Lessons from Madeleine L'Engle

My DD recently read A Wrinkle in Time with her grandfather. She immediately wanted to know if there was a movie and low and behold there is a fairly recently made movie version of A Wrinkle in Time. I unfortunately didn't get to watch the whole movie with her, house chores, ugh. But I did notice a bonus feature which was an interview of Madeleine L'Engle talking about A Wrinkle in Time and writing in general.  If you get a chance I highly recommend that you check out this bonus feature as she discusses writing Wrinkle and trying to get a publisher to sell it.

The two main lessons I learned from this interview are:

1) She wrote with little children underfoot and grabbed five minutes here and there to write whenever she could and that is how she wrote her books. I know this in theory, but rarely do it in practice. I tend to focus on getting large chunks of time to accomplish anything, but I wonder if I grabbed the five minutes here and there as she did if I would get a lot more done than waiting for a large chunk to come.

2) Wrinkle was rejected by publishers over and over, but Madeleine believed in it and kept sending it out until a publisher was "brave" enough to put it out there. It really was a ground breaking book at it's time. Especially since the hero was a girl. A good lesson in believing in your work and following Heinlein's rule of keep sending it out until someone buys it.