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Dinah Stevenson is vice president and publisher of Clarion Books.
"I lied!" Dinah tells us. She'll do a bit of bait and switch on her talk.
She let's us all know up front, "Coffee is not one of the four C's." (Although, I've got mine right within reach.)
Today Dinah will talk about writing, and she wants to start with looking at hard times right in the eye. Dinah is up front saying that she is looking at everything more closely than ever before.
Her four C's are:
1. Creativity
2. Craft
3. Community
"You already know the fourth C isn't coffee, nor is it critique group or California. My fourth C is chocolate!" (Nice laughter!)
"Yours could be an anything that feels like a treat, a reward or a celebration...The writing is what you do. Writing work that’s good enough to be published is hard.
4. What's your fourth C?
5 Comments on Dinah Stevenson: May the 4 C's Be With You: An Editor Suggest Strategies for Hard Times, last added: 8/12/2009
Commitment! I think you have to commit yourself to "Butt in Chair," commit yourself to submitting your work, commit fully to writing being your CAREER.
Cuddling and Candy Corn were mentioned by the audience as some 'C's. Lin just apologized for the SCBWI being called SCBWI and thinks maybe we can come up with a new name and someone in the audience shouted "SCOOBYWOO!"
My fourth "C" would have to be cadence. Listening to musical rhythms before I write, sometimes while I write and after I write keeps me tied to the pulse and tone of whatever I'm creating.
One of the super-cool things you can do at the LA Summer Conference is that on both Friday and Sunday night there are two hours of peer critiques!
Led by the able Jim Averbeck, attendees broke into groups of 3-5 people, and, following Jim's great advice on HOW to critique constructively and with kindness, we read and critiqued the night away!
Fresh eyes, new perspectives about our work, and encouragement filled the room and the hallways as each group settled in to work on our craft.
Peer Critiques. Just another one of the amazing benefits of attending the LA Summer Conference!
SCBWI is great not just because of all its resources for writers and book lovers, but it's also a wonderful professional organization because of all its AMAZING REGIONAL ADVISORS!!!
These hard-working men and women work tirelessly day and night to make sure the SCBWI organization runs smoothly. From offering regional newsletters with helpful articles on the craft of writing, to hosting parties, to lots and lots of xeroxing, emailing, and arranging events... these brave Regional Advisors keep SCBWI moving!
As Aaron Hartzler, SCBWI Director of Communications and Creative Director likes to say:
"That's how we roll..."
These RAs hail from all over the country and from as far away as Spain, Russia, and Australia!
Some inspirational words uttered at this year's RA Word Parade included "Success," "Newbie," "Chocolate - because you can never have enough chocolate," "Kick-awesome" (inspired by American Idol), "Embrace," "Percolating," and "Horizon."
LA regional advisor Claudia Harrington wanted to say "klutz" because her arm is in a cast, but instead, she decided her word would be "Bravery." Brava, Claudia!
Here's some live video of the RA Word Parade!
On behalf of all the members of SCBWI, Thank you, awesome SCBWI Regional Advisors for all that you do for us!
Lee: Biggest mistake writers make according to ELaw is following a trend.
Paula: Oh, she's sharing some great books that she loves that came out recently. "Hunger Games." "Wintergirls."
Lee: I'm adding them to my To-Read pile right now.
Paula: She's also talking about knowing your book's hook.
Lee: You've gotta be able to hook your book.
Paula: You're rhyming, aren't you?
Lee: Thank you for noticing.
Paula: She's giving a good pitch example - not 2 minutes long, but for Egmont's "Leaving the Bellweathers," she's saying it's "The Addams Family meets Cheaper by the dozen."
Lee: That's really interesting that those aren't book references - they're TV series and movies!
Paula: Cheaper by the Dozen was originally a book. Often, using TV and movies is an effective way of getting across a high-concept idea.
Lee: And I certainly have an idea of what tone is of "Leaving the Bellweathers" from that.
Paula: Oh, now she's saying how she relies on agents to screen for her. They're weaning out a whole level of stuff before it gets to them. You know, she could go on the road doing a one-woman show.
Lee: ELaw. On Twitter. @EgmontGal. Get her while she's HOT!
Paula: And we're finishing with a huge round of applause for ELaw!
Lee: She has a motto! "No Nonsense!"
Applause...
Posted by Paula Yoo and Lee Wind
0 Comments on Elizabeth Law Color Commentary, Part 5 - taking it home as of 8/9/2009 9:57:00 PM
Lee: ELaw just said, Competition is stiff, so the writing has to be great. Oh, she reads on kindle - and just re-read "A Wrinkle In Time."
Paula: Is that a kindle in time?
Lee: You're Funny. Make that Punny.
Paula: Now here's a quote, "Man, I thought these books were so hot when I was a teenager..."
Lee: And she's saying that Now, for her to look back on them, the passion is there, but those books seem so chaste.
Paula: She's saying that the passion is the same, (even if we're a little more candid about it now.)
Lee: I love that she just admitted "I sort of am, kind of an eleven year old." That goes with my whole theory of we all write the age we arrested in our development. What age did you stop, Paula?
Paula: 15. No, actually, make it 12.
Lee: But wait a minute. You write picture books AND YA. Do you have two ages of arrested development?
Paula: That's my evil twin.
Lee: Oh, that explains it.
Paula: Stop - she's giving us some information now!
Lee: Well, let's go to a commercial break - we'll be right back for Elizabeth Law Color Commentary, Part 4
Disembodied Voice Over: Do you miss the moments of insight and laughter that actually attending an SCBWI conference can deliver to you? Do you follow our twitter feed, #SCBWI09, yet long for the one-on-one awkwardness of pitching ELaw while she's taking the up escalator? Are you reading this post with the hope that you'll get every single wonderful detail of being here, but you know there's 90 percent of the experience that can never be translated digitally?
Well then, get yourself to the next SCBWI conference. It's a career-changing, life-changing, tribal experience. And we hope to see you at the next one.
we now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.
Hello! I'm Lee Wind, and welcome to this special edition of the S, C, B, W, I Team Blog coverage of Elizabeth Law's Keynote address to the multitudes. I'm joined here by the effervescent and insightful Paula Yoo. Paula, can you tell us what the official title of the speech will be?
Paula: From Johnny Tremain to Edward Cullen: How Children's Publishing is Changing, and how to meet the challenges head on.
Lee: While we're waiting for the crowd to simmer down, and for Lin's intro, what are some fun facts that our audience might not know about Elizabeth?
Paula: She was a girl scout leader. She was also a life guard.
Lee: Good skill set for her current gig, huh?
Paula: She's certainly keeping her head above water. She's really able to dive into her work.
Lee: And I bet she's a wiz at selling cookies!
Paula: I wonder what her favorite cookies are?
Lee: Hmmm... Rubber chicken cookies, perhaps?
Paula: With mushroom sauce.
Lee: lovely. Lin's taking the stage, let's tune in. Oh, the new joke category's being announced.
Lin: For this contest, think of a funny or hilarious psuedonym to go with a classic i.e. The Harry Potter series by Paige Turner.
Paula: I have a new nickname for her. "ELaw" Like JLo. Get it?
Lee: Okie-dokie then. Here's the ELaw intro. Let's listen in.
Rockstar Elizabeth Parisi, Executive Art Director for Scholastic trade hard covers
Some of the attendees
Kelly Dupen and Cammen Lowstuter
Frank Hansen(who was in the Portfolio Show last night and coincidentally, was one of my faves I tweeted about yesterday) and Kate Barsotti
Elizabeth's slide show mapped out the different stages of several picture books from manuscript to thumbnail to sketch dummy to printed book. BUT! Not all illustrators go through every stage:
Bell Hooks and Chris Raschka's HAPPY TO BE NAPPY, for example, went from a striking color thumbnail dummy straight to finished art. The editor of that book keeps Raschka's color thumbnail up in his office like a piece of framed art -- it is such a good example already of the energetic illustration and lovely page design that Raschka is known for. Elizabeth says though thumbnails, the dummy's color palette, rhythm, and sensibility are all there and all of this energy carries through to the final art.
Let whatever you submit, whether dummy or art sample, be as finished as it needs to be to reflect all of the things you believe your dream, finished book would have so you may catch the eye of that art director or editor.
Steven Malk discovered Frank Portman(a musician) at a Mr. T Experience show and thought his music would translate well into young adult literature.
Frank Portman performs his song Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend. (If you're not hear to experience it...find it on iTunes!)
Malk invited several editors to see one of Portman’s shows and Marino went. As an editor building her own list, she saw the potential.
Over lunch, Marino asked Portman if there were any songs he could turn into a story. Portman took that as an assignment and his first book came out of his song, King Dork.
Portman performs his song King Dork. (again...find it on iTunes!)
Portman sat down and wrote thirty pages…all voice and attitude. From that, the book was sold to Random House.
Malk says those fist thirty pages were so amazing, with a voice that you’ve never heard before: such a strong voice, such great humor.
Every word counts in a song, the same as with a picture book. And Frank has a mastery of language.
Important take-aways: -you need to take from everywhere in your life for a story idea -read a ton of YA, the classics and the new stuff -your publisher wants to sell your books but they can’t do it without your help -blogging is important, it’s a way to reach out to readers -use all of your connections…networking is so, so important -expect the book writing and revising process to be a collaboration -find an editor who gets your project
Frank Portman's second book ANDROMEDIA KLEIN is out later this month.
1 Comments on Steven Malk, Krista Marino, Frank Portman - From Idea To Book: The Writer-Agent-Editor Team, last added: 8/9/2009
The official Title of this breakout session is "The Not So Mysterious Teen Voice: Like Totally Not OMG!!!"
Ellen's first sentence:
Every teen is so different, it's hard to tell you what is "teen voice"
Ellen's telling us that she gets around 300 twitter tweets, myspace messages and facebook messages and friend requests across all these social media a day from teens.
She's reading a selection of them, asking us to imagine what the message senders look like.
Ellen's advice includes this gem:
Create your characters first, and understand their realms of experience, and then you'll have their voices.
Create your characters first, and then you can figure out your plot.
Plot needs to flow from characters.
If you don't do it in that order, then like happens to Ellen, your characters will wake you up and say "You know, I wouldn't do that."
Ellen spends 2 months pre-writing her books, creating the characters, figuring out who are their parents, their friends, their realm of experience. And then she layers them, figuring out what's good in their life, and what's bad in their life.
And then the plot flows from knowing all that...
WOW. Ellen is a MASTER at this. The room is glued to her every word, listening to her voice. We're all learning so much...
Marla was interested in illustration the song "Hush, Little Baby" so she began to research lullabies.
She found there were three categories: soothing, bribery, threat. When Marla illustrated "Hush, Little Baby (a bribery lullaby) she set her book in the 1850s in her book. She added an older sister into the mix, who's helping her papa get her new little sister to sleep.
Marla showed us images of the whole book (which is wonderful). You can pretend you were here by checking out of copy of Hush, Little Baby and studying the way the illustrations and text work together.
POSTED BY ALICE POPE
1 Comments on Marla Frazee: How Your Words Inspire Me to Draw Pictures--and How They Don't, last added: 8/18/2009
I'm a Marla Frazee fan, and I liked several things she said: "I want the words and pictures to dance with each other--two strands, two points of view that diverge and converge."
She went on to say, that in pictures books, it is "not the author and the illustrator who collaborate; it's the words and pictures that collaborate."
Illustrators, Marla says, need their pictures to be in a relationship with the text and she feels security in the text when she's illustrating books she hasn't written. If she's written the text and she finds herself in a spot where things aren't working, it's almost as if there are too many options--which Marla finds scary yet exhilarating.
She keeps hearing rules about picture books such as that a readers should be able to understand and follow the story just by looking at the illustrations, and that the illustrations should say something different than what's being said in the words. Marla disagrees with these rules.
Instead, the words and picture should work together, they should dance.
POSTED BY ALICE POPE
2 Comments on Marla Frazee: How Your Words Inspire Me to Draw Pictures--and How They Don't, last added: 8/18/2009
Marla's illos do dance, don't they? Thanks for posting this. That session had several speakers that I really wanted to see, but could not go to all of them :( This gives me a tidbit of her talk.
I agree with her interpretation of the picture book. Neither the art nor the writing should stand alone (unless it's a wordless picture book and you are David Wiesner.) It should be like a Roman arch- with complementary give and take as its keystone. Marla does it so very well. Gush.
Marla is showing the last few page turns of The Carrot Seed. She wants her talk to focus on how to make the chemistry between words and pictures happen.
Marla is showing some great example of the chemistry.
Here first editor with Linda Zuckerman after taking 12 years to break into the field. After her first book, it took her five years to get another one. Then she got the manuscript for her book The Seven Silly Eaters.
She's taking us through her process of working on Silly Eaters. For example, she added a father to the illustrations, thought there was no father mentioned in the text, but made him smaller than the mother in the story since she was more important.
We're seeing early sketches and final art. (I love that!)
POSTED BY ALICE POPE
0 Comments on Marla Frazee: How Your Words Inspire Me to Draw Pictures--and How They Don't as of 1/1/1900
Richard Peck's speech was the emotional highpoint of the conference, and there were many to choose from. Beautifully crafted, magnificently delivered, his speech was the distillation of why anyone should cherish words and their potential.
Steve won the Golden Kite Award for Excellence in Fiction for his novel, "Down Sand Mountain."
He's speaking about the moment when, as a child, he discovered that books weren't just THERE, but that they were written by people...
and that very day, he went home to write his very first book, "The Glisening Sword."
He's telling us the plot... The room is laughing! Applause for the suprise ending!
His parents made copies and distributed it to their family and friends as a Christmas present that year!
40 years later, his second attempt to write for young readers, he had better editors (that would catch things like the missing silent "t" in "Glistening!")
"I'm just so blessed to be a member of this community."
Pamela thanked George Schaller, the scientist who allowed her to profile him in her book. He was a scientist who first observed gorillas in the wild. He's now 75 years old and an active scientist and conservationists.
Pamela is donating the prize money and the profits from her book to conservation projects. How wonderful! Go great beasts!
POSTED BY ALICE POPE
1 Comments on Golden Kite Awards: A Life In The Wild, last added: 8/18/2009
I attended Pam Turner's photography session with Andy Comins. Together, they led nonfiction authors through the process of producing and selecting high-quality photos for our nonfiction projects. I was thrilled with the wealth of information and the detailed handouts Pam and Andy provided. They also gave excellent advice on negotiating with editors regarding photo illustrated books. A must-see for nonfiction authors!
Jim is the author of the beautiful and multi-award winning "In A Blue Room."
Starting quote: The Illustrator is the other partner in writing a picture book. The trick is to get them to love your words and visualize what they want to do.
Jim is a writer first, who moved into illustrating as well.
For "In a Blue Room," he wrote the words and Tricia Tusa illustrated.
Then he illustrated a story by Linda Sue Park, "Long Walk To Water." (A serialized novel that came out in newspapers. To be published by Clarion.)
"Except If," his upcoming Picture Book, is one he wrote AND illustrated.
So he's looked at this from all three angles!
And here are just a few of his great tips for authors:
Choose a subject with a strong sense of time and place.
Variety of setting is really important.
Action and movement - but can you do it with nouns?
Increasing visual complication!
Character Attitude (Like Alexis O'Neill did in "The Recess Queen.")
When Linda is writing she thinks in terms of progress and impediment.
One difference between YA and MG: YA has more impediment than middle grade.
Linda never has a subplot, instead she thinks of everything as progress and impediment as they relate to internal and external quest.
Weaving: Any element has to recur more than once. If an element is in a scene, it has to be important enough to show up again in the story. Nothing can pop up later in the book that solves some problem.
Thank you so much for calling attention to this workshop--and to the really fine distinction that Linda Sue made between a subplot unrelated to the character's quest and a strand of story that acts to progress that quest in one of four ways:
Progress in internal quest. Progress in external quest. Impediment in internal quest. Impeiment in external quest.
Linda Sue was really lovely on this point, explaining that each scene can and should know what it's doing: either progressing/blocking both internal and external quests or (even more interesting) progressing one quest while blocking the other.
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Dinah Stevenson is vice president and publisher of Clarion Books.
Commitment! I think you have to commit yourself to "Butt in Chair," commit yourself to submitting your work, commit fully to writing being your CAREER.
(Those are my favorite commitment issues!)
Namaste,
Lee
Cuddling and Candy Corn were mentioned by the audience as some 'C's. Lin just apologized for the SCBWI being called SCBWI and thinks maybe we can come up with a new name and someone in the audience shouted "SCOOBYWOO!"
My fourth "C" would have to be cadence. Listening to musical rhythms before I write, sometimes while I write and after I write keeps me tied to the pulse and tone of whatever I'm creating.
Characters! As in, interesting people that we Care about. But I like both commitment and cadence as well! :-)
Coke, as in caffeine since I don't drink coffee.