Several weeks ago I spoke to fifty aspiring children's book writers at the annual Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Annual Conference. Like most sessions, mine was filled with those who wanted to be published. While I love speaking to people who share my passion for children's books, it's always painful to be a room where the desperation for publication is palpable.

For years I've looked at that pain in myself in others and talked to others who see and feel the same. My theory all writers have a pressing need to communicate. Children's book writers have an added hope that their words may change the lives of young readers. A colleague, Palmyra LaMonaco, once told me that she believes a dancer can find a space to perform, a painter might discover a place to hang art, but unless a writer is published, the communication circle is incomplete.

Anne Lamott expresses the same feelings of discomfort at speaking to those driven to be in print in an essay she wrote for "Salon", the on-line 'zine. "I am going off to teach at a writing conference next week," she writes, "and am supposed to deliver a basic hope-to-the-hopeless pep talk. But the hope most writing students at these writing conferences walk away with is a toxic hope, because it feeds a lot of lies -- that they will get published, that success in the publishing world improves most people's lives, that thousands of freelance writers are making very good livings"

The chance of publishing a children's book is small. I proved that unhappy fact to myself by running an unofficial survey. I am far from a statistician, but preparing for my presentation I decided to categorize 130 newly arrived fall books I'd heaped on my dining room table. I found 15 gimmick books (everything from an origami folding book complete with multi-colored papers to books that came with tattoos). There were 9 or 10 books by celebrities (Dom de Luise has another cutsie book, Michael Bolton's features a hero who looks astonishingly like him, and newcomer Jane Seymour enters the marketplace with two picture books).

There were 25 books by returning writers. Some of these add to an excellent series and some add to a growing and superb body of work. But others might never have been published if the authors weren't already established. Chris Raschka, for example, writes Arlene Sardine, a book about a fish that wants to be a sardine who dies midway through the book (that's supposed to be a good thing), and eventually gets her wish. I can't believe an editor swallowed that motivation and resolution hook, line, and sinker!

There were 15 books in the category I call recycled. This included several picture book versions of C.S. Lewis' Narnia, more renditions of Laura Ingalls Wilder books (they've done so many she must be rolling in her grave), and some books that did well in picture books and have been reincarnated as board books. There were 15 books that were commercial movie or television tie-ins---Leonardo Di Capria, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and a Tonka book which uses the trademark insignia more times that I could count. There were 6 serial books ( the ones where kids remember the number before the title).

If this is a representative sampling and two-thirds of a publisher's list is taken up with these offerings, that doesn't leave great publication odds. And it makes aspiring writers feel hopeless and desperate. I know I've been there.

I wrote children's books daily for twelve years while I reviewed and saw a plethora of terrible books. I noticed holes in the marketplace and wrote to fill them. After a decade, I became driven more by a need to publish than to write. After two devastating events, my writing voice was stilled, I attributed it to the pain of rejection and hurt. Now I wonder if it wasn't my own self betrayal.

Last month I participated in a 24 Hour Novel Writing Contest run by Voices, an organization that supports all kinds of writers. I signed up because I've realized how not writing fiction leaves a hole in my life. Sure I want to publish, but if I were given a choice about whether I could publish or write, I choose writing. It's more painful for me to not write than to not publish. Since my all-night-write I sometimes wake spontaneously at 5:30 am and creep to my computer to spend time with the heroine of my novel. I know the phone won't ring, my family still sleeps soundly, the telemarketers are long hours away from arriving at work, and I can be alone with my book.

Anne Lamott, in the "Salon" article writes, " I have been teaching for a dozen years and I have found that very few writing students actually want to write. They want to be published, they want to be famous. But they don't want to write. They see it as the one real fly in the ointment ... So most people don't come to these conferences to hear writers talk about how writing can teach you to pay attention, and open your heart, help you make sense of human suffering and indeed, learn to be part of the solution....Getting to write every day, practicing, improving, trying to give people hope or illumination or at least make them laugh, is a fabulous way to spend your life. It is, for a writer, where all the real jewels are."