What is Given from the Heart, written by Patricia C. McKissack and illustrated by April Harrison, was published by Schwartz and Wade, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, in 2019. With a young boy as narrator, this story follows a family from April to February, as the father dies, they lose their home and…
Anne Enright: “Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.” The quote…
Truman, written by Jean Reidy and illustrated by Lucy Ruth Cummins, was published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers in 2019. The inside front cover reads: Truman the tortoise lives with his Sarah high above the taxis and the trash trucks and the number 11 bus, which travels south. He never worries about the world below…
Roddy Doyle: “Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.” What a metaphor! The quote came from a post, “10 Rules for Writing Fiction,” in the Guardian in the UK.
I joined StoryStorm to get more good ideas. The month is almost over and I’ve done well with StoryStorm. Brainstorming: But if you didn’t join, that doesn’t mean you can’t do your own Story Storming. For instance, I came up with the word Flower. I wanted to make that relevant to something. So I thought…
Geoff Dyer: “Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that…
I started 12×12 a bit late–halfway into the month. But I’ve already written two first drafts of picture books and done a revision of another. I’ve done a webinar, too, on query letters for children’s book authors and I have another I have a month to watch. I went to a session from SCBWI for…
I am going to be finding short, pithy statements about writing and sharing them as WOWs. To me, they are an encouraging light in the electricity-out dark. Follow them to a good space for writing.
I wrote in NaNoWriMo this year and finished my 50,000 words–for my middle grade novel. That does not count or include the work I did on my picture books. It does, however, include quite a few things that got thrown out. So while I finished NaNoWriMo, my middle grade novel is missing its final two…
My son, who studied actuarial science and graduated with a degree in mathematics, is a full-time online author. In the last two years he has written over 3 million words. I asked him what he does when he gets stuck. He had some good suggestions. Take a walk. Get out of your writing for 10-15…
