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.  

Buy BREAKOUT now:

• IndieBound (find a local bookseller near you!)
• The Bookstore Plus, Lake Placid, NY
• Powells
• Barnes and Noble
• Amazon

 

 

 

 

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.  

Buy BREAKOUT now:

• IndieBound (find a local bookseller near you!)
• The Bookstore Plus, Lake Placid, NY
• Powells
• Barnes and Noble
• Amazon

 

 

 

 

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.  

Buy BREAKOUT now:

• IndieBound (find a local bookseller near you!)
• The Bookstore Plus, Lake Placid, NY
• Powells
• Barnes and Noble
• Amazon

 

 

 

 

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.  

Buy BREAKOUT now:

• IndieBound (find a local bookseller near you!)
• The Bookstore Plus, Lake Placid, NY
• Powells
• Barnes and Noble
• Amazon

 

 

 

 

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.  

Buy BREAKOUT now:

• IndieBound (find a local bookseller near you!)
• The Bookstore Plus, Lake Placid, NY
• Powells
• Barnes and Noble
• Amazon

 

 

 

 

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:

• IndieBound (find a local bookseller near you!)
• The Bookstore Plus, Lake Placid, NY
• Powells
• Barnes and Noble
• Amazon

 

 

 

 

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 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:

• IndieBound (find a local bookseller near you!)
• The Bookstore Plus, Lake Placid, NY
• Powells
• Barnes and Noble
• Amazon