I’ve been posting for several days now on the speakers at SCBWI-WI’s fall retreat. The two I’ll highlight today were informative and funny, and their ideas were excellent.

     Author Julie Bowe started her session with prompts to get us thinking back to our childhood selves. We’re talking thoughts such as, “It makes me so mad when … ” or “I love it when … ,” and we were to complete the sentence as if we were our 3rd-to-5th grade selves. That was a fun little mental vacation back to my elementary-school playground (I can still remember the concrete tubes we climbed on.). The idea was to mentally return to the age of your protagonist, an absolute necessity if your writing is to resonate with that group of readers. Julie took us through fantastic research highlighting the physical, intellectual, emotional, and social development of older elementary-school kids. Armed with this knowlegdge, authors can have their protagonists meet and resolve their own problems within their ability and intellectual capability.

     Illustrator Henry Cole took us from rough sketches to final art on several of his books. His overhead projections showed how illustrations progress, how much they can change, and how very much emotion they evoke. We remember the art of our favorite picture books, and great art stays with us forever.

     Well, great books in their totality stay with us forever, and no doubt kids who’ve enjoyed Julie’s and Henry’s works would count their books among them.

     Pull out your English grammar book because it’s time to review story structure. Yay, yippie, I eat this stuff up! 🙂 Here we go…

     Speaking at the SCBWI-WI fall retreal, Newbery Award winner Linda Sue Park admits that she doesn’t really know her writing process. She says she reads so much that plot, for her, is innate; automatic. And she’s read enough and written enough to know good work when she sees it.

     So first, a bit on structure or, as Linda puts it, how to tell the story. There’s macro-structure, that is, the method used to tell the story; through letters (think C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters), poetry, etc. Then there’s micro-structure, that is, point of view, first or third person, past or present tense, etc. Linda makes a strong case against first person present (I run away) because it’s meant to showcase repetitive or recurring action, whereas third person is the traditional method of storytelling and one she calls the hallmark of good writing.

     Next, Linda gave great advice on voice. She finds it helpful to think of her narrator as a person instead of a disembodied voice with a motive to tell the story. That doesn’t mean the narrator must be reliable nor serious; (s)he could be comical or ironic. Linda nails this down before starting.

     Lastly, Linda spoke of scenes, defined as progress toward the quest or impediments blocking the way. Writing them in a sentence helps narrow them. Revisions are your friend.

     Honestly, I could have listened to her talk about story structure and writing for hours. Her writing is clear evidence that she knows her craft.

     Remember that novel you read awhile back — the one with three, four, five (seemingly endless) pages describing a room/field/plaza/whatever? Guh. Yeah, you remember. That may have been the point where you put the thing down. Maybe you never picked it back up.

     That is exactly what can’t happen for the writer, and it was a danger mentioned several times at the retreat I spoke of in my last post. We’re talking about children’s books here. You know, shorter attention spans. Yes, adults too.

     So the warning was put out by people in the know; people like Newbery Award winner Linda Sue Park, who spoke so well about story structure and style that she will merit her own post. That’s coming, but for descriptions and internal monologues, she says she tends to limit herself to a few paragraphs because any more kills the action (progress) in the scene.

     Author and editor Ann Angel compared description to an actor on stage suspending the scene to address the audience directly, pulling their attention right out of the story.

     No doubt description has its place. How else would a reader understand the author’s world? The description’s got to have relevance, though, and can’t drag on forever. As I don’t wish this post to drag forever, I’ll end here. More on the retreat soon.