kmessner – Page 13 – Kate Messner

May 31, 2018August 13, 2018

Countdown to BREAKOUT: Revising on my 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.

Revising on my own

One of the things that always surprises kids at my school visits is just how much revision real authors do before a book is published. I let them know that the books of mine in their school library are never first or second drafts. Or third or fourth drafts. Or fifth drafts or…you get the idea. Typically, I do anywhere from 12 to 20 drafts of a book before it’s good enough to be published. That includes complete rewrites as well as revisions based on comments and suggestions from critique partners and my editor. And BREAKOUT is no exception.

Here’s a look at what this book looked like during my revision process.

This is a program called Scrivener that I use when I’m drafting a new book, and I usually stick with it for my first six or seven revisions before switching over to Microsoft Word. Scrivener originated as a tool for screenwriters but is incredibly useful for novelists, too, because it allows you to plan and write by scene. This is basically how I outline, creating a little on-screen index card for each scene or chapter in the story. When you write that chapter, the full text is attached to the card, so you can move scenes around and try them out in new places simply by dragging the cards from place to place on your screen.

BREAKOUT is different from a regular novel in that it’s written entirely in documents, so in my later drafts of this book, instead of having 20 or 30 index cards representing chapters, I have 175 cards – each one representing a different document that does some of the storytelling.

And maybe you noticed that the cards are different colors on the screen. That’s because you can color code them to represent different voices or settings or whatever you want, as you write. In this case, each color represents a different kind of document. That made it easier for me to see how the pacing of the story was going, and how the different storytelling elements were balanced. Here’s a sample of how the color coding worked for BREAKOUT:

Purple = Nora’s letters

Red = morning announcements at school

Slate blue = Elidee’s letters

Royal blue = Lizzie’s letters

Purple blue = Owen’s comics

White = Recorded conversations

Pink = News stories & reports

Light blue = Miscellaneous (school assignments, recipes, petitions, carnival flyers, etc.)

This was all incredibly helpful to me as I revised BREAKOUT because I could see at a glance how well each major character was represented in the story and also how the pacing looked. For example, I knew that most of the humor in the book came from Owen, who makes mini-graphic-novels, and Lizzie, who wants to be a comedian when she grows up and writes parody news articles in the style of her favorite parody site, The Rutabaga (yes…that’s a play on The Onion.) So if I looked through the color-coded cards and found that a long time went by without any royal blue or purple, I’d take a closer look and see if there were places where the story in between might benefit from a dash of humor from Owen or Lizzie.

Once I’m out of ideas for how to revise in Scrivener, I print out my manuscript and read it aloud. (I used to be a strictly print-on-paper-and-mark-up-with-colored-pens-person, but lately I’ve been using an iPad Pro and Apple pencil and finding that works just as well but is easier on my home printer.)

As I read aloud, I make notes on the document for line-specific changes that I want to make like deleting sentences (or paragraphs or pages!), changing individual words, or combining scenes. I also jot ideas on Post-It notes for more global issues, like rethinking a character’s motivations over multiple scenes or going back to add more references to an issue earlier in the story.

Here’s what some of those individual marked-up pages for BREAKOUT look like. (Don’t worry – I checked to make sure they’re spoiler free, so you can read them as carefully as you’d like without ruining the story. Also, these are from a revision pass on a relatively early draft, so some of these pages didn’t even make it into the final book.)

This is pretty much what every single page looks like as I work through a revision. I also have some specific big-picture tools I use at this stage of the revision process, and we’ll take a look at one of those tomorrow.

Today’s Assignment: Find a page of something you wrote. It can be anything – a short story, personal narrative, persuasive letter, poem…whatever. Read through it, and ask yourself “What’s one specific thing about this piece of writing that’s pretty great?” Then see if you can find places to add more of that element – whether it’s descriptive language or humor or sharp dialogue.

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.

Buy BREAKOUT now:

May 30, 2018August 13, 2018

Countdown to BREAKOUT: The writer’s to-do list

The Writer’s To-Do List

I have a bit of an obsession with charts and checklists, so no book I write gets done without them, and BREAKOUT is no exception. I’m a relative fast first-drafter, so when I’m working on the first draft of a book, I tend to write from start to finish without going back to revise. But what happens when I’m writing along and notice an issue or something I want to go back and fix? I keep a big piece of paper next to my laptop with the words “Known Issues” at the top, and I add things to it every day.

My Known-Issues list for BREAKOUT met an untimely end when I spilled guacamole all over it and had to throw it out, but here’s the sort of thing that ends up on such a list.

-Go back to Chapter one and add Dad

-Where’s Sean in chapters 2-3?

-Lizzy is funny. Let her be funny more often.

– Add scenes at beginning so we see Elidee in community before breakout happens

-Need more with Nora & Dad

-Add dinner table conversation about prison demographics

You get the idea. I add notes as I write, and by the time I finish the last chapter, that list is pretty long. It becomes my first-pass revision to-do list, and those obvious jobs are the first ones I tackle. Then I usually print out the entire book, read it aloud, and mark it up with a colored pen. (That was my process for BREAKOUT – more recently, I’ve been doing this read-aloud revision on an iPad pro. I import the document into an app called Notability and use the Apple pencil to mark it up.)

Then I make another to-do list. Then I go back and revise again. Rinse and repeat.

This third draft -or sometimes fourth – is the first one I send to a writer friend for feedback. I’ll email one of the writer pals with whom I swap manuscripts and ask if she has time to read. If she does, I send the document, and she makes notes, usually using the comments feature on Microsoft Word. Then she sends it back and I do another round of revision or two. Usually by then, I’ve thought about other things I’d like to change.

I manage all of these drafts and revision jobs with both monthly goals and daily to-do lists in my bullet journal. I check off each chapter as I’ve revised. What does that revision look like on the page? We’ll take a look tomorrow.

Today’s assignment: One thing I like to do when I’m trying to identify where my manuscript needs work is write a letter to myself, from my work in progress.

Dear Kate, You’ve really given me a strong beginning (love the excitement of that prison break scene) but things really slow down in Chapter three. I feel all sluggish and blah. Help?

If your work-in-progress could talk back to you right now, what would it say?

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.

Buy BREAKOUT now:

May 29, 2018August 13, 2018

Countdown to BREAKOUT: Picking Strawberries

Picking Strawberries

While I was revising BREAKOUT, I spent a lot of time thinking about what Elidee would miss when she moved from the Bronx to the small town of Wolf Creek, NY. She was incredibly homesick, and there was a lot to miss. People had promised her Wolf Creek was friendly, the sort of place where you could knock on your neighbor’s door to borrow an egg. With the prison break, though, that friendly welcome seemed to have vanished.

But I knew that Elidee was the kind of character who would still find small moments to appreciate, and I needed to include at least one of those in the book, too. But what?

My answer came in June, when I was still revising, and the strawberries got ripe. There’s a local farm called Rulf’s near where I live, and as soon as the berries are ready, Mr. Rulfs opens the fields for u-pick from 7am to 6pm. We go every year, but this year, I was imagining the experience through Elidee’s eyes, and I found one thing about Wolf Creek for her to love.

Here’s the poem that Elidee wrote, based on the notes I collected when I was out picking that day.

“my own Saturday morning”
by Elidee Jones

(Inspired by “saturday morning” in Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson)

Today in this new place there are strawberries.
Bigger and fatter than we grew
In the community garden back home,
Sweetest I’ve ever tasted.
Mama didn’t have to work so we went out picking
With Mrs. G, who knew a place
Where you get a wagon ride back to the fields.
Old white man in a green baseball cap helped us up
Then climbed onto the tractor and we were off,
Bumping over a rutted dirt road
Past knee-high cornfields and trees with baby apples
Out to the strawberries.
Rows and rows and rows beyond rows.
College girl in cutoff blue jeans weighed our baskets
And sent us with a man darker than Mama and me put
together.
He was from Jamaica, just like Grandmama’s daddy,
But he comes here to work in summer and fall.

So he showed us where to pick and
I squatted down in the straw between the plants.
Started filling my basket but then I found one
So perfect and warm from the sun
I wanted to eat it right then.
I held it, scratchy seeds in my palm,
And caught Mama’s eye.
She shook her head.
“Not until we pay for them.”
But then someone said, “Nah, go right ahead.”
Jean-shorts girl was grinning down at us.
“Grandpa Bob says everybody should enjoy a few while
they pick.
It’s part of the deal.”
Mama smiled back at the girl and nodded
So I popped that strawberry into my mouth
Before she could change her mind.
It was so warm and sweet and full of sunshine
It almost made me cry,
And I thought just maybe
Grandpa Bob would be the sort of person
To loan you an egg if you needed one.
Maybe the Wolf Creek Mrs. G. talked about
Wasn’t a total lie
After all.

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.

Buy BREAKOUT now:

May 28, 2018August 13, 2018

Countdown to BREAKOUT: Visiting a Character’s Neighborhood

Visiting a Character’s Neighborhood

One of the expert readers who read a draft of BREAKOUT really pushed me to work harder to develop Elidee as a character and suggested that one reason I might be struggling with that was because I didn’t understand where she came from. Most of the other characters share my small-town background, but Elidee had just moved to the mostly-white town of Wolf Creek from Highbridge, a neighborhood in the Bronx. A neighborhood where I’d never spent time.

I obviously couldn’t conjure a different background for myself, but I could at the very least spend a day in Elidee’s neighborhood, paying attention. So the next time I was in New York City for a writing meeting, I took the train to Highbridge. I visited the art museum near Elidee’s neighborhood and peeked through the fence at the community garden.

I wandered by school as classes were letting out, and noticed that some kids walked past Yankee Stadium on their way home, along a street with fruit stands, and where baseball players’ faces are painted on the buildings.

I stopped in at the deli up the street and ordered a chopped cheese sandwich, which was greasy and wonderful.

I went to Mullaly Park, which would have been Elidee’s neighborhood park. I noticed where the basketball courts and skateboard ramps were, and how the 4 Train thundered by every so often.

I took pictures and notes so I’d have more details about Elidee’s world in the Bronx. Then I went home, back to my revision desk, with a better sense for what she must have missed when she moved away. There was a lot to miss – more than I’d been able to imagine without visiting. But I knew that Elidee also needed something to love about Wolf Creek, even if it was a small moment. Tomorrow’s post is about the strawberries.

Today’s Assignment: If you moved away from the place where you live now, what small and unexpected things would you miss?

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.

Buy BREAKOUT now:

May 27, 2018August 13, 2018

Countdown to BREAKOUT: Relationships in a Fictional Family

Relationships in a Fictional Family

When I was working on BREAKOUT, the character of Nora Tucker came very naturally for me. Like me, she’s a white girl who’s grown up in a small, rural town. My dad was a school superintendent and hers is a prison superintendent, but overall, our backgrounds are pretty similar. That wasn’t the case with another character in the story, Elidee. She’s a black girl from the Bronx who’s just moved to Wolf Creek because her brother is an inmate at the prison.

When I was revising BREAKOUT, I worked with multiple expert readers, or sensitivity readers as they’re sometimes called, to read my draft and offer feedback, particularly when it came to representation issues with Elidee and her family. One of those readers noticed a difference in the family relationships in the story. Nora’s family felt more fully realized (probably because it had been easier for me to write), and she suggested that I work more building a close relationship between Elidee and her mom.

Part of that work involved thinking more about how Elidee’s mom might have prepared her daughter for the move to Wolf Creek, a town where she had to have known Elidee would be one of the few brown faces at school. My expert reader reminded me that there are conversations that black parents have to have with their kids that white parents don’t. Where were they in the story? And where were the sweet, quiet moments with Elidee and her mom? The inside jokes that nobody else understands?

It was time to revise some more. Among the changes I made in this round of revision was adding one of those running jokes between Elidee and her mom – a play on that children’s book where the characters say “I love you to the moon and back.” Elidee and her mom used to go to the planetarium when they lived in the city, so I decided that they’d play a friendly game of one-upsmanship with that phrase in their text messages while Mom was at work.

And that book that Elidee left in the living room? It was one of the titles on her library check-out receipt from an earlier page in BREAKOUT. Fitting all the puzzle pieces together was one of the biggest challenges of writing this story. And at this point, it was coming together. I still felt like I wanted to do more with Elidee as a character, though, and to do that, I needed to know where she came from. More on that tomorrow, but first – today’s prompt.

Your Assignment: Write for a few minutes about the inside jokes that are part of your family’s relationships. What running jokes or little games do you play that show your love and connection?

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.

Buy BREAKOUT now:

May 25, 2018August 13, 2018

Countdown to BREAKOUT: The Sounds of Home

The Sounds of Home

One of the books that my BREAKOUT character Elidee signs out of the town’s public library is BROWN GIRL DREAMING, Jacqueline Woodson’s amazing memoir in verse. I knew that Elidee would feel connected to Woodson’s poems because there are so many parallels between their stories. There’s even a poem in BROWN GIRL DREAMING about Woodson’s experience driving up New York’s Interstate 87 to visit a relative in the prison at Dannemora.

Elidee uses several of Woodson’s poems as mentor texts – starting places for her own writing. One of them is the poem “Lullaby,” in which Woodson writes about the sounds of home. Elidee writes two poems with that title, one set in Wolf Creek and one set in Highbridge, the Bronx neighborhood where she lived before she moved.

Wolf Creek is a fictional town, but it’s very similar to the area where I live, so that lullaby was a familiar one for me. But while I’ve visited plenty of big cities, I’ve never lived in a one, and visiting isn’t the same. I reached out to friends who live in New York and asked what they hear on summer nights. I chose the sounds that seemed to fit Elidee’s old neighborhood the best, spent a lot of time playing with the language, and worked some of those ideas into her second poem.

I’ve been talking a lot about Elidee in these writing-process posts because she’s the character in this book that was the most challenging for me to represent. Many of the other characters share a cultural background and life experiences that are more similar to my own, so their stories came more naturally. Making Elidee feel real and true to character required more work. That included lots of reading, a field trip, and reaching out for help. More on that tomorrow, but for now, let’s try a lullaby.

Your Assignment: Using Elidee’s poems as mentor texts, write a lullaby for the place you call home.

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.

Buy BREAKOUT now:

May 25, 2018August 13, 2018

Countdown to BREAKOUT: Working with Expert Readers

Working with Expert Readers

As writers, we tell stories about all different kinds of characters and situations, and only some of those are drawn from our own experiences. I’ve written about coral restoration, drug addiction and recovery, tornadoes, and genetic engineering. I’m not an expert in any of those things, so getting the details right required hours and hours of reading as well as consulting with people who are experts in those topics, who have the expertise that I lack. Writing about characters from different cultural backgrounds requires that same kind of care, too, and at an even higher level because poor representation can have a profoundly negative effect on young readers from marginalized groups.

BREAKOUT has three main characters who do most of the storytelling. Nora Tucker is the prison superintendent’s daughter, and Lizzy Bruno is Nora’s best friend. Both are white girls who were born and raised in a small rural town, and both share backgrounds that are fairly similar to mine. But the third main character, Elidee, is an African American girl from the Bronx, who’s moved to Wolf Creek and discovered that she’s one of just two black kids at her new school. Those aren’t experiences I’ve had, so I had to rely on my past work in teaching middle school as well as a lot of reading and talking with people to get a sense for how Elidee might perceive the events in the story and what that move might mean to her.

That involved working with expert readers, or sensitivity readers, as they’re sometimes called. Quite simply, these are people who usually share elements of character’s background, and who read manuscripts for the purpose of shining a light on places where an author’s ignorance, lack of experience, or implicit biases are having a negative effect on their craft.

I had a lot of readers for BREAKOUT. Some were friends who shared part of Elidee’s background in that they’re black and went to school in urban areas or had the experience of being one of very few brown faces in a classroom or other community. They offered great insight, especially early in my revision process.

I also hired several professional readers to look at later drafts of the manuscript. They read BREAKOUT as I worked through final revisions and offered feedback, mostly related to Elidee’s character. An expert reader like this is paid for their work and typically takes anywhere from two weeks to a couple of months to read the book and write a letter providing feedback, pointing out places where the representation might not be solid or where more work needs to be done. This was incredibly helpful, and they pointed out some issues that my friends who read the book hadn’t mentioned.

I love my writer friends to pieces, but I’m also a big believer of having experts who don’t know you as readers because they don’t assume good intentions as friends might. My friends know who I am. They know about my support of diversity efforts in publishing. We’ve had long dinners together, and heartfelt conversations about racism, white supremacy, and social justice. At the end of the day, they know that my intentions are good. But good intentions aren’t enough when it comes to writing books with characters from marginalized groups. The reality is that my personal history with diversity and social justice issues doesn’t get to go out into the world with my book when it’s published. The story has to stand on its own. All stories do. So the reader you really want for a project like this is the toughest, most critical one you can find.

The letters that expert readers provide authors aren’t meant to be passed along, but I can share, in general terms, some of the invaluable suggestions I received from these readers.

1 – One pushed me to work more on Elidee’s relationship with her mom. Nora’s family felt more fully developed (probably because it was more like my own), and I needed to build that kind of closeness with Elidee and her mother.

2 – Elidee felt less developed as a character than the other girls, and one reader suggested that part of the problem was that I didn’t have a strong enough sense for where she’d come from before she moved. If Wolf Creek didn’t feel like home, what did?

3 – That same reader felt like Elidee’s reactions to some of the micro-aggressions she experienced in Wolf Creek weren’t realistic at first. As a new student who’d been taught how to fit in (and her mother would have made sure of this) her reactions should have been more nuanced, at least while she was getting to know people.

4 – Another reader pointed out that a character had used the phrase “circle the wagons,” which is based on negative stereotypes about Native people. It dates back to pioneer days when the thought was to circle up the covered wagons at night to protect white settlers from violent Natives (never mind that those settlers were arriving to steal their land). The line had nothing to do with the primary race issues in BREAKOUT, my reader noted, but can you imagine how it would feel if a teacher were reading this book aloud in a classroom with just one Native student? It didn’t matter that the line was a quick one, or that it came from a character who would have been clueless about its origins. It mattered that he said it, and it went unchallenged in that scene, as if it was a fine thing to say. So I had a decision to make as a writer – either take the time to unpack that language and explain its racist origin on that page, or find a different way to get the idea across. Explaining would have added multiple paragraphs that took away from what was happening in the story at a pretty tense moment. But the character’s use of that phrase wasn’t a one-time thing – the phrase echoed in several places later in the story. Ultimately, I ended up changing it – and going back to revise all the places where other characters had referenced the line later on.

For more on expert readers, I hope you’ll also read this Publishers Weekly piece from author, expert reader, Cake Literary cofounder, and We Need Diverse Books COO Dhonielle Clayton, who talks about how sensitivity readers work and raises the essential point that they are not a substitute for what is really needed in children’s publishing – more people from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds telling their own stories.

There have been some terribly misleading articles online about expert readers, or sensitivity readers, in recent months. I’ve even seen people who don’t understand this part of the writing process say that it’s censorship, that no one should tell an author what to write. I find that notion to be ridiculous. I can’t imagine writing a book about a particular branch of science or police work or law without consulting experts. This is no different, except the stakes are higher. When we’re writing about characters from traditionally marginalized groups, whose cultural backgrounds are different from ours, there’s a greater responsibility to do everything we can to get it right because poor representation in fiction harms kids in the real world.

Ultimately, that responsibility rests with the author – not the expert reader, who only gives advice. Tomorrow and the next day, I’ll share more about my research and revision after I heard from those expert readers. Here’s today’s prompt:

Your Assignment: What are some elements of your own cultural or personal background that would be tough for an outsider to understand or write about without research and conversations?

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.

Buy BREAKOUT now:

May 24, 2018August 13, 2018

Countdown to BREAKOUT: Elidee’s Library Receipt and Mentor Texts

Elidee’s Library Receipt and Mentor Texts

Once I decided to include Elidee’s poems in the documents that tell the story of BREAKOUT, I spent some time exploring the books she might love best – titles that might inspire her and serve as mentor texts for her own writing. As a former teacher, I know how important the scaffolding of a mentor text – a structure to borrow – can be for students just finding their poetic voices.

Here’s the page of BREAKOUT that shows Elidee’s receipt from the Wolf Creek Public Library…

Working on a novel-in-documents is like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle, where every time you revise one tiny thing, a big, drooly dog comes and knocks all the other pieces onto the floor, and some of them bounce under the sofa. Really, it feels like that. So as I revised, I was constantly working to make sure all the threads of the story were woven through consistently. See that book on Elidee’s list about the Hubble Space Telescope? She signs it out for a reason you’ll understand after another process post I’ll share in a few days. 🙂

Most of the books on Elidee’s reading list are poetry, though. I signed all of them out of my public library and read through, looking for the poems I thought Elidee would love most, and those that might connect with her situation in Wolf Creek as the manhunt continued. Here’s how Elidee used “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks as mentor text for her own poem.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at Elidee’s connections to BROWN GIRL DREAMING by Jacqueline Woodson, but for now, it’s time to try your own mentor-text poem.

Today’s Assignment: Choose an event from today’s current events and write a poem in the style of “We Real Cool” about it.

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.

Buy BREAKOUT now:

May 23, 2018August 13, 2018

Countdown to BREAKOUT: The Hamilton Effect

**The Hamilton Effect**

Being a writer is different from many other jobs in that you’re never really off the clock. When I’m working on a book, I can’t really turn off my writer brain (much to my family’s dismay sometimes, when they’re trying to get me to focus on something else). And when I’m living in a character’s world, I tend to see things in my world through the lens of that character’s experiences, too. That’s how Hamilton ended up in BREAKOUT.

When I went to see the Broadway musical Hamilton in April of 2016, I was deep in the revision process, rewriting BREAKOUT from a single narrative told in first person to a novel-in-documents with many different perspectives. I’d been working a lot with Elidee, a character who’d just moved from the Bronx to this quiet and nearly all-white prison town where the manhunt was happening. Elidee was incredibly homesick and felt anything but welcome in Wolf Creek, and I thought of her when I heard Lin Manuel Miranda sing “Hurricane.”

I wrote my way out
Wrote everything down far as I could see
I wrote my way out
I looked up and the town had its eyes on me…

Elidee’s brother was in prison and had been working on an appeal. She’d think of him when she heard those lyrics, but maybe of her own situation, too. Could she write her way out of Wolf Creek and write herself back home?

This was the inspiration for Elidee’s experimentation with poetry throughout the book. She uses Hamilton lyrics as inspiration and writes rap lyrics offering commentary on the happenings in Wolf Creek. This one was inspired by “Ten Duel Commandments” and is in a letter Elidee wrote to her brother Troy in prison.

As Wolf Creek’s manhunt drags on, Elidee uses more Hamilton lyrics as well as other great poems as mentor texts as she works to find her voice. We’ll explore some of her other mentor texts in tomorrow’s post, but for now, it’s time to try your hand at some Hamilton-inspired lyrics, too.

Your Assignment: Choose a song from Hamilton (or another song if you prefer) and rewrite the lyrics so they reflect an event or issue in your own community or school. (Elidee also rewrote one of the Hamilton Cabinet Battles as a rap battle between her school’s vice principal and student council president.)

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.

Buy BREAKOUT now:

May 22, 2018August 13, 2018

Countdown to BREAKOUT: Evil plots, master plans, and comics (or, the importance of humor)

Evil plots, master plans, and comics (or, the importance of humor)

The real-life prison break in Northern NY was still going on when I started writing BREAKOUT, which provided me with a unique opportunity for research. In addition to spending time in the area around the prison in Dannemora, I paid attention to social media posts, many under the hashtag #PrisonBreakNY, which offered so many different perspectives on the manhunt.

That last tweet – the notion of group of kids forming their own search party – resonated with me, and I immediately thought of Nora’s little brother, Owen. What if Owen kept a notebook with plans for defeating the inmates? He likes to draw, so it could be a series of graphic novel panels, another way to diversify the kinds of documents included in the story.

Creating these pages required a different kind of writing – with captions, narration, and illustration notes for each panel. It looked like this in the manuscript:

POST IT: Sunday, June 16 – From Owen’s plots/plans notebook

OWEN AND NOAH’S MASTER PLAN TO DEFEND THE BACK YARD FROM BAD GUYS

Illus: Tree fort

List of supplies:

Binoculars

Catapult supplies

Sticks

Stretchy things (giant rubber bands?)

Rocks

Cell phone

Wand

Brownies

SCENE 1: Wide shot of yard, Lizzie, Elidee, Nora running w/ batons, Owen & Noah in tree fort

SCENE 2: Medium shot of tree fort – Owen & Noah looking out at woods with binoculars

SCENE 3: Seen through binoculars – Close-up Inmate faces, hiding in trees

SCENE 4: (series of smaller panels…)

Owen & Noah load big rock into catapult

Ready! Aim! FIRE!!!

Schwwwwwwingggg! (Rock goes flying)

Again! FIRE!!!!!

Schwwwwwwingggg! Zzzzzinggg! (Rock goes flying)

SCENE 5: Wide shot of trees w/ rocks hitting inmates

THUNK! BONK!

SCENE 6: Medium shot: Inmates on ground, knocked out, Owen standing over them holding wand.

“Stoppia Inmatia!!”

SCENE 7: Owen & Noah in tree fort, Owen on cell phone

“Don’t worry, officer. We immobilized them with a spell. They’re not going anywhere.”

SCENE 8: Police leading dazed inmates away in handcuffs

SCENE 9: Owen & Noah in tree fort eating brownies, girls running in background

And here’s how those pages turned out in the final version of BREAKOUT.

Owen’s graphic novel panels are an important part of the story, not only because they provide a younger person’s perspective, but also because they offer something every story needs: humor. We don’t often think of thrillers or books with serious themes as being funny, but I’d argue that humor is just as essential in these stories as it is in a comedy. No reader can stand being on edge for 400 pages, and even readers who love pondering big ideas need a break from those ideas sometimes.

Sometimes that break comes in the form of graphic novel panels, and sometimes it comes in the form of musical theater. We’ll talk about “The Hamilton Effect” in BREAKOUT tomorrow. Here’s today’s prompt:

Your Assignment: Write about a sad or serious moment in your life when humor played an important role. If you’d like, try writing it as a series of graphic novel panels.

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.

Buy BREAKOUT now: