It's December!

November is over and you know what that means...no not Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, not buying and wrapping and mailing, not cards and cooking and parties.

It means PiBoIdMo is over...YAY! That's Picture Book Idea Month in case you were wondering.

It means I wrote down an idea, title, detail, character or plot for each day in November...you know, 30 wacked out, ridiculous, hilarious, sensational and best selling ideas.

This was the brain child of Tara Lazar and has caught on like hula hoops, pet rocks, and Beanie Babies. Everyday we read a post to inspire our creativity. These were wonderful and meant I could still be as silly as I wanted even though the last time I played Hi Ho Cherry-O, tried to lick my elbow, or turned a somersault was many a year ago!

Oh, the word possibilites to ponder...animals, names, aliens, the ocean, outer space, bugs, yo-yos, sparklers, monsters, and on and on and on. It was a chance to think short and crazy, long and hazey or even square and mazey!

I took my ideas to the Cakers at critique yesterday for an out loud reading. It's funny how they all seemed to agree on which ones appealed the most. And it also showed me which ones to consider first. The support I get from the Cakers is delicious. I'm fired up , ready to write, eternally hopeful as all writers must be.

Look out December, Doris is writing more than she is wrapping!

Revising With Chocolate And Pirates

I'm sure everyone's been to those workshops or conferences that are just okay--the speakers are good, and you pick up one or two things you might use in your writing. Or a few days later you tell someone it was a good workshop, but you can't think of anything specific you learned. 


Nothing like what we went to last weekend.


Three of us Cakers--Christina, Laura and &--attended Darcy Pattison's amazing Novel Revision Retreat, hosted by the Brazos Valley SCBWI. 


Luckily, even a couple of rotting tires couldn't get in my way. Before leaving town I stopped for an oil change. "Change" may not be the right word, really. The way my jalopy leaks oil, it's more accurate to say "oil replacement." But I digress. The mechanic told me not to go anywhere without getting two dry-rotted tires replaced. I wondered if it would help to rub the tires with a really good moisturizer, perhaps a hydrating mask, but mechanics look at you funny if you suggest things like that. Seems what I was driving around on were about as sturdy as papier-mâché, so a detour to Discount Tire was next.


Finally, I was on my way for real. I got to the workshop only about 15 minutes late, and there was chocolate on the table! In bowls that kept getting refilled all weekend!


I'd used Darcy's book Novel Metamorphosis: Uncommon Ways to Revise while revising CHAINED, and it helped so much (like with adding those pesky feelings I've mentioned), but it was even better seeing the activities and discussing in our small groups how we could use what we'd learned to revise our own novels.


For several of the activities, we used our "shrunken manuscripts" (the full novel printed single-spaced in an 8 point font). You can read more about the shrunken manuscript here, and it's a great way to visualize the big-picture stuff in your novel. Here's an example:

So that's my whole novel on my living room floor. At the workshop I placed a blue "X" over the chapters I thought were the strongest. They're pretty well spread out throughout the beginning, middle, and end of the story, so that's good. If you do this for your own novel, see if there are huge gaps between chapters you marked. If the strong chapters are all at the beginning and at the end, the middle of the novel may not be interesting enough to keep a reader going till the end. If your first chapter isn't one you marked as strong, see if there's a better place to start telling the story.


In this next activity, we used different colors of highlighters to mark the sensory details in one scene. 

The scene is from chapter 3 of my YA novel REASONS FOR LEAVING. The main character, Minna, is lying in bed after being fired from yet another job. Here's an excerpt from that scene before the revision:


Our bulldog Marge walks in and climbs onto my bed. Well, not so much climbs, I guess. It's more like, she puts her front paws on the bed and waits for me to help her up. She always knows when I'm having a bad day. She licks my face once before lying down next to me. 


After highlighting the sensory details there (not too many, other than what she sees and the dog licking her face), I set the page aside and rewrote the scene, keeping in mind that it would be stronger with more sensory details. Here's the "after" excerpt:


Our bulldog Marge saunters in and climbs onto the bed. Well, not so much climbs. It's more like, she puts her paws on the edge of the bed and waits for me to hoist her up. She's panting from the effort, even though I'm the one doing the heavy lifting. Her breath smells bacony--like real bacon, not like those treats that look just like bacon (but trust me, taste nothing like bacon). 
"Margie, have you been getting into the trash?" She's probably been chewing on paper towels I threw away after making BLTs last night.
She licks my face once and flops down next to me. She always seems to know when I'm having a bad day.


I'm sure I'll end up tweaking that more as I revise, but just that couple minutes of scribbling results in a scene that works harder to bring the reader into the story with more sensory detail.


Later in the story, Marge throws a wrench into Minna's plans when she again gets into the trash and then the laundry, so the scene now does something Darcy mentioned she learned from Linda Sue Park: every chapter should have something that looks forward and something that looks back. When Marge does this again later, the reader will already know that this is a habit of hers.


Saturday night after taking waaaaay too long at dinner (What? The restaurant had a dessert called "ooey gooey chocolate cake"), we returned to the hotel meeting room to watch Pirates of the Caribbean. Can you believe I'd never seen it before? But even those who had seen it were able to watch it in a whole new way, because throughout the movie Darcy pointed out things we'd learned from our revision activities. 


Objects weren't placed in a scene for no reason. That bed warmer? Nice weapon for whacking a bad guy in the face. We saw examples of mirror characters, like the two incompetent English soldiers and their pirate counterparts; repetition, like everyone swooning whenever Johnny Depp appeared Jack always grabbing for his personal effects, and Elizabeth singing the pirate song--once as a young girl at the beginning of the movie, and years later on the beach with Jack; and reversals of dialogue: a couple times throughout the movie, someone calls Jack "The worst pirate I've ever seen." At the end, an officer says, "That's got to be the best pirate I've ever seen."


These are all things we don't usually notice when watching a movie, but they add to the character development and the storyline, so novel writers can learn a lot from the big screen. I'm sure I'll spot those literary devices in movies from now on. But I won't mention them out loud while in a movie theater, unless I want people beating me up with popcorn buckets.


So, if you ever get a chance to go to one of Darcy's workshops, go! 


But you might need to give me a ride.

Voice, defined

Voice:

The words you choose.

It’s tone.

It’s mood.

It’s the way you structure.

You just know it when you see it, when you hear it.

I’ve heard writers, agents, and editors all try to explain this elusive concept of voice in writing.

At the National Book Festival last Saturday, I had the privilege to hear a presentation by one of the world’s best-loved illustrators, Jerry Pinkney. He stood up to speak late in the afternoon, when the tired crowds had thinned, but die-hard fans remained. He talked about his childhood, and the hours he spent with a sketchbook in his hand.

And then he answered a young girl's question.

“Mr. Pinkney, how do you draw pictures, so that they look like yours and not someone else’s?”

He paused a minute, considering.

“What I think you are asking about is called style,” he said. “But style is not how I draw. Style is how I see the world.”

Surely Mr. Pinkney’s simple description tells us something important about every creative discipline, including that intangible idea of writer’s voice.

We practice and practice to master the writer’s craft, until it becomes a natural extension of who we are.

And if we are brave enough, we are finally able to say something of our own unique experience, something someone else is longing to hear.

Contest of Unspeakable Evil Update!

Remember you have till tomorrow night (before midnight central time) to comment on the Speak Loudly post for a chance to win your choice of Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler, or Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. 


And, instead of picking one winner, we'll pick a winner for every ten people who comment. Thanks for all the comments so far, everyone!

Speaking Loudly for SPEAK + Giveaway

Bad things happen everyday. Hiding books that deal with the tough issues won't make the problems go away; it just gives those who have experienced them one less place to go to feel like they're less alone. Books allow us a safe place to see people who survived the unspeakable.

If you're a writer and you've been online today, you've probably seen the outrage over Professor Wesley Scroggins' opinion piece in his Springield, Missouri newspaper about the "soft porn" high school students are exposed to in their English classrooms. He gave Laurie Halse Anderson's National Book Award-winning novel SPEAK as an example. 


In case you're unfamiliar with the book, here's a description from the jacket:


"Speak up for yourself - we want to know what you have to say." From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High, Melinda knows that this is a big fat lie, part of the nonsense of high school. She is friendless, outcast, because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. As time passes, she becomes increasingly isolated and practically stops talking altogether. Only her art class offers any solace, and it is through her work on an art project that she is finally able to face what really happened at that terrible party: she was raped by an upperclassman, a guy who still attends Merryweather and is still a threat to her. Her healing process has just begun when she has another violent encounter with him. But this time Melinda fights back, refuses to be silent, and thereby achieves a measure of vindication. In this powerful novel, an utterly believeable heroine with a bitterly ironic voice delivers a blow to the hypocritical world of high school. She speaks for many a disenfranchised teenager while demonstrating the importance of speaking up for oneself.


I won't ask how familiar our readers are with pornography, soft or otherwise, but I hope we'd all agree that rape isn't porn. I find it disturbing that Dr. Scroggins thinks it is.

On one hand it would be nice if everyone ignored Dr. Scroggins so he'd quietly go away without an audience, but then what? No one says anything, and any book he doesn't like will quietly go away too, removed from the library shelves--like Slaughterhouse Five--to avoid any unpleasantness. I don't want Dr. Scroggins deciding what goes in my library or anyone else's. The thought of bare shelves saddens me.

I'm going to venture a guess that Dr. Scroggins hasn't read the books he objects to so vehemently. Maybe he heard about them from someone else, or at best he flipped through them to find sentences he could hold up as offensive. It's hard to imagine how he thinks we're protecting high school students by removing this book. If students don't read about a girl who was assaulted at a party, I suppose that will prevent it from ever happening to them.

People have been posting about this all day, more eloquently than I ever could, so I knew that much of my post here would include "Here are some awesome people and what they said." Laurie Halse Anderson wrote her own response on her website. It's so inspiring to see the support for her in blog posts and the flood of responses on Twitter (tagged #SpeakLoudly) from writers and readers.  

Most inspiring of all, though, are the writers who wrote about their own abusive pasts, their own trauma, and said "This book helped me" or "I wish I had this book when I was a teen." I can't imagine how hard it was for them to write about their experiences, and I'm amazed they've found the strength to do it. Here are just a couple of them:

Author Cheryl Rainfield, who has survived things I can't even bear to think about.

Author C.J. Redwine, who says, "I'm a Christian too, and a rape survivor, and I want SPEAK on the shelves."

I think the most powerful message was from the student who commented on Dr. Scroggins' post to say, "As a middle school girl, I was raped by a family member. I feel strongly that I might have made an actual suicide attempt if it hadn't been for a teacher who saw me where other teachers just let me fade into the background. She was the one who gave me Speak. There were no other books about being a rape victim allowed for girls my age, and Speak (in tandem with my wonderful, wonderful teacher) allowed me to understand it wasn't my fault, I could be okay. Since then, I have participated in many groups, and have found out that my story, sadly, isn't uncommon. There are far too many girls out there like me to take away one of the few books out there that speaks directly to us, tells us it will be okay, tells us that we have the right to fight for ourselves. This book isn't pornographic; it is a rallying cry for abused, raped girls who don't what to do or how to live. I thank God for Laurie Halse Anderson, that she helped me and that her book stands to help so many others."


Laurie Halse Anderson has heard from thousands of kids like her about how SPEAK has impacted them. Here's her poem about those letters:





That's who we should be listening to. 
--------------------------------------------
Want to win one of the books from Wesley Scroggins' article? Leave a comment and I'll pick a winner next Sunday. Winner gets a choice of Speak, Twenty Boy Summer, or Slaughterhouse Five.


Also visit Sarah Ockler's blog (author of Twenty Boy Summer) for a chance to win all three books, plus chocolate! 

It's for research, I swear!

I love the news programs like 48 Hours and Dateline, and recently discovered ID-- that dangerous time-suck of a cable channel that's like a true crime marathon. I've watched enough of the shows to know that if someone's accused of a murder, the police will probably be checking their computer history. Each time, I'm amazed that the suspect hadn't thought of that. I want to scream at the TV, "Seriously? You Googled 'How to poison someone with antifreeze,' then poisoned your husband with antifreeze?! Didn't you think that would look bad?" That's one of those things that's hard to explain, isn't it? Not something most of us look into just 'cause we're curious. Your trial probably isn't going well if Exhibit A is poster-sized screen shot of your search history that includes "How to train ferrets to commit murder," especially if your significant other recently died in a tragic attack by assassin-ferrets.


But watching those shows does make me worry about the search history on my own computer. Not because I plan to kill anyone, but just in case I'm ever accused of a crime if someone close to me mysteriously dies or disappears. We know sometimes innocent people become "persons of interest," so it's possible, right? And writers have legitimate reasons for searching for some pretty weird things. So how incriminating would my computer's history look? 


I can see the interview now:


Detective: "Interesting. The coroner found that your neighbor died of botulism poisoning. You've been reading quite a few articles lately about botulism, haven't you? What a coincidence."


Me: "Oh. Right. Yes. I can explain that. It really is an amazing coincidence. See, I was writing this scene where a character is hospitalized after trying to make homemade Botox by sticking a needle into a bloated, dented can of peas and jamming the needle into her forehead."


Detective: "Uh-huh. And I suppose we can read this scene, in a book somewhere?"


Me: "Well, no. Turns out botulism poisoning isn't as hilarious as you'd think."


Detective: "I'm sure your neighbor would say the same thing. If she wasn't in the morgue, I mean."


Me: "Um..."


Detective: "And you were also searching for 'How to fake a kidnapping,' 'Faking own death,' and 'New identity.' Going somewhere?"

Me: "No! Really, it's all going to be in a book. Maybe. I haven't revised yet. It's not for me, personally. I'm not going anywhere."


Detective: "Yes, you're right about that. I believe you won't be going anywhere for a long, long time."


Me: "Can I have my laptop back, then?" 

So what weird searches have you found yourself doing as a writer? We'll be your witnesses. Just in case.

Where the Heck Have We Been?

Right. I'ts been over a month since the last post!

That's OK, we Cakers know no one is keeping score (you aren't, are you?) and in our defense, we have been BIZ-EE this summer!

But now that kids are back in school, vacations have been taken, and cooler weather is on its way (yeah, not likely in Houston, but a girl can dream), we are SO excited to start the celebrating. Although a book sale is HUGE and signing with an agent is MONUMENTAL, is there anything sweeter than the moment you can actually hold the book in your hands? I think not!

So without further ado, this month we are proud to introduce:

WWFC member Laura Edge's TWO new books (adding to an already impressive non-fiction portfolio):

WE STAND AS ONE (The International Ladie's Garment Workers Strike) from Lerner Publishing Group AND

HILARY DUFF, Part of Enslow's Celebrites with Heart series.

We Cakers were lucky enough to read both of these books in critique, start to finish, and can affirm that they are awesome! Congratulations, LAURA!

Another Caker, Miriam King's first picture book officially releases on September 1!

Welcome to the world LIBRARIAN ON THE ROOF...

This is such a wonderful book, and to confirm that fact, it was chosen to represent the state of Texas at the 2010 National Book Festival in Washington D.C. What an honor! Miriam will be in attendance, along with some of the greatest authors of our time (besides her, of course).

In other news, three of us are finishing up first drafts of novels to bring to the Darcy Pattison Novel Writing Retreat sponsored by the Brazos Valley SCBWI in November. Ever gone to one? This is my second and I can't wait!

Others of us are preparing for a Fall full of school visits, book signings, writing, editing, hopefully, more frequent blogging and of course, CAKE.

Happy writing everyone,

Christina