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Stop Summer Slide
How to Run a Critique Group
What do you need to run a good critique group?
First you need people. But once you have enough people, running a good critique group needs something more than just kind words and cheerleading.
Keep it real – but Include some positive
They need structure.
We’re working on tightening up our critique group structure in our SCBWI group and I feel like we’ve hit on a good formula.
- We use a Doodle poll to find a morning date and an evening date that works for the majority, but not everyone.
- We keep our day meetings at the coffee shop and our evening meetings at a local restaurant.
- We have a Facebook group and are encouraging members to share their work at least a week in advance.
- We ask a different member of the group to run each meeting.
- The meeting runner decides the total time we spend on each person and informs the group.
- The person running the meeting picks the writer we are starting with at that meeting.
- Critiques begin with the person to the left of the writer being critiqued. The meeting runner keeps track of time.
- Each person gives their critique and tries to include positive details and places that could be improved.
- We try to avoid chitchat during critique time and save it for when the meeting is done.
- We rotate jobs!
How do you run your critique group?
Six Storytelling Tips for Kids (and Adults, too)
Our brains are made for stories. Our brains LOVE stories. More areas of our brain are activated when we hear stories, our memory works better, and our emotions kick in. If you want to sell more products or if you are a parent and want your kids to listen!!!) Tell them a story.
Some people are born storytellers and know just how to hold the audience under their spell. Other people need little bit of work and practice to tell a good story. This is true for kids and adults.
Remember the old game where one person says a sentence and the others in the group continue it? A classic. I love doing that one with my kids and setting up interesting problems for the characters to solve. That’s a great way to spark some creativity. But if you want a little coaching or helping getting ideas, try playing with Storycubes. We love these in our family. They event worked great at my workshops for the Summer Food Program.
I offer storytelling tips in my workshop “Want to Be a Writer.” I share my journal and my creative process. Running is of course a big part of my idea machine. But there are other ways I come up with story ideas. I share them all with the kids and I encourage them to experiment with some of my favorite techniques for thinking of and telling good stories.
Six Storytelling Tips
- Doodle. I love to doodle and this often inspires a fun story starter. Doodle off of paper, too. Think outside the box. Maybe the act of doodling makes it into your story.
- Lists. I generate lists of words and events that might happen to a made character. This helps with word variety, too.
- Listen. Jot down what people around you are saying. Combine the sentences of two different conversations. WHOA, did that just lead you to an amazing new story?
- Ask questions. I let my kids ask as many questions as they want. That includes my own children in my family and the kids in my workshops.
- Senses! Make sure your story includes things people see, feel, hear, smell, and taste. Get that brain activated!
- Humor. My favorite six sense is the sense of humor. Even a scary ghost story is better with a little joke here and there.
These tips aren’t about the mechanics of writing. These are about the magic of storytelling. And that’s the really fun part, in my opinion.
Looking for more info on how the brain lives for stories?
What are you favorite storytelling tips? Share them here!
How to Write a Story A Month
If you want to be a writer, you need to write and you need to write a lot. In fact, there’s a lot of advice out there that suggests writers should write a story a month.
I’ve been writing regularly for many years. I have a tidy stack of rejections that serve as a time capsule of my development as a writer. I juggle several projects at one time, but aside from that, I do try to write a story a month to keep producing new work and letting those creative juices flow. So far this year I’ve revised several stories that I started in late 2015, but I have at least four brand new stories I created in 2016:
- Schadenfreude (essay)
- The Hunter Case (adult short story)
- Weirdest Creature in the World (picture book)
- Digit (picture book)
- Good Friend, Bad Choices (essay)
That’s five new stories or essays in four months. This doesn’t count the pitches, blog posts, or articles I have sent in to magazines and doesn’t count the progress I made on my new middle grade novel.
You don’t need to write each story perfectly and you don’t need to try to publish all of the stories you write. But you need to write a story a month. The big question many people face is how to write a story a month.
Keep your writing tools handy
If you want to write a story a month, you can’t run around searching for paper and pen every time an idea strikes you. You also can’t rely on your memory. I carry a notebook and pen with me wherever I go. That way whenever creativity strikes I can jot down my ideas. But I also have a smartphone and a mini-keyboard in case a get a story idea and I’m in a spot where I can type out more details. Smartphones are also useful for recording ideas when you’re sitting in a dark bedroom waiting for your child to sleep.
It’s like an idea net
Go on autopilot
It’s not always easy to come up with ideas when you want to write a story, but sometimes inspiration does strike. It just doesn’t strike when you want it to. So you have to let yourself be open at times when you’re busy. Driving, showering, cooking – those are all times when we’re on autopilot and often ideas will float into our brains.
Force It
It’s ok to force yourself to be creative, too, by generating lists of things you like and don’t like. Just write down all your thoughts. One of them could lead to an idea that becomes your story of the month. One of my favorite tips from a writing conference was to think of twenty possible outcomes or solutions to a problem. After you write all of those down, even the dumb ones, you start on twenty-one and that’s when things get exciting.
Move
Blood flow helps the brain and you need your brain to write a story. So go for a walk. Go for a run. Ride the stationery bike. Move. Aerobic exercise tends to lead to more creativity, but strength training is good for balance.
Ideas come on the go
Listen
You don’t have to come up with all of the ideas for your stories on your own. Listen to other people! Yes, we all hate it when people tell us “you should write a story about…” but sometimes, every once in awhile those ideas aren’t that bad. My first fiction story ever sold to Highlights came from me listening to my eight year old.
Doodling also inspires ideas
Get accountable
Joining critique groups are a great way to motivate you to write a story a month just so you have something to bring and share. SCBWI has info on critique groups for children’s writing and Pennwriters has groups for all kinds of writing.
If you want to go virtual, write your story and share it on Scribophile.
There are also monthly activities out there to help you reach your goal o writing a story a month. There’s PiBoIdMo or “Picture Book Idea Month” that encourages participants to come up with one idea for a picture book a day for a month. Out of those 30 ideas you’re bound to find 12 that could become stories in the next year. And you could then join in with Julie Hedlund’s 12×12 or start your own Facebook accountability group.
Should Kids Read Books Before Watching the Movie?
What Would Snape Do?
Recently, I let my kids watch ALL of the Harry Potter movies before reading ALL of the books. I know some parents don’t allow this.
Do you?
Looking for comments on both sides of the debate!
Cool Ways Facebook Helps (not Hurts) Writers
What’s not to like?
There’s some debate if Facebook helps anyone at all.
A good friend of mine who is also a great writer recently turned off her Facebook in order to complete a major project. It was a good decision for her because she knows that like many of us, social media can be distracting. It is so easy to sit on Facebook (or other social media) and scroll through my feed laughing at funny posts, rolling my eyes at overly dramatic posts, burning with rage at posts about injustice, and trying not to cry at moving, uplifting posts. And for some people, Facebook is more than distracting, it’s detracting. It makes them feel downright bad.
It is a lot easier to scroll than tackle tough writing tasks. So why don’t I eliminate Facebook from my life all together?
Because like any good optimist, I think there is some good in everything. Even Facebook.
I spent a great day yesterday working with a creative friend yesterday who wondered if Facebook really was useful for her. Also this month, one of my favorite clients has reached out to me to ask for two presentations on social media, one for beginners and one for advanced users. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how social media like Facebook can be useful.
Story Source
People share stories on Facebook, and writers need stories. Facebook helps with inspiration! No, I don’t suggest you steal people’s life stories for your next novel, but I do suggest thinking about motivations and background and choices. Use what you read about how people to act to make your characters seem as real as possible.
Network It
Hello, critique group! Yes, you can connect with other writers and conduct a pretty decent critique group via Facebook. And if you get into a great professional writers’ group you can also learn valuable info on how to pitch your work. Just make sure you give as much as you get. Remember, online networking can be a lot more effective if you also incorporate some IRL (in real life) experiences.
What You Don’t Know
Facebook helps you gain knowledge, if you use it right. Go beyond just liking friends and find some pages that feature information on different cultures, or foods, or skills. Like them. Learn form them!! Maybe push yourself to go to new events that you discover online and learn about yourself, too.
Hone Your Funny Bone
As a writer, use Facebook and other social media to write as funny as you can as succinctly as you can. Humor works well on social media and helps you practice your craft. As a reader, find some joy in the world. Think about what it is that people love to read about and include these elements in your stories.
Keep It Real
Sometimes all we need to do is post our goals in public to help us reach them. Once you have a good core group of friends, you can ask them to help you stay accountable. Just don’t forget to lend the same support to other writers who also need that nudge.
Facebook for the Checkbook
Facebook helps writers get writing work – sometimes. It works for some people, but it’s not the best way to land great gigs and it should never be your only way.
There are lots of ways to use social media for your benefit. But I think a big part of using social media the right way is to think about your goals and identify drawbacks. I have turned off notifications and only go on social media during designated times during the day when I don’t have other obligations. I also monitor my usage on RescueTime so I can find out if I’m cheating!!
What ways do you find Facebook to be helpful?
You can also check out my article about how Pinterest can be less about procrastination and more for productivity.
Newbery Award Book Shelf at My Library!
This is a post of mini-updates about writing.
- I’m in a really cool work group of fellow writers and illustrators that is working to support each other and promote each other for school visits. Exciting!
2. I was super excited to discover that my local library has an entire shelf full of the Newbery Award winners! The only challenge is that these specific books can’t be checked out.
I’m also working on getting a poster that I saw in the library. Super exciting because I feel like I just discovered a tool to help me reach my goal!
3. I also discovered another thing about myself as a writer. I’m in a writing community right now that’s very focused on pitching freelance articles to online outlets and I have found myself increasing my pitching frequency! But I realize that I’m doing that because I’m responding to the vibe of that group. No one is peer pressuring me, I’m peer pressuring myself. But I think it’s good to be working on a variety of writing types and to recognize this aspect of my personality.
4. I set my writing goals (finally) for this year. One of them is to write a really good personal essay and get it published. I have several topics in mind. Stay tuned!
Protagonist v. Main Character v. Antagonist
A bumble bee, cousin to my characters, hard at work
Protagonist v. Main Character
I’m struggling with characters in my story and their jobs. I think I have one main character and one protagonist. But I was thrilled to find this post from elements of cinema that provides great examples of stories where the main character isn’t always the protagonist, or the protagonist isn’t clear until deep into the story, or even complex stories with an ensemble cast each going through their own struggle.
I’m working on my bee story and I want my protagonist, the one who chooses, to be my queen been.
I loved finding this post online outlining the differences between MC and Protagonist. The post author says that the main character of The Great Gatsby is the narrator, Nick (who isn’t even mentioned in the Amazon review!!!!) while the protagonist is of course, Gatsby.
What is the job of the main character? Is just it the narrator? Not exactly. According to another writing blog I found, the main character is the one through which the reader experiences the story. The protagonist is pursuing the story goal.
So with that distinction clarified, I have decided I want my main character to be a worker bee, one who has the job of Forager. She can do tasks that set my protagonist up for the choice that is essential to the story. My main character will also have a choice or two.
Ensemble Cast
I love the idea of an ensemble cast. I’m not looking to create anything as epic as Game of Thrones, but I think I could possibly produce something approaching the Breakfast Club, where the different honeybees come together to save their Hive, which is sort of a character on its own.
http://www.publishingcrawl.com/2014/02/17/tips-for-creating-an-ensemble-cast-of-characters/
Antagonist or Villain
Now I have a problem when it comes to antagonist. I had several problems facing my sweet sister honeybees:
- Winter
- Food source disappearing
- A strange new kind of bee that is out to destroying them
But I didn’t actually develop a character as antagonist. I have nameless foes. I have internal conflict and external conflict, but no villain. I’m thinking I need one.
I found this site gives three good elements: vulnerability, believability and invincibility.
Part of me is thinking a drone might make a good villain. A drone would want the natural order of the hive disrupted. A drone is born only to mate with the queen and then lives off the food produced by the workers and then kicked out to die as winter arrives. A drone who likes the sweet life might not want to be kicked out to die as winter arrives. He might look for a queen who is willing to change the way she lives so that he can live his lazy, luxurious life a little longer. He might feed her desire to make her own decisions. I think he could be a good tempter who tries to entice her to give in to her selfishness…which would lead to the end of the Hive. Ok, I think I have my villain.
For more lists about villains, here are five elements. I like intelligent.
Submissions, Rejections, and Acceptances
I’ve been keeping track of my writing submissions, rejections, and acceptances in a fancy little notebook for the past three years.
Fancy notebook
In a private Facebook group, I recently participated in a discussion about how much money other full-time freelancers make annually. Many of them are doing full-time journalism and copywriting and not trying to make it as fiction writers. While I keep track of my financials, I was inspired by this discussion to analyze the volume and success rate of my pitching.
So I launched into the analysis of my submissions, rejections, and acceptances. Now, even though someone I love very, very much is like and expert on Numbers, charts, and graphs, I’m not so much of an expert. So I started out very simply with a numeric chart. Later I might try pie charts and bar graphs. Also, later I might analyze my non-fiction versus fiction rates. But at this point, here are my basic numbers.
One of the hardest tasks I had in making these charts was choosing a color for each year. I don’t exactly have an eye for design, so I decided to use the Pantone colors of the year!
2013 Submissions
2014 Submissions
2015 Submissions
2016 Submissions – will this be the year I submit over the summer?
So it looks like 2015 was a good year in terms of overall volume. I did better on my amount of submissions and, probably logically, did better in terms of acceptances. There’s also a definite bell curve in terms of what time of year I am most productive with submissions.
For 2016, I hope to maintain a steady rate of submissions even over the summer. I’d also love to hit at least 10% of acceptances for the year.
Do you keep track of your submissions, rejections, and acceptances? Have you ever analyzed your success rate?
How to Write an Animal Fantasy Story
I juggle a lot of projects simultaneously, but every once in awhile I dive in full force on a project and decide to work on it until it’s ready to go. I’ve kind of dabbled on a certain story about bees for awhile. Back in April 2014, I went on an SCBWI writing retreat back and jotted down the basic outline. Throughout 2014 and 2015 I’ve read lots of books about bees. In 2015, I went on a bee walk!
This is going to BE fun!
But this year I’ve gone ahead and committed myself to finishing the full draft. I’m over 15,000 words into the first full draft. My final word count goal is around 35,000 so I’m close to halfway. The number of bees in a hive actually outnumbers the words in my manuscript.
Which brings me to my next question and it’s not about bee science. It’s actually “who is my main character?” It’s pretty hard to pick one main character out of a hive of 50,000 bees.
It’s also hard to write animal, or in this case, insect dialogue. It has to be just right to be believable. As another part of my research, I’m reading some of my favorite animal fantasy books Watership Down and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.
Right now when I need a break from writing new chapters, I go back and work on fine-tuning the first two pages. I want to strike the right balance between description and setting the scene in the hive, some dialogue to draw in younger readers, and establishing a page-turning problem. At a recent critique group I was told that I didn’t make it obvious enough that I was writing about honeybees. I felt a little defensive about the comment, though, because when kids pick up a book they will see (hopefully) a bee on the cover, read a blurb on the back of the book, read the tagline, etc.
Despite that, I decided to take a look at the first two pages of these books.
Two Classics
So there’s no dialogue here but there is a big problem presented right on the first page. And the words “field mice” are mentioned right in the first sentence.
Here’s the first page of Watership Down. Rabbits aren’t mentioned until the third sentence, and it’s not even clear that this story is about rabbits. Unless you look at the front cover, then you get a clue that the story is about rabbits! There really isn’t a problem clearly stated here on the first page unless you really think deeply about the quote from Agamemnon and know something about the role of Cassandra.
On both first pages, there’s really a lot of detail about the natural setting. I love that about these books. I feel really dropped into the scenery and the experience of the main characters. That’s really essential to the animal fantasy in my opinion. I’m definitely going to focus on that aspect of writing in my bee story.