“My Hundred Friends” Campaign Update #4: Math propelled the story forward

This is a joint blog post by Kara Shane Colley, the author of My Hundred Friends that is soon to be published at Natural Math, and Dr. Maria Droujkova, the founder of Natural Math. We’ll be posting periodic updates about the book on the blog.

Kids are natural storytellers because they are still open to the world of possibilities and imagination. How powerful it could be to encourage students to use their imagination when doing math, or even better, when playing with math.

Maria: The book campaign hit 100% on June 26 – THANK YOU! We extended it for three days until the end of June to match a local event. 

Kara: I’ve been beta reading middle grade and young adult manuscripts for two of my friends since 2015. Kerry Duff as stories pouring out of her. She has written several novels and published two short stories in Cricket, the children’s literary magazine. My favorite story of hers is called Granby, which focuses on a little girl left behind after the circus leaves town.

Kristin Burchell has a deft hand for writing enchanting historical fiction. She has several published novels. My favorite is The Witches of Proposal Rock, which takes place in 1660s New England, where magic is a force “to be feared and avoided.”

Kerry and Kristin’s writing feels to me like a beautiful magic. It amazes me how their sentences flow effortlessly and the pacing holds your attention while they build up complex characters and compelling plots. 

It feels easier to describe bad writing: chunky, overdone, and painful to read. 

Before I wrote My Hundred Friends, I tried to write a little story inspired by the series The Adventures of the Black Hand Gang by Hans Jurgen Press. As children, my brothers and I were obsessed with this book. As you read, you follow a group of children as they solve a mystery. You solve along with them by studying “purposefully busy” pages to find the clues.

 
I tried to write a story that had to be solved using clues hidden in a “purposefully busy” picture, called Cousins’ Campout. The writing of it felt forced. I had to work backwards to build the mystery, pulling the details aggressively from my brain, instead of my imagination offering ideas up. It’s a cute enough story, but I just don’t have the knack for this type of writing. 

My drawing for Cousins’ Campout

Over the years, I’ve heard people say, “Write what you know.” I think that is why My Hundred Friends is a good story. I know math. I know numbers.

Maria: One of my favorite loanwords is sprezzatura: the art of making something difficult look easy. Every writer has the kind of stories they know, love, and have worked out, stories they can craft with the magic feeling of flow and page-turning ease. Writing is still a complex endeavor, no matter what. Discovering what feels like your story doesn’t make writing simple, merely doable. And bearable when editing gets tough.

Kara: After my 48th birthday, the idea came to me that I am actually friends with the numbers, and I wondered if that could be the basis of a book. Immediately, I jumped to thinking about the numbers multiplicatively. I suppose that is because of the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, which says that every integer greater than 1 can be factored into a product of primes in exactly one way (aside from rearranging the factors). When I first learned about the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, the “fundamental” in its name stood out to me. That word felt like a link to mathematicians of the past, like they were telling me, “This is what’s important.” I started to make a page for each number, naming how I related to that number. For example, 7 days is one week. Since I was thinking of the numbers multiplicatively, it made sense to me to write their prime factorization in the bottom right corner. 

Things just started jumping out at me. Two was excited to see 2 ✕ 2 in the bottom right corner of the 4th page, so I drew Two yelling, “Look! It’s me and me again!” Then, it was as if I could see that scene one more on Page 8 (2 ✕ 2 ✕ 2), so I drew Two yelling, “Wow, it’s me and me and me!” I realized that these patterns had to happen every time there was a perfect square or a perfect cube, on and on. 

Multiplying by 11 is delightfully straightforward. I had the narrator point that out with a simple catchphrase, “It’s fun to multiply by 11,” on pages 22, 33, 44 and so on, while the characters added their own takes. Math was propelling the story forward. The number-characters’ excitement and playfulness gave them personality. I was off and writing! Unlike my attempt at a Black Hand Gang-inspired puzzle-mystery story, My Hundred Friends unfolded naturally. 

Maria: Another straightforward catchphrase: “Good writing is rewriting.” An author might rewrite their sentences in their mind while taking a walk, edit on paper with their special pen, or discuss the draft with trusted friends. The techniques and rituals are many, but by the time your prose feels smooth to read, it’s been polished with deep focus. What care and love sustain that focus and propel the story depends on the author. Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic? Sure! Factoring as a relatable inspiration for art is more popular than you’d think.