Shall we celebrate another week of writing with a book giveaway? I think that’s what we’ll do…

Guest author Katy Duffield has a copy of FARMER MCPEEPERS and a copy of CALIFORNIA HISTORY FOR KIDS: MISSIONS, MINERS, AND MOVIEMAKERS IN THE GOLDEN STATE. 

One lucky winner will receive BOTH books  – to enter the drawing, just leave any comment on today’s blog post before 11pm EST Saturday night, and I’ll draw a winner’s name to be announced on Monday.

Also…one of my critique partners, Loree Griffin Burns, is giving away an ARC of CAPTURE THE FLAG on her blog. (You should know Loree anyway – she writes amazing nonfiction, so go visit her even if you don’t want to enter her drawing, which ends at midnight EST on Friday, June 22.)

And finally, before we get chatting in the comments, some of you have asked about ordering signed books for yourselves or your classrooms or maybe summer birthday gifts. I have a book signing for my new mystery, CAPTURE THE FLAG, on July 2nd, and The Bookstore Plus in Lake Placid has offered to take phone orders for personalized, signed copies of any of my books for kids.  Give them a call at 518-523-2950 if you’d like to order any of my books for kids. (Let them know you’re part of Teachers Write; I have a special inscription for you guys!)  You can read about all of my available picture books, chapter books, and novels here.  I’ll sign books on July 2nd, and the bookstore will mail them out that week. Shipping’s free on orders over $50 and reasonable on smaller orders, too. If you’re enjoying Teachers Write and would like to support my books, this would be a great way to do that AND support a great indie bookseller that was instrumental in helping one of its local libraries recover from devastating flooding in Tropical Storm Irene.

My editor at Scholastic has some extra uncorrected advance reader copies of CAPTURE THE FLAG, too, and she’s offered to send those to the first 40 people who call the bookstore to order CAPTURE THE FLAG.  So if you call and order that book, and you’d also like an ARC, please email me  (kmessner@dap.kgv.mybluehost.me) with your address right after you place your order. (Please don’t ask the bookstore what number you are when you call, though…it confuses them. I promise to put an update on the Facebook page when those 40 ARCs are spoken for.)

Now…how’s it going this week?  Are there topics you’re wondering about that we haven’t talked about yet?

Friday Writing Happy Hour is a chance to relax and share comments about our progress, goals, accomplishments, and whatever else is on your mind.  And if you’d like feedback on a snippet of writing, head on over to Gae Polisner’s blog for Friday Feedback, where you can share a few paragraphs of your work and offer feedback to others, too.

 Enjoy your weekend, and remember to check in at Jen’s Teach Mentor Texts blog on Sunday.  I’ll see you back here Monday morning!

Welcome to Tuesday Quick-Write!  Got your keyboard or pencil ready? Today, guest author Miriam Forster talks about the magic of the unexpected – and flipping your story!

Miriam Forster learned to read at the age of five, wrote her first story at the age of seven and has been playing with words ever since. Her debut novel, CITY OF A THOUSAND DOLLS is being published by HarperCollins. In her daily life, Miriam is a wife, a terrible housekeeper and a dealer of caffeine at a coffee shop. In her internal life, she imagines fight scenes, obsesses about anthropology, nature shows and British television, and reads far too many books. Learn more at her website: http://msforster.blogspot.com/

One of the things that sparks a good story is the conjunction of unlikely elements. And one of the best ways to create that spark is to take an essential aspect of your story and flip it.  That’s what today’s prompt is about.

Step One: Pick your favorite fairy tale.

Step Two: Flip all the genders.

(If you’re using these prompts to help a work in progress, try flipping the gender of one of your primary characters instead.)

Step Three: Write a paragraph or two from a flipped character’s perspective. 

This also works with plot, (What if the princess from Sleeping Beauty was cursed to stay awake for a hundred years?) and setting. (What would a Snow White tale look like set in Alaska? What if Rapunzel took place in Australia?) 

Flipping is a great writing exercise because it instantly opens up the story possibilities and gets your brain thinking outside the box.  More importantly, flipping is just plain fun.

Ready…Set…Flip! Be sure to stop back and let us know in the comments what you discover today.

Wednesday is Q and A Day at Teachers Write! Virtual Summer Writing Camp, so if you have questions about writing, it’s time to fire away.

Authors are always welcome to drop by and answer questions (you never quite know who you’ll run into here!) But today’s official author volunteers are Jennifer Brown, Barb Rosenstock, Jean Reidy, Erin Dealey, and Julia Devillers. They’ve promised to be around to respond to your questions today, so please visit their websites & check out their books!

Teachers & librarians – Feel free to ask your questions in the comments.  Published author guests have volunteered to drop in and respond when they can.

Guest authors – Even if today isn’t a day you specifically signed up to help out, feel free to answer any questions you’d like to talk about.  Just reply directly to the comment.

 

Welcome to Tuesday Quick-Write!  Got your keyboard or pencil ready?  We have two guest authors and a huge range of prompts today – so if time is tight, choose on and bookmark the rest for a rainy day.

First, guest author Sara Lewis Holmes is here to talk about poetry and inspiration (even for those of you who might not think you’re poets!)  Sara is the author of two middle-grade novels, Letters From Rapunzel and Operation Yes. She studied physics at UNC-Chapel Hill, government at the College of William and Mary, and writing at home. You can read more about Sara at her website: http://www.saralewisholmes.com/

“Clear Thinking about Mixed Feelings”

 What Poetry Can Do for You…Even If You’re Not a Poet

One morning, I woke up with the phrase “Potato chips don’t go with coffee” in my head.

What a ridiculous, trivial idea.

So, of course, I reached for my pen and notebook and wrote it down. Then I wrote another line. And a few more. Until I “accidentally” wrote this poem:

 

Potato chips don’t go with coffee

My alarm alarmed me with those words.

 

I told you this, exactly—

and you said:

 

Led Zeppelin doesn’t go with mashed potatoes

and I said:

 

that’s not the same thing!

And you said:

 

you’re alarming me, my sweet, raw potato.

 

That may not be the most amazing poem I’ve ever written, but I like it. Why?

Because it speaks to how and why we might approach poetry.

We write poetry in response to the things that set off alarms inside us. The moments when we are vibrating with wonder, or fear, or heartbreak.  Poetry is most definitely FEELING.

But we also write poetry to examine things more closely; to cry out: that’s not the same thing!  To logically parse a silly thought until it reveals something we didn’t understand when first we were alarmed. Poetry is most definitely THOUGHT.

Perhaps that’s why I love Auden’s definition of poetry as “clear thinking about mixed feelings.”

So, can writing poetry help you think more clearly about your mixed feelings—whether or not you consider yourself a poet? Can it help you write fiction? Non-fiction? Memoir? I think so.

Let me give you an example.

I grew up Catholic, so I know what a credo is. Literally, it means “I believe” and it’s a statement of those things you believe in. Many writers earnestly think that this is where they should begin: with what they believe, with what they know for certain, with just the facts, please. I know I did. I wrote many a persuasive essay in school, and I was damn good at it. I could argue the leg off a table, as they say.

But one day, I heard several people toss off the phrase “I don’t believe in…” and they weren’t talking about theology. They were discussing topics like wearing synthetic socks, or eating a big breakfast, or buying things online, or giving a child a binky.

When I did a Google search on the phrase, some things that turned up after “I don’t believe in…” were:  polls, the death penalty, failure, God, love, atheists, first grade, hell and walled gardens. (Hmmm. That last one intrigues me.)

Then, for my own amusement, I began to riff on the phrase, “I don’t believe in…”

I wound up writing a poem (you can see it here) not so much about particular beliefs or non-beliefs, but about how complicated our personal creeds are. How and why did we draw those lines we won’t cross? What are our exceptions? If we had to explain ourselves, could we do it?

Those last three questions—which I never would’ve stumbled across without writing this poem—could, if well tended, grow into a variety of writing projects: a memoir about my Catholic upbringing; a young adult novel about a particular moral line the main character has crossed (Sara Zarr’s stunning Story of a Girl, for example); or even a biography of a person whose logical discoveries are at odds with his beloved’s faith. (I’m thinking of Deborah Heiligman’s non-fiction book, Charles and Emma, about the Darwins.)

In Madeleine L’Engle’s book, Walking On Water, she talks about belief this way:

“The artist, like the child, is a good believer. The depth and strength of the belief is reflected in the the work; if the artist does not believe, then no one else will; no amount of technique will make the responder see truth in something the artist knows to be phony.”

Ferreting out the phony is exactly what poetry is designed to do.

Poetry allows you to explore anything you’ve left unexamined up until now, to go to the core of yourself—and to honor both your irrational thoughts and your mixed feelings about what you find.

This is true whether you write poetry for publication—or just because you can. Or even if you’d rather read poetry than write it. That’s okay. (May I suggest two great books? Jeannine Atkins’ novel in verse, Borrowed Names, in which there is some amazingly beautiful and clear thinking about mothers and daughters, history, and choices. And Joyce Sidman’s poetry book for younger ages, This is Just to Say, which explores mixed feelings with humor and grace.)

Finally, I’d like to draw your attention to someone who’s not a poet, or even a writer, but a visual artist: Claudia Tennyson, who carries on the traditional Japanese practice of repairing cracked ceramic vessels—not with invisible glue or carefully matched paint—but with gold filigree, which makes the cracks “visible instead of hiding them.” She believes the mending process “increases rather than depreciates the value of the vessel.”

Could there be a more perfect metaphor for writing? We are not covering up the cracks that we find; not even truly fixing them, because, often, that’s beyond our power. But we can say: Look. Look right here. I believe this is important.

Today’s fun stuff:

1) Tell me about a time you didn’t reject the first silly thought or phrase that came to you—and what happened afterwards. Write a poem about it if you wish.

2) When you have a free evening, find the recent documentary, Louder Than a Bomb, which follows four teams of students as they prepare for and compete in a Chicago poetry slam. Need a quick jolt immediately? Here’s seventeen-year-old Adam Gottlieb performing “Poet, Breathe Now.”

3) Begin a “commonplace book.” This is simply a notebook into which you copy poems you want to keep nearby. You can do this by hand, inking in the lines, or do what I often do: print or make a copy with your computer, and paste it in. Or do both—no rules! Try reading from this commonplace book before you approach your regular writing time, and see if it puts you in the right frame of mind to be both open and clear.

4) To explore your mixed feelings, write a credo. But do it slant, as Emily Dickinson would advise. Start with “I don’t believe in…” and see where your intrepid words take you.

—————————

Our second guest author today, Joy Preble joins us with a prompt to get us thinking about characters…

A former English teacher, Joy is the author of the DREAMING ANASTASIA series (Sourcebooks), which blends paranormal romance with historical fiction. The second in that series, HAUNTED, is out now, and the final book of the trilogy, title TBA, but currently ANASTASIA FOREVER, is due in Fall 2012. Another paranormal – about a sixteen-year-old stoner turned guardian angel – THE SWEET DEAD LIFE – is set in Houston and slated for May 2013, from Soho Press. Joy grew up in Chicago but now lives with her family in Houston where she writes full time and frequently get into wild rumpuses and other mischief. She is not a fan of the Houston summer but does love cowboy boots, going to the rodeo, and the coffee drinks at Empire Café.

Getting to know your characters is crucial. This means more than just the surface things like hair color or height. It means knowing what they like and what they don’t. What’s in their closet. How they talk and how they perceive the universe. Once you understand these things about your characters, their voices will shine in your writing.

So today, think of the main character in whatever you’re working on. Writing in that character’s voice, answer these two questions: How do you see yourself? How do others see you?

Note from Kate: If you don’t have a work-in-progress, feel free to write this piece in the voice of one of your students or friends, a celebrity or politician, a fictional character from your favorite book, a character you make up today, or…as yourself.  Feel free to share ideas on either or both of today’s mini-lessons below. Our guest authors will be visiting later on to respond to any questions.

Hi there! Did you have a good weekend?  I hope so! Before we get down to writing today, let’s announce the winner of our Friday book giveaway!

 Congratulations, Gayle Kolodny Cole!  You’ve won a signed copy of SEE YOU AT HARRY’S by Jo Knowles. Email me your name and address (kmessner at kate messner dot com) to receive your book.  And Jo’s Monday Morning Warm-Up for the day is here!

Today’s Mini-Lesson Monday post features two guest authors — Jody Feldman and Rosanne Parry — who are going to talk about how and where to get ideas for writing projects. So it’s a choose-your-own assignment week; feel free to work on the assignment that resonates most with you, or combine ideas from both to generate some ideas this week.

Jody Feldman blames her 7th grade English teacher (justly or not) for turning her away from writing, yet the world mysteriously led her back. She is the author of The Seventh Level and The Gollywhopper Games. Coming: Gollywhopper 2 & 3 (HarperCollins/Greenwillow). You can find her at www.jodyfeldman.com and she’s @jodyfeldman on Twitter.

MINING IDEAS FROM THIN AIR

When I was a kid, I originally concluded I was incapable of Important Thoughts. Being naturally competitive, though, I didn’t let my internal conversation stop there. I learned how to mine ideas from what often seems to be thin air.
 
Because it’s as simple (and as difficult) as opening your eyes and ears and instincts, and consciously noting what’s happening both around you and inside your mind, I offer four suggestions – practices I’ve integrated into my everyday life.
 
1. Extend your dreams. Even if it means setting your alarm several minutes early, lie in bed and hold on to that semi-sleep state. Grab an image from your mind. Assign it to a character. See what new ideas evolve while you’re still hazy.
 
2. Reading a new book? Pause right in the middle of the story. How would you end it? Is your ending satisfying? Dig deeper. Think of another road to travel. Is your ending different? Try building a separate story around it.
 
3. Go to a public place. Observe. Watch that guy use a tissue after he sneezes. Imagine, instead, if he wiped his nose on his sleeve. On his bare arm. On a napkin from his lunchmate’s tray. What if he sneezed out fire? Or was propelled upward? Let your mind run with the possibilities.
 
4. Get in touch with your mini adrenaline rushes. What makes your ears perk? What raises your creative antennae? Go to any bookshelf and look at the titles. Which words stir your insides, have you wondering about the story? Visit any museum – art, history, science. What objects stop you? Make you take a second look? Follow those thoughts.

Today: Get inspired by a single word.

Assignment: Go to the random noun generator: http://www.wordgenerator.net/noun-generator.php
The first word that pops up is yours for the day. You have two choices:

• Brainstorm:Generate a full page of plot ideas with that noun at the center of yourthoughts. Need a boost? Add in a second word.
• Dive in: Let your noun kickstart a piece of writing. The word generator, for example, gave me expansion. My first, raw thought:

Whenever Parker caught sight of the Four Springs Expansion Bridge, he always gasped a little.

          Funny.  Now I want to know why.

Speaking of expansion, for an expanded version of this mini-lesson, email me, jody@jodyfeldman.com

———————–

Guest author Rosanne Parry’s titles include SECOND FIDDLE, HEART OF A SHEPHERD, and DADDY’S HOME. Rosanne was born in Oak Park, IL and lived just a mile or so from the childhood home of an author named Ernest Hemingway. I moved away from Oak Park when she was five and grew up in Portland, Oregon, where she lives now. When she’s not writing, she likes to play the violin. She can also juggle, and is learning to tango, but cannot throw a frisbee to save her life.

STORY HUNTING

Thanks Kate for the invitation to join summer writing camp! I’ve been eagerly following along as my deadlines allow and enjoying the conversation immensely. It makes me miss teaching full time.

But here’s what I don’t miss—giving a writing assignment and hearing a high-pitched wail from the back of the room, “But I can’t think of anything to write!!!”  The distress that accompanies the lament is absolutely genuine, but it can take a lot of teacher energy to get that doubting writing to give his or her story a try.  But to be fair, most adult writers do quite a lot of (hopefully internal) wailing before choosing a setting, characters, and plot for a new story.  Part of the answer lies in believing you have good ideas. I do a workshop for kids called Story Hunting to help them generate a bank of story ideas to draw on. This is a variation of that workshop geared more for adult writers of fiction and memoir.

The idea is to generate a bank of story ideas to draw on in future writing projects, so don’t worry about having a story in mind for everything on the list. Generate the list and then let it spark story ideas over time. The important thing is to generate more ideas in the bank than you will ever use. It takes the pressure off because you aren’t looking for one perfect idea, just a whole bunch of ones that are personally appealing and can be combined in ways that make for a story only you can tell. Pull out a pencil and find a blank page in your journal. If you don’t get to ten ideas in a category, leave yourself some space and come back to it in a few days. If you’re on a roll, you are more than welcome to go beyond ten.

Setting Bank

1. List ten places that you have lived in your lifetime. It need not be 10 different towns. Different places in one town are fine. Summer camp, visits to grandma, college dorm, basic training—they all count as places you’ve lived

2. List ten places to which you feel a strong emotional connection. The emotion can be positive or negative. Either is powerful. (it’s okay to have repeats in the bank. That can tell you something useful about where your heart lives.)

3. List ten places you’ve visited on vacation or places you’d love to visit in your lifetime were money and time no object.

4. List ten places from which your ancestors or in-laws come.

5. List ten books or movies that have settings you’ve found particularly captivating. (you may want to include a brief note about what attracted you to the setting.)

 Here is your “bank” of 50 setting seeds which are likely to be fruitful in your own writing. Use them as a jumping off place for deciding where to set your next story. For example, I listed Paris under #2 and #3 so I made it the setting for part of Second Fiddle. The combination of emotional connection and first hand experience made it easy to write about with both warmth and realism.

Character Bank

6. List ten jobs whether paying or volunteer that you’ve done in your life.

7. List ten famous people, historical or contemporary, that you would love to share a meal with.

8. List ten ethnicities, religions, tribes, cultural groups, gender or sexual orientations, or political philosophies that are represented in your extended family.

9. List ten people who can make you laugh.

10. Complete this sentence ten times. “I’ve always wanted to _____ like ____________. For example, Dance like Gene Kelley.

Here is your bank of 50 character seeds. None of them is a fully developed character but used in combination, they can help you develop a rich and complex character that is likely to resonate with you. For example, I have always wanted to be able to rope a calf from horseback like my college roommate could. And many years ago I met a Quaker midwife who told me that once during a particularly difficult labor and delivery she had a vision of the Virgin Mary helping her. She didn’t convert to Catholicism or anything, but she did gain an insight into a religious experience that had previously felt very foreign to her. I drew on my friendship with a ranch girl and this intriguing blend of Quaker and Catholic experience to craft the characters in Heart of a Shepherd.

 Thanks, Rosanne and Jody, for these GREAT ideas to generate more ideas!!

Last week, I wrote a bit about critique groups — and after I blogged, a whole bunch of super-smart writers popped in to  offer tips and leave comments about how their critique groups work. If you haven’t already read that post, you should go check it out before you continue reading here.

Now…does a critique group sound like something you’d like to try?  If the answer is “no” or “mmm…not right now,” that’s totally fine, and you can skip the rest of this post or come back to it another time. But for those who do feel like this is something you’d like to do,  I thought we’d use today’s post to start the process of setting up some groups.  Here’s what I suggest…

If you’d like to start a critique group where you live, or an online group, leave a comment here with the following information:

• Your name
• Where you are in your writing life: (beginner, long-time poet, working on 1st novel, agented nonfiction writer, etc.)
• What you’re working on now or what you most want to write: (YA fantasy, MG mystery, picture book biographies, professional books, poetry, etc. Or you can say not sure – a little of everything.)
• Where you live if you’re hoping for an in-person group, or just “Online” if you think connected via email will work out better.  Or share both if you’re open to either of those.

(Remember that in-person critique groups actually go someplace to meet and eat brownies and drink coffee once or twice a month, while online groups do all their critiquing and commenting via email or Google docs or something like that. Sometimes, they eat brownies while they do this, too. Just not in the same city.)

If you’re intrigued by all this, but you’re not the kind of person who likes to start things, then you can just hang out and see if anyone posts a request for critique partners in your city, or if anyone who shares your passion for memoir is looking to form a group. If you see a comment from someone you’d like to chat with about forming a group, then reply to it and figure out how you’d like to continue the conversation (email, Facebook, etc.) to work out details.  Then I’d suggest you arrange to swap just a few pages of something for a sample critique, so that you can see how it works out and figure out if you’re compatible in this way. (You can read this piece I wrote for Stenhouse to get ideas on how to offer good feedback.)

Please don’t get stressed about this ,okay? If no one answers your request right way, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer or that you smell like onions or anything else. Give it some time, and if this doesn’t work to connect you with someone like-minded, we’ll find another way.

Once you’re connected with a maybe-critique-buddy, try it out. See how it goes. And understand that this is not a perfect science. Critique groups have fits and starts, growing pains, and bumps in the road, so it may take a few tries before you connect with someone who is the right match. It’s worth it, though. You’ll get great feedback on your writing,  you’ll learn a lot from critiquing your partners’ writing, and you’ll come away with some ideas that you can share in the classroom or library with kids who are trying to help one another improve their writing, too.

Ready  to round up some critique partners?  Fire away in the comments! Remember that the point is to find one another here and then trot off to email or Facebook or Google to talk amongst yourselves and decide how you want your group to work.  There’s a good number of authors planning to visit for Q and A Wednesday this week, so if you end up with more questions about critique buddies, be sure to ask for their thoughts.

It’s time to celebrate all that we’ve worked on this week! And we’re going to do that with another book giveaway.

SEE YOU AT HARRY’S by Jo Knowles (of Monday Morning Warm-up fame!) is recommended for ages 10 and up, and it’s a beautiful tearjerker of a book that will  have you laughing on one page and sobbing on the next.

Enter to win a signed copy of SEE YOU AT HARRY’S by Jo Knowles by leaving any comment that adds to the conversation today. Deadline is 11pm EST Saturday. I’ll do a drawing over the weekend, and a winner will be announced on Monday.

So how’s it going this week? Friday Writing Happy Hour is a chance to relax and share comments about our progress, goals, accomplishments, and whatever else is on your mind.  And if you’d like feedback on a snippet of writing, head on over to Gae Polisner’s blog for Friday Feedback, where you can share a few paragraphs of your work and offer feedback to others, too.  And we also have a special guest post on the topic of world building today, from author Mike Jung. Check that out here.

And finally…I just have to share this. This week, I had a dream that everyone in Teachers Write (like a thousand of us!) took a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the assignment to write a poem in response to any piece of art we loved. (I was in line for-EVER buying special exhibit tickets for everyone, but after that it was great fun!) If you’re itching for a writing prompt today, why not try it? The Met’s collection is online here – choose something you love and let it inspire a poem if you’d like.

Happy writing! And happy weekend!  Remember to check in at Jen’s Teach Mentor Texts blog on Sunday, and  I’ll see you back here Monday morning!

Teachers Write welcomes debut author Mike Jung today for a guest post on world building. This will be especially useful to those of you working on fantasy & science fiction but applies to other kinds of writing, too. You may want to bookmark it for later if it doesn’t seem to fit what you’re doing right now.  Take it away, Mike!

Hello teachers! I’m thrilled to be here at Teachers Write, and I applaud you all for taking the plunge with us. My sixth grade teacher Miss Drake, would have been extremely pleased to see me involved with this terrific project.

Now, Kate herself is a far greater authority on worldbuilding than me – check out this blog post about her TED talk, for example – but I have a few thoughts on the matter, particularly as I’m currently working on two separate manuscripts that involve a fair amount of worldbuilding.

But perhaps you’re saying “hey pinhead, what the heck is worldbuilding?” Okay, here’s the Mike Jung definition: worldbuilding is the process of creating the setting that your story takes place in. If you’re a Tolkien fan like me, you may be recoiling in horror at the thought of creating thousands of years of history, a panoply of elfin and dwarvish peoples with their own cultures and characteristics, and a bunch of fake languages nobody can actually pronounce.  Create an entire world?? Are you crazy, Mike? Or maybe you like that idea, in which case, hey, go to town.

That’s not precisely what I’m talking about, though – I don’t think of “worldbuilding” solely as the creation of an entirely new world from the ground up, although that’s certainly one option. I think of it more as creating a setting with enough credibility to evoke a sense of reality in the reader, support the suspension of disbelief you’re asking of the reader, or both.

Here’s an example that’s also a thinly-veiled reference to my own book *cough cough* – Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities takes place in a small, contemporary city that’s fairly realistic, except for the fact that it has a resident superhero, Captain Stupendous, with the powers of flight, super-strength, invulnerability, and super-vision. In fact, there are over 50 superheroes scattered throughout the world, and they’re constantly defending the safety of their respective cities by battling one crazypants supervillain or another.

Nobody’s EVER going to mistake my book for a work of non-fiction, and clearly readers will have to willingly engage in some suspension of disbelief. So I didn’t try to create some plausible, scientifically-grounded explanation of how Captain Stupendous actually could fly in the real world. There’s enough pop-cultural precedent for that particular element of fantasy to make it easy to swallow.

One thing I did do, however, was try to establish some consistency and logic behind the way people in the world of Geeks think and react to the thyroidal spandex-clad weirdos in their midst. For example, I created a very broadly-sketched culture of superhero fandom throughout the country, a culture that’s represented by two specific Captain Stupendous fan clubs in my fictional city.

I also needed to create some settings that would fill the needs of my plot, and also the needs of my characters as real people, if that makes any sense. For example, there’s this pizza parlor which worked really well as the setting for my first chapter in terms of facilitating the plot, but it also fills a role in the characters’ lives outside of that chapter. Kids need public places to hang out, you know? Spud’s Pizza was my characters’ place to hang out long before the events of the book happened. And I didn’t want that because my story absolutely needed a pizza joint instead of, say, a boba tea house, an ice cream parlor, or a convenience store full of giant-size beverages and various conglomerations of processed butter and sugar – I wanted it because it helped make my characters into people who could be real.

A character’s thoughts, feelings, and actions may be driven by her pointy-eared people’s fifteen millennia of dragon-infested history, but they might also be driven by the history of her local town, which has always been driven by a particular multinational company that’s suddenly decided to shutter all its local facilities. A group of disenfranchised kids might end up mystically transported to a dimension that’s terrorized by giant, intelligent fish, or they might face challenges with the bully population at their school, but in either case the antagonistic characters will be products of their environment and history.

All of which is a rambling way of saying that on the surface, worldbuilding is about…well, building a world: creating a sense of place; conveying specific details; establishing continuity; and making things believable, all of which are hugely important, of course. But on a deeper level, I think worldbuilding is actually a vital way of showing the history behind our stories, and ultimately, the history of our individual characters. No matter how fantastical or everyday our settings are, their ultimate purpose is to illuminate the worlds inside the hearts and minds of our characters.

********************

Mike Jung has obviously read a whole lot of fantasy and science fiction. His debut novel Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities will be released on October 1, by Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. He lives in Northern California with his wife (who tolerates his weirdness), his kindergarten-age daughter (who can already debate him to a standstill), and his toddler-age son (who’s developed a suddent reckless streak). Learn more at his website and follow him on Twitter @MikeJung.

Hi, everybody! Some of you have been asking if it would make sense for you to form smaller groups within the Teachers Write community to give one another feedback in addition to what we’re already doing, and that’s a fine idea. So let’s talk about critique groups.

A critique group is a small group of people (usually 2-6) who write and agree to read one another’s work from time to time and provide feedback with the purpose of helping one another improve. Critique groups can happen in person — if you live close to some other writers, you might agree to meet once a month at the local coffee shop for this — or online, in which case you’d exchange pages of writing via email or set up a system with folders in Yahoo Groups or something similar.

They can be made up of people who are at about the same level (beginners, folks revising first novels, etc.), people who write the same genre (YA, MG, picture books, nonfiction, etc.) or people who write different kinds of work but have an appreciation for what the others write, too.

Sometimes, critique groups operate on a schedule (each week, writers take turns sending maybe five pages for critique by the others) and sometimes they’re more informal (people share work when it’s done or when they need feedback, and others critique as they can. This is more common with experienced writers, I think, who tend to have deadlines and less predictable schedules.)

Sometimes, it takes a while to find the right critique group. People sometimes post new critique groups or openings in established ones at the SCBWI site or on Verla Kay’s discussion boards for children’s writers. Sometimes, you express interest in this, and someone else has filled the spot already or seems to be a better fit for that particular group. Do not take this personally or read anything into it at all. It happens. It happened to me numerous times when I was looking for a critique group, and if it happens to you, it doesn’t mean that you’re not a good writer or a nice person or anything else. It only means that your “just-right” critique group is still out there.  And sometimes, people join a critique group and then realize it’s not a good fit, so they drift away. All of this is part of the process, and it’s okay.

I’ve been in a bunch of critique groups over the years, all full of great people and talented writers. Some have been better fits than others, especially my current group with writers Loree Griffin Burns, Eric Luper, and Liza Martz.  Though we write different genres, we all appreciate one another’s work.  We run into each other at conferences & retreats sometimes, but our group operates mostly online (via Yahoo groups) and we don’t have a set schedule.  I also have a couple other good writers friends with whom I swap manuscripts sometimes.

Last summer, I wrote a pretty detailed piece on how to critique a friend’s writing for the Stenhouse Summer Blogstitute. It uses one of my editor’s revision letters as a mentor text for how to critique someone’s writing in a way that’s constructive and rigorous without making that person feel sad or frustrated or so angry they want to shove their crummy manuscript up your nose.  You should read that here. Go ahead…and then come back. I’m going to get a cup of coffee while you do that….

So…do you think you might like to be in a critique group?  I can’t create one for you…or tell you who to have coffee with, but I can provide a place for you to talk with other like-minded people who feel the same way and might want to connect with you.  We’ll do that early next week. After that, you’ll be on your own to make arrangements with the people you meet on that post and figure things out.

Watch for that post on Monday, in addition to our regular Mini-Lesson Monday.  But today…I’d like to invite your questions about critique groups, and I’d like to invite authors to comment and share a little about how their critique groups work.  I think you’ll see that like writing styles, there are many critique group styles, and the “right” one is the one that works for you and your writing partners. A respectful, supportive tone is essential, but beyond that, you can figure out how to set things up.

Questions? Comments? Critique group models or tips to share? Fire away!