Critiquing a Manuscript? Do it in a sandwich!

Are you writing on a desert island?

It probably feels like you’re all alone sometimes.

There’s only one way to change that.  Meeting other writings.  Working with them.  Critiquing each other’s stories.

If you’re like me, you’re the only children’s writer in your circle of “real life” friends.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t surround ourselves with other writers – if not in real life, then online.

Why bother reaching out?

There are so many reasons to network with other kids’ writers!  Being around other writers makes me more creative – and I don’t mean stealing their ideas, which I’d never do.  It gets my own creativity going and lets me bounce ideas off other real human beings. 

But here’s the most important reason…

We all need feedback to make our writing better. 

Hands down, the best way to get feedback is to SHARE feedback with others.  If your feedback is helpful, your own writing circles will expand and you’ll have an even bigger group you can exchange ideas with. 

And the VERY best way to share feedback is in a sandwich.

The feedback most writers are hoping for is known as a critique.  Sometimes, people get together in loosely or formally structured critique groups.  However you find one another (a topic for another post!), you must know how to craft a critique that can help other writers without discouraging them.

That’s where the sandwich comes in.

You simply cannot have a sandwich without bread.  And bread, in this metaphor, is… PRAISE.

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5 ways breaking rules makes your writing more powerful (a guest post)

We’re getting ready for our big family vacation in Canada, so I’m turning over the steering wheel to the capable hands of author and speaker Dawn Goldberg Shuler, who’s here to talk about…

5 Reasons to Break Writing Rules

As a lifelong writer, former English teacher, and writing coach and communication consultant for the last ten years, most people think that I write perfectly, no mistakes in grammar, structure, punctuation... it's all perfect.

Nope! I don't write perfectly at all. Actually, I don't know that I ever write anything that an English teacher wouldn't get her red pen out for (case in point).

I do it on purpose. I start sentences with "And" or "But." I use ellipses as if I have a huge box of them, and they must be used! I use slang; heck, I use my own made-up words like "baddies." I end sentences with prepositions. I use numbers instead of writing them out. Sometimes my sentences are not complete sentences.

With my writing background, why in the world would I break writing rules? Here's the thing... I know exactly what the rules are, and, more importantly, I know WHY I'm breaking them. I have a reason.

Those reasons usually fall into one of five areas:

1. Makes the writing more conversational.

Makes the writing more conversational, so that it sounds as if I'm actually talking to you.

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What do you need to know about the magic of threes?

Close your eyes and think of a number between one and ten.  Umm, now open your eyes so you can read the rest of this post.

Did you pick seven?  If not, you probably picked three or eight.

According to this mathematician, seven was the favourite number from among 44,000 people worldwide.  But the second favourite – maybe not the winner, but the first runner-up – was three.  And I think you will be, too, when you see how much three (3!) has to offer us as writers.

Why are threes so powerful? 

Physically, three is the lowest stable number that stands up on its own.  IF you’re building a step-stool, you can’t use just one or two legs.  You’ve got to have at least three.  (Okay, there is such a thing as a one-legged stool, but it’s more for propping your body up than actually sitting and relaxing on!)

Take a look – this is just such a basic, iconic design because of the central human assumption:  three = stable.

[source:  Nerijp via Wikimedia]

Even if you don’t think about it actively, your brain knows this, and so does your reader’s.  We trust threes in a way we do with few other numbers (even seven!).

Count your way through these 3 crucial principles of threes that will help you write better, stronger kids’ books.

1) The Three-Act Structure of your story

The three-act structure is a model used in screenwriting, writing and storytelling.  All it means is that your fictional story has three parts.  In fancier circles, these parts are sometimes the “Setup,” the “Confrontation” and the “Resolution.”  But I usually just call them Beginning, Middle and End.

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The stinky fish guide to choosing and using big words in your children’s story.

What’s your favourite condiment?  What do you love to squirt onto your burgers, your dogs, your sandwiches?

(I’ll tell you what America’s current favourite is in a minute – and why it’s important to you as a writer.)

Know what condiment the ancient Romans loved best?  It’s called garum, a putrid blend made of stinky rotten fish.  The Roman writer Seneca called it an “expensive bloody mass of decayed fish [which] consumes the stomach with its salted putrefaction.”

Yum, right?  (OMG, no.)

Know why the Romans loved the stuff?  Because their food was so, so stinky that they needed a condiment strong enough to cover it up.  Ew.

The perfect condiment for stinky writing

Some people’s writing is like this, too.  Stinky stuff.  Their writing isn’t clear, their ideas are shallow – but they use big, fancy words, splashing them around like garum to cover up the stench.  They hope you won’t notice.

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GUEST POST: Writing Children's Books: Using Proper Fonts

(Guest post by Irene Watson.)

Writing a children's book is hard, but so is illustrating and designing it. Yet everyone seems to think he or she can create a children's book. Plenty has been written about why children's book authors need feedback from children on the story before they publish a children's book. But just as important is getting feedback on illustrations and from the adults who might actually be the ones who read the book to children. No matter how good the story might be, more than with any other type of book, how a children's book looks is going to determine whether kids or adults want to read or buy it.

In other words, hire a professional illustrator and a professional layout and design person. In this age of computers and all kinds of graphic design programs, everyone thinks she can design her own children's book. The result is usually a disaster made by someone who doesn't understand that less is more. Many things need to be avoided when designing a children's book. Based on years of experience reviewing children's books and seeing what my children and grandchildren have and haven't liked, here are a few tips on what not to do:

Unprofessional Artwork

With a children's book, a picture is worth a thousand words, and trust me, little kids know the difference between good and bad art. You may not be able to tell what they are depicting in their own drawings, but they know when something "sucks."

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DIY chapter books in Microsoft Word – a five-step cheat sheet.

Written five books for kids with nothing to show for it but a page of Kindle ebooks? 

It’s time to break into print, if only to have something to show your mom, and your friends, and your kids, and their friends, and… well, print books are just awesome in every way.  If you haven’t released one  yet, you should.

Even if your ebooks are selling great, you may not feel like a “real” author if everything you’ve done is digital.  There are other great reasons to print your stuff as well, especially for kids, even if the profit margins may not be as high as for ebooks.  (They’re not; sorry.)

It may sound like an exercise in masochism, but with a little patience, you can format your own book for print using nothing more than Microsoft Word.

The most popular thing on my site are my free children’s picture book templates, and it’s true:  I could have just made another template to help you do chapter books.  But take my word for it:  you don’t need a template for this.  I want to help you make the book you dream of, quickly and easily, using tools you already have.

That’s what this post is all about.

I originally wrote my new chapter book, No Santa!, in Scrivener, but I knew all along that print was in its future.  Scrivener can output to Microsoft Word format (.doc or .docx), but only provides minimal formatting.  Your book is definitely not ready to print yet.

But don’t panic.  It won’t take much to whip it into shape.  You will need a slightly more-than-basic familiarity with Word, but you don’t have to be a guru.  If you’re comfortable with stuff like Styles and Margins, plus Headers and Footers, you’ll be okay.

Here’s your five-step cheat sheet to take your naked manuscript, Times New Roman and all, and turn it into a professional-looking print-ready PDF:

1) Use global Styles rather than formatting

Don’t format your text!  What I mean by this is don’t just highlight individual sections of your text and set them up to look the way you want.  Instead, assign each section of your text to a particular Style – either one of the many built-in styles or styles you create yourself.  You can change the way that style looks once you’ve done that, and then every instance of that Style will be changed at the same time.  You will save yourself a TON of work in the long run.

I assigned all my chapter titles to the Heading 1 style.  Heading styles are important because they will show up in your Table of Contents later on, if you create one.  Of course, all of your text should be in the same Style.  I usually use the built in Normal style and then tweak the Style for the size and font I need.

2) Choose fonts carefully

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5 illustrated ways to overcome the “self-published” curse (and make your picture book look great).

Are you cursed?

Lots of writers would swear they are.

It’s sort of true.  There’s a “self-published” curse that makes many, many independent, print-on-demand and Kindle books look… bad.  Stinky.  Rotten.

Is yours one of them?

I don’t believe in curses, I believe in bootstraps.  I hope you do, too.

I believe that today every writer has a chance to succeed in publishing a kids’ book… by following these five tips (illustrated for your amusement) to help ensure that yours succeed.

Before you go on, here’s my confession:  I have made mistakes in all of the following areas.  Might be making them at this very moment.  Who hasn’t? 

That’s how we learn.

Let’s sit down and learn these five easy lessons (with illustrated examples by me!) together.

1.  Fonts – get serious.

There is a special place in purgatory for those who rely on Comic Sans to make their story seem childlike / innocent / fun.  Your book is made for reading… so make it readable. 

Script fonts can be hard to read, especially in large doses where there’s not enough whitespace around them.  Similarly, novelty fonts like this sawed-off-boards font make it difficult to read more than a little text at a time.  Finally, don’t mix more than three into your book.  I think the experts say four, per page… but I say three per book, so there.

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Are editors and agents sick of YOUR book? 11 things they don’t want to see.

Is your story perfect?

Wait! 

Don’t hit the send button just yet.

Before you email (or snail mail) that manuscript, make sure you aren’t sending an editor (or agent) a book she’s already sick of seeing.

It’s not like it’s tough to read their minds.  Editors, agents and other publishing professionals are out there giving interviews.  They are sitting down with bloggers and newspaper / magazine writers, mostly begging us (as writers) to please not send them certain books.

Which books?

Let’s listen to what they’re saying for a minute.  Can you hear them all?

Straight from the horses’ mouths, here’s what all those editors and agents are utterly, completely, and totally sick of…

Books that rhyme.

1.  Rhyme.  “I am SICK of seeing rhyming picture books with bad meter and rhyme. Ugh. Is there anything worse? No. No, there’s not.” – editor Josh Plattner, via Writers’ Rumpus.

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WriteKidsBooks.org Writers’ Workshop: Judo Juan

  Every once in a while, people email asking if I’ll take a look at their story.  I thought it might be fun to run this as an occasional blog feature, so I asked one writer’s permission to have his story and my suggestions appear here on this site.

Rick was gracious enough to allow me to share his work, and I’d be thrilled if any of you would like to offer your comments as well in the Comments section below.

It’s an interesting concept, of a boy who starts taking martial arts, but the true potential of this story doesn’t shine through.

Martial arts is a creative, fun way to channel aggressive impulses.  Lots of parents, teachers and principals know that.  It would be a fun idea to create a kids’ book that would share this idea with children on their own level and perhaps make them eager to try martial arts for themselves.

I identified four factors that could really help this story succeed.

• Punching up the language – careful line editing
• The dojo as a whole new world – making the main character’s entrance into the new world of martial arts more dramatic
• Adding a longer middle – the story needs to be longer, with more action
• Finding the story / character arc – more emphasis on the takeaway

Punching up the language

Unfortunately, in his first draft, the writer does a lot of telling, not showing, and the language not only

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Writing Style with Strunk & White: #1 and #2

Flipping through my vintage Strunk & White, rediscovered why I liked the book so much in the first place.  It’s as jarring and fun as anything written about writing today, especially the unassuming Approach to Style section near the back.

(This vintage edition is actually new to me – it arrived a few weeks ago after I ordered a newer edition from Better World Books; they refunded my money very quickly when I reported the mistake.)

So – I thought – why not bring it up-to-date, sharing these fabulous insights in a way that applies to children’s books?  Brilliant.  And then kick it up just a bit (unless you’re Emeril, don’t call it a notch) with a “Lazy-Day Takeaway” – an easy tip you can incorporate into your own writing, like, immediately, today.  Or whenever.

Why not, indeed???

So I did.  I am.  I will.  I must!

There are 21 points in the Approach to Style, and I’m going to take them on two at a time. 

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