The fabulous, and I do mean fabulous, Leah Odze Epstein (@leaheps on Twitter)has given us another one of her in-depth reports on one of the many wonderful SCBWI-LA Conference intensives. This one is from Linda Sue Park, the award-winning author of many books, including Newbery Honor winner A SINGLE SHARD. Linda Sue Park is another speaker you'll want to hear in person if you ever have the opportunity. She uses her own books to illustrate and inform her tips, she provides enough actionable information to immediately help you transform your writing.
Workshop on the Middle Grade Novel
Why do kids read?
- Very young children read to find out about their world, i.e. stuffed animals.
- Middle Grade children read to find out about The World.
- Young Adults read to find out about themselves.
- In middle grade, you can explore a broader range of topics.
The Great Mission of Middle Grade Novels
Middle grade readers are learning that the world isn’t fair—what are you going to do about it? This is a huge part of growing up. The great mission of middle grade novels is to show young people that the world isn’t fair, but that doesn’t mean it has to be miserable.
Exercise: Write 5 things about you that not everyone knows. Next, do the same exercise for your main character.
Stuff
When writing scenes, you should have a mix of universal (emotional) and specific. It’s a balance. Doesn’t have to be 50/50, but overall in the manuscript there should be a balance. Characters should be both universal (emotions) and specific (real to us) Specific things include our stuff: In Western culture, we often define ourselves by our stuff.
Exercise: Go through your manuscript and circle stuff that is time and place specific (Just to cultivate awareness—as opposed to universal). When you’re stuck, you can make a list of the nouns, objects, and stuff in your manuscript.
TIP: When using a contemporary setting, you still have to put the stuff in: what’s in your character’s backpack? What’s in their room? Etc.
- The character has no substance without a setting context.
- Make a character specific so he/she can feel real. Don’t want your characters to be every kid-you want your character to be real & specific. In Western culture, making a character real & specific has to do with stuff (show me the character’s stuff).
- Can create a real sense of time/place setting for reader by chars. Stuff
(In Linda Sue Park’s novel, A SINGLE SHARD, the main character, Tree Ear (and his father figure, Crane Man) have very little stuff, but what they do have tells you a lot about them.
If an item isn’t time & place specific, then it has to do with universality: could be anywhere, any time, i.e. emotions such as “I hate my mother” are universal.
Defamiliarization: Taking stu
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By: Adventures in Children's Publishing,
on 5/31/2010
Blog: Adventures in YA Publishing (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Book Deals, Book Expo, Children's Publishing, Fiction Writers, Distopian, Book Ideas, Leah Odze Epstein, Young Adult, Authors, Add a tag
If you haven't heard about the recent event BookExpo America, you must be living under a rock. BEA has been blowing up in the blogosphere in recent weeks. Our fantastic follower Leah Odze Epstein was in attendance, and generously offered to share her experience at the Children's Book and Author Breakfast. Her copious notes were so fun to read through that we could hardly wait to share them! Not only are there tips on writing and trends, there are some awesome upcoming books included below. If you have attended, or plan to attend a conference, please let us know. We'd love you to guest blog for us!
Notes from the Children’s Book and Author Breakfast:
From Corey Doctorow, author of the YA novel, Little Brother, and the forthcoming, For the Game, co-editor of the site Boing Boing:
--“Being a reader and a writer are the same thing.”
--A writer reads a story or hears a story, then makes the story his/her own to communicate with a reader. (For example, after seeing Star Wars, Doctorow wrote the story out again and again in his own words).
--It’s important to know when to leave kids alone to learn. His teacher let him sit and read Alice in Wonderland for a few days, without bothering him.
--Doctorow started sending out his work at age 16-17. He sold his first story at age 26.
--“Surgeons don’t have surgeon’s block, garbagemen don’t have garbagemen’s block. If you’re a writer, you just write.”
-When an adolescent says she doesn’t like your work, that’s good—it means she wants to talk about it.
--“YA lit is the most serious literature, because it’s written for readers who want to do something, who want to make something, who want to make books part of their identity.”
--Doctorow wanted to write YA lit that would “inspire kids to live as if it were the first day of the world.”
Mitali Perkins, author of many books for children, including Rickshaw Girl and the upcoming Bamboo People:
--The theme of her talk was how books can be mirrors of our own lives, or windows into other worlds. We read both to see ourselves and to see others.
--When she was a child, she read and read, with no adult hand to guide her. The library was her favorite place.
--“If life is a narrative, seventh grade is when the plot thickens.”
--As a child, she read books with all white characters (Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, A Little Princess, Betsy Tacey). She loved those books—they were windows into other worlds--but she also desperately needed stories as mirrors. At home, she lived in “Village Bengal,” but at school, it was “Charlie’s Angels.”
--She started out by writing books about the Add a Comment
By: Adventures in Children's Publishing,
on 5/24/2010
Blog: Adventures in YA Publishing (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Getting Published, Query Letters, Editors, Writing for Children, SCBWI Conferences, Children's Publishing, Cover Letters, Pitch, What Agents Want, Leah Odze Epstein, Add a tag
This week's conference round-up comes to us courtesy of Leah Odzen Epstein. She's one our fantastic followers, so please give her a warm welcome! If you have attended, or plan to attend a conference, please let us know. We'd love you to guest blog for us!
Getting Past the First Reader—How Your Manuscript Can Make the Cut was presented on Tuesday, May 18th, as part of the SCBWI Metro New York Professional Series. It was held at the Anthroposophical Society on West 15th Street in Manhattan. Even though there was heavy rain, people showed up for the event, which was sold out. Two editors spoke, Katherine (Kate) Jacobs, an associate editor at Roaring Brook Press and Grace Elizabeth Kendall, an editorial assistant at Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. Their advice included many nuggets of wisdom for authors who want to make their books rise to the top of the submission heap.
If you were to take away only two things from their presentations, they would be:
1. Know who you're submitting to and bring a personal touch to your query letter. Be specific when submitting to editors or agents. Do some research—look on the acknowledgments page of books you admire for the editor’s or agent’s name, or Google the author or editor, or even call the publishing house to find out what book a certain editor has published. (EVEN BETTER, though the editors didn’t mention this, the SCBWI has a publication that lists which editors are at which houses, and what books they’ve worked on. See the SCBWI website for details). Know what books they’ve published, and make a connection with the editor or agent by mentioning books they’ve worked on that you’ve admired or that are similar to your book. There’s nothing worse to an agent or editor than feeling like they’re part of a mass mailing. It wastes your time and theirs.
2. Spend time distilling your book down to its essence. Write a one-word keynote, like editors do when they pitch a book to their publishing house. Pretend you’re the one selling your book. Study jacket copy for books you like, and write the flap copy for your own book. Think about what books are comparable to yours. You don’t have to say your book is exactly like another book, but there may be elements of your book that are similar e.g., the humor of the Wimpy Kid series, or the honesty of another book). Write a synopsis of your book. All this will be time well-spent when you go to craft your query letters.
Now for the longer version. Here are my detailed notes on their talks:
Kate Jacobs: How Editors Pitch Their Books
Kate Jacobs spoke first. She felt it would be helpful for authors to learn how editors at Roaring Brook Press pitch their books, so they could apply those same skills when pitching their books to agents or editors.
As an example, they discussed Jacobs used Jacqueline Wilson’s young adult novel, Kiss. Jacqueline Wilson is enormously successful in the UK, but she’s not as well-known in the U.S. She wrote the middle-grade novel, Candyfloss, among others, and her editor felt she could break into the YA market with Kiss.
Here are the steps Jacobs took to pitch Add a Comment
This is AWESOME!! Thanks so much!
WOWEE- "in-depth" is right! Made of awesome!
I'm in the middle of revising a MG fantasy, so this post is a godsend. Thanks to Leah and LSP!
Wow! Talk about thorough. And some great NEW suggestions. I especially like the idea of giving your character an object when your stuck to see what he does. I think a lot of this can be used in YA as well. Thanks!
Wow - that was awesome!
Middle grade readers are risk takers and love to soak up all kinds of knowledge. There are so many kinds of books they love :)
Thanks so much for this!
Holy cow, that was helpful. Thank you!