When I talked to Cynthia Voigt about the ideas of place attachment and our psychological connection to place, she said she uses maps to orient herself within a story because she doesn’t like to feel “geographically dislocated” as she writes. When we discussed A Solitary Blue she said, “I think of Solitary Blue as a […]
Dicey and her siblings were searching for home, but Jeff, the main character in A Solitary Blue, is not. This book is about the shadow side of place. Jeff lives in Baltimore with his father, the Professor, after his mother abandons them when Jeff is 7. Voigt only describes the home in Baltimore once, after […]
To explore these ideas of positive and negative place attachment, I chose to focus on middle grade settings, and home in particular. However, these concepts do apply across genres and across ages. Why middle grade? Between our childhood and teenage years, we begin to see the world through new eyes. We observe carefully, we make […]
Take a look at the room you’re in. If I asked you to write a story set there, which details would you use? The color of the walls? The way the light comes in through the windows? Maybe something about the chairs. With those details you could sketch out a pretty good picture of the […]
Years before I sat down in my first writing class, I took a lot of painting studios in college. At some point, I noticed a pattern to my work: I’d start with charcoal, sketching my subject on the canvas, and by the time I worked my way from the head down to the legs, there […]
I swore I’d never, ever write historical fiction. Don’t get me wrong, I love reading it, but do you realize how much work those writers have to do? Like all good stories, I set off on one journey not knowing I’d end up a changed person at the end of the trail. My grandmother left […]
As readers, we’re drawn though a book because we care about the character, or we want to know what happens. But for a book that is a meditation on grief, something else has to pull us through this dark and potentially boggy place. In We Are Okay, Nina LaCour offers a handful of narrative threads […]
As writers, we obsess over chapter endings for good reason. The best ones hook readers for another few minutes, or hours. Not so good and it’s lights-off-for-bedtime. We love a good chapter ending when we read it, but recognizing one and writing one are mysteriously different. “We know we need to craft good chapter endings […]
In the middle of The Thief, Megan Whalen Turner crafted an intense, high-action page-turner of a scene. But there’s no fight, no adversaries, and no great stand-off. Just a single character, Gen, our protagonist and thief, in a cave. Why does it work? Pacing, sensory details, verbs and sentence structure build and release tension. Detailed, […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about beginnings – what captures us quickly and draws us into the center of story? We’re told to start with action, bring the reader into the scene, and keep it moving. That’s important advice, keeping us from lingering in backstory, setting the scene for too long, or wandering until we […]