Category: General
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XXX marks the spot
The temptation is to keep starting over at the beginning of the story every day, and that can get me into trouble.
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Mary Amato’s Tips for Keeping a Diary
A diary is a place to write down your own life experiences. Keeping a diary can be rewarding, even if you’re not interested in becoming a writer. If you speak to its pages with honesty and emotion, it becomes the most amazing keepsake possible: a record of your life. Writing in a diary is: Comforting—a…
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Mary Amato’s Tips for Keeping a Writer’s Notebook
A writer’s notebook is a place where you can write all kinds of things: ideas, questions, thoughts, true stories, invented stories, rough drafts for poems, songs, or stories, bits of dialogue that you overhear, and more. It’s different from a diary, which is a record of your own life experiences. If you are interested in…
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Presentations
Previous Author Visits, Workshops, and/or Presentations for Mary Amato Arts and Education Organizations Adventures in Learning Camp, Winnetka, IL American Library Association American Society of Ophthalmic and Reconstructive Surgeons, Family Workshop, DC Arizona Library Association, Tucson, AZ Arizona Reading Association, AZ Baltimore Writers’ Conference, MD Bethesda Literary Festival (2011) Book Expo America Gaithersburg Book Festival…
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A gold star for Mary Amato
From Publishers Weekly’s ShelfTalker column. Posted by Alison Morris on December 12, 2007. With a nod to the beloved “star charts” that often graced the walls of my elementary school classrooms, I think I’ll start giving out (virtual) gold stars to people, publishers, books, experiences — anything that wows me in a given week or…
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Mary Amato’s Tips for Parents: How to Encourage Creative Writing
Create a time and place for writing. Children will want to write if you make it a fun activity to do together. “Let’s write a story!” Accept your child’s ideas. Your child may create a character/story you don’t like. Be open, and your child will want to keep writing. Allow your child to dictate to…
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Mary Amato’s How to Become a Writer
Write a lot of stories, poems, songs, essays, articles, plays: whatever you’re interested in writing. Your work will improve if you keep writing. Read like crazy. Read for enjoyment first; but if you really love a book, read it again. Try to figure out what techniques the writer used to make the book so good.…