Megan

Oct 09

This post is going to be pretty short. After a hectic week, I’ve had little time to research exciting things. What I did have time for, though, was to sign up for my first ever Writers’ Workshop.

The workshop is next weekend, 10/16. It is being held in conjunction with the Boston Book Festival and run by Grub Street. I’ve been thinking about trying out a workshop or class through Grub Street for a while, but the cost has always held me back. What if the class isn’t good? What if workshops don’t work for me? This workshop will give me the perfect opportunity to try them out because it is free.

If you are in the Boston area, you should look into this workshop and the other Boston Book Festival events. While last year, their first year, had some problems – pouring rain, more people than the spaces could handle – the festival was still a lot of fun. After all, what could be better than a celebration of the literary world? This year should be better organized and there are several Children/Young Adult lit events on the schedule, including presentations from Jeff Kinney and Kristin Cashore (my review of Fire to follow next week). Sadly I have to work part of the day and will miss Jeff Kinney, but by optimizing what little time I have, I’m hoping to get the most that I can out of the festival.

Look for my update next week, 10/17, where I will share my thoughts on the event and my first workshopping experience.

Oct 07

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled How Handwriting Trains the Brain. According to a study, children write more words faster and express more ideas when writing by hand as opposed to typing. This raises an interesting question. Does a writer’s reliance on typing as opposed to writing by hand limit the writer’s creativity?

Writing by Hand

I’ve always been drawn to writing by hand, but you can’t easily share your work if it’s written on paper. Such is the nature of our digital society. Despite my preference for handwriting, typing things into a computer seems to save time. Or does it?

If writing by hand engages the mind more than typing, are we really saving time when we turn to the computer for our first drafts? If we are engaging our creativity to a higher degree by hand than on the computer, writing things first by hand should lead to less editing, thus saving more time while helping us to produce better content.

Engaging our Creative Juices

I’ve always found that my ideas flow better when I am outlining by hand. The same is true for putting pen to paper. I don’t know if it’s because I feel like each word needs to count for more if I don’t want my paper to be covered with scribbles, or if, as the artlice from the WSJ claims, the actual act of creating the letters engages my brain. If your brain is already engaged, it seems to follow that it would be easier to tap into your creativity.

A Dying Art

Sadly, kids are spending less time practicing their penmanship. They are more and more often using computers in class. It’s practically unheard of to submit a handwritten essay in college or high school and I would guess the same is true for middle school. So what does this mean for our content? Will our society start producing less interesting content? Will our words become mundane and our stories sub-par?

What do you think? Which do you prefer? Do you write everything by hand? 50/50? Or are you a die hard technology fan? Do you think technology limits our creativity? Our productivity? Should we be concerned by the dying art of writing by hand?

Oct 05

I finally finished reading all the Percy Jackson books, and I’ve got to say, job well done. Although I personally did not relate to Percy Jackson, I found Rick Riordan’s use of voice captivating. Told in first person, you know who Percy Jackson is from the very beginning. The books are riddled with sarcastic and witty remarks and unexpected similes and metaphors, not to mention good ol’ fashioned imagery. Here’s a line I loved from the 5th book, The Last Olympian: “I hoped she wouldn’t get stuck. I couldn’t imagine how much Drano we’d need to un-stick a hellhound wedged halfway down a tunnel to the Underworld.” The reason Riordan’s voice is successful, though, is because he waits to throw out comments like this until you aren’t expecting them. They are not on every page. They creep up on you.

Another thing Riordan succeeds at is beginnings. He knows how to pull you in. Take another example from Book 5. Here’s the first line of the book: “The end of the world started when a pegasus landed on the hood of my car.” How can you not keep reading after a line like that?

As a series, these books were successful for many reasons:

Percy Jackson – although I did not relate to him, his voice was witty and interesting. I wanted to keep reading to see what things would come out of his mouth next.
Mystery – I know a lot of people frown up the use of prophecy to drive a story, but Riordan does it well, and, after all, these books are a retelling of Greek mythology, whose very existence relies on prophecy. Each book contains a prophecy, and the series is held together by one overarching prophecy that we don’t hear until the end of the final book. The use of a separate prophecy for each book gives each book a mystery that is solved by the end, but, because of the main prophecy, the reader wants to come back for the next book.
The world – Riordan has created a believable world, where mythological creatures exist and the Gods live above the Empire State Building. Without a successful world, complete with an explanation for how monsters that were killed in Greek myths have returned and why humans don’t know that there are monsters, demigods, and satyrs running around, the book would not have succeeded.

All-in-all, this was a successful series that wrapped up nicely. If you are a writer for MG/YA, i highly recommend reading the series if you haven’t already.

Oct 03

Yesterday I finally picked up a copy of The Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market, 2011 and I am inspired. I wish I had picked up a copy sooner. If you haven’t picked your copy up yet, I highly recommend you do.

Bitter Sweet Endings and New Beginnings

I have decided to put my WIP on hold. It is a total mess and, while I still like the basic idea behind it, it’s not what I really want to be writing. This book started as something completely different. By the time I reworked everything to make the plot work, I just didn’t love it anymore. Even though I am so close to the end of the 1st draft, that last couple chapters are killing me. I need a break. I need to quit rushing to finish it out of my desire to have something to get published. If it’s not good, no one will buy it. Of course, I’m not trashing the book, just putting it on hold and starting something new.

In reading the articles in the Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market, an idea began to form, and that idea turned into a nice, concise plot summary complete with a beginning, middle and end. There are tough decisions, identity issues, and betrayal. There is a solid setting, character flaws, and suspense. And the best part about it is that the idea came along without forcing it. The same cannot be said about my now on hold WIP.

While I love NaNoWriMo, it did cause me to force an idea. I remember 3 years ago on November 1, sitting in my home office trying to will a plot into my head. Maybe veteran writers are capable of doing that, but for someone writing their first full length book, that kind of thinking can be disastrous. No wonder I have never succeeded in completing a NaNoWriMo.

What next?

This time around, I’m doing it right. I so badly want to dive in and start turning my concept into a book. But I learned my lesson last time. I’m going to sit down and write an outline. I’m going to develop my characters before I even put them to paper. I know that my outline will change and my characters may pick up new traits or abandon other ones, but to write a book without a blueprint can be suicide for a writing career, or at least it can be or me.

Oct 01

I received a shock the other day. The boyfriend actually asked me how I come up with blog posts. Now, this may not seem shocking to the general reader since I have a blog and have been pretty good about adding content, but it was a shock to me for two reasons.

The boyfriend’s job involves finding ways to integrate his company’s product with social media.
He was the one who insisted I start a blog and, in the early days, I asked him how to find things to blog about. I guess the tables have turned.

If you saw my post from 9/27/10, you will recall that one of my responsibilities at work is to find ways to use social media in my office. This is easier said then done. My office more or less acts as a consultant for national parks. Our client base is internal and we don’t get clients in the traditional sense. Figuring out where we fit in the social media world is no easy feat. Much as figuring out how an unpublished author can find a place in that world was quite the struggle.

Making the Most of Social Media

I know there are tons of blog posts by people far more experienced on this matter than I am, but to be honest, I didn’t find a lot of them to be that helpful. I am not a published author. I am not a non-fiction author trying to build my reputation. I am a fiction writer, and I write for middle grade and young adults. What in the world am I supposed to tweet, blog, Facebook, etc about?

Finding a Blog Topic

Before finding a blog topic, you first need to know what you are going to blog about. I decided to blog about writing, books I enjoy, publishing news, and the occasional blog about my writing progress (I didn’t want it to be all about my progress). By choosing these areas to focus on, I am killing two birds with one stone. I am forcing myself to stay apprised of things in the industry I am hoping to break into, while also creating and maintaining a blog.

To get ideas, I read a lot, and not just mg/ya books. I use Google Reader to have blog feeds sent to me so I don’t have to keep accessing things online. I also find new articles and blogs through Twitter. When I have time, I conduct Google searches on topics that I think might be interesting to my readers. If I find something interesting, I do more research and then write about it. If applicable, I link to the source that inspired me.

Of course, sometimes I get inspired from things around me. If I just had a breakthrough about character development, I may write about it. If I read something in a book and can’t decide how I feel about it, I may blog about that. The options are endless. Once you get started blogging, the inspiration starts to come to you more naturally. Just like any kind of writing.

Scheduling in Blogging Time

I try to blog every other day, but this can become quite time consuming. To get around the unpredictability of the work week, I set aside several hours every weekend to create my weekly blog posts. During the week I save interesting stories/articles or send myself short emails with the beginning of an idea. One easy way I keep track of links is through delicious.com. This is a network that allows you to save links and attach tags/notes to them. You can sign on from any computer, so it doesn’t matter where you are. If you have Internet, you have access to your links.

By tracking what I read during the week, I have some options for my upcoming posts come the weekend. All I have to do is a little research and a little writing. Then I schedule them to go out. Easy peasy.

Do you have any special tricks for blogging? Do you ever worry you will run out of ideas? Are there other subjects an unpublished writer can/should focus on in their blog?

Sep 29

I recently learned about this great website/newsletter – WriteSpa, part of Winslow Eliot’s website. You can either subscribe to the newsletter or view past newsletters online. The premise is to provide writers with a weekly writing exercise. In perusing some of the past exercises, I came to one from last week: Great Dialog (part 1/3). The exercise encouraged eavesdropping to improve dialog in your writing.

So why does this excite me?

I LOVE to eavesdrop. I can’t help it. Out at dinner, on the T (subway for you non-Bostonians out there), walking down the street, in a dressing room. If there are people conversing, I’m probably eavesdropping. I think my favorite type of conversations to eavesdrop on are phone conversations. There is a sense of mystery and intrigue. You have no clue who is on the other end. It’s always fun trying to figure out what is going on, creating the other end of the conversation in my head, imagining who the mystery person is in relation to the one in front of me. Of course, first dates are also fun to eavesdrop on.

Wait, doesn’t this make me a creep?

And now we come to the crux of the matter. If eavesdropping helps me to better experience the world and see how others interact, then there’s nothing creepy about it at all. It’s research. I mean, how boring would it be if all of my characters interacted in the same way? Super boring. So, to all you writers out there, I say give into your inner creep, the voyeur inside us all, and engage in some healthy eavesdropping.

Sep 27

I have officially immersed myself in the Social Media sphere. So what does that have to do with books, writing, and the title of this blog post? Just wait, I’m getting there.

Having been put in charge of my office’s social media, I started subscribing to Mashable and TechCrunch. And wouldn’t you know that instead of reading about all of the new advances in technology, I was captured by an article on Mashable titled “11 Astounding Sci-Fi Predictions that Came True.” The main premise of this article is that it is only natural that a few sci-fi inventions/predictions would become reality. There are so many sci-fis out there, how could a few authors not manage to get a few things right? But what struck me about the article was a completely different idea – do inventors invent things because sci-fi has shown them that they are possible? Does sci-fi plant the seeds into the heads of children and adults that then grow into our technological advances?

Ideas Spawned from Literature

All inventors come up with their ideas from somewhere. Who’s not to say that reading about a “newspad” in 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t give the brains at Apple the idea for the iPad? Sure, these technological advances may have come around without the help of sci-fi, but to dismiss the foreshadowing as mere coincidence? I don’t know. I’m not quite buying it.

Does sci-fi influence our future? Are we planting seeds in our readers heads about what the future can hold, and by doing so, encouraging them to create that future? Or are similarities in the predictions of books to the realities of the future merely coincidence?

Sep 25

So my secret is out. I’m a huge Project Runway junkie. I can’t get enough of it. While I was watching it the other day, I guess my subconscious was trying to tell me that I should be writing instead of watching t.v. because I could not stop comparing participating in the show to writing a novel.

Here are my comparisons:

Start with a plan. The designers that don’t have at least some idea of where they’re going before heading off to Mood to buy fabrics usually waste valuable time trying to figure out what to do with what they’ve got. Writing is much the same way. You dive in to an idea or a character without knowing where you want to go and then you spend a significant amount of time backtracking.
Edit, edit, edit. Having too much bling on your garment will generate a lot of negative criticism from the judges. Having too many useless words, characters, scenes, subplots, etc will generate negative criticism from agents and publishing houses.
Don’t over-think it. 9 out of 10 times, the designer who over-thinks his/her design gets the boot, or at least ends up in the bottom 3. If you over-think your writing, chances are you won’t end up in the bottom or anywhere else for that matter because you will not have a finished product. Over-thinking something can be the death of creativity. Of course, putting zero thought into something is equally as bad, if not worse. See my first point in the list.
And, most importantly, to directly quote Tim Gunn, “Make it work.” If you love your idea and you believe in it, then do whatever it takes to make it work.

Sep 23

I resisted reading this book for quite some time. I can’t say what it was, exactly, that made me revolt against it, but whatever it was, I am glad I got over it. While there was no central plot to this book, I found the story to be incredibly engaging. I read it in one sitting. Jeff Kinney really captured the voice of a middle school kid, including the selfish acts middle schooler perform without realizing they are selfish and the way a middle school kid sees the world. I felt like it could have been my diary from when I was in middle school, assuming I had been born a boy, of course.

I thought this was a great book and I highly recommend it, especially to writers of MG looking for a refresher course on life as a middle school kid.

For all those in the New England area, Jeff Kinney will be a presenter at the Boston Book Festival this year, October 16. The schedule of events isn’t posted yet, but it should be up sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Sep 21

Courtesy of Paul Foot

Alright. So September is almost over and I am not done. Life did, indeed, get in the way. In particular, my chronic headaches. And let me tell you, chronic headaches make writing near impossible. But it was more than just my excuses. It’s also feeling like I’m sprinting a marathon instead of pacing myself. Instead of really thinking about the scenes, I feel like I have been creating skeletons of scenes. But you know what, apparently I’m not alone.

Rushing to the finish line

I was reading a blog post from The Literary Lab called Don’t Rush to the Finish Line, and I realized that this is a common problem when there is a deadline involved. In reading the responses to the post, I realized that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to have merely sketches of scenes. After all, my deadline is more so that I can get the ideas all out there, see how the story will play out, and then start sketching my new story idea before I come back to the serious work of editing. So maybe rushing to the finish line isn’t so bad in this situation.

What do you think? Are you guilty of this? How rushed can your story be to still count as a first draft? Is rushing a bad thing?

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Page 14

Writers' Workshops and Book Festivals

Handwriting and Creativity

Writing by Hand

Engaging our Creative Juices

A Dying Art

Review of Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series

Change of Plans

Bitter Sweet Endings and New Beginnings

What next?

Making the Most of Social Media

Finding a Blog Topic

Scheduling in Blogging Time

Eavesdropping-the secret to great writing…or so I hear

So why does this excite me?

Wait, doesn’t this make me a creep?

Does Sci-Fi Influence the Future?

Ideas Spawned from Literature

How Writing a Book is like Project Runway

Review of Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Deadline Schmedline

Rushing to the finish line