For the past few summers, I've co-taught a picture book workshop with author/illustrator, Leslie Helakoski at the Highlights Foundation. HOOT AND HONK, Leslie’s newest picture book, follows an owlet and a gosling, who have trouble adjusting to sleep patterns when they end up in each other’s nest. The spare text in this beautifully illustrated bedtime ...
Fiction Notes
Believe in Your Story
-
-
-
3 Ways to Show Don’t Tell
Classic advice to beginning fiction writers: Show, Don't Tell. I taught several sessions to teachers last week and they all nodded. Great advice. But how do you DO that in practical terms? How do you teach students to Show, Don't Tell? Show, Don't Tell: Why? In the old days of storytelling, it was fine to just say ...
-
5 Ramblings for 2017
Today is a series of rambles, comments on a variety of things. Why do we keep on writing? I ask myself this at least monthly, if not weekly and daily. Why? And there are many answers. Because there's a story to finish. Because there are readers to please. Because I can't NOT write. Putting words into print seems to ...
-
How to Spice Up Perfectly Good (but Boring) Scenes
In my work-in-progress, I'm studying a scene to see if I can tighten it in any way. It's a perfectly good scene. The characters go to a jewelry store. The protagonist's mother has a birthday next week and he's got to find a suitable gift. In the jewelry store, they pick up a crucial clue ...
-
Why Does Your Character Do That: A New Look at BackStory
I've written about backstory, flashbacks and dealing with what happens before the story starts several times before. This fall, however I'm taking a new look at backstory. Lisa Cron in Story Genius gives the backstory a whole new life. In particular, Cron asks WHY a character is doing something and then looks to something in the ...