Good morning! It’s Q and A Wednesday – a chance to ask your questions about writing to an all-star cast of author volunteers. This week’s guests are David Lubar, Nancy Castaldo,and Phil Bildner!
Teachers & librarians – Feel free to ask your questions in the comments. It’s fine to ask a general question or to direct one directly to a specific guest author. Our 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.
Hi, everyone! It’s Kate today. (You didn’t think I could sit back and let our guest authors have all the fun, did you?)
A couple weeks ago, I was at the Boston Museum of Science with my daughter when I saw this quote on the wall in the room that talks about sound…
“The acoustics of the season…”
I like that. Because so often, when we write, we get caught up in our characters and the action, and we forget that every day has weather and a feeling outdoors. Every day has sounds that would let us know, even if we were blindfolded, what season it is.
So today’s quick-write is this: Write about “the acoustics of the season” for your work in progress. You can choose a single day, a single moment if you’d like. Or, if you’d rather, write about the acoustics and sounds of this photograph that I took out on the lake over the weekend.
As always, feel free to share a bit of what you wrote in the comments!
Happy Monday, everyone! Our guest author for today’s mini-lesson is the inimitable Linda Urban, whose new book THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING made me laugh and cry both. And on top of that, it made me crave donuts, too. You can read my not-quite-a-review of the book over at the Nerdy Book Club, but for now, Linda’s visiting us to talk about something that’s a part of all of our writing lives — time.
Got minute? Let’s talk time.
One of the coolest things about writing is that we can become masters of time. We can speed it up, summarizing entire weeks of a school year in a sentence (By the time my daily writing journal was full, I had come to the conclusion that Dana and I would never see eye to eye on this.) or slow time down so that a second-long gesture takes on weight and importance through its extention. (Dana stared at me, her pencil tapping out a funeral march, and I swear I could see the whole history of our friendship erased in the slow, steady shake of her head.). We use scenes to allow our readers to participate in the important stuff, to feel crucial emotions, to process information along with our characters, to experience action. We use summary to say: here’s a bit of info you’ll need to know, but you don’t have to fully engage in.
Time is one of the ways that we signal importance. We usually spend more time with major characters than minor ones. More time in scenes that detail key actions or emotions than in scenes with little consequence. You can use this assumption to your advantage. Want to hide a clue? How about sneaking it into a scene where the majority of our attention is spent on something else? Want readers to understand that a moment in a character’s past shapes their current actions? Don’t just tell us, take the time to show us in a scene.
And what about those really important parts of our story – the ones that mark crucial decisions or key turning points? We can use time to help those moments stand out in the mind of the reader.
Here’s an example from my most recent novel The Center of Everything, which has time (our perception of it and our desire to manipulate it) as one of its themes. In this scene, our main character, Ruby, who has been shielding herself from her emotions after the death of her grandmother Gigi, has just seen the color wheel project of her classmate, Nero DeNiro. The wheel is creative and funny and Ruby laughs a real, genuine laugh and feels for the first time in a long time. This is what happens next:
But when she stops laughing, all the little Nero faces start to blur. And Ruby has a bunch of thoughts.
One of them is that there is something wrong with her eyes.
Another is that there is something wrong with her ears, because when Lucy says “Are you okay?” it sounds like she’s using a speaker phone.
And another is that maybe there is something wrong with her hands, because they have dropped her pencil to the floor, and even though it makes sense for her to bend over and pick the pencil up, her hands are not moving. They are just sitting there on her color wheel, covering up all the complement lines. And there are drops of water landing on her hands and on the painted squares of color too, and the red and the orange are mixing all up into some other color that Ruby doesn’t have a name for and for which there is no complement on her color wheel, and she knows she is going to get a bad grade now.
“Ruby?” That’s Mrs. Tomas talking. “Ruby? Did you hurt yourself?”
What I hoped to do in this bit of the scene was to both slow time down in terms of the way that Ruby is processing and experiencing information, but also speed up the events around her. I spent time in the scene to put in the details that show how Ruby is experiencing sound, color and movement, so that the reader can truly feel her struggling to make sense of what is happening. I cut out the details that she doesn’t process, such as Lucy and Nero calling their teacher Mrs. Tomas over to the table to help. In playing with time in this way, I hoped to signal that this moment was unlike the ones that had come before – that it was important to Ruby and important to the story.
So, how might this work in the story that you are writing? Have you come to a crucial scene yet? Is there a key moment you want your readers to slow down and really experience? Think about that moment and see if you can find one central action in it – the turning of a door handle, the connection of bat to ball, the touch of a fingertip to the nape of a neck – and slow it down. Slow it way down.
As an experiment, let’s overdo. Let’s see exactly how long we can extend this moment. Keep it moving forward but detail every sense, every thought, every tiny change along the way. See how long you can make this moment last.
Not in the middle of a project? You can still give this a whirl. Take a fairy or folk tale you know well, identify a key moment, and extend that. Can you make the bite of a poisoned apple last for a paragraph? Two? A page?
When you’re done writing, take a look at what you’ve got. Chances are what you’ve written is way longer and more detailed than anything you’d want to put into a novel or short story. But I’m betting you’re going to find some great details in there, some emotions you hadn’t examined before, and some key words or phrases that you’ll want to keep in the scene – and maybe use again in times when you want your readers to remember that crucial plot moment.
If you did do the experiment using a moment from your work-in-progress, put it aside for a day or two and then see if you can edit it down to something that works for you. At the very least, I’m betting that this exercise has you thinking about that moment in a more vivid and dramatic way.
Note from Kate: Feel free to share a few lines of today’s writing in the comments if you’d like! Thanks again, Linda, for joining us! And don’t forget, everyone, that Jo has your Monday Morning Warm-Up today, too!
Good morning! Your Thursday Quick-Write today is courtesy of guest author Megan Miranda. My favorite thing about Megan’s YA novels is the way they’re infused with science — total reading candy for geeks like me.
Megan is the author of the young adult novels Fracture and Hysteria, both published by Bloomsbury/Walker Books for Young Readers. She has a degree in Biology from MIT and spent her post-college years working in biotech and, later, teaching high school science. She currently lives near Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband and two young children. Megan is represented by Sarah Davies at The Greenhouse Literary Agency. Today, she’s visiting to talk about point of view.
What We See vs. How We See
On a recent vacation, I found myself at a desk with a view of the ocean—which was coincidentally the perfect backdrop for me to write a very relevant scene of my work in progress. My main character was about to take the plunge—quite literally—into the ocean.
I started writing what I saw: the light catching off the moving water as the sun set on the horizon; the way I could see beneath the surface to a deeper shade of blue; how the world felt suddenly limitless, stretching out before me.
All of which was there and true, but also not at all howmy main character would see these details. Because that character about to take the plunge into the water? She can’t swim. This same setting, filtering through me in a calm and peaceful way, would be terrifying for her. Those same details represent uncertainty for her. She’s full of anxiety. That setting sun is a ticking clock, the premonition of darkness coming. The water that seems to turn a deeper shade of blue beneath the surface is bottomless, disorienting, and something to be feared.
Setting the scene is not just what we see, but how we see it.
When describing a scene, ask yourself: What’s my narrator’s perspective?
The details our characters see are important, but how they see them gives the reader an even greater understanding.
Ask yourself:
*Who is setting the scene for us?
*What’s their mood? What are they feeling?
*Why are they there?
This is a picture I took on that vacation. It’s a beach that’s only accessible by water. But this setting can be described in countless different ways depending on who’s behind the camera, what they’re feeling, and why they’ve landed there:
*What is he or she feeling? Is she lonely? Content? Exhausted? Excited?
*Why is he or she there? Did he seek the spot for solitude? Is he hiding from someone? Is he exploring? Is he lost?
Feel free to use your own story setting, your current view out the window, or this picture, if you’d like.
But whatever you choose to describe, think about the perspective of the narrator. What’s his or her mood? Why is he or she there?
And let your narrator tell us how he or she sees the scene.
It’s time for this week’s Q and A Wednesday – a chance to ask your questions about writing to an all-star cast of author volunteers. This week’s guests are Donna Gephart, Cynthia Lord, and David Lubar!
Teachers & librarians – Feel free to ask your questions in the comments. It’s fine to ask a general question or to direct one directly to a specific guest author. Our 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.
I’m thrilled to share the news that someone has a birthday today. It’s Ernest the Sea Monster!
SEA MONSTER AND THE BOSSY FISH is out today, a follow-up to my picture book SEA MONSTER’S FIRST DAY with Chronicle Books. I’m super-excited about this book because:
1) Like the first book, it’s illustrated by the talented and hilarious Andy Rash.
2) I really love Ernest. I want him to live in my lake.
3) I’ve already heard from quite a few teachers and librarians that this book will be kicking off their school years when the subject of bullying and inclusion come up. In SEA MONSTER AND THE BOSSY FISH, there’s a new fish in town, and he hasn’t learned how to be a good friend…yet. The book takes a constructive look at bullying and will get kids thinking and talking about their own responses and responsibilities when it comes to bullying and exclusion in the schoolyard.
4) Along those lines, the fantastic Chronicle Kids team has created a “Friend Fish Pledge” handout and poster that you can display in your classroom and pass out to students during the first week of school. I think it’s a great reminder of what good citizenship looks like, for sea monsters and kids alike. You can download the pdf file here.
It’s time for your Tuesday Quick-Write, and guest author Amy Ludwig VanDerwater joins us with a little writing of gratitude today…
Amy is the author of two poetry books for children: FOREST HAS A SONG (Clarion, 2013) and READING TIME (WordSong, date TBA). She is also co-author (with Lucy Calkins and Stephanie Parsons) of POETRY: BIG THOUGHTS IN SMALL PACKAGES (Heinemann, 2013). You can find Amy at her blogs, The Poem Farm, a site full of hundreds of poems and mini lessons and Sharing Our Notebooks, a site celebrating notebooks of all kinds.
TUESDAY QUICK-WRITE: THANK A STRANGER
Look around. Wherever you are, strangers have touched your life: pioneers cleared the land, a faraway soul designed those shoes, someone unknown to you raised your puppy during his first weeks. Invisibly, strangers bump against and through our lives. Today stop to thank one. Write a letter.
The style of your letter does not matter. You may write a formal letter or you may simply write notes. You may write a poem or a story or a list. You may share or never share. But thank. And begin with a stranger. It will not be hard to find one. Just look around.
This is a snip from a letter I recently wrote to a stranger. Glancing atop my desk, I saw two dolls sewn by our daughters.
One quick glance reminded me of my own long-ago doll:
Dear Stranger,
When I was six years old, you sewed something for me. You did not know me or my family or what would land me in the hospital (tonsils), but still, you sewed. You sewed a doll by hand, a doll about seven inches long, her head the size of a silver dollar. My doll had yellow yarn hair and a full-skirted kelly green and white checkered dress. She was a post-surgery gift, given to me by a nurse.
In the 1970’s, you were a hospital gift-sewer, a hidden volunteer, my doll’s mother. You created this doll with simple peach hands and bits of lace on her collar and sleeves. You made her bright green satin legs. And I never said, “Thank you,” because I never knew who you were…
We are touched daily by those we will never know. As Margaret Tsuda writes in her poem Commitment in a City, “If we should pass again/within the hour,/I would not know it./Yet –/I am committed to/love you.” In his poem Candles, Carl Dennis encourages us, “But today, for a change, why not a candle/For the man whose name is unknown to you?” Why not? And as we sit in candlelight, why not write a few lines of gratitude too?
Note from Kate: Thanks, Amy! Campers, as always, feel free to share a few lines of what you wrote today in the comments!
We’ll be giving away a copy of Amy’s FOREST HAS A SONG to one commenter, drawn at random.
Hi there! I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday weekend and is back, ready to write this morning! Today’s guest author is Donne Gephart!
Donna’s humorous middle grade novels from Random House include: As If Being 12-3/4 Isn’t Bad Enough, My Mother Is Running for President!, How to Survive Middle School and Olivia Bean, Trivia Queen. Her new novel, Death by Toilet Paper, comes out August 2014. Many resources for student and adult writers are available at: http://www.donnagephart.com
Making Sense of Sensory Writing
Did you know 80% of our brain’s energy is used to process what we see? 80%! If you ever want to rest your brain, close your eyes. (But not while driving!)
While writing, we tend to rely mainly on our sense of sight and ignore our other four senses. We should pay attention to all our senses when writing, especially during the most important scenes – the ones we want to slow down for our readers.
Here are examples of writers using sensory description other than sight:
TOUCH: From Holes by Louis Sachar – During the summer, the daytime temperature hovers around ninety-five degrees in the shade—if you can find any shade. There’s not much shade in a big dry lake.
(Temperature and texture are good ways to use the sense of touch.)
TASTE: From Crystal Allen’s How Lamar’s Bad Prank Won a Bubba-Sized Trophy: . . . to be nice, I take a handful and stuff them in my mouth. Man, these peanuts are off the chain! They’re sweet and salty and remind me of Mom’s snack mix.
She holds the bowl up. “Take some more, baby. Aren’t they good?”
SOUND: From Saint Louis Armstrong Beach by Brenda Woods: Almost like a whisper, I heard someone calling out my name. . . . Then, four times in a row, “Saint, Saint, Saint, Saint,” each time louder, a girl’s voice, until finally she stood right in front of me. “Saint!” she screeched.
SMELL: From Small as an Elephant by Jennifer Richard Jacobson: Clothes dryer – that’s what the tent smelled like: a trapped-heat smell that filled his nostrils and told him the sun was high.
Smells, in particular, are a powerful way to access memories. The scent of your mother’s favorite flower. The odor of your father, after a day’s work. The smell of grandma’s soup bubbling on the stove. The sharp stink of a science experiment gone wrong.
Time to write: Think of a memory triggered by a smell, sound, taste or touch and write about it. Use as many sensory details as you can while writing. Those sensory details will help your readers experience your scene more deeply. Those will help recreate the mood of your memory.
Every time I do this exercise, I’m brought back to my childhood kitchen with my mother cooking at the stove or to our holiday dinners, brimming with aunts, uncles and cousins and smells by the dozens. Someone once wrote about the taste of blood and sweat at his local boxing gym. Another young woman wrote about the smell of her school lunchroom, where as a kindergartener, she was made to sit until she finished her lunch. (She sat through every single lunch period — as every grade from K-8 sat, ate and left — before being allowed to leave, her lunch still uneaten.)
Who knows what YOU will come up with? And who knows where it might lead?
Happy writing trails . . .
Note from Kate: Feel free to share a little of what you wrote today in comments – and remember that even when Gae and I aren’t around to respond, you can cheer one another on with replies!
Good morning! As we wrap up this second week of Teachers Write virtual summer writing camp, I want to say two things before I announce giveaway winners and send you off to give/get critiques with Gae.
1. You rock. Seriously. So many of you have come here nervous to write and terrified to share, and you’ve taken deep breaths and done just that. You are mentors for your students, not only when it comes to reading and writing but also when it comes to courage – and that is being a Mentor in the most capital-M, Dumbledore-like sense of the word. I’m cheering for you.
2. Remember that it’s summer and you are human. I’m getting lots of notes/emails/tweets saying things like, “Well, I’d love to do Teachers Write, but I have a dentist’s appointment on the 12th, so I won’t be able to write that day and oh, well, I guess I’d better call the whole thing off.” No. You should write with us whenever you can write with us. If you took yesterday off to watch fireworks and eat s’mores, that’s fine. Don’t beat yourself up over missing a day. Just wash the marshmallow out of your hair this morning and get back to work.
THE BARFTASTIC LIFE OF LOUIE BURGER by Jenny Meyerhoff goes to Kimberly Mach.
BORROWED NAMES by Jeannine Atkins goes to Jen Howe.
And Lisa Schroeder’s ARC of FROSTING AND FRIENDSHIP goes to Kerri Schegan.
If you’re one of our book winners (sorry…U.S. addresses only, so if you’re overseas & you win, you can have it sent to a friend/relative) email me your mailing address via my contact form and we’ll get your book sent out. Have a great weekend, everyone!
It’s time for your Thursday Quick-Write! I know it’s a holiday, so no worries if you’re too busy setting off fireworks and eating s’mores to write before bedtime. You have the weekend…
Our guest author today is Jenny Meyerhoff. She’s the author of a young adult novel, Queen of Secrets, and three books for young readers–Sami’s Sleepaway Summer, Third Grade Baby, and most recently, The Barftastic Life of Louie Burger, a story about an aspiring stand-up comic with an unusual catch phrase. Unlike Louie, Jenny is not a comedian, but she does know a lot about barf. After all, she’s a mom. Her three kids love fluffernutters, comedy and reading. Jenny lives in Riverwoods, Illinois with her funny kids and her delightful husband. For more information, visit her website: www.jennymeyerhoff.com.
Setting a Mood
When I am writing a short story, a picture book or a novel, I believe one of my main goals is to make the reader feel something. In fact, this may be my most important goal, but often I get caught up in the plotting, the clever wordplay, the characterization, and I forget about the mood. When the writer isn’t deliberate about mood, the reader is often left emotionally cold.
The way I define mood, it is the overall emotional resonance of a piece of writing. While a novel as a whole has a mood each scene will also have its own mood as well, but that mood will relate to the overall mood. For example, if the overall mood of a novel is sad, then the moods of scenes may vary from heartbreaking to bittersweet but will likely not extend as far as giddy excitement, unless there is a great reason for it.
Often when I’m writing a first draft, I forget to think about mood, and while this is okay, at some point I need to go back and check that what I’ve written isn’t at odds with the mood I meant to create. Maybe I wrote about the desolation of gray snow and bare trees in the same scene that my character got up the nerve to ask for what she wanted and got it. My reader is going to have a hard time knowing what to feel. When I revise, I pick details that echo what my character is feeling and describe them in ways that evoke a certain feeling.
Get a blank paper and in a few sentences, write a bare bones factual description of the room that you are in right now, for example, one brown desk, a wooden bookshelf, a rectangular window. Use all five senses if you can. How does the room smell, feel, what sounds do you hear. Get up and walk around. Pick thinks up, touch them.
Okay, now imagine you are creating a scene in that room with a character who is feeling terrified. What would that character notice about the room? How would it be different from the emotionless factual description. Perhaps the way the clock ticks? The way the door sticks? The fact that the door doesn’t lock. Write a paragraph describing the room from this character’s point of view. Don’t tell us that s/he is terrified, but make it clear from the description.
Now write from the point of view of a character who is in love.
Now from the point of view of a character is impatient, sad or angry.
Extension: if you have a work in progress, pick a scene, and write the emotion you want your reader to feel at the top of the page. Now read through and notice all the details you’ve included that evoke that emotion, all the places you could add detail that would add layers of emotion, all the places you’ve created an emotional response at odds with the mood you intended.
Thanks for writing with me!
Jenny
Note from Kate: Feel free to share a few lines of what you wrote in the comments.
Jenny’s giving away a signed copy of her newest book THE BARFTASTIC LIFE OF LOUIE BURGER to one lucky commenter today!
Happy Monday, everyone! Our guest author for today’s mini-lesson is the inimitable Linda Urban, whose new book THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING made me laugh and cry both. And on top of that, it made me crave donuts, too. You can read my not-quite-a-review of the book over at the Nerdy Book Club, but for now, Linda’s visiting us to talk about something that’s a part of all of our writing lives — time.
Good morning! Your Thursday Quick-Write today is courtesy of 
Our guest author today is Jenny Meyerhoff. She’s the author of a young adult novel, Queen of Secrets, and three books for young readers–Sami’s Sleepaway Summer, Third Grade Baby, and most recently, The Barftastic Life of Louie Burger, a story about an aspiring stand-up comic with an unusual catch phrase. Unlike Louie, Jenny is not a comedian, but she does know a lot about barf. After all, she’s a mom. Her three kids love fluffernutters, comedy and reading. Jenny lives in Riverwoods, Illinois with her funny kids and her delightful husband. For more information, visit her website: 