Hello, friends! Are you ready for World Read Aloud Day? It’s an annual celebration of sharing stories from the amazing folks at LitWorld and Scholastic. This year’s World Read Aloud Day will be February 5, 2025!
If you’re new to this page, I’m Kate Messner, author of more than sixty books for kids. I’m also a former middle school teacher and a forever reader. Each winter, I help out with LitWorld’s World Read Aloud Day by pulling together a list of author & illustrator volunteers who would like to spend part of the day doing quick virtual read-aloud visits with classrooms around the world to share the joy of stories.
To celebrate World Read Aloud Day, I’ll be offering virtual read-alouds from several of my new & upcoming books! Just bookmark this page & pop back the first week in February. They’ll be posted here by 2/1 and will be available for viewing with kids all month!
This virtual Author-in-Residence program includes:
• A pdf of the first 40-ish pages of The Trouble with Heroes to share with students • The Trouble with Heroes teaching & discussion guide • FOUR on-demand virtual poetry workshops (about 10-15 minutes each), all available through June 30 • An invitation to a live Zoom Author Visit Q&A session with me in late April • A link for families to order personalized, signed copies (delivered to your school in early May)
And of course, there’s also an AMAZING list of authors and illustrators who have volunteered to Zoom into classrooms for World Read Aloud Day this year!
WORLD READ ALOUD DAY IS FEBRUARY 5, 2025!
The authors & illustrators listed have volunteered their time to read aloud to classrooms and libraries all over the world. These aren’t long, fancy presentations; a typical one might go like this:
1-2 minutes: Author introduces himself or herself and talks a little about his or her books.
3-5 minutes: Author reads aloud a short picture book, or a short excerpt from a chapter book/novel
5-10 minutes: Author answers a few questions from students about reading/writing
1-2 minutes: Author book-talks a couple books he or she loves (but didn’t write!) as recommendations for the kids
If you’re a teacher or librarian and you’d like to have an author Zoom with your classroom or library on World Read Aloud Day, here’s how to do it:
Contact the author directly by using the email provided or clicking on the link to his or her website and finding the contact form. Please be sure to provide the following information in your request:
Your name and what grade(s) you work with
Your city and time zone (this is important for scheduling!)
Possible times to connect on February 7th. Please note authors’ availability and time zones. Adjust accordingly if yours is different!
Your preferred platform (Zoom, Google Meet, etc.)
A phone number where you can be reached on that day in case of technical issues
Please understand that authors are people, too, and have schedules and personal lives, just like you, so not all authors will be available at all times. It may take a few tries before you find someone whose books and schedule fit with yours!
If you’re lucky enough to book an author to visit for World Read Aloud Day, please honor that commitment. In years past, unfortunately, we’ve had some educators and librarians cancel when they found a different author, and that’s awfully demoralizing for folks who are volunteering their time. Please only schedule visit dates that you’re excited about keeping!
Authors: Once your schedule is full, please send an email via my website contact form, and I’ll remove your name from the list. Please note that due to deadlines and other obligations, it may take up to a week for me to update.
A pdf of the first 40ish pages of The Trouble with Heroes to share with students
The Trouble with Heroes teaching & discussion guide
Four on-demand virtual poetry workshops (10-15 minutes each), all available through June 30.
An invitation to a live Zoom Q&A session with me in late April
A link for families to order personalized, signed copies (delivered to your school in May)
Bloomsbury is also offering a truly unique pre-order gift for anyone who pre-orders THE TROUBLE WITH HEROES from any bookstore – a poetry notebook loaded with writing prompts to try out!
Bestselling and award-winning author Kate Messner takes readers on a heart-filling journey as a boy finds his path to healing.
One summer. 46 mountain peaks. A second chance to make things right.
Finn Connelly is nothing like his dad, a star athlete and firefighter hero who always ran toward danger until he died two years ago. Finn’s about to fail seventh grade and has never made headlines . . . until now.
Caught on camera vandalizing a cemetery, he’s in big trouble for kicking down some dead old lady’s headstone. But it turns out that grave belongs to a legendary local mountain climber, and her daughter makes Finn an unusual offer: climb all forty-six Adirondack High Peaks with her dead mother’s dog, and they can call it even.
In a wild three months of misadventures, mountain mud, and unexpected mentors, Finn begins to find his way on the trails. At the top of each peak, he can see for miles and slowly begins to understand more about himself and his dad. But the mountains don’t care about any of that, and as the clock ticks down to September, they have more surprises in store. Finn’s final summit challenge may be more than even a hero can face.
Early Praise for THE TROUBLE WITH HEROES…
Equal parts suspenseful adventure and heartrending emotion, this beautiful book will capture your heart.
~Jasmine Warga, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of A Rover’s Story and Other Words For Home
Take one drooling dog, add one pretty desperate kid, mix in mountains–a lot of mountains–sprinkle with unexpected cookie recipes and hardnosed quirkiness, and let rise. You’ll know it’s finished when the generosity and hope and truth of this novel run over. Let it.
~Gary Schmidt, bestselling author of Okay for Now and Orbiting Jupiter
Messner’s masterful storytelling is unique, timely, and enthralling in this novel-in-verse. THE TROUBLE WITH HEROES explores the heartbreak of grief and reminds us that the strongest heroes are the ones who are brave enough to admit when they are hurting. With astute intention and invention, each verse touches your soul and puts tears in your eyes—the kind of tears that comfort and heal.
~Renée Watson, #1 NYT bestselling and Newbery Honor author of Piecing Me Together and All the Blues in the Sky
The Trouble With Heroes is a compelling and deeply moving story of an angry boy who must conquer mountains both literal and metaphorical. As always, Kate Messner writes with an acute understanding of the emotional lives of today’s kids, and her respect for readers shines on every page. Messner is the Judy Blume of a new generation.
-Anne Ursu, Award-winning author of Not Quite a Ghost
You’d think a story about a young man who must climb 46 mountains in one summer would be a story of survival. This story, though, is about surviving and survivors. Pack your tissues and hold onto to your heart as Finn sweeps you into a tale that traverses the peaks and valleys of adolescence, of life, of grief, of growth. Through poetry, recipes, letters, texts, and more, Finn’s shrewd honesty and cut-to-the-bone humor creates a peak multi-modal experience for middle grade readers.
~K.A. Holt, Award winning author of House Arrest
Kate Messner, master of so many different kinds of stories, has delivered a masterpiece with The Trouble With Heroes. Part funny, part fascinating, and fully rooted in a deep emotional soul, readers of all kinds will be rooting for Finn Connelly with everything they’ve got.
~Ann Braden, Award-winning author of Flight of the Puffin
You don’t have to relish poetry to love Kate Messner’s The Trouble With Heroes, but if you do, you’re in for a special treat. This richly imagined story of grief and the great outdoors, of healing and transformation—and the reverberations of 9/11—is a layered tale, told in a refreshing variety of poetry that includes sonnets, haiku, found poems and free verse.
Messner gives us Finn, a character with attitude, swagger, and a smart mouth who also reveals emotional depth and vulnerability. Readers will not only laugh at and with him, but will undoubtedly root for him throughout. Creating a character of such complexity is something of a magic trick, and yet no wands were involved. Messner simply knows what she’s doing, and boy aren’t we glad!
Split this story like a log, and you’ll find concentric circles of metaphor and meaning on every page. There are passages that will gut you, and others that will leave you laughing out loud. The 46 Adirondack mountain peaks Finn begrudgingly ascends in this story, and the joy and healing he finds along the way—these are satisfying metaphors, indeed. Would I call The Trouble with Heroes a poem? Yes. Yes, I think I would.
~Nikki Grimes, award-winning author of Garvey’s Choice
Verse is the perfect format for Finn’s journey through the Adirondack High Peaks in The Trouble with Heroes by Kate Messner. The pitch-perfect tween voice spills out of the poetry with raw authenticity. Any tween who’s ever lost someone, made bad choices, or felt unworthy of love will identify with Finn, forced to hike the peaks as reparation for vandalism. I couldn’t put this book down!
~Kip Wilson, award-winning author of White Rose
In poems filled with humor and heart, The Trouble with Heroes is a story about the healing power of place. Finn’s journey will speak to every kid who’s felt the weight of the world on their shoulders.
~Laura Shovan, award-winning author of Takedown
The Trouble with Heroes is a heartfelt, moving page-turner that tackles grief, loss, anger and redemption. Another Kate Messner triumph!
~Dan Gemeinhart, author of Coyote Sunrise
Magnificent and moving. The Trouble with Heroes is a triumph — as healing and inspiring as the view from a mountain peak. Finn’s voice and his story will stay with me for a long time. I can’t wait to put this in young readers’ hands.
-Julie Berry, NYT Bestselling Author of Lovely War, and owner. Author’s Note, a Bookstore
I just finished The Trouble with Heroes with tears in my eyes. Adirondackers will appreciate the history incorporated into this book, but folks who have never stepped foot in our mountains will still feel right at home. A beautiful story that I will be championing in our store.
~Sarah Galvin, The Bookstore Plus, Lake Placid, NY
The Trouble with Heroes brings readers up and down the Adirondack mountains with tenderness, toughness, humor, and heroics. Messner’s poetry allows heightened access to the emotional roller coaster Finn rides while battling the unexplained loss of his father as he attempts to climb every one of the 46 High Peaks … with a slobbering dog. Positively unputdownable- with one caveat: Readers may occasionally break to test the cookies Finn bakes after reaching each summit.
~Karen Armstrong, Children’s Librarian, Lake Placid Public Library
I’m not a hiker or a dog person, but THE TROUBLE WITH HEROES makes me feel like I could be! Readers will relish every step and delicious morsel of Finn and Seymour’s journey as they grapple with obstacles both physical and mental. Messner captures Finn’s inner monologue with wit, warmth, and just the right amount of snark. THE TROUBLE WITH HEROES is a testament to the power of showing up.
Messner’s The Trouble with Heroes opens your heart up, breaks it into pieces, and knits it back together again. Finn’s voice is clear and true as he struggles with unimaginable loss and how to get yourself back onto the path where you belong. Strap in, you are about to embark on a journey you won’t soon forget.
– Katherine Sokolowski, 7th grade teacher.
In true Messner fashion, Finn’s story will offer company to young people who are trying to make sense of life’s complexities. The Trouble with Heroes is an artfully crafted adventure that showcases the mountains as a place of self-discovery and healing.
~Melissa Guerrette, National Board Certified educator
I read The Trouble with Heroes as my very first read of the summer and I fear I have now set myself up for disappointment. A captivating, perfectly tuned middle grade read from cover to cover. Finn’s journey is complex, as our middle grade children are, and his transformation in the subtleties is perfection. You feel his grief pour off the pages while also searching for something else to cling onto. His frustration simmers and bakes, much like the cookies that not only separated him from his dad but also provide his family’s hope. A truly meaningful read, that will go down as one of my favorite reads and one that I wish I could physically thrust into the hands of as many readers as possible to say; find yourself in these pages, surely you can connect somehow, and then go explore to seek what else you didn’t even know you needed.
~Pernille Ripp, educator & creator of the Global Read Aloud
In THE TROUBLE WITH HEROES, Kate Messner reminds us that there is no such thing as a lost cause. Through lyrical verses which capture voice and emotion, the reader meets Finn, a 7th grader, who is off balance, lost, and full of grief following the COVID-19 pandemic and the loss of his father. He now faces a future that seems unpredictable, and the reader gets to join him as he treks through learning to truly live again, even though his life will never be the same.
~ Kellee Moye, middle school librarian & 2024 ALAN President
When a teacher reads a book as wonderful as The Trouble with Heroes do they:
A) Make a curriculum connection with poetry focusing on Haikus
B) Build a unit on resilience and determination or fitness and endurance
C) Create a cooking after school activity based on the recipes Finn creates
D) Start a Social Studies Exploration on the Adirondack High Peaks
My suggestion?
E)All of the above, but only after their students have devoured it for a toppingly unique story that will have them hooked from the first page.
~Kimbra Power, the Barefoot Librarian
The Trouble With Heroes represents an emotional journey as well as a physical one. A young teen, mourning the death of his father in the post-COVID era, is tasked with hiking all 46 Adirondack High Peaks during his summer vacation. This novel in verse reads like part journal, part school poetry project, and incorporates several other media such as text messages, documents, and articles. Full of humor and heart, the layered plot offers many entry points for engagement and connection. Highly recommended for any upper elementary or middle school library or classroom!
~Rebecca Sofferman, middle school librarian, Colchester, VT
This is a story that unboxes the spaces where heartbreak and loss are contained, walks us through the darkest cloud-shadowed valleys of grief, and guides us to the highest summits of hope and healing. Kate Messner’s natural poetic voice deftly navigates the complexities of grief — unfiltered pain and heart-aching beauty — not as an experience to be repaired, but an evolution that allows it to be both released and held, left behind and found. The truth just might be that transforming a relationship with grief takes moving through it — mud puddles, insect bites, fatigue, and all — to begin to heal. One step, one hand-hold, one unpredictable path at a time, and a community of those who have traveled there before to guide the way.
Hello, friends! How goes your writing this week? It’s hard to believe that we’re already in our final week of Teachers Write. Before we get started with today’s mini-lessons, I want to say thank you. I’m so grateful you chose to spend part of your summer writing with us, and I hope you’ll take that inspiration into your new school year.
And may I also take a moment to share some exciting news? THE NEXT SCIENTIST: THE UNEXPECTED BEGINNINGS AND UNWRITTEN FUTURE OF THE WORLD’S GREAT SCIENTISTS just got the most amazing starred review from School Library Journal!
Fascinating and captivating, Messner’s latest nonfiction book encourages elementary readers to keep digging, crafting, deconstructing, building, reading, and moving to find out more about themselves and the world around them…. The inclusion of names that are not often covered is a breath of fresh air. A first purchase for all libraries ~School Library Journal (Read the full review here.)
All this month, we’ve been sharing specific revision strategies that you can try out with your own writing and with your students. Some of you have written to let us know how much you appreciate having a checklist of revision jobs to offer young writers and to use with your own projects. But today, I want to talk with you about departing from that list and trying something new. Sometimes it’s not a matter of fine-tuning text; it’s a matter of going back the drawing board entirely. And that brings me back to The Next Scientist!
When I was working on this book, I knew I wanted to include a wide variety of scientists from all different fields and all different backgrounds, so that every curious reader would have a chance to see themselves in the book. It probably won’t surprise you to know that my first draft was way too long. There were so many amazing scientists! How was I supposed to trim this manuscript down to a reasonable length?
Sometimes, the best way to revise is to return to an earlier stage in the writing process – in this case, brainstorming and planning. So I wrote down all of my scientists on Post-It Notes. I tagged those notes with smaller colored stickers to indicate the field of science in which each person worked. Then I rearranged the scientists into spreads that would make sense for both the text and the illustrations.
Stepping back from my laptop and getting away from the rough draft allowed me to look at the book’s subject with fresh eyes, and to create a new shape for the text, keeping that balance of diverse scientists and discoveries even as I trimmed. That allowed for a book that was much more readable and gave our amazing illustrator Julia Kuo a much stronger draft to start with when it was time to work her magic. Here’s a sampling of how those rearranged page spreads look now.
This week’s Teachers Write guest author Amy Guglielmo went back to the drawing board, too, when the draft of her picture book LUCY! HOW LUCILLE BALL DID IT ALL needed work.
My co-author, Jacqueline Tourville, and I struggled to revise our most recent picture book biography LUCY! HOW LUCILLE BALL DID IT ALL. Our opening page felt wordy, setting a slow, heavy tone for the rest of the book.
How it started: Lucy loved to make people laugh. When Lucy was three, she hopped up on the counter of Mr. Newman’s general store and pretended that she was a frog. She stuck her tongue out to catch a make-believe fly. She puffed out her cheeks, crossed her eyes…and let out a great big Riiibbit!
We wanted the text to feel light and zippy, like a joke or a song. So, we decided to turn it on its head by trying it in rhyme.
Rhyming version: Back in the days when kids were calm and proper… A girl named Lucy put on shows for Newman’s shoppers. [At a grocery store]
A lady shook her head. “Good girls don’t yell out jokes!” But Lucy just laughed and let out a great big…CROAK!
While the book didn’t ultimately come out as a rhyming book, this process helped us find our flow, rhythm, and groove with the pacing and page turns. We made major edits that let the text sing!
Final text: Back in a time when children were told to be proper, calm, and quiet, a girl named Lucy hopped up on the counter of Mr. Newman’s general store, puffed out her cheeks, and let out a great big… Riiibbit!
Trying something different can open a pathway to perfect pacing!
Welcome to Week 3 of Teachers Write! In last week’s camper survey, many of you shared that you’re working on picture books and/or poetry, both forms that depend on economy of language, where every word truly counts. So this week, we’re going to take a look at fine tuning. My next novel, THE TROUBLE WITH HEROES, will be out in April, and it’s written mostly in verse. I don’t have a cover to share with you quite yet, but it’s a story about hiking and self-discovery, featuring an angry middle school boy and a dog that he’s trying hard not to love. (And yes, this one was inspired by my own journey to become an Adirondack 46er!)
When I was revising this book, I realized that in addition to all of the usual jobs of revising a novel, I needed to focus on the shape and feel of each individual poem as well. One of the texts I found helpful was The Art of Revising Poetry by Charles Finn and Kim Stafford, which includes both rough and final drafts from various poets, along with essays about how they revised their poems.
It’s brilliant and inspired me to create a list of strategies — guide posts to work with as I revised the poems in THE TROUBLE WITH HEROES. I made sure to spend time focusing on each of these elements.
1. Title – Are you using the title to do some of the work of the poem? Rather than just pulling a word or phrase from the poem, how can the title help to make the transition or create a double entendre? Can it help to frame a metaphor? In a novel in verse, the title can sometimes be used to propel the story forward or provide context (with a title like “The Next Morning” or “After the Funeral.”)
2. First and last lines – Your first and last lines are the most important in your poem. The first has to be intriguing or evocative enough to pull the reader in. And your last line must leave them with something. It can be a feeling, a laugh, a gut punch. It can be a question. Or a settling, a resolution. In a novel in verse, it can also propel your reader into the next poem.
3. Geography – What is the shape of this poem on the page? And does that shape match what it’s trying to do? Is this a moment for white space or pouring out of words? And should those words come in a trickle or a cascade, or a wall?
4. Line Breaks – The end of each line should represent a conscious choice. Most often, that line break will come when you’d like to reader to pause just for a beat. Sometimes, when a poem presents a series of images, line breaks work to separate them as if each is a snapshot of its own. Sometimes line breaks play with meaning, leaving a word hanging so it stands alone or takes on another connotation. Sometimes, line breaks spill over to create a feeling of breathlessness or anticipation or tension. Experiment with your line breaks. Try out different variations to see how they change the meaning and feel of the poem.
5. Images and strong verbs – What strong images do the lines of this poem paint in the reader’s head, and how can you revise to make those images more striking or surprising? How can each verb in those poem be more powerful? It’s a good exercise to go through with a highlighter to mark all of the verbs. Then play around with them to make sure each is conveying the exact action you intend. Audition other verbs to see if one might be stronger. Choose the best one.
6. Balance familiar and surprising words. Poetry should contain some surprising language. But in a poem built of nothing but unusual words, there are no surprises. Casual language, chosen carefully, can pack just as much of a punch, and that will allow surprising words to shine — to truly surprise — when you choose to use them.
7. Where does the poem turn? Where is there a shift in mood or meaning, and how can you use the craft of poetry — the word choice and geography and line breaks — to enhance that turn?
8. When you’ve finished revising, read the poem aloud again. Listen closely. Is there a stronger opening line buried somewhere in the middle? Is there a cleaner exit that you might use as your last line?
Here’s a peek at one of my first drafts — and then the final draft — of a poem from THE TROUBLE WITH HEROES.
Our Teachers Write guest authors this week have some more brilliant tips for fine-tuning language in your current manuscript, whether you’re working on poetry, picture books, or novels.
“One thing I always do when revising on the line level is to look out for ‘filter words’: words that relay that a character is processing, but not what they’re processing. If the viewpoint of the sentence is already in the character’s mind, these words can generally be cut. For example, notice the filter words in the following sentences: Harry tapped his foot impatiently. He noticedthat Beth was arriving to school later and later. He watched the rest of the students in the class greet their friends, but his best friend? He felt like she was nowhere to be seen.
Look how much lighter the text feels when we cut the filter words: Harry tapped his foot impatiently. Beth was arriving to school later and later. The rest of the students in the class greeted their friends, but his best friend? She was nowhere to be seen.”
~Eliot Schrefer, author of THE DARKNESS OUTSIDE US and THE BRIGHTNESS BETWEEN US (coming on 10/1)
“Think of your manuscript as a plant, and the revision process as pruning. Whether it’s big picture revising, or line-by-line reviewing, the concept is the same. Consider carefully which paragraph, word, or scene you can delete, and which is absolutely essential to propelling the story forward. Analyze how you can prune this plant or hedge to make it smoother, sleeker, less cumbersome. How you can trim the excess leaves and branches in order to allow the flowers to shine? This is what revision is, and sometimes it means cutting off perfectly good off-shoots to benefit the plant overall.”
~Saadia Faruqi (photo credit QZB Phorography), author of the Yasmin series and Saving Sunshine
“The best way to liven up a manuscript, especially for a picture book, is to do a quick search for all of the forms of the word verb “be” (is, was, are, were, am, being, etc). Many can, and should, be eliminated. “How?” you ask? Three simple steps.
First, figure out if you even need that phrase at all. Is Ophelia sad? Is it possible you’ve already made it clear that she’s sad through the rest of your brilliant prose? You might be able to just cut “Ophelia is sad” entirely from the story to tighten it up.
Maybe you decide you need to make it more clear that “Ophelia is sad.” Instead of telling the reader what’s happening, show them by changing “Ophelia is sad” to “Ophelia cried” or “tears slipped down Ophelia’s cheeks.”
Are you writing a book that will have illustrations? Change that phrase “Ophelia is sad” into an illustration note [illo: Ophelia is sad].
Bonus: You can also do #2 & #3 for other boring-ish words besides ‘be’ – like went, got, walked, etc.”
~Josh Funk (photo credit Carter Hasegawa), author of ATTACK OF THE SCONES (Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast #6)
Take some time this week to try out these fine-tuning strategies on your work in progress, and we’ll be back next week to address more of your revision questions, including pacing, mentor texts, and how to know when you’re done.
Don’t forget to check in with Educator & author Jen Vincent for Friday’s Weekly Check-Ins at her new space: storyexploratory.substack.com. This is an opportunity to reflect on your writing practice, share the ups and downs of the week, and most importantly, really celebrate yourself.
And mark your calendar for next week! On July 31st, authors and writing teachers Jo Knowles and Rob Costello will host a free Revise and Shine Zoom workshop just for Teachers Write participants! Revise and Shine is a community of writers who offer critiques, retreats, and other services for passionate writers, and you can learn more about it here. We’ll include the Zoom link in next week’s newsletter.
Welcome to Week 2 of writing camp! Now that you’ve had a chance to settle in, we’re going to roll up our sleeves and get to work in earnest. Today’s session applies to all kinds of writing, but later on we’ll be looking at revision strategies for different genres and forms, and I’d like to make sure we touch on those that are of the most interest to all of you. I’d love it if you’d take a minute to fill out this quick, two-question survey to help with that. It includes an opportunity to ask questions you’d like to see us address!
Reading Aloud
The idea of reading work aloud probably isn’t new to you, but it’s worth thinking about why this revision strategy is so tried and true. Our TW guest authors have some thoughts on this!
Reading our drafts aloud helps the revision process immensely. It’s good for proofreading, because ears will catch mistakes and awkward phrases that eyes will gloss right over; it also helps us notice the flow of our own language. Giving voice to a rough draft will tease out sentence-level rhythms and structural repetitions.
Ursula K. Le Guin has a lot to say about repetition in her slender and essential book Steering the Craft: “The rhythms of prose—and repetition is the central means of achieving rhythm—are usually hidden or obscure, not obvious. They may be long and large, involving the whole shape of a story, the whole course of events in a novel: so large that they’re hard to see, like the shape of the mountain where you’re driving on a mountain road. But the mountains are there.” Revising aloud helps us see and hear the shapes of those mountains.
~William Alexander, author of A Properly Unhaunted Place and The Kids in Mrs. Z’s Class book #4, The Legend of Memo Castillo (coming in October!)
Read your novel draft out loud. The WHOLE draft. I always read my drafts aloud as a part of my revision process. There are some problems you can only catch when you hear them, like when there are similar sounding words in the same sentence, or a line of dialogue that doesn’t sound like anything a person would ever say, but that looked great on the page. Reading aloud also forces you to face those lazy sentences and word choices that were perhaps easy to skim over when reading, and gives you a fresh opportunity to whip them into shape!
~Dayna Lorentz, author of Wayward Creatures
One of the questions we’ve already gotten from campers is “How do you know when you’re done?” Teachers Write guest author Lauren Tarshis shares a peek behind the revision process behind her bestselling I Survived books:
I am constantly revising as I’m writing my I Survived books or magazine articles. Each morning, I open my laptop and read my draft from the very beginning, up to the point that I am working on. In the first phases of writing, these “sunrise reads” with fresh eyes often compel me to make dramatic changes — sometimes scrapping everything and starting from scratch. Weeks can go by and it actually feels that I am moving backwards instead of forwards. But over many years and many books and articles, I’ve realized that this process of ongoing, daily revision is what enables me to build a strong foundation. I get a clear sense of my character — his or her voice, needs, upcoming journey. I plant seeds that will enable my plot to grow, even if I’m not entirely sure what exactly I’m growing. The process can be frustrating for sure, and I envy authors who are able to meticulously outline and stick with their plan. I’ve tried this, but have learned the hard way that this is not me. And if I don’t do this kind of ruthless revising from the outset, I risk spending months plowing ahead, only to have the weak foundation crumble midway through the book.
My favorite part of revising is when the book is done, and I get to dig into the sentence level revisions, polishing up descriptions and dialogue throughout the drafts and the copy edit and the proofs…until finally my patient editor Kate politely tells me to stop. And it is at that point that the work is done.
~Lauren Tarshis, author of the I Survived series (I Survived the Black Death is coming in November)
So what do you look for when you’re reading that draft aloud? In addition to what our authors mentioned above, if you’re working on a novel, you’ll also want to think about how the main character’s emotions change from scene to scene. Guest authors Kekla Magoon and Elly Swartz have some tips for how to approach that!
Revising for Emotional Continuity
Writing a novel takes a long time, which means that the scenes your reader sits down to enjoy back-to-back may have been first drafted months or years apart. Time lags in the creation process lead to natural fluctuations in tone, voice, and emotion from scene to scene. In my own drafts, I tend to write scenes at random then later put them in story order, which complicates matters further. But even if you write in a more linear fashion, it’s important to take time in revision to ensure that there is continuity across neighboring scenes. Go through your novel, scene by scene, and make note of the protagonist’s emotional state at the beginning and the end of each scene. First, consider the emotion within the scene itself. Does it change? If not, why not? Did anything meaningful happen in the scene that pushed the story forward? If so, there should be some emotional change, even if it is subtle. Next, compare the ending emotion in each scene with the starting emotion in the next scene. Are they the same, or similar? If not, why not? What happened in between to change the protagonist’s mood? If you’ve done your job well, the reader will be feeling what the character is feeling at the end of each scene, but they may not be able to follow big emotional leaps from scene to scene. Taking time to catalog the emotional changes systematically will point out discrepancies you won’t necessarily catch by reading the manuscript normally, because the writer’s mind often automatically fills in gaps that are simply not addressed on the page.
Pro Tip: You can use the same technique to revise for other areas where continuity is important–like weather, or setting, etc. Is it snowing at the end of scene 5, and sunny at the start of Scene 6? Did time pass, or does one of those setting details actually need to change? Were your characters in a boat at the end of Scene 7, but suddenly they’re in a coffee shop in Scene 8? Are you missing a scene, or simply a transition line? And so on.
~Kekla Magoon, author of The Secret Library
Embrace the Emojis in Life!
Every great story needs a character that feels all the feels. All happy, you’ve written a giant Hallmark card. All sad, well, no one really wants that. But how do you get there? Emojis. I use them. And I promise, I’m not kidding. To me, revision is all about looking at my story from many different lenses. So once I finish my first draft – that I have lovingly named Swiss Cheese – because it stinks and has lots of holes – I use emojis to help ensure that my character’s journey has the all-important emotional resonance. I put an emoji at the beginning and end of each chapter. What’s the emotion going into the moment and what is the emotion coming out? Emojis cue me visually to ensure that my characters, like my readers, feel all the feels.
~Elly Swartz, author of Hidden Truths
Your writing camp assignment this week is to embrace the read-aloud and experiment with some of the revision strategies above! Either choose one piece to work on or experiment with a few different ones, and see what you notice while you’re reading aloud. You can do this on your laptop if you’d like, but personally, I prefer to read from either a printout of my manuscript or a pdf on a tablet, so I can mark it up with a pen or Apple pencil. There’s something about being away from the keyboard that helps me focus on the actual words.
Happy writing (and reading aloud!) – and don’t forget to drop any questions you have in the camper survey. Have a great week!
Happy summer, friends! And welcome to Teachers Write, our free online summer writing camp especially for teachers & librarians. Whether you’re a new writer or you’ve been with us from the very beginning, I’m so glad you’re here. A few housekeeping things before we get started…
Teachers Write is meant to be a fun, low-stress way to stretch your writing muscles over the summer. That means there’s no pressure to complete every writing prompt or revision task on any given day. Take things at your own pace and if you have to take a week or two off, don’t feel like you need to step back. Just join us again whenever you’d like!
Weekly Check-ins
Teachers Write co-founder Jen Vincent helps keep us motivated through the summer with her weekly check-ins each Friday at her new space, storyexploratory.substack.com. This is an opportunity to reflect on your writing practice, share the ups and downs of the week, and most importantly, really celebrate yourself.
Zoom workshop on July 31st
We’ll also have a special revision Zoom workshop on July 31st, hosted by authors and writing teachers Jo Knowles and Rob Costello of Revise and Shine, a community of writers who offer critiques, retreats, and other services for passionate writers. Mark your calendars now, and we’ll send out a link later this month.
Books for your Library or Classroom
Teachers Write has always been and will always be free. But it does take many hours of work from me and our mentor authors, so if you can, we’d ask that you say thanks by buying our books this summer. I have three new titles coming out in August!
HISTORY SMASHERS: SALEM WITCH TRIALS comes out August 13th. It’s the ninth book in our popular graphic nonfiction series that smashes historical myths with primary sources, along with lots of photographs, illustrations, and comics. Shoutout to Dylan Meconis (cover art) and Falynn Koch (interior art) for their amazing illustrations!
OVER AND UNDER THE WETLAND, illustrated by Christopher Silas Neal, also comes out August 13th! This is the seventh book in our series of nature picture books that have become read-aloud and StoryWalk® favorites, and it explores the wonderful, watery ecosystem of the Florida Everglades.
THE NEXT SCIENTIST: THE UNEXPECTED BEGINNINGS AND UNWRITTEN FUTURE OF THE WORLD’S GREAT SCIENTISTS, illustrated by Julia Kuo, comes out August 27th and takes a look at how the childhood passions of great scientists have fueled their future endeavors. This is a follow-up to our 2020 picture book THE NEXT PRESIDENT, illustrated by Adam Rex, which looks at what America’s presidents were doing before they led the nation and how they grew into the job. It’s a great one to share in an election year!
All three books are available for pre-order now, and I’d love it if you’d order from my local indie The Bookstore Plus in Lake Placid so I can sign a copy especially for you and your readers. When you order, please leave a comment to let them know how you’d like your books signed, and that you’re part of Teachers Write so that I can tuck a special thank you into your package!
Now, let’s talk revision!
I do school visits and staff development sessions all over the world, and I’ve noticed that no matter what continent I’m on, when I first bring up the subject of revision, kids often groan. They finally finished that piece of writing and they don’t want to keep working on it. But I’ve also noticed that when I break down the revision process into small, manageable steps, they’re suddenly a lot more interested in getting back to work. It’s that nebulous, undefined “REVISION” that feels overwhelming.
Simply asking writers to revise doesn’t offer them the specific tools and strategies they need in order to do the job. But when we break that job down into specific steps that can be done in a sitting or two, it changes everything. That’s why we’re going to dig deep into the revision process this summer, with a look behind the scenes at how published books were revised (again and again!) and a smorgasbord of specific revision strategies from some of your favorite authors. You’ll be able to try these out with your own writing and share them with students when you go back to school in the fall.
The Evolution of Over and Under the Wetland
Before I draft an Over and Under picture book, I spent several months doing research – reading books, visiting museums, interviewing biologists, and most of all, spending time in the ecosystem featured in the book. Being there allows me to soak in the world of the story, listening to the sounds, feeling the sun or wind or cold, and of course, observing the animals. I’ve found that there’s just no substitute for having my boots on the ground, or my kayak in the water, depending on the setting.
Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Southwest Florida
Once I’ve organized my notes, I tend to make a Post-It Note outline for these books, pairing the living organisms in the story with the moments that my human characters might experience in that ecosystem. This allows me to move things around, play with different pairings, and work to strengthen connections.
From there, I write a very rough first draft. My first revision pass might happen right away with a read-aloud. When you read aloud, you get a first chance to hear what works and what doesn’t. This is an essential step for every kind of writing I do, perhaps picture books most of all because they’re meant to be shared aloud. From there, I’ll make additional revision passes, focusing on different elements of the text.
For a long-standing series like this one, structure is less of a question mark, since it’s already been established, and that consistency is part of the appeal for readers. So my revisions for books in this series tend to focus most on word choice – especially verbs, sensory words, and onomatopoetic language, all of which help a young reader to feel more immersed in the world of the book.
I’ll do this work in several passes; having a single focus keeps me from getting distracted and makes the work of revision feel less overwhelming. “We don’t have to revise the whole thing!” I’ll tell myself. “We just need to look at these verbs today.” I’ve been known to go through the text with a highlighter to mark verbs, which forces me to consider whether each is the very best word for the action happening at that time. Is that turtle diving into the pond or splooshing? Is that alligator chewing, chomping, or snapping?
Once I was happy with the text for Over and Under the Wetland, I sent it along to my editor Melissa Manlove, who read it and shared notes. Again, because this is part of an already beloved series, those notes focused less on already-established elements like structure and more on the finer details – including connections and tension as well as word choice. I used Melissa’s notes to mark up my draft, adding more of my own notes, too.
After we’ve gone back and forth a few times, the manuscript will make its way to copy edits and fact checking, and I continue to revise. Sometimes a copy editor’s suggestion regarding a grammatical word choice doesn’t work for the music of the story and I end up finding a way to rephrase a whole section of text in a way that works better, all around. Sometimes when I run the almost-final text past an expert, they’ll point out an inconsistency that I missed or share a tiny, lovely detail that’s too perfect to leave out, and there are more changes. The edits grow smaller and smaller until the book’s final pass pages are laid out with all of the edited text and art in place.
Over and Under the Wetland is ready for readers now and comes out August 13th! Feel free to bookmark this post about the book’s revision process to share with your students when you read the book aloud – it’s one of the very best ways to model revision for young writers!
Teachers Write Guest Author Sarah Albee on Revising for Humor
The Over & Under nature series is poetic and informational, so for these titles, my revision strategies focus on those elements. But what if you want to revise with an eye on humor? Guest author Sarah Albee joins us this week with some tips on that:
I love writing history with a humorous voice. That presents challenges right off the bat, because as we all know, there’s plenty of history that isn’t funny. So it’s important to start with a topic that lends itself to humor, or at least, to a lively voice.
The final revision stage is my favorite part of the process, because that’s when I can add the fun stuff. By the time I get to that late-stage revision, I have already toiled over the hard parts: I’ve confirmed the facts (to the best of my ability). I’ve boiled down what are often complex, nuanced historical events and explained them with precision and clarity (to the best of my ability). After that’s done, I can focus on the voice. Here are some of the questions I ask myself:
Can I use a stronger verb here?
Can I jolt my reader with a kid-friendly, funny, unexpected metaphor?
Can I insert other rhetorical devices such as alliteration, synecdoche, direct address, onomatopoeia?
Have I read it out loud for rhythm and prosody?
But the fun doesn’t stop there! Next I go through and check these things one by one:
I assess line length (it should vary) and word order (the punchline should go at the end of a sentence!).
I add “jokes” that employ that time-tested comic trope known as rule-of-three (or misdirection and reversal).
And finally, I try hard to fun-up my subtitles, sidebars, and special features.
Humorous writing has to look easy, but for the writer, it can require laborious, painstaking, and time-consuming revision. And yet, when kids tell me they’ve loved a book or laughed at something I’ve written, there’s nothing more gratifying.
I’d like you to spend this first week of Teachers Write camp coming up with a few pieces that you’d like to work on revising as we work our way through this next month. These can be narratives, poems, short stories, nonfiction, picture books, or longer works of fiction or nonfiction.
If you don’t have anything to work on right now, that’s okay! Take this afternoon to write a very rough draft of something that you can play around with this week. Need a prompt? Write a personal narrative about a journey you made that was incredibly lovely, eye-opening, or hard.
Whether you’re working with an older piece or something you just wrote, take some time this week to choose a few small revision jobs. Ask yourself what the piece is asking for. With my Over and Under books, action and sensory language are always important. Maybe you’ll decide that’s a good first focus for your piece, too. Or maybe you’d like to start by adding more humor or crafting sharper dialogue.
Make a list of small jobs. This week, choose just one of those jobs to focus on in earnest, and let me know how it goes!
Happy June, friends! I wanted to let you know that I’ll be at ALA in San Diego this month. You can join Kekla Magoon, Tracey Baptiste, William Alexander, and me at the PopTop Stage for “From Brainstorm to Bookshelves: The Journey of Creating ‘The Kids in Mrs. Z’s Class’ series” at 1:30pm on Saturday, June 29th, and I’ll be signing at Algonquin Booth 616 from 3-4pm Saturday afternoon. If you’re there, please put us on your schedule to come say hello and get a signed copy of EMMA MCKENNA, FULL OUT!
(Photo from one of my book tour schools last month – every third grader went home with a signed book!)
Whether or not you’ll be at ALA, I have another invitation for you – an important one. I feel like school and library budget cuts and changes in the social media landscape have made it a lot harder for librarians and readers to learn about new books lately, which is why I’ve decided to put together a School Librarians Advisory Team for the coming school year, with a few representatives from each state and several international school librarians as well. Here’s a little more about what that means and how it will work so you can see if it might be a good fit for you and your most enthusiastic readers!
As an advisory team member, you’ll:
Have early access to preview all of my new books and occasionally other authors’ upcoming titles for curious readers in grades K-8.
Share titles you love with fellow librarians, educators, families, and readers via social media, newsletters, and state book list nominations.
Receive periodic emails requesting input from you and your readers about new series topics, book titles, and cover art.
Have priority access to free in-person author visits when I’m on a publisher-sponsored book tour that includes your city.
Get invitations to a selection of free virtual author visits that fit your readers’ interests.
If this sounds like a good fit for you and your readers, just fill out this form to apply. https://forms.gle/pAzQgQAUZDfrkmUG7 I promise to get back to you later this summer. Even if you’re not selected for the advisory team, you’ll get an invitation for your school to attend a free virtual author visit this fall.
For now, I hope your last days of school are great ones, and I’m wishing you the very best of summers!
Hello, teacher/librarian/writer friends! It’s almost time for Teachers Write, our free online summer writing camp for teachers & librarians. Have you signed up yet? If not, you can do that here.
For those who are new, Teachers Write is all about writing in community. It’s about walking the walk and taking risks with our own writing so we can be more empathic teachers when we ask our students to take risks of their own, to be brave enough to put words on paper and maybe even share those words.
Every summer, we have a special focus, and this summer’s theme is REVISION. It’s honestly where the real writing happens. We’ll still be doing some generative writing this summer, but feel free to show up at the keyboard with some pieces that you’d like to take another look at. I promise you’ll end the summer with a whole new toolbox full of revision strategies to use with your own writing and to share with your students!
Educator & author Jen Vincent will host Weekly Check-Ins on Fridays at her new space: storyexploratory.substack.com. This is an opportunity to reflect on your writing practice, share the ups and downs of the week, and most importantly, really celebrate yourself.
And we’ll have some special events this summer as well! On July 31st, authors and writing teachers Jo Knowles and Rob Costello will host a free Revise and Shine Zoom workshop just for Teachers Write participants! Revise and Shine is a community of writers who offer critiques, retreats, and other services for passionate writers, and you can learn more about it here.
Teachers Write 2024 runs from July 8-August 2. You’ll get an email at the beginning of each week with writing lessons, prompts, and revision tips for you to work through on your own time, away from the screen if you’d like. Many will be lessons you can try out yourself and then bookmark to share with your kids later on. Join us, won’t you? Here’s the link to sign up. We’re looking forward to a great summer of revision!
Just how does an 18-book multi-author series come together? It all started with an email and some Afro-fusion street food.
About two years ago, I found a note from my literary agent in my inbox with the subject line “Idea for Kate Messner.” She was sending along a proposal from Algonquin Young Readers editorial director Cheryl Klein, asking if I’d be interested in heading up a new multi-author chapter book series about all the kids in one elementary school class. The project was ambitious – 18 books over three years – and involved a ton of collaboration. Each author would create their own main character, who would then be a secondary character in all of the other books. Would I be interested in writing the first and last books in the series and helping to recruit a team of authors to write the rest?
When I shared the idea with my husband and daughter, they had immediate thoughts.
Ella: That sounds like SO much fun! Tom: That sounds like SO much work!
(Spoiler: they were both right.)
So was I interested? I needed more information, and fortunately, I had plans to be in New York City in just a couple of weeks, so Cheryl and I scheduled lunch at Berber Street Food, an African café in the West Village. Over djolof rice and mint iced tea, we brainstormed how such a project might work. The more we talked, the more excited we got, and I knew this was a series I wanted to work on.
Our next step was to begin building a team of authors. This was a unique project – one that required a particular set of talents. We agreed that we needed authors who were amazing, funny, voice-driven writers, but that wasn’t enough. Because of the unprecedented level of collaboration, our writers also needed to be kind, flexible people and amazing team players who would respect their colleagues’ visions for their characters, even as they spun their own stories around them. And one more thing: they had to be good at meeting deadlines, which don’t have much flexibility in a series like this.
Fortunately, our kidlit community has an abundance of such wonderful people, so we had no trouble pulling together our wish list. We anticipated that it would take quite a while to get a team together, especially since we were approaching some of the busiest writers in the business. But we were wrong about that. Almost everyone we invited responded with an enthusiastic yes, and we had our team. I still have to pinch myself when I look at our incredible list of creators!
Our next step was brainstorming our characters and setting for the series. So what did that process look like? More on that tomorrow!
