John Scalzi kindly allowed me to blather on (at length) about how I came about the ideas that led me to writing Come Fall. You can find my essay here, as part of his ongoing The Big Idea columns.
I also posted a much shorter piece for Write Up Our Alley about book birthdays — what they are and aren’t.
On Saturday June 5th, I attended the Twelfth Annual Shoreline SCBWI Conference. The topic this year was the cross pollination of fact and fiction in writing for young people—both in fiction and in nonfiction. The speakers were fabulous.
After a thoughtful introduction by Doe Boyle, laying the groundwork for the questions of the day, Dana Meachen Rau told us how she looks for the WOW! moment in facts to find things to write about in her hundreds of nonfiction titles. She advised us to discover what intrigues us and children, to ask questions about what our readers know and what we want the readers to know, and to find the truth in the story of our facts. Page McBrier walked us through her process of building stories from facts she researched in far flung places of the world, using her discoveries to tell truth in tales.
Stacy DeKeyser described how a fabulous summer vacation in the Dolomites gave her the groundwork that turned into a fantasy novel. While Jennifer Thermes showed us how the seeds of her work as an illustrator of maps brought her to new and interesting illustrating opportunities in picture books and middle grade novels. Finally Tony Abbott talked about writing novels in a way that makes them sound like fact, while writing compelling nonfiction using the tools of a novelist. (Listening to him read the first page and a half of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood has forever changed my understanding of the power of settings in a book.)
The mantra for the day was…
I’ve recently updated my website to include resources for writers who are seeking information on how to get their works published. The list is a work in progress, and I’ll be updating it from time to time. You can find the current version here.
I blog about my workspaces at Write Up Our Alley. You can read about it here.
On Saturday April 25, I gave a workshop at the New England SCBWI conference in Nashua, New Hampshire titled “Dealing With White Default.” In the workshop I discussed ways in which to bring to life characters from many different cultures. It’s not complicated: make each character real. That isn’t to say that it’s easy — making any fictional character come to life is work. Hard work. But it’s entirely doable.
At some point I’ll summarize my talk and post it. In the meantime, I gave a hand-out during the presentation which I’ve uploaded (with minor changes, plus links) onto my website. You can see it here.
The conference, by the way, was terrific! The folks at NESCBWI know how to put on a great event.
Karen L. Day and I had a great visit at the Edith Wheeler Memorial Library in Monroe, Connecticut today. We received a warm welcome and had some interesting questions from the audience.
One of my favorites was from a mother: whenever her daughter writes an essay for her teacher, it comes back with lots of notes for corrections. Her daughter always corrects as directed, but when can or should she question those directions?
The answer Karen and I gave was twofold.
First, the teacher is teaching the rules of writing. A writer will break those rules, but on purpose, for a purpose — to create something deliberate with the piece. But before a writer can break those rules s/he has to know them. At school, the teacher’s job is to make sure a student learns the rules — which is what all those corrections are about.
A professional writer also gets corrections and directions from editors. Writers will correct as directed, but they will also build what Karen called “the internal editor.” The job of the internal editor is to have a clear sense of how the writer wants the writing to sound (the “voice” of the story). And sometimes that internal editor will trump the editor’s call.
So if you’re a kid, how do you build this internal editor?
Read, a whole lot, to see what kind of writing you like. Then write, a whole lot, and experiment with breaking those rules. But maybe not at school. ‘Cause you still have to…