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!
One more quick note before we start… I’m actually in New York City the first part of this week for BEA, so I’ll be checking in when I can, but it may take longer than usual for comments to be approved, etc.
Today’s topic is the very first one people asked about when we started talking about summer writing camp on Twitter.
“How do you find time to write?”
(If you are already an expert at making time or you magically have plenty of time, and you just want to get writing, you should go straight to guest author Jo Knowles’ blog and look for her weekly Monday Morning Warm-Up. She shares great writing prompts every Monday!)
If you’re still here…let’s talk about time to write. For the first five years of my writing career, I was also teaching middle school full time. I have a family, too, and lots of people asked how I managed to write books with everything else going on. The answer is easy…and not-so-easy. I made time because it was important to me.
Nobody gets more than 24 hours in a day, and while some people can get by on less sleep than others, we’re all still on a pretty level playing field when it comes to time. Notice that the title of this post isn’t “Finding Time.” It’s “Making Time.” You can’t decide that you want to write and then simply conjure up two new hours a day. Your days, like mine, are probably already pretty full from the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep.
So where does that writing time come from? It’s pretty simple. You have to not do something that you’re currently doing, and use that time to write. So take a look at how you spend a typical day, and if you really want to write, choose something else that can go. If you watch TV, maybe that means not watching TV. Or watching half an hour less. Maybe it means checking your email once in the morning and once in the afternoon instead of flittering in and out of it all day long. Maybe it means waking up half an hour earlier, or staying up half an hour later. During the school year, maybe it means having your lunch in front of your computer or notebook instead of in the faculty room. Or maybe you can write instead of chatting with the other parents while your kid is at ballet/karate/baseball/basket-weaving practice. I don’t recommend stealing time from exercise or family dinners, but there are lots of other options.
I’ve blogged about this before, talking about “Waiting for the Perfect Time to Write” and “Making Time to Write,” and you can read those posts if you need more ideas, but it comes down to this: If you really want to write, you need to do these things:
Look at how you spend your time now. What can go?
Make time. Even 15-20 minutes a day is a great start. Make it an appointment with yourself, and then keep it.
Make space. If you choose a place to write, as well as a time, you’ll be more likely to stick to your routine. It doesn’t have to be fancy – one of my friends set up a tiny desk in her closet – but it helps to have a place where you usually write.
Share your plans with the other people who live in your house, and remind them that this is important to you.
Ready for your assignment this week?
Make a writing plan for your summer and for your school year.
Then if you’d like, leave a comment to let us know:
What you found that you might be able to cut out of your schedule or cut back on to make time to write.
When you’ll be writing each day & for how long. Remember to be realistic. 15 minutes is fine to start.
Where you’ll usually write. This can be different places on different days, depending on your schedule.
Who you told about your plans. Remember, sharing your writing plans with the people in your life helps to make them real and reminds your family & friends to give you that space for writing.
Tomorrow, we’ll have our first Tuesday quick-write…to make use of some of that time you foundmade!
So… I hear some of you are kind of scared about this whole writing thing. Jen Vincent mentioned that many of the comments on her Teach Mentor Texts writing group blog post today were about anxiety over sharing your writing, or being good enough. She thought I might want to blog about that, and she was right.
This is where you’re probably expecting me to say, “Don’t be afraid” or “There’s no reason to be scared.” But I’m not going to say that.
Be scared. That’s absolutely fine.
Because you know what? I’m scared, too. I put up a blog post a few days ago expecting a dozen people to sign up for a cozy little online writing camp. And then I turned around and there were more than 600 of you. Way cool…but for sure, a little scary, too.
I’m also scared when I start a new book. When I was writing my first book, I thought this would be a temporary thing…that the second and third books would be easy and fun and fearless. But no. Turns out they’re all scary in different ways, and making art – the very process of making art – is inherently fear-producing. (There’s a whole book about this idea, by the way – ART AND FEAR by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It’s excellent.) But making art is scary in a good way.
You see… there are two kinds of fear. The first kind keeps you safe from things that might cause you real and imminent harm.
My son and I encountered this cottonmouth while we were hiking in the Everglades in April. We were scared, and we quickly identified our fear as the kind that saves you from danger. With this kind of fear, it’s good and healthy to act on your fear and run away to avoid venomous bites and other potentially fatal things.
But there’s another kind of fear – the kind that we feel when we’re about to exceed the artificial limits we’ve set for ourselves. When we’re about to step outside of our cozy little boxes and try something new. Something that’s scary because we might fail. And what will people think?
I learned a lot about this kind of fear in March, when I gave a TED talk at the organization’s annual conference in Long Beach.
Photo by James Duncan Davidson – TED
There were 1500 people in the audience, including CEOs of huge companies, inventors, producers, engineers, a former vice president, and other leaders in just about every area imaginable.
One of the other speakers was Bill Nye the Science Guy, who said something that I am going to remember for the rest of my life. He told one of the other (scared) speakers, “If you weren’t nervous, it wouldn’t be worth doing.” And he was right. I was terrified when I stepped onto that stage. Absolutely terrified. It was extremely uncomfortable. But I learned so much from the experience, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
The kind of fear I was feeling is not the kind we should avoid. It’s the kind of fear we should seek out because it gives us opportunities to be brave and to grow. In fact, nervous writing camp member Colby Sharp reminded me this morning that Mattie Breen, the main character in Linda Urban’s brilliant novel HOUND DOG TRUE says it perfectly: “You can’t have brave without scared.” It’s true.
That twist of anxiety you feel when you think about sharing your writing? Think of it as a big, huge billboard in your heart that says, “GO, YOU!! YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING AWESOME AND NEW!” And after you do the new awesome thing, you will never be quite the same. Your world will be a little bigger. And this is good.
One of my favorite things about being an author is being part of an incredible community of people who write and illustrate books for kids and young adults. Some of you interact with these authors via Skype and online, and you already know how much they rock. The rest of you are about to find out, because more than THIRTY guest authors have offered to visit us at Teachers Write! over the next ten weeks.
Jen Vincent (Jen’s more than a guest, too! She’s a teacher-writer who’ll be blogging every Sunday about her journey & inviting you to join the conversation.)
Some guest authors will be offering Monday morning mini-lessons. Some will be providing Tuesday & Thursday writing prompts, and some have signed up to answer your questions on Wednesdays and hang out to be part of our Friday Writing Happy Hour conversations. They’re doing this because they support teachers and librarians, so please support them, too, by purchasing and sharing their books whenever you can.
The list above is a work in progress. It includes folks who signed up and committed to visit on specific days. Other authors will be dropping in from time to time to answer questions and join our conversations, too, so get ready for some surprises along the way. (You never know who’s going to show up at writing camp!)
Note for authors: If you signed up for a day but you’re not on this list yet, please let me know and I’ll fix that. (With 570 more than 700 teachers/librarians signed up so far, it’s been a little crazy around here… 🙂 If you haven’t signed up to help but would like to join us as a guest author, please drop me an email (kmessner at kate messner dot com) I’m focusing on traditionally published folks for now because those are the books teachers are most likely to know & have as models in their classrooms – also because I don’t want this to get too overwhelming. Thanks!
Thanks to all of you who read OVER AND UNDER THE SNOW and shared it and talked about it and read it aloud to kids while you sipped hot chocolate, Chronicle Books has asked illustrator Chris Silas Neal and I to work on a follow-up book! UP IN THE GARDEN AND DOWN IN THE DIRT will explore the hidden secret world of a vegetable garden while a child and grandparent plant,weed and harvest up above.
I’ll be spending a lot of time in my vegetable garden this summer, looking even more closely than usual at the spiders, ants, grubs, and worms that live alongside (and underneath!) my basil, marigolds, and tomatoes.
So if you happen to walk through my neighborhood and see me sprawled on my belly, peering into the dirt with my notebook at my side, don’t worry. I’m no crazier than usual; I’m just doing research.
