Paul Schmid: What Illustrator’s Can Teach Writers

I just love it when I find a great Youtube series.  The Western Washington region of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators had created a series of Youtube videos featuring some of their illustrators.  The producer is Dana Sullivan.  He is the Assistant Regional Advisor for the Region and, obviously, very talented himself.

The first video in the series, or at least the first one I found, features illustrator Paul Schmid.  He discusses his work on A Pet for Petunia.  

I don’t know a whole lot about illustration, so I really enjoyed hearing Schmid explain how he uses line to convey various aspects of Petunia’s personality, specifically that she is high energy, as well as how design elements enter into telling the story and conveying her emotional state at that particular point in time.  I also found it fascinating that he combines the super inexpensive (drug store Pentel pencils) with high tech (using Photoshop).

As a writer, I know how much work I put into a project, but I’ve always been a bit clueless as to how much work goes into it from the illustrator’s end.  After watching this, I realize how much effort Schmid puts into creating artwork that looks effortless and free.

If that isn’t a take away for writers, I don’t know what is.

–SueBE

 

Book Awards: Children’s Book Council Gives Children’s Choice Awards

On May 13, the Children’s Book Council named the winners of the sixth annual Children’s and Teen Choice Awards.  This is the only national book award in which the winners are chosen by the young readers themselves and this year over 1,000,000 votes were cast.

The winners they chose are:

AUTHOR OF THE YEAR:  Jeff Kinney for Diary of a Wimpy Kid 7: The Third Wheel (Abrams/Amulet)

ILLUSTRATOR OF THE YEAR: Robin Preiss Glasser for Fancy Nancy and the Mermaid Ballet(HarperCollins)

KINDERGARTEN TO SECOND GRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR:  Nighttime Ninja by Barbara DaCosta, illus. by Ed Young (Little, Brown)

THIRD GRADE TO FOURTH GRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR: Bad Kitty for President by Nick Bruel (Roaring Brook/Macmillan)

FIFTH GRADE TO SIXTH GRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR: Dork Diaries 4: Tales from a Not-So-Graceful Ice Princess by Rachel Renée Russell (S & S/Aladdin)

TEEN BOOK OF THE YEAR:  The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (Dutton)

I’m a little embarrassed to see how few of these books I’ve already read.  Off to make some requests from my local library.

How many of the books beloved by your audience have you read?

–SueBE

 

Classroom Visits

Just over a week ago, I got to do a different kind of classroom visit.

Instead of going to a school to talk to a classroom or auditorium full of kids about reading, books or writing, I went to a university campus in Springfield, Missouri.  Through the Ozark Writing Program, middle school students (5th to 8th grade) get to come take three different classes and work on their writing.  I was one of a large number of instructors (maybe 30?) who were there for the day.

My topic was Telling True Stories and I showed my students how to find character, dialogue, setting and story/plot in a variety of nonfiction scenes.  The scenes came from Bomb by Steve Sheinkin (Flashpoint, 2012) and Cave Detectives: Unraveling the Mystery of an Ice Age Cave by David Harrison (Chronicle Books, 2007).  I chose the first book for the teachers since it is a recent award winner.  I chose the second for the students and BINGO at least one of them had read it and met David.

 

Then I gave them a chance to do some writing.  Some students used facts that I gave them to write a scene.  I had pulled the facts from four different books:

• A Day that Changed America: Earthquake! by Shelley Tanaka (Hyperion, 2004)
• In Disguise: Stories of Real Women Spies by Ryan Ann Hunter (Beyond Words Publishing, 2003)
• Painting the Wild Frontier: The Art and Adventures of George Catlin by Susanna Reich (Clarion Books, 2008)
• The Prairie Builders: Reconstructing America’s Lost Grasslands by Sneed B. Collard III (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005)

The vast majority of the students had troubles getting going on this assignment.  Translating the facts on a sheet of paper into a scene seemed to befuddle them.  A few kids chose the earthquake scene but the vast majority chose the scene about the woman spy.

For the second writing assignment, I asked the kids to write a scene of their own choosing.  What a huge variety!

• A girl wrote about dance competition.  
• Another wrote an “as told to me” piece about military service in Afghanistan.  
• A third girl wrote about a local civil war battle.
• Another, who is allergic to bees, wrote about getting stung while taking nature photos.
• A fifth girl wrote about guinea pigs.
• One boy wrote about playing paint ball.
• Another wrote about playing baseball and waking up with an IV in his arm.  

What did I learn doing this?  One thing that I asked them was which assignment they preferred.  The baseball player simply prefers writing fiction, which he does a lot of on his own.  He and I debated which is more fun — fiction vs nonfiction.  I was really surprised that a number of the kids, often the one who had the most trouble getting started, said that they like writing from my fact sheets better because they had a ready made topic.  Still, if I do this topic again, I’ll put more emphasis on writing their own scenes and take my examples of true stories from biography, autobiography and memoir.

If you get the chance, get into the classroom.  I learned quite a bit from my readers.

–SueBE

Headers in Word: How to Use both Headers and Page Numbers in Word 2010

You know how your editor wants your manuscript to be formatted.  She wants a header with your name to the left, book title centered and page number to the right.  Easy peasy.  Or at least it was until you got Word 2010.  Now it’s impossible!  If you use Header and Page Number on the ribbon (menu at the top of the page) you can get a Header or a Page Number, which ever one you do last, but not both.

This was one of those topics that might critique group and I were discussing at the Missouri SCBWI Advanced Writer’s Retreat.  At the time, I hadn’t figure it out because I’d only been using Word 2010 for about two weeks.  But tell me I can’t do something, and I will figure it out.  Unless you tell me to clean my room.  My parents tried that.  It didn’t work.

But it did work when my critique group said no one could figure out header formatting.  I’m not going to tell you that it’s easy, but I will show you how to do it.  For the most part, I figured it out because I found a video which I’ll plug in here but after the video I’ll tel you how to do it just in case you find the zooming in and out as distracting as I did.

Here are the steps:

1. With your document open, first add your header.  To do this, select the Insert tab (toward the upper left) and then select Header on the ribbon.  I tend to use the second one down, Blank Three Column.
2. Select the left field labeled Type Text and then type your last name and first initial.  I type Edwards, A.  
3. Select the center field also labeled Type Text and then type your abbreviated title.  In my case, this was Rat Race.  
4. Select the right field labeled Type Text but instead of adding text, delete it.  
5. Be sure to select different first page if this is necessary.  Now it’s time to add the page number.  
6. Now it’s time to add the page number.  Select the Insert tab and this time select Quick Parts.  
7. From the Quick Parts Drop Down Menu, select Field.
8. From the Field Names on the left, select Page.  
9. From Field Properties toward the center, select the proper Format.  I generally chose the first one (1, 2, 3…).
10. Then select OK.  

Frankly, I’m surprised no one just figures this out.  ::snort::

–SueBE

Your Opening Scene

Always say start where action is.  Start where change happens.  We’ve heard that advice time and time again and it’s entirely surprising.  Have you ever read a manuscript where the writers starts way too early, poking and plodding through paragraph after paragraph of yawn inducing back story?  Heck, we’ve all written a few manuscripts like that when we’re being honest with ourselves.

Unfortunately, I tend to err in the other direction.  You want action?  I’ll give you action.  Me?  I tend to plunk the reader down in the middle of something BIG.

That’s what I tried to do with Rat Race and my critique group just shook their heads.  ”Too confusing.  We need to know this, but we need to know X first.”

So I’d write a new first chapter, squeezing it in before the original.

Nope.  Still starting too late in the story.

Fortunately, I was able to diagnose by problem when I sat down with Martha Alderson’s Plot Whisperer Workbook and the original Plot Whisper book.  Check out Saturday’s post at the Muffin to find out how using these two books got the ball rolling.

–SueBE

Series Fiction

Recently, I critiqued a novel that was clearly meant to be the first in a series.  ”We need an ending, a resolution.  Right now, it feels like someone snatched the manuscript and ran away before you were done.”

The problem with a series is that you need overarching goals for the whole thing, be it a three book trilogy and an ongoing series with 20+ titles.  You also need a plot that is somehow resolved in each individual volume.  To find out how to do this, read Rae Carson’s The Girl of Fire and Thorns and then the second novel, The Crown of Embers.  

In the first book, a naive young princess finds herself married off to a man who doesn’t love her and in a land that is falling into war.  She is lost, alone and completely out of her element while also married to a man who sees her only as a political benefit.  Carson ties up the plot in the first book by having Elisa, our princess, find a place, develop skills and friendships and even become friends with her husband.  Note:  the problems of the kingdom are not solved so neither are biggest Elisa’s problems.  The series goes on.

In the second book, we find a young queen who wonders which of the people around her is a true friend.  She wants love and belonging (still) and a true purpose (what should she do to solve the problems swirling around her).  By the end of the book, she knows who loves her for who she is vs what purpose she can serve, she has succeeded in a quest, and she has started to learn to harness her greatest power.

But things are still not entirely rapped up.  The man she loves is snatched away, war is eminent and she still doesn’t know everything there is to know about power.

Do you see what Carson has done?  Many smaller problems are wrapped up but larger problems remain.  There is a resolution but still a thread drawing the reader forward.

Read, study and learn.

–SueBE

 

Bent Objects

There’s no doubt in my mind — we creative types see the world in a slightly different way than “normal people.”  The fact that I would even use that phrase, normal people, says something.  That said Terry Border may have a more bent take on life than the rest of us.  He’s made his name as the creator of Bent Objects.  Check out this video made by his local PBS affiliate.

There’s no doubt in my mind — Terry does what makes him happy.  How about you?  Do you love what you create?  If not, what are you willing to do about it?

–SueBE

 

Call for Submissions

Enslow Publishers has launched a new imprint.  Scarlet Voyage is devoted exclusively to trade young adult fiction.  Individual titles will be released in hard cover, trade paper back and ebooks.

They define young adult as readers grade 6 and higher and are seeking manuscripts in all subgenre but most especially “

fantasy/sci-fi, thriller/mystery, contemporary/teen issues, dystopia, and paranormal romance.”

Submissions must include:  your resume or list of published works, a synopsis and a complete manuscript.  Although this wasn’t mentioned specifically, there is a also a section on the submission form (no postage necessary!) titled “Who is this written for?”

Go through your files and see if you have anything suitable.

Again, special thanks to Jan Fields who listed this market in the Children’s Writer eNews.

–SueBE

Please forgive the unreal formatting of this post.  Periodically WordPress decides to make free and loose with my layout.  Obviously, this is one of those posts.

Online Submissions

Another publisher is now open to online submissions.

Recently Carus created an online form for submitting material to the Bug mags (Babybug, Ladybug, Spider, Cricket, Cicada) and also to ASK.  In addition to the submission form, there are also links to the appropriate guidelines with the ASK guidelines including themes.

You have to register to take advantage of this opportunity but it will also give you the ability to verify the status of your submission.  What a load off a busy writer’s mind!

Why not take a look through their guidelines and then check out your files to see what you could slip through the ether to an interested publisher?

Special thanks to Jan Fields for bringing this opportunity to my attention.

–SueBE

Stimulate the Brain

Recently, I read an awesome post by Andrea Badgley on reading and how it effects/is processed by the human brain.  Basically, linguists wanted to understand what parts of the brain lit up when someone read so they took MRIs.  They discovered that when someone read a sentence, the example was something like The shortstop threw the baseball to first base, multiple parts of the brain were activated.  In short, the reader both saw and felt the actions.   It is how their brains understand what they read.

This is one of the things that I discussed with middle schoolers Friday at the Ozark Writer’s Project (OWP).  The OWP is a one day event for Springfield area middle schoolers.  They sign up for three classes taught by various authors and teachers.  There may be some librarians on staff too but everyone I know is a writer.

My topic was narrative nonfiction or nonfiction that tells a story.  We tell a story by writing scenes, in this case nonfiction scenes.  But the same details that create great scenes also pull our readers in by engaging their brains. How totally cool is that?

But it will only happen if your writing is vivid.  Different writers do this in different ways.

Fantasy author Rae Carson is a consummate world builder.  If I woke up in one of her settings, I would know where I was, no doubt about it.

Sharon Shin does the same with her characters.  Although she makes them vivid and real, she does it without an information dump, weaving details here and there throughout her stories.  If I bumped into Senneth, I’d know her in an instant.

But you can do the same with nonfiction.  Read the prologue of Steve Sheinkin’s Bomb and see what I mean.

Now, take a minute to consider your current work in progress.  Are you including the details needed to help your readers not only see but feel and hear, smell and taste your story?

If not, you may not engage them in the way that you hope.

–SueBE