WIFYR 2014

WRITING & ILLUSTRATING FOR YOUNG READERS

I attended the most amazing conference this week. Really. It was called Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers. Everyone who aspires to publish in children's and YA literature should go. 

In our small class of thirteen students, we had people from Utah, Texas, Pennsylvania, Canada, and one of our friends even flew all the way from China to be there. 

Why would people come all this way for a simple writing conference? 

Because it's the only one of its kind. 

It provides an opportunity to sit in a class with award winning children's and YA authors. I attended a class with Carol Lynch Williams. She critiqued twenty pages of our work and shared amazing lessons in writing.

There were many different types of morning workshops to choose from. Other attendees took classes from J. Scott Savage, Shawn Stout, Lisa Mangum, Ken Baker, Cheri Pray Earl, A.E. Cannon, Cynthia Leitich Smith, and Greg Leitich Smith. 

Single-day morning workshops in voice, plot, illustration, world building, and character were taught by Emily Wing Smith, Sherry Meidell, Ann Dee Ellis, Brody Ashton, and Jennifer Nielsen.

Am I missing anyone? There were so many talented authors and individuals who shared their knowledge and talents. I can't believe how hard they worked giving each attendee their time and attention. I left the conference with many new heroes and role models!

Each day, following our morning workshops, we went to afternoon breakout sessions. During this time a variety of classes were offered by other incredible authors, agents and publishers. Among the agents who spoke with us were John Cusick from Greenhouse Literary Agency, Amy Jameson from A+B Works, and Michelle Witte from Mansion Street. The editor who attended was Kristen Ostby from Simon & Schuster.

James Dashner, author of The Maze Runner, gave an amazing keynote. His movie is coming out soon.

Here's my morning class. I'm sure we were the best WIFYR group at the conference. Someday, when we're all successful like Carol, this photo will go in a museum. ;)

 What I Learned

 I don't know where to begin summarizing what I learned. Here's a few bullet points:

• Always write truth. It is your obligation. 
• Tools for Raising Tension: 
• Isolation
• Misdirection
• Disorientation
• Trust the Process: 
• 1st Draft = Down Draft
• 2nd Draft = Up Draft
• 3rd Draft = Dental Work for Perfection
• Create pre-writing rituals
• Anytime you pull the reader out of the story, you've failed.
• Stop using all "thought" verbs
• As I writer, I will have to make sacrifices.
• Forget about the whole book and concentrate on doing one page today.
• We need diverse books!

Most important of all, I made connections and learned what I needed to know about my WIP to make me believe in myself and my writing.

DANCE PARTY!

We had a dance party one afternoon after classes. To get into the dance, everyone brought a book to donate to charity. What do you get when a bunch of introverted authors and writers hold a dance? Well, mostly just a lot of very awkward wall flowers. And while I have something of a phobia of dancing in front of people (yes, I was one of the wall flowers), I did take a few embarrassing photos of our wonderful instructors dancing and having the time of their lives.

Closing Celebration:

At the end of the week Cheri and Carol got up and sang a song about WIFYR. Carol mixed up the words and they had to start over. It was kind of hilarious. I took a picture. How could I not? :)

Honestly, I loved Carol's books before I met her, but now I admire the person as well. I don't know how she finds time to teach at BYU, author amazing books, organize a huge conference, mentor four amateur writers, and still find time to mother her five daughters. She has an incredible heart.

I'm so glad that I was able to go. I made great friends, and received wonderful feedback/ encouragement.

We worked so hard. Between classes during the day and writing and revising on my own at night, there was hardly time for sleep. I'm exhausted.

Without a doubt, I'll be back next year.

Thank you to everyone who did so much for the conference! It was the experience of a lifetime. My writing is better and it changed me forever.

Thoughts on Self-Publishing

Some authors do self-publishing right. You know who you are.

You consult with professional editors.
Meet with writing groups.
Utilize feedback from beta-readers.
Attend writing clinics,
Rewrite your manuscript again,
And again.

Making sure it is perfect.

It's expensive.
It's hard.
It's worth it.

And some authors hurt my heart.

They are the ones with lovely words and wonderful ideas
But not enough patience for perfection.

It makes me so sad.

Such beautiful aspirations deserve love and care,
Not a quick read-through, an amateur cover, a rushed online publication.

They're excited. They want to send their story into the world. 

But be kind to dreams.

The first time you type "The End" on a full length manuscript, put it aside.
Celebrate.

Then tell your excitement to sit and simmer.

Wait.

Read it again. 
Write it again. 

Show it to trusted friends and mentors.

Then repeat.

Make your manuscript shine.

The same applies for traditional authors
Who query agents and publishers
Before a novel is ready.


The secret to writing,
So far as I can tell,
Is as much patience
As persistence.

It is hard.

But we can do it.

Five Writing Tips from Stephen King We Should Never Forget

This summer I will be attending the Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference in Sandy, Utah. My instructor for the week long intensive course, author Carol Lynch Williams, sent her students a mile long list of books to read in advance. One of the books on our list is Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

I'd read it before, but this time I purchased my own copy of the book and went through it with a highlighter. Here are five gems of advice he gives to aspiring authors that we all need to remember.  

1. "I believe the first draft of a book-- even a long one-- should take no more than three months, the length of a season. Any longer and-- for me, at least-- the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel."

Even the best stories get old if they drag on and never end. I can't imagine working on the first draft of a novel for year or more, but it happens to people all the time. If it drags on that long, it's not really a work in progress anymore-- it's in cold storage.

First drafts are painful, uncertain, and grueling. The beginning chapters are always written in high emotion for me as I'm caught up in the excitement of a fresh story, but eventually you hit a point when it is just plain hard work to keep going. What I'm finding more and more is that amateur writers tend to put their writing aside when they get to this point, and I refuse to be an amateur anymore. King recommends writing 2,000 words a day, but but challenges more timid beginning writers to achieve at least 1,000 words. I can do that. 1,000 words is roughly five pages each day. That's within my grasp. It doesn't have to be perfect the first time through, it just has to get done. To become professionals, we have to work like professionals.

2. "Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as for what they say; they are maps of intent.  ...In fiction, the paragraph is less structured-- it's the beat instead of the actual melody. The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own. And that's what you want."

I love playing with paragraph structure as I write. Sometimes I get a little "paragraph happy" if you will. Realizing that this is something I need to watch and be aware of in my writing, it's fun to have permission to experiment. For me, paragraphs play a key role in the development of the voice and mood of each piece.

3. "The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. ...Writing is seduction."

This is a quote I need to read every time my inner grammar nazi threatens to stall out a manuscript. I'm writing for the sake of a good story, and my purpose should not be to impress my fellow English teacher grammarians or former college professors. Don't get me wrong, that would be nice. You know what would be even better? If those individuals become so wrapped up in my book that they forget to look at the grammar and structure and are instead swept away by a good story told well.

4. "...while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one."

Does this sentence discourage you? It shouldn't. It means that while our work might not ever be studied in universities alongside Milton or Shakespeare, if you have a bit of talent you can still have reasonable hope of becoming a good writer someday. That's comforting to me on days when the quality of my work is the same as if a horse has just "dropped a load" on my keyboard.

5. "Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. ...What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not."

We hear all the time to "write what you know" as authors. Too many people interpret this to mean that they should only write about characters who are,in essence, the author with a different name. I don't know about you, but the last thing I want to write about is someone who knows all the same things I do. Part of the fun of reading and writing is getting to escape into someone else's life. Write what is exciting and enjoyable to you. If you have to spend hours in a library or doing interviews, even attending a few classes, it won't feel like work because you will be having fun. Then use your prior experiences and knowledge about life to enrich the story. I could hug Stephen King for making this statement.

There was so much valuable advice in his novel that I could never summarize it all in a single blog post, but these were the five that stood out most to me. What advice about writing or the writing process inspires you? I'd love to hear about it.

Writing to My Audience

In addition to that pesky "internal editor" that follows me around, poking me in the ribs every day and telling me I'm a terrible writer, I occasionally become frozen by the fear of what others will think if they ever read something I wrote.

Part of the problem is that I have way too many heroes that I would love to impress and hate to disappoint. I think about my English teacher friends who all have incredible brains and are armed with amazing BS detectors. If my writing is crap, they will catch it faster than anyone else.

Then there are others: former professors, teachers, mentors, friends, and family. I can just imagine showing them my first published book (because of course in my imagination everyone will be so excited about it) and the confused looks that will appear on their faces when they read fart jokes, magic, and scary monsters instead of something a little more thought provoking. Like, you know, something a mature adult in her thirties would be expected to write.

A few weeks ago, while banging my head on my keyboard and wallowing in the misery of writing a literary novel I'd been working on since July, I had an epiphany: I am terrible at writing literary fiction. I just don't have the skills to do it. I can critique it all day long, but I can't create it. Not well, anyway. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

And then I remembered my teaching days, shut up in a remedial reading classroom with seventh, eighth and ninth graders who hated reading only slightly more than they hated me (I realize that sounds quite negative, but bear with me). I taught students who's primary experiences with reading had been the humiliation of reading out loud, comprehension testing, timed readings, and misery. All of their associations with books were negative.

I struggled finding fun and interesting material for them to read. So much so, that in my frustration, it actually became easier to write my own short stories tailored to their specific needs and interests.

I can't tell you what it felt like to hear my kids who hated reading, who struggled with it and despised it, giggle and snort over something silly I put in my stories.

It was fun.
It was thrilling.
It was fulfilling.
It's the reason I want to be a writer.

And I can't let myself forget it.

I took a break from my literary novel and started writing something new-- something I would have written for my students-- something completely ridiculous and fun.

I guess what I'm saying is, when everyone I know reads my first book and thinks to themselves, "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever read" if they finish that thought with the phrase "...but for some stupid reason my kids/students love it" then I will know I've done all right for a first timer.

Welcome

I am a junior high English teacher taking a break from my career in education to spend a few years at home with my two small children. Having had a lifelong obsession and love for YA and children's literature, and after having quietly dabbled in creative writing for many years, I am finally making my first serious attempt at a novel. This is where I hope to record my journey along the way.