Free Bronze Pen (9781439156650) by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

the one about the girl detective, but Audrey had finished the chapter about the evil cat in the sinister alley, and after quite a bit of thought no other exciting possibilities had come to mind. And the earlier story about the magical transforming lily had bogged down where the main character, a stuck-up jerk, had managed to get himself turned into a wild boar.
    However, she had been thinking about a slightly interesting idea she’d gotten from Mr. Baxter’s list of extra-credit projects for English class. A list that had included such uninspiring suggestions as interviewing an important Greendale citizen and then writing their biography. An interview with Captain Banner, for instance? No thanks.
    But there was one extra-credit project that had caught Audrey’s attention. And that was writing and illustrating a picture book for beginning readers.
    While she had never thought of herself as a really gifted artist, she was able to draw some things pretty well, and as for the story itself…Well, writing a picture-book story should be no problem for an experienced novelist, even one who was not exactly well known. At least, not yet.
    So it was a little after eight o’clock on a moonlit night in May that Audrey sat down at her desk, opened her novel notebook, and got ready to write a very short story. But after half an hour or so she was still staring at the blank paper. It was beginning to seem that most of the good ideas that might appeal to little kids had already been done. But finally, after a lot of wasted time and paper, she began to get an interesting idea.
    It was an idea that came out of her own life, when she was about as old as the readers of the book would be. She could write a story about a baby dragon who lived under the main character’s bed. A character who would be a little girl who might be called…Let’s see. Perhaps Debby? Then a nice alliterative title for the book could be Debby’s Dragon.
    So she wrote Debby’s Dragon at the top of one page of her secret notebook, and then, with her pencil poised, she stared at the two words and waited for a good beginning sentence to come to mind. But for quite a long time nothing did. After a while she decided the problem had something to do with the title. Somehow the look of the thin lead-gray letters scribbled across the top line of a sheetof notebook paper wasn’t all that inspiring, particularly when you compared it to the way her handwriting looked when she was using…Suddenly she put down the pencil, opened her top drawer, and got out the bronze pen and several sheets of white construction paper. She folded the paper so each sheet made four pages of a very small book, and using the bronze pen, she wrote across the top of the first page, in careful block printing:
    DEBBY’S DRAGON
    By Audrey Abbott
    And right away the ideas began to flow as smoothly and easily as the lines made by the bronze pen. On the first page she wrote:
    Debby liked to think about dragons and play that she could see them. Beautiful dragons who could fly and shoot fire out of their noses.
    â€œNostrils” would sound more elegant, but since “nostrils” probably wouldn’t be in a first grader’s reading vocabulary, “noses” would have to do. The story went on:
    In her room Debby had lots of dragon pictures and toy dragons, too.
    Actually, the dragons in Audrey’s collection, which she still kept on the top shelf of her bookcase, weren’t the kind of things you’d call “toys.” More like figurines. Dragon figurines. But once again a simpler word would be better for a beginning reader. The next page read:
    She had silver dragons and wooden dragons and dragons made out of glass.
    Since there couldn’t be much writing on each page, in order to leave room for a picture, the written part of the book had to be very brief. And drawing the pictures should be quick and easy too. At one time Audrey had