it comes to child labor? Have we overreacted to the horrors of children working as slaves in the mills and the mines and gone from viewing our children as people who need to help support the family, who need to sacrifice for their brothers and sisters, to viewing them as people we must serve and coddle until they are well into their thirties?

And a couple of bonus questions: How does society’s view of children affect the way we write for children today and how does it affect reader choices? Are thirty-year-olds reading YA books because they still feel like children?

I met with a writer-friend the other night and spent a couple of hours, discussing plot.

This woman has wonderful characters with incredibly detailed backstories. She’s lived with the characters for six years or so. She has written thousands upon thousands of words, scene upon scene. She has three books wavering around in her head.

Her problem was that she didn’t have a beginning, a middle, and an end, for the book she’s presently working on. As she told me about the story, I saw a plot emerge. We determined that a story has to start with a character in conflict. That character has to want something. And someone or something has to stand in the character’s way.

The easy way to do a plot is to have the character work toward her goal, and fail. She can plan and fail and land in worse shape, over and over, until she finally has learned enough along the way to defeat the foe and achieve her goals. If she is, at that time, tempted to turn back the story will be even stronger than if she defeats her foe without any inner struggle. The black night of the soul makes the climax all the better. If the protagonist sacrifices something she wants, in order to serve the greater good, we will cheer.

This is a very easy plot to work with.

But my friend didn’t have this kind of story. Her story pulled me along because there were so many questions I wanted answered. But in the middle of the book my friend lost her grip on the story. One reason for this is that the conflict the character faces at the beginning of the book does not have anything to do with the conflict she faces at the climax.

There is a reason for this. At the beginning of the book the character doesn’t know who she is. She can’t know what she’s working for as her big goal, because she has woken up with amnesia. So her first conflict is that she doesn’t know who she is and the story is very interesting because of all the mystery that surrounds her.

My friend and I discussed the plot and we decided that the character has to figure out who she is and then she has to take off on the new goal. She has to have a new conflict. Once she remembers who she is, she has to go to work trying to defeat the problem she had before she lost her memory.

It will work.

Not all stories have to be written like a hero’s journey. Not all protagonists have to hear and heed the call to adventure. Not at the beginning, anyway. Or you might have several smaller calls to smaller adventures, before you get to the one adventure that will carry you to the climax.

All that matters is that the story is interesting.

But it’s nice to know that no matter what kind of story we have, if we get lost, we can always look at what we have, and we can plug in elements we know we need—desire, conflict, plans, set-backs, and finally success—and bring the book back on track.

Where to draw the line?

Just a little over two weeks into the new year I find myself already looking for things I can cut from my over-extended schedule.

I only check emails twice a day, now. I have left only a few comments on blog posts since the year started, I think. I simply can’t find the time to respond as often as I’d like.

Last week I was invited to post to three team blogs and to take on the role of secretary for my Toastmasters Club. I am on the Adult Sunday School Committee at church. I have cut small groups at church and women’s Bible study. I’m still having a hard time fitting exercise into the schedule.

Everyone is neglected. My children. My mother. People I blog for. Authors I interview. People who listen to my speeches. Writers who exchange work with me for critique. Younger writers and younger Christians I mentor. No one gets my undivided attention.

And maybe I’m wrong to think that anyone should have undivided attention, outside of God. I think it’s OK to put varying values on things. Does an author I interview deserve as much from me as my children deserve? Of course not. But if I agree to do the interview I should do a good job of it. Otherwise I’m wasting the authors’ time and treating them with disrespect. So do I cut all interviews? I have to weigh all these things, of course, and decide them for myself.

But when I look at very productive people, I see that they usually focus on one thing at a time, but they also have a big-picture grasp on the things they need to do each day. They don’t allow one task to suck up too much time.

One thing I learned last year that really helped me to be more productive was to use a timer. If I set a timer and concentrate on only one thing while that timer is running, I put out a lot of work in the time allotted, and if I know that I have to move on to the next task when the timer dings, I can manage to complete the task in the time allowed.

Focusing on one thing at a time helps.

I think combining tasks, though, is also a good way to be more productive, and that’s what I’m going to work on this year.

I want to make each moment do double-duty. Just as dialogue can never be put into a story simply because we like to hear our characters talk—each bit of dialogue must also work to characterize the speaker or reveal the plot—so, too, I need to pack each moment of my day with more than one purpose, perhaps.

I have experimented with listening to John Piper while I ride the exercise bike and plotting a chapter while I swim laps. This year I want to try tacking blog post and speech ideas onto the cork-board in my mind while I have conversations with people in real life. I want to train myself to try to think about info that comes to me in more than one way. I want to be constantly listening and looking for ideas to write about.

Because the hard part about writing, for me, is coming up with interesting topics.

Multi-tasking comes hard for a one-track-mind person such as myself, though.

And how do I reconcile my advice to myself to focus on one thing at time, with the idea that I should do more than one thing at a time?

The secret has to be in knowing when to do what. I have to learn which things naturally complement one another, which little things can ride along on the backs of bigger things, and which things need time and energy devoted to them alone.

You tell me: Who are your favorite organization/prioritizing gurus? Where is a great article on getting your to-do list done? Give me one tip for gaining more time in my day.

Where do you get your ideas for the books you write? That’s a question every author gets and one that often frustrates them. Many don’t know where they got the idea for a particularly story? Do we remember three years later, when we finish the fourth draft, where the germ of the original idea came from? And when we compare the fourth draft to the first, how can tell when the final idea took root out of the mess that was the first draft?

A story idea is not a static thing that lights up like a bulb above your head. It’s a seed that falls to the ground and dies and comes popping out of the soil of the imagination as a fresh shoot, and keeps on growing and changing and maturing, until you have a full-grown oak tree that looks nothing like the little acorn you started with. When does the acorn become a tree? When does AN idea become THE IDEA for that particular story?

And if the one asking the question is asking something more generic, such as, “Where do you get ideas for any story, not for one particular story?” that’s no easier to answer, really.

I brainstorm, but I admit, I’m not one of those writers who has ideas bulging out her brain and who can’t find enough time to write them all. Ideas are hard for me to come by. I have to shake the trees a long time to get even one acorn to fall.

I have given two speeches at the new Toastmasters club I joined last month and I’m hard-pressed to come up with an idea for a third. Blog posts come no more easily. I stare at the screen and struggle to find something to write about. Same with short stories. I’d like to enter several short story contests and submit to a few children’s magazines, but I can’t come up with ideas.

Rebecca LuElla Miller tells us that story ideas are everywhere. And I agree with that. She goes on to say there is a bit of a trick in discovering which ideas will be interesting to write about.

And that, I think, is what children want to know when they ask authors during school visits, “Where do you get your ideas?” I think they want to know how to bring their passions to the page. Of course there are ideas everywhere, but they don’t all make a good story idea. They won’t all make interesting speeches.

What we need is passion.

On one wall in my living room there is a picture of elephants running, on another wall the Château de Chillon. My mother sits in one chair watching TV, my sister lies on the loveseat with a book. I’m on the couch with earphones in, listening to Apocalyptica and blogging. There are bookshelves bulging with clutter, lamps, a fan, several computers, a tea-cup, and a floor that needs to be vacuumed.   Hmm. None of these inspire me to write a story about them.

The Château de Chillon has some promise. I was there when I was six. I remember a toilet there, it looked like an outhouse seat, but the hole was a chute that went all the way down to the lake, and I remember seeing Lord Byron’s signature carved into the post in the dungeon. And I actually put some of those memories into a novel I’ve written. But does the castle give me an idea for a story?

It gave Lord Byron an idea.

What we need is a character. We need a character who wants something. A character who can’t have what he wants. A prisoner who couldn’t get free, a prisoner who lost all of nature and all his family, found his way into Lord Byron’s mind and burst out in a poem, after Byron looked at the dungeon at the château.

Stories are about people. Maybe the people in the stories are robots or toasters or bunny rabbits, but they are people still. All stories are about people.

I guess all I can say for sure about ideas right now: They have to be about people in some kind of trouble.

Where do you get your ideas?

One brother and one sister came from the west last week. They decided to skip Christmas this year and come out for Mom’s 90th birthday, instead. (Ninety years! Wow. And she’s still with it enough to hold her finger over the candle in an attempt to make the ninety look like a seventy.)

I like seeing my brothers and sisters. One of the benefits of living with my mother is that I get to see several members of the family each year. When I lived in Alaska I never got to join them for holidays. It cost too much to fly down. But now, here I am, in the thick of it.

My family is a game-playing family. Here are some of my favorites.

Great Games for Writers to Play

Creativity with words/acting/drawing:

• Balderdash
• Taboo
• Scattergories
• Guesstures
• Pictionary

Vocabulary:

• Boggle
• Scrabble

Factoids that might spark ideas:

• Wits and Wagers
• Trivial Pursuit

Last night we laughed so hard—I have one brother who is so funny—and we ate too much pizza and cake and ice cream, and we had a couple of margaritas and we played games and thoroughly enjoyed Mom’s birthday.

What about you? What are your picks for best games for writers?