I often use index cards to keep track of my plot. I try to write short statements related to the action of the story on cards. Sometimes I spread them on the floor to “see” my plot. Sometimes I tape them to a display board.
In addition to using the cards for plotting purposes, I also use them to keep track of important bits of information, such as my character’s school schedule. These are the cards for the novel Invisible Lines. I have a new set of cards for the book I’m working on now.
Sometimes adults ask me if I am conscious about word choice when writing for children: Do I deliberately choose a “small” word so that it doesn’t go over the reader’s head?
I shoot for the best word, no matter how small or large.
I believe that there is an organic process of learning language, which is called exposure. How do we learn “big” words? By hearing or seeing them used in context. I still recall the thrill of learning the word “salutations” when reading Charlotte’s Web. Imagine if E.B. White had deprived me of that thrill?
Kids are remarkable creatures and can handle just about anything.
While walking to the outdoor pool last week, I passed two boys, about seven years old, sitting on a fence, legs dangling. One boy’s flip-flop sandal fell off his foot, and he turned to his friend and said, in absolute deadpan, “I just lost my dignity.”
Why don’t our schools embrace creative writing more consistently?
Last week, at the suggestion of a mom, I offered a three-day creative writing workshop for middle schoolers. The seven kids who came to my studio with notebooks and pencils were on fire. The quality of the writing and critiquing was thrilling.
After the class, a mom told me what I feared: During her daughter’s sixth gradeyear there was only one opportunity to write a short story. Why? Is it because it’s hard to “grade” creative writing? Is it because making people laugh or cry through your writing isn’t on a standardized test? What do you think?
And what kind of support can I, as a writer, offer to teachers out there who want to do more? Any ideas?
If you were a “good student” in school, you may sometimes find your creating writing strangled by the long-ingrained impulse to write correctly. Sometimes I forget to allow my characters to stumble, to speak in fragments, to say what comes out.
Speech, thankfully, is not robotic and grammatically perfect; it’s sometimes rushed, sometimes painful, often quirky or unconventional. Author M.T. Anderson is a master of capturing authentic voice. Am I legally allowed to pull a quote from one of his books and post it as an example? I don’t know.
Every time I read him, I’m reminded how much I need to let go.
Identify your climax (the ultimate showdown between your protagonist and antagonist). Think of it as the moment when all the lights and sounds go off. Basically, you want all the wires to be connected in such a way as to enable the climax to work. You don’t want any broken circuits.
You also don’t want lots of unnecessary wires tangling up the scene. Follow each element of your story back from the climax to the beginning as if you’re tracing the wires. Take a good hard look at anything that doesn’t connect to your climax. Either get rid of it or re-engineer it so that it adds more power.
I’m on fire writing a new children’s book, and yet one important character—a kid named Daniel—has been flat in every scene. I haven’t been able to conjure up a distinctive picture of this character, and it shows.
Today, out of the blue, I realized that Daniel could be a girl, and I wondered if this would be an improvement. I picked up a pen and began writing possible names. The moment I chose her name and began re-writing her first scene, a wonderful, dimensional character appeared.
Whenever I’m inching my aching and tight muscles into my yoga routine, I’m reminded how difficult and crucial it is to maintain flexibility. Flexibility of the imagination is difficult and crucial, as well. Somehow you have to allow yourself to consider all the options that you never allowed yourself to consider.
My songwriter friend David Christman sent me the lyrics of a new song about pomegranates, which was bursting with fun, juicy rhymes. An unexpected rhyme is such a pleasure.
I like to consult my rhyming dictionary when songwriting to make sure that I haven’t overlooked any gems or to get out-of-the-box ideas and was encouraged to keep doing this in a songwriting workshop I took with Pat Pattison. He said that his beginning students mistakenly assume that using a writer’s tool, such as a dictionary, is cheating; but relying only on the rhymes that are in the alphabet of your own brain doesn’t prove anything. He says that your creative talent emerges by choosing the best rhyme possible, so it makes sense to comb through as many rhymes as possible.
David told me that he uses RhymeZone on the web after first tapping his own inner rhyme-maker, which he imagines “to run much like an ice cube maker in a funky old hotel.” Love that image!
When working on a new book I try to get a few chapters down. Then I print it and read it to see what I’ve got. Last week, after having done that, I realized that I had to throw away everything I’d written so far and start over. Too much was happening in the story. The main character had the wrong motives.
My first thought: what a waste of effort, time, and keystrokes! My second (and wiser) thought: what necessary writing! As my playwright friend Richard Washer says, “I gotta keep writing through the wrong to get to the right.”
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