Got questions about writing? Wednesday is Q and A Day at Teachers Write Virtual Summer Writing Camp, and we’ll have some great guest authors answering. Today’s author guests are Grace Lin and Emma Otheguy!
Before Grace Lin was an award-winning and NY Times bestselling author/illustrator of picturebooks, early readers and middle grade novels, she was the only Asian girl (except for her sisters) going to her elementary school in Upstate NY. That experience, good and bad, has influenced her books—including her Newbery Honor WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON, her Geisel Honor LING & TING, and her National Book Finalist WHEN THE SEA TURNED TO SILVER. But, it also causes Grace to persevere for diversity as a New England Public Radio commentator and when she gave her TEDx talk “The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child’s Bookshelf,” as well as her PBSNewHour video essay “What to do when you realize classic books from your childhood are racist?.” In 2016, Grace’s art was displayed at the White House and Grace, herself, was recognized by President Obama’s office as a Champion of Change for Asian American and Pacific Islander Art and Storytelling. These days, Grace is most excited about her new picture book, “A Big Mooncake for Little Star,” out at the end of August. Grace is offering exclusive, limited edition moon calendars to readers who pre-orders her book. See (link below) for more info! http://www.gracelinblog.com/2018/05/pre-order-big-mooncake-for-little-star.html
EmmaOtheguy is a children’s book author and a historian of Spain and colonial Latin America. Her picture book debut, a biography of famed Cuban poet and independence leader José Martí, titled Martí’s Song for Freedom (Lee & Low Books), received five starred reviews and was named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, School Library Journal and the New York Public Library. Otheguy lives in New York City with her husband.
Teachers & librarians – Feel free to ask your questions in the comments. It’s fine to ask a general question or to direct one directly to a specific guest author. Our author guests have volunteered to drop in and respond when they can.
Note from Kate: I’ll try to be here for Q and A most Wednesdays, too. Please be patient with me if you’re a first-time commenter – it may take a little while for me to approve your comment so it appears.
Tuesday and Thursday are Quick-Write days at Teachers Write, so our guest authors will be coming by with some writing prompts to try out. Do as much or as little as you’d like with each mini-assignment, and feel free to bookmark those you’d like to use with students later on. Teachers Write posts don’t go anywhere after the summer ends. They’re always here for you to use and share with student writers.
Our guest author today is Traci Sorell, who writes poems as well as fiction and nonfiction works for children—the type of books she sought out in her school and public libraries as a child. Her debut picture book, We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga, focuses on the universal spirit of gratitude in contemporary Cherokee culture across the four seasons. Illustrated by Frané Lessac and published by Charlesbridge Publishing, the book shares Cherokee celebrations, history and experiences beginning with the new year in fall and ending at the tribe’s National Holiday in late summer. Traci is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation and grew up in northeastern Oklahoma, where her tribe is located.
My debut picture book focuses on Cherokee people expressing gratitude in every season, not just when something good happens or when something asked for has been provided. In Cherokee culture and many others worldwide, cultivating gratitude for both the blessings and struggles experienced is critical to maintaining balance and perspective on life’s journey. It is an intentional practice and a muscle to be strengthened daily.
Your Assignment: Take a moment, close your eyes and reflect on recent blessings and struggles experienced this spring or so far this summer. Sketch or write those down.
Now review what you’ve remembered. Place a star next to the one that speaks most to you. Use this as the basis of a poem, short story, free-write, sketch, picture book, song, etc. Select the method that best resonates with your experience and create! Feel free to share some of your work in the comments if you’d like.
A quick note about blogging your Teachers Write experience: Our guest authors have given permission for their lessons & prompts to be shared on the Teachers Write blog only. Please do not copy and paste any mini-lessons or writing prompts to your own social media feeds or blogs – publish only your own writing there. If you’d like to reference the ideas shared here, providing a link is the best way to do that. Thanks!
Our weekly schedule will look like this:
Monday Mini-lesson, and a Monday Morning Warm-Up
Tuesday Quick-Write
Wednesday is Q and A day – authors will be here to answer your questions!
Thursday Quick-Write
Friday Mini-lesson and Friday FeedbackSunday Check-In – a chance to check in with everyone, reflect on the week, and share encouragement.
I’ll be popping in to comment, and I know many of our guest authors will, too, but since this community has grown so much (we’re more than 3000 teacher-writers strong now!) you’ll also need to commit to supporting one another. When someone decides to be brave and share a bit of writing in the comments, or when someone asks for advice or feedback, please know that you are welcome (and encouraged!) to be mentors to one another as well. Watching this writing community grow is one of the best things about being part of Teachers Write.
The first time you comment, I will have to “approve” your comment before it appears. This is to prevent us all from being besieged by online trolls. So when you comment, it will not show up right away – sometimes, it may be later in the day when your comment appears. THIS IS OKAY. Please don’t post more than once. I’ll be traveling for conferences & research some of the summer but promise to check in whenever I get wherever I’m going each night. Be patient with me, okay? 🙂
Now…let’s get started!
Another Point of View
When I was working on my June 2018 novel, BREAKOUT, about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home, I wrote the first draft in first person point of view, from the point of view of Nora Tucker, the prison superintendent’s daughter. I revised. And revised. And somewhere around my third draft, thanks to feedback from writer friends, I reconsidered that POV decision.
How might different elements of this story look different to different characters? How would their backgrounds and life experiences change the way they saw things? And how might different documents – letters, poems, text messages, emails, news articles, signs, etc. – be useful in sharing those different perspectives?
This exploration ultimately led me to rewrite the entire book with a different structure, as a novel-in-documents.
I loved working on this project with this challenging puzzle of a format. (And I really hope you’ll want to read BREAKOUT and share it with your students- you can pick it up from your favorite bookstore!)
My next book won’t be a novel-in-documents because every story is different, and this one (a mystery set on a cricket farm!) will be better served with a different structure. But I’ll still take some time to write letters and poems in my characters’ voices, even though those pages probably won’t end up in the final draft. Writing from different points of view is a helpful way for writers of all ages to explore character, whether or not the final story will be told in multiple points of view. Often, when I’m writing a novel with an antagonist who doesn’t feel fully fleshed out, I take a break from the manuscript to journal in the “bad guy’s” point of view. It always helps me to understand more about my villain’s motivation and the backstory that shaped them.
So for today’s mini-lesson, let’s spend a little time playing around with point of view and structure.
Next, brainstorm a list of all the different kinds of documents that might be part of this story if you were to write it using that format. Would there be text messages sent? From whom? What would they say? Who might write letters or diary entries or emails? What might a poem from one of the characters in this story look like? Could there be a rap battle? Petitions? Related news stories or editorials? Cartoons?
Choose one of the documents you brainstormed and write it. Keep in mind which character(s) created that document and what their perspectives might be.
If you’d like, share a little of what you wrote by copying & pasting into the comments. (If you link to a blog or other website, most people won’t see it.) And feel free to read some of the other posts to see how different writers handled other points of view!
If you’re not ready to share quite yet, you can also just introduce yourself in the comments & say hello! I’m excited to meet everyone!
And here’s a little extra incentive to participate in the comments today. If you share a snippet of your writing and/or an introduction, I’ll enter you in a drawing to win all four of these amazing MG novels by TW guest authors, past and present. And they’re ALL signed! Deadline: 11pm EST on July 9th.
It’s release day for Ranger in Time: Hurricane Katrina Rescue!
Ranger, the time-traveling golden retriever with search-and-rescue training, arrives in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approaches and residents start to evacuate the city. Ranger meets Clare Porter, who is searching for her grandmother. Once Ranger helps Clare find Nana, he takes shelter with them at their home in the Lower Ninth Ward, and they wait for Clare’s father to return from the gas station. But there’s no sign of him as hours pass and the weather gets worse. The wind picks up and rain pours down. And when the levees break, floodwaters dangerously rise, and Clare and Nana are separated. Can Ranger help Clare navigate the flooded streets to safety and back to her family?
This is book eight in my Scholastic chapter book series about a time-traveling search and rescue dog, and its more recent setting made it one of the toughest to research and write. The first seven books in the series are set in the more distant past…
Most kids who enjoy the Ranger in Time series weren’t born yet when Hurricane Katrina happened in 2005, so this story is also “history” to these readers. But for those who lived through the storm and its aftermath in New Orleans, the memories are still raw. When I was researching this book, I spent my usual weeks in library, reading everything from first-person accounts to news reports and government documents. I watched hours of video, including Spike Lee’s powerful documentary When the Levees Broke. I spent time doing research in New Orleans, too.
It was December of 2016 when I visited, and the tourist areas of New Orleans were sparkling with holiday decorations. But parts of the Ninth Ward were another story. Some streets looked as if the hurricane might have happened in the past year or two, rather than more than a decade ago. And many people who live here still feel just as forgotten as they did when they were waiting for help in the days after the storm. Laura Paul with the relief and rebuilding organization lowernine.org drove me though the neighborhoods that were hardest hit in 2005. She pointed out the homes that her organization helped rebuild and the areas where the neighborhood seems to be coming back.
But there are still blocks where most every home is ruined. Porch steps that lead to nowhere. Streets littered with debris from work crews. Uncovered storm drains that don’t seem to get fixed, no matter how many calls people make to the city. And there is still so much frustration and anger. A sense of betrayal over how the people of this neighborhood were treated when they needed help.
There’s a wonderful little museum in this neighborhood called the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum, and it chronicles the history of the neighborhood, from its role in the Civil Rights Movement through the devastating aftermath of Katrina. Photos tell the story of the storm and the days that followed.
One of the things I appreciated about this museum is that it pointed out examples of racist media coverage of the aftermath of the storm. Below is a pair of headlines about people taking supplies from grocery stores, described as either “looting” or “finding,” depending on the survivor’s skin color.
J.F. “Smitty” Smith, a resident of the Lower Ninth Ward, talked with me about his experiences in 2005 and read an early draft of this Ranger in Time manuscript. When we talked on the phone, he was incredibly helpful and pointed out some details about the storm and recovery. But mostly, he wanted to talk more about the lack of help in 2005, and how awful it was, waiting. Reading the manuscript had brought it back for him, and he was frustrated all over again. “You don’t understand,” Smitty told me. “That dog has got to get in there and SAVE more people.”
That conversation, more than any of the other research I’d done, helped me to understand how residents of the Lower Ninth Ward felt after Katrina. And it led me to revise the manuscript, again. I’m so grateful to Smitty for making time to talk with me.
There are still many residents of the Lower Ninth Ward who need help rebuilding homes that have been in their families for generations. I’ll be celebrating book release day by making a donation to lowernine.org. Will you join me?
If you donate $20 or more, I’ll enter you in a drawing for a 30-minute Ranger in Time Skype visit in the fall (date to be agreed upon in September). You can use it for your classroom, library, or book club – or give it away to a school you want to support. To enter the drawing, just make your donation, and then leave a comment below.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
Design Notes and Covers
Usually, when I write a novel, I don’t need to worry much about design notes. Laying out the chapters in a book with a traditional narrative structure is relatively simple, but that wasn’t the case with BREAKOUT because the entire novel is made up of different kinds of documents. There were letters, written by different characters who needed different handwriting styles. There were news reports, petitions, recipes, and text messages, all of which had to be formatted differently. There was art, including multiple pages of graphic novel panels that Nora’s little brother Owen draws as he’s dealing with his fears over the prison break. And that required a detailed design memo. More than one, actually. Here’s a page of the first-draft design memo that I sent the team at the beginning of the design process.
(Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read BREAKOUT yet, don’t go to that website listed on the design note!)
As the Bloomsbury team began to work on designing this book, they realized that there was a need for even more detailed notes and created additional design memos like this one.
The team went to work, and then there were multiple reviews of the designed manuscript, with more proofreading. We call this step in the process reviewing “first pass pages” and “second pass pages” and so on…until every detail is right and the final draft can be sent to the printer.
And of course, every book needs a cover. I’m incredibly grateful that Bloomsbury hired artist Christopher Silas Neal to do the art for this one. Chris is the illustrator for several of my picture books with Chronicle and designed some other book covers that I really, really love.
Chris started the cover design process with sketches of different possibilities, and then a rough draft of one idea.
We all loved the look of this cover, but there was a concern that people might think the girls running were the escaped inmates when really, that’s meant to represent a relay-race element of the story. Bloomsbury asked Chris for another draft, keeping the overall feel of the cover but perhaps doing more with light and action that doesn’t involve the girls running or the prison.
And here’s a fun secret about this cover…. Authors and cover artists don’t usually collaborate like this, but Chris and I found ourselves on the same shuttle bus at the wonderful Gaithersburg Book Festival while all of this going on, so we spent our 15-minute ride back from the author reception tossing around ideas. Could we maybe use the tree fort as an image? What if there was a police helicopter? With a search light beaming down from it?! Here’s the final cover.
One last writing assignment for today:If you could design a cover for the book you’re writing right now – or redesign one for your favorite novel – what would it look like?
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
“This highly recommended tribute to the imagination is comprised of delightful pictures and three clever and entertaining stories.” –Booklist, starred review
There’s a beautiful new picture book in the world today, and it’s a perfect choice for kids with big imaginations. MABEL AND SAM AT HOME is written by my friend Linda Urban and published by Chronicle Kids. Here’s the official description…
At the new house, there were movers and shouting and boxes and blankets. There were many places a girl like Mabel and a boy like Sam could be tripped over or smooshed or trod upon. There was one safe place where they would not. And that is how Mabel became a Sea Captain. In this three-part picture book of moving house and imaginative play, Mabel and Sam sail the high seas of their new home; tour the intriguing museum of their living room; journey through outer space to the safety of their own beds; and discover how far afield—and how close to home—imagination can take them.
Linda and I are good friends who constantly talk writing – over lattes in Burlington, VT or chatting online. We thought it might be fun to invite everyone else into one of those conversations as we celebrate Linda’s new book. So get yourself a cup of coffee or tea or whatever you love, and listen in….
KATE: Hi, Linda! You already know this, but I’m SO excited about your new picture book MABEL AND SAM AT HOME releasing today, especially because I was there to hear some of your early noodling on this project. This is a picture book, but I think in those earlier days, you were thinking of it as more of an easy reader or transitional chapter book, right?
LINDA: Right. You know I have wanted to write an easy reader for a long time, but as soon as Mabel and Sam started talking it was pretty clear that their vocabulary would be too complicated for very beginning readers. A transitional reader seemed more reasonable and I wrote five chapters about these two imaginative kids using play to get comfortable in their new environment. A few editors who saw it mentioned that the story had a very visual quality that suggested the possibility of a picture book interpretation, but it was Melissa Manlove at Chronicle who sorted out how that might actually work. It was her idea to cut two of the stories and treat the other three as episodes/adventures in one expanded picture book.
You’ve worked with Melissa, I know. She’s got amazing vision and can see a project in ways nobody else does. I think you’re working on something for her now that might feel similar?
KATE: Yes! Melissa really does have an amazing gift when it comes to looking at a manuscript and imagining what it might be. We were having a very casual dinner in Montreal (Melissa was there for a conference) when she asked what I was working on and I told her, “Well…it’s kind of a mess right now, but I have this idea for a picture book about American presidents…” In ten minutes, she’d whipped out a pen, asked for an extra napkin, and sketched out how the project I was describing might look on the page. It’s fun knowing how she worked that same kind of magic with MABEL AND SAM AT HOME.
One of the other things I love about your new book is how you capture the dynamics between brother and sister and the real-kid language of imaginative play. How much of that came naturally, inspired by your own kids, and how much of it was the result of playing around with language as you revised?
LINDA: When my kids were little they played in very much this style — sort of like little kid improv, riffing on each other’s ideas, picking up language from one another and rolling it around to see where it led.
As a parent, I was terrible at it. I could not engage in their play in the natural, free-form, open-ended way that they did. I was fine to serve tea to or to string up blankets for safari tents, but I was not IN play in the way that they were. I was always aware of how much time there was before I needed to make dinner or checking myself on the logic of space walking without an oxygen tank. And they sensed it. I was audience or prop master, not player.
One of the great things about writing, for me, is that when I am writing well, I am experiencing the fictive world through the character, much like my kids do when they play.
For me, so much of that experiencing is in point of view as understood through dialogue. I’d love to claim some sort of careful crafting here, but really, if I’m feeling IN the character, the dialogue is of that character, too.
This is not to say that there wasn’t a lot of revision. There was. And it tended to be of two different kinds. One sort is the analytical revision, the kind that comes with the conscious mind that recognizes a scene takes too long or that an action verb would be more powerful than using a verb/adverb combination. The other sort is what Robert Olen Butler would call “redreaming” and feeling myself go back into that character world and expanding or rephrasing in a more improvisational way, just like kids do when they play. Is it the same for you, Kate?
KATE: In many ways, yes – it’s always interesting to me how when you and I are teaching together at a workshop, I gravitate toward the big-picture revision things (like my beloved charts!) and you have such a gift for the fine tuning of words and sentences and language. And I know that your notebooks play a big role in your thinking process, too, whether it comes to brainstorming or revision. Can you talk a little about that – how writing about the manuscript but not in the manuscript is helpful? (And could we maybe see a page or two? Pretty please?)
LINDA: I’ll see if I have a notebook page for Mabel and Sam around, but I can tell you that the notebook part of my thinking is most valuable to me because it is in the notebook and not typed up in the same sort of format that my manuscripts are.
When I first started writing, it was all play. While I dreamed of publication, I wasn’t writing with anything under contract or expecting that THIS would be the book that sold. It was all loosey-goosey messing around and mostly just for me. Once I sold something, a little bit of that play slipped away. I started thinking that the writing needed to “count”, you know?
When I started writing by hand in a notebook, though, a lot of the play came back. Of course what I was writing wasn’t for anyone else to see! It was in handwriting and messy and it looked and felt nothing like the sort of thing I’d submit to an editor.
I’m a big fan of Lynda Barry and I believe a lot of what she says about how the hand being in motion can sometimes let us access thoughts and memories and modes of play that typing doesn’t — at least, I believe that’s true for me. So I mess around a lot in my notebooks in order to experience things differently, to come at them from new angles, or to get outside of my own awareness.
I’ll go look for a notebook example now.
I know you carry a notebook with you everywhere, too. But I think you also have project notebooks, right? How are they different and when do you find you use them most?
KATE: I do! It’s important to me to get away from the manuscript. It’s like I can’t talk about it while it’s right there in my face, so writing elsewhere helps a lot. But these scribblings are not as pretty, so I have a major notebook crush on yours. I especially love seeing how they help you move forward with a story.
Hey – can we talk about the art in this book for a minute? Because as you know, I read this manuscript long before there was even an artist on board, and I truly cannot imagine it in the hands of anyone except Hadley now. It’s brilliant.
LINDA: IT IS! Completely, beautifully, stunningly brilliant. I love the way she characterized these two kids. I love the way she grows and broadens the color palette as the grow more and more comfortable in their home. I love the way household objects take on metaphorical value and then return to themselves again.
I think her work in Iridescence of Birds and Another Way to Climb a Tree is wonderful, but she has outdone herself here.
There’s such a growing sense of warmth and comfort as the book comes to a close, too. I want to live in that room, with that family, under that moon.
KATE: Me too! And that’s a perfect note for us to end on for now, I think.
Linda, thanks for doing this with me, and congratulations to you and Hadley on such a magical adventure of a story!
Everybody else….you should go read it now. Seriously. Read it to a kid if you can. And then imagine an adventure of your own.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
Copy Edits and Proofreading
Because BREAKOUT is a complicated book, written entirely in documents that turned the project into a great big puzzle, my editor and I went back and forth with revisions even more than usual. But finally, I sent back a revised draft and got the note that authors wait for: “Great! I’m sending this off to copy edits now!”
Copy edits happen at the end of revisions but before the book is laid out as a pdf for printing. A professional copy editor – someone who’s really great with details, grammar, spelling, and punctuation – reads the manuscript and makes notes about any issues. Sometimes, that’s done with colored pencil on a paper copy, and sometimes, it’s done electronically, using “Track Changes” and the “Comments” feature in Microsoft Word. That was the case for BREAKOUT.
This is the very first page of the story, and you’ll notice that the copy editor has made several different kinds of suggestions here. She’s corrected my capitalization from an upper to a lower-case i on Post-it Notes, since that’s a brand name and the i isn’t capitalized. (Clearly, I did not retain this knowledge, as I’m pretty sure I capitalized it again in one of the blog posts in this series.) They’ve noted that I used the word “all” twice in the same sentence and asked if I’d like to delete one of those (yes, please). Copy editors also note continuity errors – like if it’s Friday on one page but then only one day passes and somehow it’s Monday on the next page.
Once the copy editor and my original editor have gone through the whole manuscript to make these notes, it’s sent back to me. As the author, it’s my job to approve the suggested changes, address any queries the copy editor posed, and make any other eleventh hour changes I’d like to make to the manuscript. This is the last stage of the publishing process where major changes are supposed to be made.
Kids at school visits sometimes ask what happens if I don’t like the suggested changes, and that does happen from time to time. When it does, I slow down, read the sentence again, and ask myself why the copy editor made that suggestion. If it’s a situation where there are good reasons not to make the change, I mark that suggestion with the word STET, which means “nope – please leave this as it was.”
Once I’ve reviewed the whole manuscript and addressed all of the suggestions and queries, I send it back to my editor. Sometimes it comes back again with additional queries, so we go through the process again. Then the book goes to the design team, which is normally a relatively simple process of laying out the pages, designing chapter headings, and designing the title page. In the case of BREAKOUT, though, it was a lot more complicated because every page was a different document that needed to be designed differently. (I owe the BREAKOUT design team a LOT of chocolate because their efforts on this monster of a book were heroic.) Tomorrow (book release day!!!) we’ll talk about that last element – design, and how the team turns a story into a beautiful book that you can hold in your hands.
Today’s Assignment:When you’re proofreading a manuscript, it helps to know the common mistakes you tend to make. My personal weaknesses are overuse of the word “just” and not knowing whether or not to hyphenate a compound word. Spend a couple of minutes brainstorming the kinds of errors you tend to make; it’ll help you keep an eye out for those issues the next time you’re proofreading!
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
Revising again…and again…
Turning a book in to an editor is a great feeling. That project that you’ve worked and worked on for months, and sometimes years, is finally in someone else’s hands! At least for a while…
When I visit schools to talk about writing, one of the questions that kids often ask is, “Don’t you feel sad when your editor tells you all the things you have to change to make your book better?” I tell them that, in fact, it’s just the opposite. I’m thrilled. You see, when I turn a book in to my editor, I’m telling her, “Here…I’ve done everything I can possibly to do make this story as strong as it can be. I’ve used every trick in my toolbox, and I’m out of ideas. Help?” When she writes back, her editorial letter and notes give me a whole new perspective on the story. Her questions get me thinking in new directions, and suddenly, I have a second wind. That means that the book I thought was as good as I could make it can be even better.
Here’s what some of my editor Mary Kate Castellani’s notes looked like for BREAKOUT…
When I get this round of notes from my editor, I usually read through the full manuscript first, adding notes of my own when I have ideas for how to address the questions or concerns raised in her comments. There are more Post-It notes, and then I sit down with the whole project – manuscript, notes, editorial letter, big chart and all, and go back to the drawing board. Again.
It’s not uncommon for a manuscript to go back and forth three or four times, or even more than that, before it’s ready to move on in the process. And often, I’ll have additional readers – both regular critique pals and expert readers – take a look at various chapters during this part of the process, too. When the revision issues are all addressed, the project moves on to copy edits, which we’ll talk about tomorrow.
Today’s Assignment: Find a piece of writing you’d like to work on some more, and read it as if you’re an editor getting ready to publish it. What questions could you ask the writer that might nudge them to think more deeply about the characters and their motivations?
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
Working with an Editorial Letter
Once I turned in a manuscript to one of my editors, and she wrote back, “Wow! This is a really clean first draft!” I laughed. It was a “really clean first draft” because it was actually a fifth draft. I’d never send one of my editors a first draft. Those messy beginnings are for my eyes only. A first draft is the work that I do to discover the story I want to tell, and then I can begin the process of revising to turn it into something worthwhile. Typically, it’s my fourth or fifth draft that goes to my editor. I just looked through my files, and I’m pretty sure that for BREAKOUT, it was draft #7.
My editor – in this case, Mary Kate Castellani at Bloomsbury – reads the manuscript and makes notes. She writes me an editorial letter – an overview of what she sees as the strengths of the story and the places where she’d like me to do more work. Usually, this is multiple, single-spaced pages and divided into sections by topic. Her full editorial letter is full of spoilers, but here’s a section that isn’t.
This particular editorial letter was five pages long – it gets much more detailed in subsequent pages – and this was one of two letters that Mary Kate sent me for BREAKOUT, at different stages in the revision process. When I took the photo above, I’d begun the process of going through the editorial notes to underline key ideas. That’s because I have a tough time revising directly from a five or six page letter. Instead, I take time to read the letter multiple times and digest the big ideas. I go through to underline those things I want to work on and think about more, and then I make my own to-do list with the major jobs that my editor asked for in her letter.
In addition to sending an editorial letter, my editor also makes notes directly on the manuscript, most often, asking questions that push me to think more deeply about the story and its characters. Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at some of those notes.
Today’s assignment:Writing yourself an editorial letter is a great way to step back from a writing project to look at it more objectively. Take a piece of writing that you’re working on and pretend you’re the editor to whom it’s been submitted. Using Mary Kate’s letter above as a mentor text, write yourself an editorial letter about what’s working well with the story and what needs more work.
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
The Big-Picture Revision Chart
Much of my revision process for BREAKOUT involved marking up individual manuscript pages with notes – crossing out lines, paragraphs (sometimes whole pages and chapters!), choosing stronger words, adding details, and things like that. But it’s hard to get an overall sense of a 400-page novel when you’re looking at individual pages, so at this stage in the revision process, I need to find a more effective way to see the big picture – a global view of what I’ve written.
My favorite tool at this stage in the process is a big-picture story chart that I developed, and I use it with all of my chapter books and novels. It’s a big piece of paper with a grid of vertical and horizontal lines. Across the top, I write each chapter number (or document number, in the case of BREAKOUT) and down the left hand column, I make a list of all the characters, themes, and issues I want to track as I revise. BREAKOUT is a long book, and a complex one because the story is told entirely through documents, so this chart was a bit of a monster. (Note: If you’re worried about spoilers, don’t enlarge this to read the tiny details until after you’ve read the book. BREAKOUT is a mystery, and clues are one of the things I keep track of in a chart like this.)
So down that left-hand column, you’ll see that I’ve listed characters, and I also include other issues and themes I want to keep track of in the story, including the upcoming relay race, Elidee’s obsession with Hamilton, Nora’s journalism, Alcatraz references, Lizzy’s interests in math and comedy, the prison, Elidee’s old neighborhood, clues to the mystery, issues of race and privilege, etc.
Once I’d created the chart, I read my manuscript and checked off each element or character that was represented in each document. This takes a long time – usually a couple of full days – but the end result is a big-page synopsis of everything I’ve written. The checkmarks or lack of checkmarks show me which characters and ideas are woven smoothly and consistently through the novel and which ones need more attention. If I find a long series of documents where a certain character or idea just disappears for pages on end, I go back to that section and see where I might be able to drop in a reminder, even if it’s just a quick reference. I make more notes on the document and on Post-It notes as I review the manuscript using my chart. And then it’s time for another revision pass.
Once I’ve done everything I can possibly do to revise on my own – and with the help of critique buddies – I send it to my editor. Mary Kate Castellani at Bloomsbury edited BREAKOUT (along with my other Bloomsbury novels like THE SEVENTH WISH, ALL THE ANSWERS, THE BRILLIANT FALL OF GIANNA Z, WAKE UP MISSING, and more), and tomorrow we’ll take a look at how her work on this book helped me to find even more ways to strengthen the story. But first – let’s play around with this idea of big-picture charts a bit more.
Your Assignment:Choose a book – either the book you’re writing right now, or a novel you’ve read recently – and imagine what its big-picture chart would look like. Make a list of characters, themes, clues, elements, and big ideas that you’d include.
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
When I was working on my June 2018 novel, BREAKOUT, about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home, I wrote the first draft in first person point of view, from the point of view of Nora Tucker, the prison superintendent’s daughter. I revised. And revised. And somewhere around my third draft, thanks to feedback from writer friends, I reconsidered that POV decision.
