It’s time for Thursday’s Quick-Write. Before we get to the prompt, let’s have a virtual round of applause for the authors who answered questions during Wednesday Q and A. (Woo-hoo!!) If you’d take a few minutes to look up those authors who made time to answer your questions, that would be great – their responses will mean more if you learn about their books. And if those books sound like something your readers would enjoy, please consider adding them to your IndieBound wish-lists or GoodReads to-read lists.
Today’s Thursday Quick-Write is courtesy of guest author Pam Bachorz! (Bio courtesy of Pam’s website & photo by Louis Torres) Pam grew up in a small town in the Adirondack foothills, where she participated in every possible performance group and assiduously avoided any threat of athletic activity, unless it involved wearing sequined headpieces and treading water. With a little persuasion she will belt out tunes from “The Music Man” and “The Fantasticks”, but she knows better than to play cello in public anymore. Pam attended college in Boston and finally decided she was finished after earning four degrees: a BS in Journalism, a BA in Environmental Science, a Masters in Library Science and an MBA. Her mother is not happy that Pam’s degrees are stored under her bed. Pam draws inspiration from the places she knows best: she wrote CANDOR while living in a Florida planned community, and set DROUGHT in the woods where she spent her summers as a child. She currently lives in the Washington, DC area with her husband and their son.
Ready to write?
Think of the place that is home for you. It might be where you live today, or perhaps where you grew up. Wherever you choose, be sure to pick a place that you know well. Take one minute to write down every detail about this place that you can think of.
Done with the first part? Now we’re going to twist it around. Take the rest of your time to write about three changes that would make this place utterly altered for you–changes that would mean it was no longer home.
What sort of changes? That’s entirely up to you. Perhaps you’ll change how home looks, or smells, or where it’s located. Or maybe it’s the people there who make it home.
This prompt aims to help you draw rich details from familiar settings into your fiction, and to also see how they can be altered to be something entirely different for your stories. Think of it as taking a favorite pair of pants to the tailor and coming home with a pencil skirt!
Note from Kate: If you have a work-in-progress, you can also feel free to write this from your character’s point of view. It may teach you something about him or her that you didn’t know before.
Feel free to share a snippet (no more than a paragraph or two, please!) of what you wrote today in the comments if you’d like – and thanks for the support you’re giving one another by responding to those comments! You’re making this a really fun place to be a writer.
Got questions about writing? Wednesday is Q and A Day at Teachers Write! Virtual Summer Writing Camp. 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 Mara Rockliff, Miriam Forster, and Erin Dealey. 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.
On Tuesdays & Thursdays during Teachers Write! Virtual Summer Writing Camp, I’ll be sharing quick-write prompts, designed to get you free-writing for a few minutes in response to a question or idea. These can be used as a simple free-write, brainstorming, warm-up activity OR as a way to deepen your thinking about a work-in-progress. Got your keyboard or pencil ready?
Today’s writing prompt is courtesy of guest author Jeannine Atkins, whose most recent book is Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C. J. Walker, Marie Curie and Their Daughters (Holt). She teaches Children’s Literature at UMass-Amherst and a graduate course in writing for children at Simmons College. You can learn more on her website at http://www.Jeannineatkins.com
Advice from a writing teacher my freshman year in college has stuck with me all these years. She took a look at my labored prose and suggested I take a break to write some letters home describing life around me. My family was glad for some details, and I got the point that writing can be best when begun with a very particular audience in mind, rather than the vague judge I’d been used to writing papers for, backing up opinions and providing citations.
I suggest taking the main character of the piece you’re working on, or want to start, and write about her or him as if to your mom or a trusted friend. Or begin a poem or story as a letter to your main character, or if you’re already on your way, take a break to ask your character the sort of sincere, casual questions we often reserve for friends. These questions might include: Do you have a favorite place to be alone? A favorite toy, piece of clothing, pet, tree, tool, or book? Did someone encourage you to do what you love? How? Did anyone try to stop you? What did they do or say? What parts of your work are hard or boring? What mistakes did you make? What did you learn from them? Who or what do you love?
What starts as a letter may turn into more of a conversation, and if your character seems chatty, please, just let her speak, even when it seems off topic.
You might move into writing dialog between two characters. Or you can write a poem based on questions and responses, and edit out the questions if you want. Love That Dog by Sharon Creech is an excellent example of a narrative composed of a boy’s letters to his teacher, which makes it clear we don’t need her replies to get a sense of her character.
Thanks, Jeannine!
Lots of options for today’s quick-write. Ready? Get writing! And if you’d like, stop back later on to share a paragraph or two in comments.
The magical and wonder-filled Adirondack Mountains are the setting for OVER AND UNDER THE SNOW, the picture book that I wrote and Christopher Silas Neal illustrated. So it was beyond exciting when our book won the Adirondack Literary Award for Children’s Literature in Blue Mountain Lake this weekend. And what a setting for the event!
View from the Blue Mountain Center
It was so much fun to hear about all the other award-winning titles, too. Best Fiction went to author Steven Millhauser for We Others: New and Selected Stories, Best Memoir to Earth, Air, Fire, & Waterby Jean Rikhoff. An Elegant Wilderness: Great Camps and Grand Lodges of the Adirondacks by Gladys Montgomery won for Best Nonfiction. Best edited collection went to Heaven Up-h’isted-ness! The History of the Adirondack Forty-Sixers and the High Peaks of the Adirondacks edited bySuzanne Lance. The Best Book of Poetry went to Paul Pines for Reflections in a Smoking Mirror. And the People’s Choice Award went to Questions for the Sphinx by Stuart Bartow.
One of my favorite parts of the day was listening to author, storyteller, and poet Joseph Bruchac read aloud from some of the nominated fiction and poetry. You know how some people are just amazing at reading aloud? He’s like that. I wish you could hear…
Toward the end of the event, I discovered that my husband and kids had…well…disappeared. I went looking for them down by the lake (always a good place to start with my family). I found them in the boathouse playing ping pong and joined in for a game or two before it was time to go home.
Thanks, Adirondack Center for Writing and Blue Mountain Center, for a wonderful celebration of words and a magical clouds-in-the-water afternoon.
Good morning! Before we get to Mini-Lesson Monday, we have some winners to announce for our EYE OF THE STORM giveaway. Drum roll, please…
…Cindy Hundley, Carol Ann Osler, Lisa Rosenman, Stacy Dillon, and Catherine Flynn! Please email me (kmessner at kate messner dot com) with your name & mailing address, and Walker/Bloomsbury will send out your books. If you didn’t win (sorry!) but want to purchase EYE OF THE STORM, you can click here to order from your local independent bookstore.
In addition to our Monday Mini-Lesson, remember that author Jo Knowles offers a Monday Morning Warm-up on her blog to start each week, so be sure to visit her if you’d like another idea for free writing today.
Now for today’s topic…
Outlining: When, Why, & How…
…with guest author Sally Wilkins. Sally is a New Hampshire author and research lover who has written both nonfiction and early readers. Check out her books here.
We’ve probably also all heard that writers should create outlines for their work – even for their fiction! We know that we’re supposed to be able to state the theme and summarize the plot of our books in a single sentence. We’ve heard expressions such as “If you don’t have a map, you won’t know whether you’re headed toward your destination” or “without a recipe, you’re just throwing in the ingredients and hoping something edible emerges.”
And most of us have probably felt the paralysis of trying to codify our freedom-loving creativity into that oh-so-structured outline format, and wondered, simultaneously, both “How?” and “Why?”
Some authors swear by their outlines, many others will flatly state that they don’t outline. By which they generally mean that they don’t do a Roman/Uppercase/Arabic outline of their book or article before they start writing. Scratch the surface of that declaration, and you’ll almost certainly discover some other way of planning and organizing their material – something that doesn’t look or feel like an outline, but works like one.
A writer’s outline may take the form of a calendar or a timeline. It may resemble a flowchart or, indeed, a road map (or a set of directions printed out from the internet). For a picture book, the storyboard is a very common form of outline. Most important, a writer’s outline is not a static document, created before the writer begins to write and followed, point by point until the end. A writer’s outline is a dynamic tool. In the end, the finished work will have internalized the structure of the outline, so that a student told to make an outline of the book (especially if it is non-fiction) will be able to do just that, distilling the contents into that old familiar format. But that’s the finished product!
So let’s go back to the beginning and see how the writer’s outline works.
Every piece begins with an idea. The idea may be a theme or a topic (assigned pieces often begin this way). It may be a character, an event or a landscape the writer wants to explore. The very first outlining that the writer does looks a lot like jotting down notes: capturing random thoughts as they occur, adding bits and pieces of information she already knows and reminders of pieces she’ll need to research or discover. The bits may include names and descriptions of characters, snatches of dialog, one-sentence summaries of important information (with references, we hope), even photographs torn from magazines. Sometimes this jotting is an intentional, structured effort (as it will be in a classroom). Often it happens over time, frequently while the writer is working on other things, resulting in a file folder full of notes scrawled on the backs of old drafts, assorted pieces of notebook paper and stationary, and yes, envelopes and napkins. When the writer is ready to begin the project, these random bits get grouped together – maybe by character, maybe in chronological order, maybe as stops along a journey. Although the groups may not be labeled with Roman numerals, they are, in fact, the headings of an outline. In a classroom setting, you could ask students to create that outline from the groups and bits and pieces of information – but you would need to make it clear that this is not a finished product, because it is very likely that there will be A’s without B’s and all kinds of other missing parts to these outlines. Give yourself that same instruction – this is a work-in-progress tool. Leave lots of blank space in each section, so you can include new material as it comes along.
This early outline not only helps you think about the structure of your writing, but highlights the places where the material is unbalanced. In a non-fiction piece, this will point out places where you need more research. In fiction, you’ll see gaps in your narrative, characters that need developing, plot breaks where you need to construct a transition. (An important observation for those who write picture books and short form pieces – the outline may in fact be longer than your manuscript!)
Timeline for a biography that was shorter than its outline!
This is the point where the “I never outline” and the “I must outline” writers generally diverge. You may choose to fill in those gaps right then, so that when you begin to write you do in fact know every episode in your plot or every concept in your article. Or you may trust the outline to remind you that you need to go back to them later, and begin writing with only that bare skeleton of an “outline” as a guide. (Many writers don’t look at it again until they complete the first draft.)
As you continue to accumulate material you’ll create another kind of outline (or your original skeleton will morph into one). Building the structure of the “chapter” outline goes along with the process of mapping your work in your mind. Will it move chronologically, geographically, or thematically? How will you transition from one section or chapter to the next? For this outline your headings may be possible opening sentences, bullets or titles. Under each heading you’ll note the scene, the characters, and the action you’ll be describing there. You’ll note what information you’ll be including, and may decide some things need to be introduced earlier or held until later to improve the flow or balance of the work. When you actually begin to write, you may find yourself writing the middle of the piece first, then the scene leading to the climax, circling around to fill in the blank places later. An outline allows you to do this: you don’t have to write the book or article in the order that your reader will read it.
Your outlining will continue as you begin to write – the outline and the manuscript will interact, each illuminating the other.
Always, the outline remains a tool, not a dictator. As you write, the work may turn in unexpected directions. New characters may show up and demand a part. A question from a critique group member may make you rethink your underlying assumptions. Write on! You can always go back and adjust the outline. Move the pieces around. Combine some, expand others, prune and remove parts that don’t work. Contrary to the oh-so-neat finished product, outlining is a messy business. (Some writers like to put each section on an index card or post-it note, so they can move them around more easily.)
When you have finished the first draft, do another outline – this one from the text. This outline will become a useful tool in your revisions, highlighting problem areas and enabling you to see the overall structure of your work. You can look more dispassionately at the outline/summary of each chapter and say “is there enough action here?” and “does this move the plot?” than you can when you’re reading the words you’ve lovingly set down on paper. With each successive draft, the outline will become tighter and cleaner. Eventually you will be able to label it “Chapter synopsis” and include it in your book proposal!
Assignment for this week:
If your project is at the idea stage, do a brain-dump, jotting down all the random bits and pieces. Begin to sort them into logical groups. Create a rough outline (or timeline, or map, or flow chart) from these groups.
If you already have a work in progress draft, create an outline from the text. Look for gaps and bulges in the outline. Think about (and jot down) how you can smooth and balance those problem areas in the next draft.
And a note from Kate…
If you don’t have one major project for the summer but you want to practice outlining and see how it all works, try creating an outline of one of your favorite books. When I was writing EYE OF THE STORM, I really wanted to make it fast-paced for kids who love action. Before I started writing my thriller, I sat down and studied the pacing in a book I admired for its pacing, THE HUNGER GAMES. I made a chapter-by-chapter outline and learned a lot about why we can’t put that book down. It’s a fun exercise!
And remember…outlines take all kinds of forms. Here’s another example from Sally, with story elements on a calendar.
Outlines are kind of tricky to share in comments, but feel free to ask any questions you have in the comments for this post, or stop back and let us know how it goes!
Thanks to my editor Mary Kate Castellani at Walker/Bloomsbury, we’re also going to give out some presents today. When I told Mary Kate about writing camp and about all of you, she offered to donate five hardcover copies of my science thriller EYE OF THE STORM as a giveaway for our first Friday celebration.
So…if you wrote this week, just leave any sort of comment at all on this post, and you’ll be entered to win EYE OF THE STORM. It’s recommended for kids in grades 4-8, and you can read more about it here.
You have until 11pm EST on Saturday to enter. I’ll do a random drawing & announce FIVE winners Monday morning.
Enjoy your weekend, remember to check in at Jen’s Teach Mentor Texts blog on Sunday, and we’ll see you back here first thing Monday morning!
I spent the first part of this week in New York City for Book Expo America, a frighteningly enormous publishing trade show at the Javits Center. This was my first BEA, thanks to Chronicle Books, which sent me to attend the ABA Celebration of Bookselling where OVER AND UNDER THE SNOW received an E.B. White Read Aloud Honor. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
I actually arrived in New York on Monday, in time to have lunch with my Walker/Bloomsbury editor, Mary Kate, before heading to the Scholastic offices for a big party for bloggers. The “Scholastic Live” event featured a bunch of authors, including me, performing readers theater from one another’s new books. It was so much fun to be part of a dramatic reading from CAPTURE THE FLAG — and I’ll tell you that Raina Telgemeier, Jeff Hirsch, and Donna Cooner have some serious acting skills! Here’s a photo of the four of us, acting out a scene from Raina’s upcoming graphic novel, DRAMA.
Before the blogger party, all the authors signed books here:
Turns out this is THE room where acquisitions meetings happen at Scholastic. When David Levithan told us that, a sort of awed hush fell over that big conference table. Then we all admitted we’d imagined the chairs would be a lot cushier.
After a late dinner with my agent and some of her smart, hilarious clients…and a few hours of sleep…and an early breakfast with my Scholastic editor, it was time for a video shoot at the Scholastic offices.
The video we taped is especially for teachers & librarians, and I’ll be sure to let you know when it’s up on the Scholastic website!
Then it was off to BEA for the awards luncheon, where I got to meet OVER AND UNDER THE SNOW illustrator Christopher Silas Neal for the first time ever. Here he is saying thanks to indie booksellers for the E.B. White Read Aloud Honor.
You can read more about the luncheon and see the full list of winners here.
Before it was time for me to fly home, I took a walk through the BEA exhibits hall, which was big and busy and kind of scary in its intensity. But it was fun to play “spot the celebrity.” Know who this is?
I’ll give you a hint: Excuse me, sir. I think there’s been a mistake. I know we’re in detention but I don’t think I belong here.
Yep – it’s Molly Ringwald of Breakfast Club fame. She wrote a book and was signing copies of it for this crazy mob of people.
That’s the crowd at the BEA autographing stalls…which scared me into leaving a little early for the airport.
Many thanks to the ABA and all of the independent booksellers who not only serve as their communities’ literary hearts but also share my books with readers. Thanks for the E.B. White Honor, for sure. But mostly, thanks for just doing what you do. I hope you get to keep doing it for a long, long time.
First of all today, a HUGE thank you to the authors who popped in to answer questions for our Wednesday Q&A day. There is some mighty useful information in the comments here, so you may want to bookmark it for later, too. And teacher/librarian friends, please do me a favor? Take a few minutes to look up all those authors who made time to answer your questions yesterday – their responses will mean more if you learn about their books. And if those books sound like something your readers would enjoy, please consider adding them to your IndieBound wish-lists or GoodReads to-read lists.
A student walks into the library/media center at lunchtime. What is she/he thinking? Worried about? Dreading? Hoping or wishing for? What are the risks/stakes for him/her? Show us in a paragraph or two.
Note from Kate:Some possible formats for this quick-write:
A journal entry from that character, written later on
A letter from that character to his or her best friend
A letter from that character to his or her worst enemy
A poem in the character’s voice
A monologue in the character’s voice
A conversation in dialogue between the character and a friend/the librarian/an enemy
For those of you in the middle of a work-in-progress, try this with your main character, or better yet, a secondary character you want to develop more fully. Imagine him or her walking into a room and feeling uncomfortable and awkward. Why? You can write this from a third person perspective, from the focus character’s point of view, or for a twist, try writing from the point of view of a disinterested observer in the room — someone who has no idea who the person is or what’s going on. What would he or she observe in terms of mannerisms and body language?
Feel free to share a paragraph from your Thursday Quick-Write in the comments later on if you’d like!
Got questions about writing? Wednesday is Q and A Day at Teachers Write! Virtual Summer Writing Camp, and we’ll have a bunch of great guest authors answering.
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.
Note from Kate: I’m chaperoning my daughter’s field trip today & won’t be checking in until tonight. Keep the lemonade cold, okay? I’ll stop by later & answer questions, too. But note that if you’ve never posted a comment here before, I won’t get to “approve” it for moderation until I’m home, so it may be later on when it shows up. Thanks for your patience!
First of all, I have to tell you that you are amazing. I’m away at BEA in New York this week but came back to my hotel room late Monday night and read your posts and your commitments to make writing time, and I’m so, so excited. (I might have teared up a little, too. Collectively, the 700+ of you are a serious inspiration!) I’ll be commenting more later in the week, but for now, I just wanted to say to all of you….well…wow. Well done walking that walk.
So…let’s get on with Day Two, shall we? On Tuesdays & Thursdays during Teachers Write! Virtual Summer Writing Camp, I’ll be sharing quick-write prompts, designed to get you free-writing for a few minutes in response to a question or idea. These can be used as a simple free-write, brainstorming, warm-up activity OR as a way to deepen your thinking about a work-in-progress. Got your keyboard or pencil ready?
Tuesday Quick-Write:
Write for two minutes to describe a very specific place. If you’re just free-writing, it can be a place that you love, or have visited, or a place that frightens you.
This is one of my favorite places (which also happens to frighten me sometimes), the Florida Everglades.
Anyplace is fine. If you want to relate this to your work-in-progress, choose a very specific setting within the piece and imagine yourself there.
When your two minutes are up, stop writing.
Now…if your place is real and you can go there, go there now. I’ll wait….
If it’s far away, find a picture of it. If it’s not a real place, put yourself there in your mind. Now write for one minute about each of the following:
Everything you SEE – Pay attention to big things and tiny things. Search for concrete details.
Everything you HEAR – Be specific. Don’t just say “a scraping sound.” Say a “high-pitched, raspity-raspity-screeeeeaking noise.” You can make up words if you want.If you aren’t in the place, try to find a video. Or guess what you might hear.
Everything you SMELL – Especially pay attention to the smells that surprise you. If you’re not in the place, pictures can help you smell. Look carefully…what would that dumpster smell like?
Everything you FEEL – Weather, wind, things that land on you or brush against you. Again – pictures help you imagine if you’re not there, and if it’s not a real place, try imagining images and then assigning sensations from a similar place that might be real (desert, tundra, etc.)
Now, go back and rewrite that descriptive paragraph. Include your best tiny, surprising details, and work on senses other than sight. Better? More vivid? This is a fun activity to do with kids, too. Have them write about the playground or gym or cafeteria; then go there and hunt for sensory details!
Feel free to share your final paragraph in the comments if you’d like! I’m busy at BEA in New York through tonight but will check in to read from the airport if I can, and you can cheer one another on, too!
Today’s Thursday Quick-Write is courtesy of guest author Pam Bachorz! (Bio 
