One of the best recommendations I hear concerning what to write about is to write from your heart. There is no doubt in my mind that that is absolutely the truth. It’s helpful to know what’s up and coming in the market. It’s helpful to know what particular agents and editors are looking for. But writing just FOR that market, agent or editor just to be published is the ultimate betrayal of self. Where else can I write from but the heart?

Question is … what if most people really don’t want to know what I will write from my heart? What if the more I pour my heart and soul into a story, the more frightened the reader becomes … the more they begin to feel somehow responsible, if not for the individual I write about, but for how things have become this way? I can tell you – they want to turn away and run … to not think about it.

What I’m referring to at the moment, because something I read today is so fresh in my mind, is the immense suffering we, as humans, perpetrate on animals. Whether it be horses slammed together in double-decker trailers, trekked for days on end with no food or water to a brutal slaughter in Mexico, or sows imprisoned in metal-barred gestation crates their entire lives … people don’t want to know. Far too many people don’t want to know.

What’s in my heart is a deep and abiding love of animals. It is knowing they are individuals that matters to me – how can anyone simply see millions of dollars in pork sales if you look into the eyes of one desperate, intelligent pig who can never physically move? How can anyone watch a rodeo cowboy lasso a 3 month old calf, pulling back so hard that he breaks the calf’s neck? And then know this mere baby lays in agony, out of sight, sometimes for days, not being released from its suffering. How can anyone attend a circus where highly intelligent animals are beaten with bullhooks until they bleed and scream for the sake of a few tricks, and then are chained in place for 23 hours of every day? How can anyone look into just one of those elephant’s eyes and not drown in her sadness?

You may be pulling back even now – wanting to move away from the painful reality of our own part in all of this. Don’t go yet – it’s not my intention at the moment to explore the horrific suffering animals know at our hands, but rather, how do I write about it in my chosen field? How do I write picture books and bring my heart into it, without watering it down, sugaring it up, and burying the truth?

Children cannot – should not – hear what’s truly in my heart. It’s far too frightening for them, but what can they hear? How can I tell them?

Each of you has something in your heart that you yearn to write about … your heart’s desire, whatever that may be.  How do we bring our heart’s desire to the table in children’s books, to help a child learn to listen closely to his or her own heart, to know the value of all life, before the window closes and they become lost in the routine of daily life, the numbing by TV, the  brainlessness of texting?

How do we bring what’s truly in our hearts to a young child’s reading? I’m yearning to know.