TOMORROW, BARBARA Williams will celebrate the publication of her 50th book. Actually the celebration is her husband J.D.'s idea, because Bea Williams doesn't really like parties and she's not much for hype.
J.D. is the extrovert in the family, the one who made headlines when he called for Richard Nixon's resignation, the one who was an outspoken professor at the University of Utah. Bea is the one who would rather sit home and write.Her 50 books include novels for middle grade and junior high readers, and a dozen picture books, including "Albert's Toothache," which was voted one of the best books of 1974 by the American Library Association.
Williams' 50th book, "H-E-L-L-P! The Crazy Gang Is Back," has just been published by HarperCollins. Her 49th book, "Titanic Crossing," also came out this year.
In any other genre, an author with 50 books to her credit probably wouldn't have much trouble finding a publisher for number 51. But the children's book market has always been fickle and cautious. Theodore Geisel's first Dr. Seuss book was rejected before a publisher finally took a chance on his oddball drawings and rhymes.
Bea Williams' 48th book, a picture book called "The ABC's of Uniforms and Outfits," produced 37 rejection slips before finding a publisher. "Titanic Crossing" had only "a few" rejections, says Williams. "I mean not more than 10."
To survive in such a humbling industry, Williams has always been careful to rely on more than just inspiration. "Albert's Toothache," for example, came to her almost like an equation: No books had been written lately about turtles, turtles don't have teeth, so what would be funny would be a story of a turtle with a dental problems.
In the beginning, like many aspiring children's book writers in the mid-1960s, Williams tried to imitate Dr. Seuss by writing what she now refers to as "cutesy little poems." After getting a mailbox full of rejections, Williams went to the library to find out what was getting published (series books, as it turned out), spent eight hours writing down all the series in the card catalog and then went home to think of books that might work. One of these - about the Indian cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde - was accepted by a publisher.
"Everything I learned, I learned the hard way, sort of like parenting," says Williams, whose four children are now in their 30s and 40s. "I learned a lot from my rejection letters and from my reviews."
Later she turned those lessons into a course for aspiring writers. Picture books may look easy to write (they are, after all, so short), but the good ones are really mini-novels.
Williams has seen hundreds of picture book manuscripts during the nearly 20 years she has taught writing classes and workshops. Only two of these manuscripts, she says, were worth publishing.
"A lot of them don't have a point, and they have no sense of structure. A good picture book has to have a climax. A lot of books start well but kind of peter out." The ideal picture book, she says, "has characterization, a story line and ends with a zinger, all in 1,000 words. It's harder than it looks."
Plagued by self-doubt, even after 50 published books, Williams is having a hard time working on her most recent book, a fictional account of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
One bad review of her engaging novel "Titanic Crossing" has paralyzed her for six months, she says. One day last summer, though, when she was trying to get the energy to turn on the computer, she did come up with an ending for a picture book she had started 23 years ago.
Picture books are popular again now, says Williams, because the cost of color reproduction is down. The trendy theme right now is ethnic stories, perhaps epitomized by a recent release called "Jalapeno Bagels."
Williams is able to write for children, she says, because she can remember her own childhood so well. She can remember what it felt like driving home in the front seat of Mrs. Wetzel's car the day she was turned down for early admission to kindergarten.
She used her old neighborhood in Federal Heights, and her school days at Bryant Junior High, as settings for her 50th book. She remembers clearly what it felt like to be in junior high. And of course she remembers her first dance with the blond boy in the eighth grade.
She has a picture of them dancing, he in his white bucks, she in her saddle shoes. It hangs now in the front hall in their home in Holladay.