This Thursday (May 11) the #mglitchat on Twitter will be about modern classics. If you want to join the discussion, hop on Twitter at 7 PM Mountain Time, 9:00 Eastern and search for #mglitchat.

In case you haven't heard of #mglitchat before, I'll explain what it is. Several writers (many published--you might even recognize some of them) and even some editors and agents get together weekly to discuss a topic having to do with Middle Grade books. I usually keep Amazon open in another tab to keep track of all the book recommendations that come up in the chats.

For those of you who do the #pitchwars thing, several of the mentors participate, so this is a good opportunity to get to know them and what they like.

#mglitchat has become a part of my weekly routine. It is always worth the hour spent reading tweets.

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I'm popping in today to let you know about a great deal I found. For the next five days, Scrivener 2 is available from AndroidPit for $22.50 for Mac, half off the usual $45 price tag. For Windows, it's $20, half off the usual $40. So if you've been wondering whether to try Scrivener, you might want to jump on this deal.

Android Pit also has Scapple, the mind mapping and white boarding tool from the makers of Scrivener for $8.99, 40% off, for both Mac and Windows. This deal only lasts four more days. I've been using the trial version of Scapple the past week for a school project and I really like it, so I'm taking advantage of this deal.

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As you've no doubt noticed, posts have been scarce on our little blog recently. Our regular contributors have dropped off due to busy lives and, in some cases, the demands of the increasing success of their writing careers.

We will continue to post to this blog from time to time, but we're basically on hiatus for now. We're not going away, but the infrequent posts will likely stay that way for a while. If you're interested in becoming part of a rejuvenated blog writing team, drop us a comment. In the meantime, I recommend that you continue to find help in our archives. There's a ton of great info to be found.

For more current information and quick feedback, I encourage you to visit the Utah Children's Writers Facebook page, where several blog readers and contributors hang out. I would like to see that page become more active as a meeting place for members of our large writing community. Like any Facebook page, the UCW page is only as active as the people who post to it, so help us help you by joining in or starting new conversations.

Thanks to everybody who has participated in this blog, either as a writer or reader. We have a large, active community, and I hope to see all of you on Facebook and in other places.

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In many stories, the antagonist may even be more important than your main character. Your main character cannot become sympathetic without an opposing force.

The antagonist is more than just a bad guy who tries to stop the good guy. A good antagonist actually pushes the protagonist to action. The bad guy gives the good guy a reason to behave like a good guy. Because he is so important, your antagonist has to be every bit as real, every bit as well-rounded, as the protagonist.

The Antagonist is Evil

 No. The good antagonist is not evil. OK, he could be, but not for the mere sake of being evil. It's fun to write the bad guy who ties maidens to railroad tracks for fun, and throws the hero's One True Love on to the conveyor belt at the saw mill just because he can. The kind of bad guy who spends his time laughing maniacally while he twirls his 'stache. There's one secret, one thing you need to remember, if you want your antagonist to be truly interesting:

The antagonist honestly believes he is the good guy. Everything he does has a reason, and to him, those reasons are Right. They are Correct. They are Good.

Your good guy needs flaws and your antagonist needs positive characteristics. In some stories, the reader might even start to wonder just which character is the good guy and which is the bad guy. Few characters are as dull as the arch-villain who is evil just because being evil is evil. People aren't like that. Even people with a warped sense of reality (another little secret: we all have a warped sense of reality, shaped by our imperfect perceptions), do things for a reason. There are truly evil actions, and your bad guy might do some of them. But we humans have an almost unending supply of rationalizations for what we do.

A Rebel With a Cause

Your antagonist has his own character arc. Give your antagonist a cause. She wants to accomplish something, wants that more than anything else. And, like your protagonist, she is prepared to do what she has to do to achieve it, because that's what people do when something is of ultimate importance. Even a bad guy who wants to do something truly awful, like blow up a stadium full of innocent people, does it because he believes it has to be done to achieve the end result, which he believes to be for the ultimate good.  

• Sauron thought he was doing Middle Earth a favor by taking dominion.
• Saruman thought he was doing good by trying to stop the Black Lord and taking the power himself.
• Darth Vadar probably saw the Jedi as nefarious upstarts who wanted to thwart his plan to make the universe a better place.
  
  

A Hero in His Own Mind

The antagonist believes he's the hero. Your protagonist, who stands in his way, is the villain.

We are both nice people. The last cookie is sitting on the counter. You want it. I want it. Boom: conflict! In my story, you are now a villain because you want what I want.

My favorite example of this principle comes from politics. No matter what your political position is, your side is right and the other side is wrong. Maybe even evil. The thing is, the other side looks at you the same way. Why? Because each side believes it is right. If they were allowed to have their way, the world would be a spectacularly better place. It's the same with your hero and villain.  

Which one is the bad guy? Molly has a new puppy. This puppy is so naughty. When she takes it for walks, it pulls at the leash and tries to go its own way. It doesn't follow Molly's perfectly reasonable rules. When the puppy runs away, Molly is devastated. How could her puppy be so wicked? But what is the puppy doing, really? It's being true to its own puppiness. It doesn't understand Molly's unnatural rules. All she does is try to to restrain it and she scolds it for simply being what it is.

Let your reader sympathize with the villain, and understand why he wants what he wants, and maybe even see his point. If your reader can sympathize with both the hero and the villain, the conflict becomes more real, the stakes are raised, and your reader is more engaged.

Read More About It

• Writer's Digest: "6 Ways to Write Better Bad Guys" by Laura DiSilverio
• Writer's Digest: "3 Techniques For Crafting a Better Villain" by Hallie Ephron
• springhole.net: "Basic Tips To Write Better & More Despicable Villains"

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• I’d like to write a book but I don’t know where to start.
• I’d like to write, but I never have any good ideas.
• I could never be a writer. I’m not creative enough.

• Our real life
• The news
• The books we read
• Overheard conversations
• Travel

• Look for writing prompts online. Several sites provide them.
• Write about anything. It doesn’t matter what.
• Work on one element of writing at a time.
• Write badly on purpose.

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Discover how your characters tick

Type	Role	Personality	Stress	Security
1	The Reformer	Rational, idealistic	4	7
2	The Helper	Caring, nurturing	8	4
3	The Achiever	Adaptable, success-oriented	9	6
4	The Individualist	Intuitive, reserved	2	1
5	The Investigator	Perceptive, cerebral	7	8
6	The Loyalist	Committed, security-oriented	3	9
7	The Enthusiast	Enthusiastic, productive	1	5
8	The Challenger	Powerful, aggressive	5	2
9	The Peacemaker	Easygoing, accommodating	6	3

Deepen your characters

Type 1: Reformer	2
Type 2: Helper	8
Type 3: Achiever	3
Type 4: Individualist	5
Type 5: Investigator	2
Type 6: Loyalist	6
Type 7: Enthusiast	4
Type 8: Challenger	3
Type 9: Peacemaker	3

Wash, rinse, repeat

Learn more about it

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1. Use a real place.
2. Create a fictional place.
3. Create a fictional place based on a real place.

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Writing is like life.

I don't mean that what you write is a reflection of life, or that writing means that you give life to ideas and make-believe people, or even that writing makes you feel alive, although all of that is true.

I mean writing is like life. You start out with goals and plans. Whether you're a planner or a pantser, in writing or in life, you have some idea of what you want to make out of  your story, and you work to achieve it.

And, despite the planning and lists of goals and hard work, as with those best-laid plans of mice and men, no matter how much you work toward your goal, you end up somewhere you didn't completely expect. Stuff happened in the process of making your story. You met a character you didn't expect to meet. You got hurt or frightened and reacted by backing away, or by running blindly down the nearest alley. You took one turn to explore a road that looked interesting, expecting to get back on your path at the next corner. Your intended plot was blocked by some obstacle and so you had no choice but to look in another direction. The bumps and twists and attempts to work around obstacles and respond to conflicts led you in an unexpected direction.

You let go of the rod. You didn't stay on the Yellow Brick Road. Your story forced you to slog down the Muddymuck Swamp Gas Trail, and you probably forgot to roll up your pant legs until it was too late.

And you ended up here. You look back, wondering what would have happened if you had stuck to your plan. Would things be better? Worse? Or just different?

But your story is what it became, intentional or not. Maybe you just hoped for the wrong tale, and got what you got. And chances are, it's a pretty good story the way it ended up, even if it's not what you always wanted.

Yeah, it's kinda like life that way.

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To write well, you don't need much equipment. An inexpensive pen or pencil and enough paper to hold whatever you are writing, and you're good. However, the modern writer, if he hopes to publish, needs a little more. Today, I'm going to write a little about my writing space.

I love my writing space. I want to be in here. Loving that space is important, considering how much time I spend in here. I work from home most of the time in my day job, and this is my writing retreat for my creative time. I call my space my Schreibwinkl, or writing nook, and I've set it up to be a kind of refuge, which is not necessarily how we usually think of a work area. But if I'm going to spend a lot of time here, I want it to be comfortable, have what I need, and most importantly. be pleasant enough that I want to spend time in my room.

We all have a different writing space. Some write on the kitchen table, or a small desk in the corner. I'm lucky enough to have a room of my own. It's a small room, about 9x10 feet, which presents some challenges when making the room both functional and welcoming.

No matter how big your space is, personalizing it makes it more comfortable. I need my own space, so making this little room my own is important to me. When I moved into this room, it had basic dark brown carpet and brown 1980s paneling on the walls and fluorescent tube ceiling lights. I lived with that for a while, but I got tired of somebody else's decor, especially since it was dark and dreary. I tore down the paneling (and discovered unfinished drywall with huge gaps behind it. I finished the walls, painted, and replaced the light fixture with bulbs on a dimmer switch. I gave one wall a half-timbered look, as close as I could come to the real thing because I've spent a lot of time in Germany and Austria, and enjoy medieval stuff, and I enjoy the kind of rough, rustic look I created. This summer, I finally pulled the carpet and replaced it with durable vinyl planking that looks like wood. Real wood would have been nicer, but I roll my chair all over the place, so I need something that won't easily scratch. Some people might hate this decorating style, but that's OK. It's me, and it's comfortable. You'll want to do your space your own way.

All of that's great, but this room is for working, and I need it to be a workspace, not just a place where I escape and hide out. For me, that means this is a TV-free room--but with plenty of music, thanks to a sizeable hard drive and decent-enough speakers--and it has plenty of work surfaces.

I have two desks. One is a large corner desk with my personal computer and lots of empty surface space where I can lay out notes or tablets or whatever I need at the moment.


The other is an old, small, inexpensive wooden kitchen table, just big enough for the laptop and two monitors I need for my day job.


And, being me, I also need plenty of technical gadgetry to improve efficiency and help me overcome my natural tendency toward clutter and disorganization. This is where Amazon has been useful.

For example, I have several tablets and other gadgets that I use as part of work and writing life. All of these gadgets need to be plugged in and charged, and that creates a spaghetti of tangled cords that takes up space and does little to add to the comfort of the room. So, I bought a 6-port USB charger that only requires one power outlet but can charge six devices at once.

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Trello is as flexible as you need it to be. The way you set up your project really depends on the way you work. In this tutorial, I'll assume that one story or book is one project. I'll also assume that you've set up template cards as shown in a previous tutorial.If you haven't set up template cards, it's no big deal. Those templates make it so you don't have to re-create similar cards for each character, for example, or for each scene.

Create Project

In the previous tutorial, we created a Trello board to hold our templates. Because we want to be able to use those templates in multiple projects, we don't want to use that same board as our project board, so we'll create a new one.

1. Open Trello.
2. From your Boards menu or on the Boards screen, click Create New Board.
3. Name the board. For this example, I'm calling the board for my project "Jack and Jill."

A story consists of several elements. For my Jack and Jill story planning, I want to create lists called Characters, Settings, and Scenes. Eventually I'll create another list to track submissions, but let's not get ahead of our selves.

On your new project Trello board, create a list called Characters. Conveniently, there's already a box to help you create your first list. Just type "Characters" and click Save. A new box automatically pops up for the next list, so call it "Settings," then do this one more time for Scenes."



Copy Templates to Project

The next thing we need to do is copy cards from our Templates board to our project board.

From the Boards menu, pick your Templates board. Next, click your Character template card, then click Copy.



Change the Title field to your character's name. Then, in the Board field, select your story project, and select the Characters list. Then click Create Card. This creates the card based on the template and puts in the right place. If you switch back to your project board, you'ss see the character card you just created in your Characters list.

Repeat this for each template you want to copy. Remember to set the name, board and list for each card. But if you forget, it's no problem. You can easily change all of that stuff later.

Edit Cards

Once the cards are where you want them,you can edit them.

For example, my Character card includes a comment with some basic info about thecaracter. In the template, I just have headings for the info, but I can go into the card and add the details now that it is is in my project.


That's most of the basics for creating your project and starting to plan your story. Next we'll go into some deeper information, like using Trello to manage actual writing.

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If you use Trello to manage your writing projects, you might find it useful to create cards that you can use for multiple cards.

STEP 1: Create a "Templates" Board

Let's start by creating a Trello board where you can keep the cards you want to reuse. Open up Trello and click Create new board. Give the new board a title, such as "Templates," and click Create.

That's it. That was easy enough, right? You now have an empty board, waiting for your cards.

STEP 2: Create a List

Now that your board is ready, it's just sitting there empty. An empty bulletin board isn't particularly useful unless you pin something to it, and the same is true of your Trello board. Unlike the blank slate of a bulletin board, though, Trello expects you organize your cards in lists. The kinds of lists you create on your template board depend on the types of templates you want to keep there. For this demo, let's keep it simple. You can always take what you learn and get fancy later. Let's create a single list.

That's easy enough. Turns out, your board is not exactly empty. Turns out there's a box waiting for you, where you can type a name for your first list. Let's call it "Novel Cards."


Click Save (or just hit Enter) and you'll have a list, ready for your cards.

Step 3: Create Cards

Your cards can be anything you want, but because we're keeping it simple for this demo, let's go with something high level, like the following:

• Character
• Scene
• Setting
• Submission

In your new list, click Add a card, then type the name of the card, "Character," Hit Enter, and type "Scene. Continue this process until you've created all four cards.

Step 4: Add Details

Next Steps

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Lately, I've been using Trello a lot at work to track tasks and projects. As often happens when I'm using cool software, I automatically consider how it can be used to improve my writing process. Turns out that with a little creativity, Trello can easily be adapted to be anything you want.

I guess I should start at the beginning. What is Trello? Trello is a task management system, which is a fancy way of saying it's a way to manage your To Do list.

Trello is set up like a bulletin board where you pin cards with each task into a list. Typically, you might have three lists: To Do, Doing, and Done. When you start working on one of your To Dos, you move it to Doing, and when it's completed, you move it to Done.

Of course, the cool thing about cards on a bulletin board is you can make the cards whatever you want them to be, and you can arrange them however you want. That means the ways you can use it are limited only by your imagination.

Trello is very easy to use, but there are some tricks and tips that add extra power, which you can use to improve your writing processes. If it were just about making cards and moving them around on a board, this would be a short post.

In this series of posts, we'll look at ways to use Trello to manage a writing project. We'll use it as a kind of sketching tool to map out our plot, start developing characters, and build our fictional world. I'll also show you how you can use Trello as a way to organize your actual written documents, and to collaborate with others, whether it's a co-writer or your crit partners. And once you have everything written, you can, of course, use Trello to track submissions.

The first thing, of course, is getting it for yourself. That's the easy part. Go to trello.com and sign up. Trello is a web app, so you can use it anywhere you have an Internet connection. In addition to the web app, you can get free apps for iOS and Android. The mobile apps let you do almost everything you can do on the web, except for a number of customization options and some advanced management. You'll probably want to use both the web and the mobile apps.

Trello is completely free. You can create an unlimited number of boards and cards without paying a cent. There are a couple of paid versions, but you probably don't need them. The paid versions give you a few extra features, like emojis you can use as stickers on your cards and the ability to create more personalized backgrounds for your boards. The one bit of functionality that is nice in the paid version is that you can attach bigger files to your cards--the free version limits you to attachments that are 10MB or less--but unless you work with very large files, this really won't make much difference to you. Everything I will show in this series will take advantage of the standard functionality in the free version.

I recommend that you download Trello and get familiar with the basic functionality. Create a test board and some cards and lists. We'll start digging into the details in the next post.

But for now, I've finished this post, so I can move my Intro card to the Done list. Moving a card to Done always feels like a reward!

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I'm in a group that has had a sudden explosion of success. With one writer (out of five) having published a few books now, and two others recently finding agents, the need of the group is changing. We still do the standard critiques, but it has changed. There's sometimes more time pressure, or at least one writer is too busy making a deadline to dedicate much time to a traditional group in a certain week.

With these kinds of changes and under these kinds of pressures, some groups might collapse. Not us. We're changing though. We're more about support, providing feedback when needed and not necessarily in scheduled get-togethers, cheering each other on, pushing each other to write in scheduled or impromptu writing sprints, and encouraging the two members who are still trying to join the success party.

This creates some growing pains, but we've been together long enough that, so far, we've weathered the changes. It's almost a new group with the same people, and we continue to make adjustments so we can keep helping each other. It's been interesting to watch, and it will continue to be interesting as the group matures and evolves in the face of success.

For those of you who have been through similar changes in your groups, what advice do you have? How have maturing and success affected your groups?

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Today's contributor is Miranda Snow. It is a wonderfully told harrowing tale.

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Many of us have trouble setting priorities for our writing sessions. Maybe we're working on different projects in various stages. We might be querying one story, revising another, and writing and researching a third. Or maybe we're focused on a single project but have a number of things to do.

Those of you who are organized at all likely keep to-do lists, which you prioritize from 1 to n. If you do, chances are you've run into problems because prioritizing this way doesn't necessarily work. You feel guilty if your list is long and you only manage to skim the top. You feel like a failure. Even the act of prioritizing that list can be daunting. Your top priority might be clear, but how you choose to order the rest of your list might as well be rock-paper-scissors. By the time you've made your list, you're ready for a break.

This is where the 1-3-5 method might be useful. It's a pretty simple concept. Before you start your day, list your priorities, only instead of trying to list them 1 to n, list them in three levels. Put your most important task on top. This is the one thing you have to do, if you don't do anything else. On the next level, put three things that are less important. You can order them if you want, but you don't need to. If you have time after your number 1, you can choose any of these, as many as you're able to do. finally, list five tasks you'd like to get to if you have time.

Now, the idea isn't that you have to do all nine things. You have to tackle number one, and that might take more than one day. Lower priorities can wait. If you don't get toy our threes but you finished your one, you've had a good day.

The next day, you start again. Maybe one of your threes becomes a one, but you might have a new one.

Your one every day might be to write a new scene on the project you are writing. Your threes might involve the work you're revising, and maybe a couple queries for the finished project. Your fives, well, you get the idea.

For those of you who like to use technology to help stay organized, there are apps to help with this method. For example, 1-3-5 To-Do is available for both iOS and Android. But this method works just as well on a white board or a good old piece of notebook paper. If you keep a writing journal, you can put your list in your daily entry, if you want.

To me, the 1-3-5 method feels more natural than the 1-to-n method. I'm not a highly organized person, but I do this almost automatically. There's always that One Thing I really need to get done. After that, priority groups just kind of happen. Sometimes I can work down a list, but for most tasks, levels fit the way I work and think.

Maybe it will work for you too.

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