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Welcome Mat: Your Novel’s Title When you are brainstorming titles, think of it as a welcome mat. A title’s job is to bring readers into your novel, story, or picture book. This is why the title is often changed by
Stiff Competition for These Picture Book Topics Dial editor, Liz Waniewski (ONE–es-key) spoke at the Arkansas SCBWI 2007 conference. For a couple months before the conference, she kept track of her slush pile picture book submissions by category. This resulted in my 2007 posting 12 Picture Book Topics to Avoid, one of the more popular [...]
Within the picture book genre, there are certain sub-genres and I’ll cover some of these in the next few days. First, the ABC books. How to Write a Good ABC Book Story Oriented Alphabet Books. If you want to write an ABC book, you should first read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, a rollicking story with [...]
Scene Cuts Help Quicken Your Novel’s Pace Readers today like fast-paced novels. Yet, too fast a pace confuses the reader. When you revise your novel, you can solve this by paying attention to transitions. Where are we? The most important thing to do in a transition from one scene to the next is to re-orient [...]
Match Emotional Structure to the Novel’s Settings Always try to matching the setting to the emotional layers of your story. For example, the setting of Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy is a New England coastal village, appropriate for several reasons. It’s built on a solid cliff, like Turner’s life is built on the solid [...]
Character Names Help Characterize A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but do you really WANT to smell a swamp lily? Doesn’t the name itself just put you off? Or consider that in early drafts Margaret Mitchell is supposed to have named her famous heroine Pansy, instead of Scarlett O’Hara. Do you [...]
Voice Friday: Word Choices Voice Friday: Word Connotations Voice Friday: Word Sounds A professional writer must be a lover of words. It is the basis of their craft. We know about the definition of words, what words mean. Today, I want to talk about connotations of words. Connotations Speaking to Connotations John Ciardi and Miller [...]
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