Guest Blog Post by Lisa Rogers
I was a daily news reporter for 10 years before becoming an elementary school librarian, so I thought I knew the difference between a news article and a picture book. For one, my news stories could be no more than 12 column inches long—less than 400 words. I wrote short and packed my articles with information.
Though I shared thousands of books with children, and fell in love with children’s picture book biographies, my first cracks at writing about John Cage were far longer than any news story I ever wrote.
I began working on this manuscript in 2016. After writing many versions in a standard picture book biography way, which were altogether too tell-y and ran to over 1,000 words, I decided to focus on Cage’s landmark “silent” piece: 4’33”.
Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds: How John Cage Found Sounds in Silence (early June 2017)
A musician crosses a stage, bows to an audience, and sits at a piano, He closes the keyboard’s lid and starts a stopwatch.
For four minutes and thirty-three seconds, he does not strike a key. He turns pages of music that have no notes. Then, he stops the watch, opens the lid, takes another bow, and leaves the stage.
The musician is renowned pianist David Tudor. It is 1952, and he has just performed music composed by his friend, John Cage.
John Cage’s 4’33” fascinated me, but I can now see that I was telling, rather than showing, the impact of his musical methods. My agent sent it to Anne Schwartz, who published my debut, 16 Words: William Carlos Williams and “The Red Wheelbarrow.” She liked the idea of writing about Cage, but wanted more of a story arc.
Beautiful Noise (June, 2017)
When John Cage played the piano, he stuck coins, cards, and even toys in its strings to make it go clinkety-clink! Plonk! Bing! Thwock!
He composed music with the glub, glub, glub of water in a turtle’s tank. The swish of a washing machine. The crackle of static.
For John, anything could be music:
A truck grinding trash. Grr-whiirr-screech!
Thunder. Cra-ack! Boom!
A dripping faucet. Plip-plop. Plip-plop. Plip-plop.
Traffic rumbling past his New York City apartment. Whoosh! Vroom!
I loved the surprise and onomatopoeia of this beginning. A couple of sentences later, I got to the theme: listening.
“He listened, and he realized that music was everywhere, even in what most people think of as silence.”
And then I got lost in backstory.
I tried again, basically appending this new beginning onto the previous manuscript.
Beautiful Noise (June, 2017)
John Cage heard music in noise:
Tires squealing.
An alarm blaring.
A door’s slam.
John Cage heard music in quiet:
The wind’s whisper.
A hummingbird’s hum.
His heart beating.
He liked how these sounds combined in a way no composer could imagine.
My notes have the word listening all over them, but I still couldn’t get to the heart.
Unbelievably, though I didn’t look at these versions before writing my final draft, they both ended with exactly the same last sentence as the published book:
With 4’ 33” John had finally invented a new way to think about music.
All you have to do is listen
With 4’ 33” John had finally invented a new way to think about music.
All you have to do is listen
With 4’33” John had finally invented a new way to think about music.
All you have to do is listen.
Then I left this manuscript alone, revisiting it occasionally, while I worked on other projects.
During a very difficult winter in 2021-2022—my husband had a serious case of Covid and my young dog was hospitalized for several days and needed specialized care once he was able to come home—I finally got to the heart of the story, about six months after I had last looked at it.
On January 18, 2022, I sent this note to my agent:
After considering revising v rewriting, I woke up the other morning with a totally new take on John Cage that I think gets to the whole heart of the thing. Only took five years or so...
It's around 350 words and all of my old stuff is compressed in the author's note.
What if…
all the sounds you heard…
crosswalk squawking trash truck screeching pigeons scattering rain pattering
horses neighing
hounds singing
wind rushing, whistling, sighing
things beeping, brrruping, scrrritching
teeth crunching
faucet dripping
page turning
… what if you thought all those sounds were music?
Then you’d be like John Cage.
She loved it; we sent it to Anne Schwartz as an exclusive, and Anne loved it, too!
She brought in Il Sung Na, and to help with their vision for the book, asked me to rework some of those initial images, which I was happy to do and which gave me a chance to make the text even more effective. The rest of the text stayed almost the same as in this draft.
And on October 10, 2023, Beautiful Noise: The Music of John Cage was published by Anne Schwartz Books. It received three starred reviews, the 2024 SCBWI Golden Kite Honor Award for Nonfiction Picture book Text, and was voted a 2024 Crystal Kite Award finalist. The difference? Real revision—re-envisioning, versus tweaking—that came from a deep emotional connection with my subject.
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Lisa Rogers became inspired to write for children during her career as an elementary school librarian. She is the author of BEAUTIFUL NOISE: THE MUSIC OF JOHN CAGE, illustrated by Il Sung Na (Random House/Anne Schwartz Books, 2023), a 2024 Golden Kite Honor Award winner and 2024 SCBWI Crystal Kite Award finalist; 16 WORDS: WILLIAM CARLOS AND “THE RED WHEELBARROW,” illustrated by Chuck Groenink (Random House/Schwartz & Wade, 2019), a 2020 SCBWI Crystal Kite Award finalist; HOUND WON’T GO, a rhyming picture book illustrated by Meg Ishihara (Albert Whitman, 2020); RONALD REAGAN: A LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK BIOGRAPHY (Random House, 2023); and coauthor of DISCOVER HER ART: WOMEN ARTISTS AND THEIR MASTERPIECES, (Chicago Review Press, 2022).
Forthcoming are ELVIS PRESLEY: A LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK BIOGRAPHY (Random House, September 2024); JOAN MITCHELL PAINTS A SYMPHONY: LA GRANDE VALLÉE SUITE, illustrated by Stacy Innerst (Astra/Calkins Creek, February 2025); and WOODY’S WORDS: WOODROW WILSON RAWLS AND “WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS,” illustrated by Susan Reagan (Astra/Calkins Creek, Fall 2025). Her poem is the title poem of the anthology IF I COULD CHOOSE A BEST DAY (Candlewick, March 2025) edited by Irene Latham and Charles Waters.
A former daily news reporter and editor, Lisa lives outside Boston with her husband and obstreperous hound and is a four-time runner of the Boston Marathon. Visit her at: lisarogerswrites.com
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