beautiful oops

Having little kids is really great practice for writing books. 

There are so many reasons why (including that you have to be super motivated to carve out purposeful time for your writing; you can’t faff around). 

But one of my favorite reasons is encapsulated in Barney Saltzberg’s board book Beautiful Oops!

If you haven’t read it, the main thrust of the book is that when you make an artistic mistake, you can use it as fuel for your artistic exploration. 

“Bent paper,” he tells us, “is something to celebrate!” The bent corner of the paper becomes the face of a penguin. 

“Holes in your paper,” he writes, “are worth exploring!” Here, there are layers of holes that are patterned and colored in all different ways. 

I’m raising a four-year-old and a seven-year-old, and the language of Beautiful Oops! has become part of the vernacular in our household. 

So when my son can’t get his dragon drawing to look the way he wants, we talk about how what he’s done is a beautiful oops and is practice for what he wants to create next.

When my daughter is frustrated that she wrote a “c” backwards, we remind her it’s a beautiful oops and she can turn it into something else. 

When I sit down and am writing a scene and I can’t get a description right, or I’m not sure what the character would do next, or I have an idea that would negate everything I wrote the week before, I remind myself that this is part of the process. 

As Saltzberg says: