Good morning! How was everybody’s weekend? Great, I hope!

Today’s mini-lesson is from guest author Shutta Crum, who writes picture books, novels and poetry. She is also a storyteller, a public speaker and a librarian. Her articles about writing have appeared in many professional journals. Her book, THUNDER-BOMER! (Clarion) was an Amer. Library Assoc. and a Smithsonian Magazine “Notable Book.”  MINE! (Albert A. Knopf) was listed in the New York Times as one of the best board books of the year. Her newest book, DOZENS OF COUSINS (Clarion) came out in July, to glowing reviews.

 CORNERING YOUR CHARACTERS

Have you ever read one of those books where all along you’re wondering why didn’t the main character just  . . . call the police, tell a parent (take whatever action, any reasonable person would) and then he/she would not be in this predicament? I can tell you that one of John Grisham’s books annoyed me greatly that way. (I won’t tell you which title, in case it is one you like.) I simply could not suspend my disbelief . . . I kept wondering why doesn’t the kid just tell everybody and then the bad guys wouldn’t have been solely after him to shut him up.

When an author doesn’t take care of these kinds of loose ends he/she risks losing a reader. A character—especially a main character—must consider and act as any rational person would unless there is a compelling reason not to do the sensible thing.

If you really want to put pressure on your protagonist, and pump up the action, you need to corner your “prey”—your main character (MC). After all, part of creating plot is putting the hurt on your characters. The way to do this is that with every major cause and effect link in your plot, you need to be sure to securely close any escape routes. As you do this, you are narrowing the choices of your MC until your MC must make the hard decision you’ve wanted him/her to make all along. Then you’ll have your reader glued to the page.

Let me give you examples from two of my own works. In my teen novel, SPITTING IMAGE, (Clarion), a young girl wants to find out who her father is, and her mother won’t talk about him. As it turns out, her mother had been raped. Now, no mother who truly loves her child is going to willingly tell the truth about that. So I had to take away the mother’s options and corner her in such a way that she had no choice but to tell her daughter the truth. If she hadn’t, the one person in town who knew the truth would have spilled the beans in a most unkind way.  Doing this made for a much stronger, and well-reviewed book, that made a number of prestigious lists.

In my younger fantasy novel, THOMAS AND THE DRAGON QUEEN (Knopf), the whole plot is a simple one of elimination. Thomas starts out on his quest with three things to help him (the traditional armor, sword, and steed). Along the way he gives away, loses, or has stolen from him all the items—even most of his clothes. All of his options as he prepares to do battle with the dragon queen have been slowly stripped away. When he does meet her, he is barefoot and clad in a pair of ragged trousers. There is only one thing he can do—it’s a dangerous gamble, and it is precisely what I wanted him to do. He does it, because it is his only remaining choice.

In each novel I write, and in many of my picture books, I have to determine what the “easy outs” are along the way. Then I write scenes that eliminate each alternative “logical” action. Only then am I able to bring both my MC and my reader to the point where I want them. By using this thinking, I am able to more easily determine what my scenes should be. If a scene does not contribute to the eliminating of alternatives in the furtherance of the plot, then it has to be there for another very good reason (such as character development), or it gets cut.

What I recommend is to stop periodically and ask what are the possible options for my character(s) at this precise point in the story? (You should do this at least four to six times. More is better.)  List the options from the most to the least likely; including the step you want your MC, or other major character, to take. And then make sure you have written scenes that block any other reasonable choice from being made. After all, this process of constantly evaluating our situation and making decisions by eliminating choices is something we humans do naturally. You need to do it on behalf of your characters.  (See tomorrow’s Quick Write for an exercise to practice this technique of stopping and blocking.)

In the comments today, feel free to list options for your character – or simply reflect on today’s mini-lesson!

 

 

 

 

 

Good morning! Our guest author for today’s quick-write is the lovely & talented Anne Marie Pace!

Anne Marie  is the author of VAMPIRINA BALLERINA and its just-released sequel, VAMPIRINA BALLERINA HOSTS A SLEEPOVER, both illustrated by LeUyen Pham and published by Disney-Hyperion.  She has also written A TEACHER FOR BEAR and NEVER EVER TALK TO STRANGERS for Scholastic Book Clubs.  You can find a wonderful teachers’ guide for VAMPIRINA BALLERINA at Anne Marie’s website, http://www.annemariepace.com.

You’ll have to forgive me if I seem dreamy; as I write this, I’m physically at home, jotting notes down between driving kids to activities and doing laundry, but my head and heart are still walking along the shore of Folly Beach, South Carolina, searching for a perfect shell.  For a variety of reasons, it was our first family vacation in four years.  My vacation week has inspired this quick-write exercise for you today.

Choose a character, either one from your work-in-progress or a character you create just for this exercise.  Don’t feel you need to answer these questions one at a time.  Read them through with this character in mind, and then write something in response:  a letter, a poem, a journal entry, a descriptive paragraph–whatever flows.

First: Has this character ever gone on a vacation?  If your character is from the type of family that takes yearly trips, what was the favorite?  Why?  Does she go on the same trip every year?  Who is there?  What does she like to do there?  Is it boring or comforting to go to the same place?  How does she feel if that trip changes?  Or is it a different trip every year?  If so, how does she feel about changing it up all the time?  Does she like exploring new places or does she regret being unable to return?

At the other end of the spectrum, perhaps your character has never been on vacation.  Why has she been unable to vacation?  Is it financial or is there another reason?  How far has she been from home?  Are there any events she looks forward to during summer?  Does she have friends who are able to vacation with their families? Is she jealous?  Is she happy for them?  Would she be scared to leave home?  Does she have a dream place to vacation?  Is there something she could do to make a vacation possible (win a contest, win the lottery, convince a neighbor or friend to do something that relieves parental stress)?

Note:  These questions are somewhat slanted towards contemporary fiction.  If you are writing in another genre, feel free to replace “vacation” (in our contemporary sense) with “travel.”  If the setting of your story is a world you have built, how does that world deal with a desire to travel and/or rest?  How does your character feel about those societal customs or expectations

Now:  Think about what you have discovered about your character.  What part of that person is illuminated? Is there a parallel between your character’s experiences on vacation and what she is facing today? How might this revelation develop or connect to your plans for your work?

Today’s guest author is Joanne Levy, whose funny and sweet book for tweens, SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE, was released from Bloomsbury in 2012. A survivor of the corporate world, Joanne is also a virtual assistant, providing admin services to busy authors via www.jlauthorservices.com. Joanne lives in Ontario, Canada with her husband and a lot of pets, one of whom vomited during the writing of this bio. For more about Joanne, the author, check out  www.joannelevy.com.

What’s the worst that could happen?

Back when I was dipping my toe into the writing pond, I took some writing courses at my local college to see about getting some info on the basics. I’d always loved to write, but I knew nothing about craft and how to make an okay story into a GREAT story; I needed help. I learned a lot in those courses, especially as they were workshop based and I could get feedback from my peers (one of the great things about Teachers Write!) but a couple of pointed lessons really stuck with me.

One is that you have to kick the crap out of your main character. Repeatedly.

“Noooooo,” you say. “I love my character! I want only the best for her. Sunshine and light and all things rose-smelling.” But if you’re writing a story, no matter if it’s a short or an epic tome, you need to kick your character a few times. You need her to grow, thrive and shine* and it’s only through overcoming high-stakes obstacles that she’s going to triumph.

So think of the worst that can happen to your character. And then make it happen.

My very favorite example of this is the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks. Give it a watch (you can call it research!) and see how many times poor Tom gets kicked. Hard. And the way he gets kicked is brilliant, too, in that good news/bad news way:

Good news: You survived a plane crash, bad news: you’re stuck on a deserted island, by yourself.

Good news: You found new shoes that you desperately need, bad news: you have to take them off the corpse of your buddy.

Good news: You get the shoes off, bad news: they’re too small (some kicks are big, some are small, but they all still count).

And it goes on and on. But through hardships we grow and show our true colors—these are life’s pivotal moments. These are the kinds of things that make your character human and sympathetic. You love them more for what they have overcome, right? It’s hard to love a character who has everything handed to her (and makes for a boring story). Where’s the grit? The strength, the stuff that makes you root for her?

So today for your quick write, take your character, thinking about her most debilitating fears or faults, and make the worst possible thing happen.

Is your character a terribly shy introvert? Force her to do a speech in front of 1000 people.

Is your character deathly afraid of snakes? Put him in a pit full of them (remember Indiana Jones?).

You get what I mean. Kick the crap out of your character and see what happens. I bet you’ll learn a little something more about her that you didn’t know before—maybe she fails miserably or maybe she can succeed and come out the other side stronger.

And when that happens, you know what to do–kick her again.

Good luck! Feel free to paste some of your writing below; I’ll be hanging out as much as I can today.

*Some characters don’t grow, thrive and shine, but fail and come apart when faced with hardship. But I’m going to assume that many of us are writing for kids where there is a positive or hopeful, if not happy, ending. If that’s not the case, for a character to fail and fall apart, they still have to face hardship, so this exercise is still valid, you’ll just have a less than positive outcome.

We’ll be giving away a signed copy of Joanne’s SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE to one lucky commenter today!

Happy Friday, everyone! As always, Gae is hosting Friday Feedback, but we also have a special guest here to talk about critique groups..  Natalie Dias Lorenzi is a teacher, librarian, and author of the middle grade novel Flying the Dragon. She lives outside of Washington, DC during the school year and eats gelato in Trieste, Italy during the summers. Visit her at www.nataliediaslorenzi.com <http://www.nataliediaslorenzi.com>

The Care and Feeding of a Writers’ Critique Group

by Natalie Dias Lorenzi

First of all, let me just say that I agree with Kate who posted this to you all: “So many of you have come here nervous to write and terrified to share, and you’ve taken deep breaths and done just that.”

When we put our thoughts and feelings on paper, it is scary sometimes. But sharing those thoughts and feelings? With strangers?? Now that’s terrifying.

There are some authors who don’t share their writing at all; no one sees their manuscripts except for their editors. And this works well for them. But me? I can’t imagine bringing a story into this world without feedback from my critique group.

Back in 2005, I was a few chapters into a manuscript which would later (seven years later, to be exact) become my first middle grade novel, Flying the Dragon. I had joined SCBWI and perused the message boards trying to learn all I could about the craft of writing. One day I came across a message from another writer, Kip Wilson Rechea, who was looking to fill an open spot in her critique group. I emailed her with my first chapter, as requested, and waited. Would she hate my writing? Would she chortle at my beginner’s prose? Luckily for me, she did neither; instead, she invited me to join her critique group.

During that first year, members came and went, but eventually our group settled into four writers: Kip, Julie Phillipps, and Joan Paquette. A few years ago, we even came up with a name for our group: The Lit Wits. 🙂 Every Wednesday for the past seven years (give or take a Wednesday or two), one of us submits pages to the group via email. The others leave comments within the text itself as well as a paragraph of their overall thoughts and impressions.

Other writers have asked me how we’ve kept our group together for so many years. If any of you are interested in forming a critique group, this is what I’d recommend:

1. Get to know other writers.

There are several forums out there for kid lit writers: Verla Kay’s message boards and SCBWI (these messages boards will actually be merging in the near future). Although I hadn’t met Kip before responding to her call for a new critique group member, I did get to know Joan through an online writing course before she joined the group. You just might find a critique partner or two here at Teachers Write!

 2. Join writers who are at a similar stage of writing.

When my group started out, we were at the beginning of our writing careers. Over the last seven years, our writing has been published in magazines and anthologies, and we have picture books, middle grade and young adult books now out on the shelves. This isn’t to say that a beginning writer and a published writer can’t be in the same group. In larger, in-person critique groups, there’s often a greater mix of writers that swap manuscripts or snippets of stories. But in general, I recommend finding a group with at least one other member who is at a similar point along the writing path as you are.

3. Decide on a method that works for your group.

For us, we sub no more than ten pages per week. We had one critique partner who is such a prolific writer that she left the group because she needed someone for full manuscript-swaps, not 10-page submissions every month or so. She spends a lot of time outlining first, but when she’s ready to write, she cranks out at least 1,000 words a day and finishes a first draft in a few months. Neither method is wrong; just decide which one works for you, and find others who feel the same way.

4. Give constructive feedback.

This seems obvious, but isn’t always easy to do. We tell each other what works, what’s funny, what touched us, and what didn’t make any sense whatsoever. If you were to look at our critiques, you’d see comments like these:

? I stumbled over this line–maybe reword?

? 🙂

? Huh???

? This doesn’t sound like her—would she really say that?

? Lovely!

We had one critique group member years ago who only said positive things about our writing. She is a lovely person, but she wasn’t helping anyone grow as a writer. She ended up amicably parting ways with the group, which was a good thing in the end. If I want to hear all good things about my writing, I’ll share it with my mom. 😉 If you want to grow as a writer, you’ll need to hear what works and what doesn’t work from your readers.

Being a part of the Lit Wits has definitely informed my teaching. When it’s time for one of my students to share his or her writing, I understand—really understand—how intimidating that experience can be. As a writer, I also understand what kinds of comments help me to become a better writer. We need to hear what we do well, and we need to hear, in a constructive and supportive way, what isn’t working.

If you flip to the acknowledgements page in any children’s novel, you’ll almost always read the names of those who have helped shape a manuscript into a story. Joan (who writes as A.J. Paquette) sums it up perfectly in the end pages of her just-released middle grade novel RULES FOR GHOSTING, when she says:

 “… to the many others who have had a hand in critiquing, guiding, shaping, idea-brainstorming, and otherwise helping make this story what it is, I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Joan goes on to name the members of the Lit Wits and other critique partners, including Kate Messner.

Best of luck to you all in finding whatever type of feedback works best for you. I look forward to one day peeking at the acknowledgements section of your books!

I’ll be around today to answer any questions you may have about critique groups. We’re in Italy for the summer, which is six hours ahead of EST in the US, so any questions I miss after bedtime here I’ll answer in the wee hours tomorrow morning.

Happy Writing!

Good morning, writers!

Your Thursday Quick-Write today is courtesy of my friend & fellow mystery lover, Erin Dionne. Erin lives outside of Boston, where she writes, reads, teaches, and juggles family life. Her latest book, Moxie and the Art of Rule Breaking (Dial Books) is a race-against-the-clock adventure set in Boston.

Erin has two young kids, so she writes most of her books in her local coffee shop or local library. She’s also an associate professor of Liberal Arts at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts. When she’s not writing or teaching, she’s having dance parties with her kids, spending time with her husband, or managing the expectations of their disgruntled family dog.

Setting

 Often, setting gets overlooked when we’re drafting and revising. It becomes a “backdrop” on which our characters perform. In reality, our surroundings influence us in many ways each day—consider everything from the weather, to how comfortable the furniture is where you work or live, to ambient sound (lawn mowers, traffic, etc). In my latest novel, Moxie and the Art of Rule Breaking (Dial Books, 2013), the city of Boston becomes a character that Moxie and her best friend explore.

For this quick write, I am asking you to take away your characters and focus only on setting. Let’s see what you can pull from your setting to influence your story. Here goes:

1. Choose a significant moment in your story (could be a climactic scene, could be the beginning…whatever feels important to you right now).
2. Open a fresh page/document/etc, and just describe where this scene is taking place. Really dig into the details: what type of floor is in this space? How clean/dirty is it? What’s on the walls? What’s out the window? What noises do you hear (even in a room devoid of people, there are sounds—hums of electronics, clicking/ticking clocks, whoosh of heating/ac/fans)? If your characters are outside, address similar elements: what is the weather like? Wind conditions? Sun? Is this an industrial area? Woods? Is there litter? Graffiti? What does it say? Do you hear birds? Other animals? Planes? Sounds coming from other houses/teepees/hobbit holes? Don’t forget smells! Fresh cut grass, musky swamps, microwaved burritos or the tuna sandwich in the next cubicle. Your goal is to be as detailed as possible. Write in full sentences, lists, whatever works for you (you can draw a chart for all 5 senses and fill it in, if that helps).
3. Now, when you’ve gotten every last detail down, review what you have. Identify 3-5 elements of setting that you did not incorporate in your existing scene but might influence your characters. What are they? Is the smell of that sandwich making your pregnant protag nauseous while she talks to her boss about a raise? Does your main character really regret not putting on sunscreen this morning? Is the incessant ticking of the heirloom clock in the living room adding to a character’s insomnia?

Hopefully, you’ve discovered some ways setting can expand and reinforce what’s going on in your story.

Have fun! I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Note from Kate: Feel free to share in the comments if you’d like!  We’ll draw a random commenter to win a signed hardcover of Moxie and the Art of Rule Breaking (Dial, 2013).

Hi, everyone! It’s Kate today. (You didn’t think I could sit back and let our guest authors have all the fun, did you?)

A couple weeks ago, I was at the Boston Museum of  Science with my daughter when I saw this quote on the wall in the room that talks about sound…

“The acoustics of the season…”

I like that. Because so often, when we write, we get caught up in our characters and the action, and we forget that every day has weather and a feeling outdoors. Every day has sounds that would let us know, even if we were blindfolded, what season it is.

So today’s quick-write is this: Write about “the acoustics of the season” for your work in progress. You can choose a single day, a single moment if you’d like. Or, if you’d rather, write about the acoustics and sounds of this photograph that I took out on the lake over the weekend.

As always, feel free to share a bit of what you wrote in the comments!

Happy Monday, everyone! Our guest author for today’s mini-lesson is the inimitable Linda Urban, whose new book THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING made me laugh and cry both. And on top of that, it made me crave donuts, too. You can read my not-quite-a-review of the book over at the Nerdy Book Club, but for now, Linda’s visiting us to talk about something that’s a part of all of our writing lives — time.

Got minute?  Let’s talk time.

One of the coolest things about writing is that we can become masters of time.  We can speed it up, summarizing entire weeks of a school year in a sentence (By the time my daily writing journal was full, I had come to the conclusion that Dana and I would never see eye to eye on this.) or slow time down so that a second-long gesture takes on weight and importance through its extention. (Dana stared at me, her pencil tapping out a funeral march, and I swear I could see the whole history of our friendship erased in the slow, steady shake of her head.).  We use scenes to allow our readers to participate in the important stuff, to feel crucial emotions, to process information along with our characters, to experience action.  We use summary to say: here’s a bit of info you’ll need to know, but you don’t have to fully engage in.

Time is one of the ways that we signal importance.  We usually spend more time with major characters than minor ones.  More time in scenes that detail key actions or emotions than in scenes with little consequence.  You can use this assumption to your advantage.  Want to hide a clue?  How about sneaking it into a scene where the majority of our attention is spent on something else?  Want readers to understand that a moment in a character’s past shapes their current actions?  Don’t just tell us, take the time to show us in a scene.

And what about those really important parts of our story – the ones that mark crucial decisions or key turning points?  We can use time to help those moments stand out in the mind of the reader.

Here’s an example from my most recent novel The Center of Everything, which has time (our perception of it and our desire to manipulate it) as one of its themes.  In this scene, our main character, Ruby, who has been shielding herself from her emotions after the death of her grandmother Gigi, has just seen the color wheel project of her classmate, Nero DeNiro.  The wheel is creative and funny and Ruby laughs a real, genuine laugh and feels for the first time in a long time.   This is what happens next:

 But when she stops laughing, all the little Nero faces start to blur.  And Ruby has a bunch of thoughts.

 One of them is that there is something wrong with her eyes.

Another is that there is something wrong with her ears, because when Lucy says “Are you okay?” it sounds like she’s using a speaker phone.

And another is that maybe there is something wrong with her hands, because they have dropped her pencil to the floor, and even though it makes sense for her to bend over and pick the pencil up, her hands are not moving.  They are just sitting there on her color wheel, covering up all the complement lines. And there are drops of water landing on her hands and on the painted squares of color too, and the red and the orange are mixing all up into some other color that Ruby doesn’t have a name for and for which there is no complement on her color wheel, and she knows she is going to get a bad grade now.

 “Ruby?”  That’s Mrs. Tomas talking.  “Ruby? Did you hurt yourself?”

 What I hoped to do in this bit of the scene was to both slow time down in terms of the way that Ruby is processing and experiencing information, but also speed up the events around her.  I spent time in the scene to put in the details that show how Ruby is experiencing sound, color and movement, so that the reader can truly feel her struggling to make sense of what is happening.  I cut out the details that she doesn’t process, such as Lucy and Nero calling their teacher Mrs. Tomas over to the table to help.   In playing with time in this way, I hoped to signal that this moment was unlike the ones that had come before – that it was important to Ruby and important to the story.

So, how might this work in the story that you are writing?  Have you come to a crucial scene yet?  Is there a key moment you want your readers to slow down and really experience?  Think about that moment and see if you can find one central action in it – the turning of a door handle, the connection of bat to ball, the touch of a fingertip to the nape of a neck – and slow it down.  Slow it way down.

 As an experiment, let’s overdo.  Let’s see exactly how long we can extend this moment.  Keep it moving forward but detail every sense, every thought, every tiny change along the way.  See how long you can make this moment last.

Not in the middle of a project? You can still give this a whirl.  Take a fairy or folk tale you know well, identify a key moment, and extend that.  Can you make the bite of a poisoned apple last for a paragraph?  Two? A page?

When you’re done writing, take a look at what you’ve got.  Chances are what you’ve written is way longer and more detailed than anything you’d want to put into a novel or short story.  But I’m betting you’re going to find some great details in there, some emotions you hadn’t examined before, and some key words or phrases that you’ll want to keep in the scene – and maybe use again in times when you want your readers to remember that crucial plot moment.

 If you did do the experiment using a moment from your work-in-progress, put it aside for a day or two and then see if you can edit it down to something that works for you.  At the very least, I’m betting that this exercise has you thinking about that moment in a more vivid and dramatic way.

Note from Kate: Feel free to share a few lines of today’s writing in the comments if you’d like! Thanks again, Linda, for joining us! And don’t forget, everyone, that Jo has your Monday Morning Warm-Up today, too!