The thing about the people who inspire us is that they just get us. They don’t necessarily have to know us personally, but the things that they create connect us to them and make us want to replicate that creativity.
Reading books as a kid made me want to write books. It started with the picture books that were read to me and then graduated to the chapter books that I read myself. And it was the middle grade genre that I really grasped onto and ultimately decided that those were the types of books I wanted to write.
Years later, when querying publishers and agents hoping to get my own chapter books published, I would list a handful of authors who wrote similar types of stories. One of those authors was Judy Blume.
I haven’t read Blume’s entire catalog, but I have read a lot of her classics. The Fudge series, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., and Summer Sisters are the titles that most stick out in my mind.
As an adult, I’ve been rereading those titles and devouring those that I didn’t get a chance to read as a kid. And it has shown me how influential Blume has been for me in terms of my own writing. Below are the reasons why Judy Blume is one of my creative inspirations.
Blume’s sense of humor
One of the best parts of Blume’s stories is the humor. Even her most dramatic novels have funny moments. It comes in the form of witty dialogue from young kids, slapstick situations that you’re happy to watch from a distance but would never want to be a part of, or even sly, tongue and cheek responses from adults who are wiser than their kids think.
Blume’s number one comedian is Farley Drexel Hatcher, or Fudge, who made his debut in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and took his final bow in Double Fudge. Starting out as a toddler who can’t even speak in full sentences, the academically gifted but super headstrong and hyperactive middle child from a family who practiced gentle parenting way ahead of their time steals every scene he’s in throughout the series.
Blume never talked down to kids in her books, and she made sure that they had full personalities. Fudge’s is one of the fullest as he is always walking that tightrope between curiosity and naughtiness, cuteness and rudeness, tenacious and delinquent.
In my post, “Funny Characters in Children’s Literature,” I highlight Fudge even more and explain why he’s such an effective character. And I’ve always made sure to inject some humor into my characters, especially the annoying younger siblings who are usually more wild yet more beloved than their older brothers and sisters.
How Blume writes siblings
Sibling relationships are also a large part of Judy Blume books. These relationships are very widespread in terms of how they play out. Her recurring character, Sheila Tubman, has an older sister named Libby. However, the two might as well be strangers for as much as they pay attention to each other. At the same time, Davey Wexler from Tiger Eyes is close with her much younger brother, Jason.
Whether they’re a large part of the story or not, the interactions between siblings in Blume’s books make for the most interesting scenes. They can be heartfelt or downright brutal depending on the context. Either way, it helps to show that there is a kid world and adult world, and those worlds rarely intersect despite the shared experiences that families go through.
When shaping my stories, the first thing I decide is how many siblings there are going to be and their birth order. I know from Blume’s books that this is going to have a major effect on how to shape the relationships of the characters and what parts the siblings are going to play in the main character’s journey.
Having come from a large family myself, I can’t imagine writing a character who is an only child. I’ve even gone so far as to create adopted siblings just so there’s another young person in the house to play off of. Siblings may be going through their own separate highs and lows, but there is always going to be that relatability of being the kids in the household.
Judy Blume is not afraid to be edgy
Blume was first published in 1969, and her stories have spanned a number of eras. With that comes numerous changes in childhood and young adulthood experiences and how they’re portrayed in her stories.
It’s so interesting reading about kid life in the eras that predate me. They are of their time, and in the days when you were likely to be holding a cigarette in one hand and a baby in the other, let your kids ride in the backs of pickup trucks, and encourage them run wild and trust that they get home by the time the streetlights come on, they can come across as edgy compared to these days.
Probably the most famous example of Blume’s “edginess” is Are You There, God? It’s Me, Maragret., which even non-fans know is a book about a girl getting her first period. It’s hardly the darkest of Blume’s books, but it tackles a topic that is especially taboo for its day, and it also lightens the topic to make it not only relatable but informative.
The main character, Margaret, and her friends are preparing themselves for puberty, but when puberty hits, it’s not as fun as they’d imagined. Intertwined with this is Margaret’s exploration of religion. Having been raised in a non-religious household, she likes the idea of identifying with a specific one as many of her friends have due to their specific upbringings.
The combination of these two themes have caused the book to get banned for the usual ridiculous reasons that books are banned, but it hasn’t deterred me from being unafraid to write about serious relatable conflicts and fears in my own books. Again, Blume’s refusal to cater to political correctness is inspiring in that it helps me to see that I’d rather write a book by my own rules than the rules of others. And as we all know, banned books only increase their popularity because we all like to think of ourselves as edgy in even the tamest of ways.
Blume’s settings
Many of Judy Blume’s most famous characters are born and raised in New York City. It’s a fascinating setting that I have also written about in my post, “My Favorite New York Kids in Middle Grade Fiction.” I’ve always been a big fan of New York City, even before I first saw it with my own two eyes. And that exciting landscape always drew me to stories set there.
What’s great about Blume, though, is that she’s not afraid to venture out to other places and create fish out of water tales by sending her city-bred characters into the suburbs or even out of state. The suburbs, which are my setting of choice, as evidenced in my post, “Creative Inspirations – Suburbia,” became a brand new playground for her kid characters to broaden their horizons, make new friends, and have new experiences.
My favorite setting is the depiction of Tarrytown depicted in Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great. Imagine getting to spend your entire summer in an upper middle class rural landscape with plenty of activities to do and friends to make.
Unfortunately, it’s not that exciting for Sheila who we find harbors a lot of fears, and many of those fears, such as dogs, swimming, spiders, and thunderstorms, love to rear their ugly heads at her in this strange and unfamiliar place. Luckily, she learns to overcome these fears to an extent with some major exposure therapy that she stubbornly exists and eventually embraces.
Setting is a major appealing element in a book, and Blume shows just how effectively setting can be used to tell a story. In rereading her work, it’s inspiring me to branch out from my usual familiar settings and think about setting future stories in places I have visited in the past and know well enough to be able to describe while still building new details and fitting a conflict perfectly into that new place.
She can write both stand alone books and series
The obvious path to take as a children’s author is to write a book series with dozens of formulaic books that readers will want to collect. Think of Goosebumps or The Boxcar Children. While I’m currently in the middle of writing a trilogy, I would never want to be tied down to a specific story that spans dozens of titles.
Blume too has the Fudge books which you can’t get enough of, even if their quality does start to deteriorate a bit in the later editions. But she was also successful in writing stand alone, one and done books that say all they need to say in those pages.
Series are always going to appeal to publishers because if one is successful, they know that readers are going to read more of them. But Blume’s collection of stand-alone stories shows that she’s going to write for herself first, and she’s going to make sure that she doesn’t get bored with the same old characters and the same old situations. Even Fudge grows up throughout the course of her series, if only a few years older from where he first started, and it’s a great reminder that childhood doesn’t last, and we need to prepare kids for that constant change that they’re going to experience as they get older.
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She can still be read in adulthood
A few years ago, when Instagram still liked me, I posted a photo of a Judy Blume book which was liked by an account called The Blume Saloon. After a little digging, I found that this account is tied to a podcast where two friends read and discuss books by Judy Blume and other similar authors. Each episode covers a few chapters and deep dives into the characters and the eras in which they were written.
You’re unlikely to find a book club for adults where the group reads classic middle grade and YA titles. So, this podcast is a bit of a unicorn in that respect, but it’s a unicorn that seems to have been born and bred specifically for me: a nostalgic middle grade and YA reader who is unwilling to let their childhood go.
Listening to the discussions that take place throughout the podcast, from the silliest anecdotes to the most serious dissections, you can see how versatile Blume and her peers’ writing toolboxes are in shaping these coming-of-age novels for us young readers. And reading them as an adult opens up a whole new perspective of these tales that young and fresh eyes just don’t have the experience to be able to recognize.
Our days of growing up may be behind us, but there’s still a lot we can learn from Blume, and there’s still a lot of enjoyment that we can get for her work. On top of that, we writers can be inspired to create our own original tales with her influence in our back pockets.
What are your favorite Judy Blume novels?
Know any young readers who are reading Blume for the first time? What do they think about her books?
Leave your answers in the comments below!
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