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Review: Wintergirls
by Laurie Halse Anderson Young Adult, 288 pages. Viking Juvenile (2009) ISBN: 978-0670011100 At a recent Not Your Mother’s Book Club event, Laurie Halse Anderson mentioned a yearning that came over...
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Review: If I Stay
by Gayle Forman Young Adult, 208 pages. Dutton Juvenile (2009) ISBN: 978-0525421030 Mia, a senior in high school, sees her entire life flashing before her eyes like an old cartoon cliche. Only for...
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Back From New Orleans
About once a year, I like to visit New Orleans, which is one of my favorite US cities. I usually don’t post about my personal life and what I’ve been up to, since that’s boring to everyone but me, but...
View ArticleSupertaunt Tension and Sizzling Stakes
Mmm… sizzlin’ steaks… Oh! Hello! What? Were we talking about something? (A great example of low tension, BTW.) Tension and stakes are two absolutely important elements to a novel if you want your...
View ArticleTheme, Imagery, and Description
This is quite literally a literary grab-bag of thoughts. The things mentioned in the title — theme, imagery, and description — are important considerations when revising a manuscript, but they usually...
View ArticleVoice, Loud and Clear
So, voice is the number one thing that separates the published from the unpublished and, after that, the good books from the mediocre ones. The most successful writers in kidlit these days have...
View ArticleGive Yourself License to Try
There’s something I want to say, just in case there’s anyone out there waiting to hear it from a professional: it’s okay to play around with your manuscript and try stuff, even if it doesn’t work....
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Boiling It Down
Recently, I’ve posted two things that I firmly believe are the cornerstones of my fiction philosophy. First, writing must make me care. I need to care about character (most important) and then about...
View ArticleWhat Makes a Lasting Novel
This paragraph comes from an interview I did recently, and I just wanted to put it out there for your consideration. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about, especially as I’ve been finishing...
View ArticleSentence Craft
The sentence is the smallest unit of thought in a novel, and I’ve been finding myself giving more and more sentence-related notes in critiques for webinar students and conference attendees. I’ll do a...
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