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30 Days to a Stronger Scene What has the most potential for improving your writing? Learning to write a strong scene; then making sure every scene in your story is strong. Because it’s so important, we’ll spend the next 30 days breaking down scenes and trying to write the strongest possible. 30 Days to a [...]
Exploring Issues through Story This weekend, I read Kenneth Oppel’s new book, Half Brother. I’ve enjoyed his award-winning Silverwing trilogy about bats, and loved his AIRBORN, a Printz Honor book. Because his career has been grounded in fantasy, it was interesting to see this foray into historical fiction. Half Brother is about a family who [...]
On BookTrailerManual.com, we’ve posted a Q& with Analine Johnson, a librarian from Laredo, TX, who loves to create book trailers. Four–count them, four!–of her trailers are finalists for the new School Library Journal Trailie award. A
When should your characters notice and comment on something and when should it be just subtly included? Subtext is when something is going on in the story, but it’s only mentioned in passing, slantwise, or it’s just understood. Often, subtext comes out in dialogue, the unspoken things that the audience understands from knowing the characters [...]
Notes from the Field If you’re revising a novel or picture book, one step is to look at the dialogue of your characters and sharpen it. Tom Chiarella, in his book,Writing Dialogue suggests recording dialogue — yes, you get to EavesDrop! — around you for a day. At least for a couple hours. If you [...]
I’m getting much closer to actually starting my new novel, but I’m still asking myself a crucial question. What is the cost of success for the main character? Loss of innocence. If you write a bildungsroman novel, that genre which take a main character from
As I’m working on the plan for this new novel, creating characters and trying out voices, I’m trying to strengthen my weakest areas. My Weakness is Character My weakness is character. I can plot fine, but creating characters with plausible character growth is hard for me. I think I’ve got it and my friends tell [...]
How Firm are Book Publisher’s Guidelines on Book Length? I had a question come up last week: how hard and fast are the rules about the length of a picture book manuscript? Can you get by with 1900 words? 2000 words? 2500 words? The length requirements for every genre, from picture books to easy readers [...]
Use the power of your word processor to help you keep track of details while writing a novel. You’ll have fewer mistakes Have you ever forgetten the color of a character’s eyes? Keep a Character Bible: create a file in which you keep descriptions of each character. This is much easier than hunting through a [...]
Ever have one of those off days? You don’t sleep and wake up grouchy. You’re half sick but not really sick enough to call it a sick day. You are just disgruntled and don’t know why. 5 Things to do on Off-Days On those awful days, there are still tasks you can do to be [...]
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