GUILDERLAND — After a few years of lugging a bag of other authors’ children’s books around New York City, Ralph Fletcher decided he’d like to carry some books of his own.

In his early thirties, with a master’s degree in hand from Columbia University, Fletcher went to work for the Teachers College Writing Project, helping teachers across the city develop new methods for teaching writing. The books in his bag—from authors like William Steig, Cynthia Rylant, and Katherine Paterson—were meant as examples for the teachers, but they turned out to be inspiration for Fletcher.
"I fell in love with the books," Fletcher told The Enterprise. "I started to realize that writing for kids could be an honorable thing to do."
For the first few years of writing, Fletcher said, "I got a lot of rejection slips."
"They said, ‘You’re writing more of a lesson than a real story," he said.

Children, Fletcher said, aren’t looking for morals when they read; they want to be told a tale. Once he got the hang of that, he started to find success.

At 38, Fletcher published his first book, I Am Wings: Poems About Love. He followed that up with over 30 more books, from picture books to novels, some quite popular with his young readers. His latest, Marshfield Dreams: When I Was a Kid, is a memoir about growing up in a large Catholic family in Marshfield, Mass.
On a visit to Guilderland Elementary School Tuesday, Fletcher read the students a portion of Marshfield Dreams. Called "Eating the World," the chapter describes Fletcher’s brother’s habit of consuming anything he could get his hands on, which ultimately landed him in the hospital to get his stomach pumped.
His brother eventually got over that phase, Fletcher writes, but, he wrote, "For a long time, the idea of trying to eat the world stayed in my mind."

In an excerpt from his novel Spider Boy, Fletcher read about Bobby, a Midwestern boy and arachnid enthusiast who moves with his family to New Paltz, N.Y. and tries to fit in at a new school. Though he’s bullied by some of his classmates, Bobby comes up with creative solutions to his problems.
"I think that growing up is learning when to walk away and learning when to stand up for yourself," Fletcher told the Guilderland students.

When pressed by the children, Fletcher admitted that his favorite among his works is Fig Pudding. Drawing heavily from Fletcher’s own life, Fig Pudding describes a year in the life of 12-year-old Clifford Allyn Abernathy III. Like most of Fletcher’s books, it combines humor with the drama of family life.

When asked where he gets his ideas, Fletcher said he sometimes takes them from his life, sometimes from research, and sometimes they emerge through the writing process.
His novel, Flying Solo, about a sixth-grade class that decides to run itself after the teacher doesn’t show up, was inspired by a news item Fletcher saw. A character in it who persistently labels statements as "fact" or "opinion" came from a trying car ride with his son who did the same thing for five hours, Fletcher said.
"Sometimes, my kids will say things like that and I’ll say, ‘I can use that in my book,’" he told the students.

Fletcher continues to teach writing and to teach the teaching of writing. He’s written books on the subject and conducts seminars. He espouses the writing process—keeping notebooks, revising—not just the end result, in an attempt to demystify the work of a writer.

He showed one of his writing notebooks to the classes on Tuesday. It contained ideas for an unfinished story on a boy who challenges the world’s best poker player to a game in which words replace chips.

Writing, Fletcher explained, isn’t as hard as it looks.
"You just have to get used to being patient," he said.