Each episode of Cabin Tales focuses on one aspect of creative writing, such as setting. They include original spooky stories, excerpts from creepy classics, and writing tips from authors like me. The stories are deliciously monstrous – ones you might tell around a campfire to scare your friends – so Catherine warns that they’re not for very young listeners.
Cabin Tales also encourages young writers to share their own stories with fun weekly prompts. I hope you check it out!
I’m excited to share my profile of the talented Soyoen Kim in the CANSCAIP NEWS Spring 2020, available to members and friends of CANSCAIP. Her latest book is A Last Goodbye, which was written by Elin Kelsey and published by Owlkids Books. Kirkus Reviewscalls it “Staggering” and it is!
UPDATE: Thank you to the organizers of the SCBWI Canada East Art of Story Conference, who have wisely decided to cancel it due to covid-19. I hope to be back as a speaker at a later event. In the meantime, they’re hoping to host online workshops and distance critiques so stayed tuned!
I’m thrilled and honoured to be included as faculty at the upcoming SCBWI Canada East Art of Story Conference. This is an intimate and craft-based conference focused on writing and illustrating for children and teens. I hope you’ll be able to join us.
Date: April 24 to 26, 2020 Place: Albert at Bay Suite Hotel, Ottawa
You can check out all the faculty and workshops. My talk will be based on my critical thesis and grad lecture I completed during my MFA in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. I’m excited to be able to share it with a wider audience.
How To Build Character Cultural Literacy To reflect the full and varied reality of human experience, all writers need to respectfully and thoughtfully depict secondary characters with a range of cultural beliefs. Even when our protagonists largely mirror us, can we say the same for all their friends?
Each character we create exists within a global village and within a particular nation, neighbourhood, social class, ability level as well as an ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, family, and peer group—each with its own distinct culture. Awareness of our characters’ culture beliefs will deepen their presence on the page.
Using insights from contemporary cultural anthropologists, I’ll introduce tools we can use to identify our characters’ deep-level cultural beliefs, offering insights into their motivations and story arcs. I’ll focus on family culture since that’s where we first learn and express our beliefs, although these tools can be applied to other cultural groups. We’ll also compare our own cultural beliefs to our characters’ to discuss the importance of respecting #OwnVoices, writing within our cultural elements, and avoiding bias through omission.
I’ve been having fun drawing my Kan’t Draw Komics, which I started because I’m a terrible artist. You can read more about that in this post. Here are my latest ones.
As author Jane Smiley said, “Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.”
May your story garden thrive!
Personally, I’m not sure the revision stage ever ends. That’s one of the wonderful and challenging parts of writing.
During my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, I wrote about how to revise picture-book manuscripts. I’m happy to share this as a two-part article in the CANSCAIP News.
The first part was published in the Spring issue, and it focuses on beginnings and endings. Now, the Summer issue includes the second part on how to revise the messy middle.
I’m currently finishing up my second semester with my genius advisor Amanda Jenkins, author of the Printz Honor Book Repossessed, among others titles. My goal this semester was to understand how to convey authentic and deep character emotion in both revised and new manuscripts. It expanded to include how to structure a story based on a character’s emotional journey.
Here’s what I did over the last six months:
I read and analyzed books in a wide range of genres — picture books, chapter books, poetry, novels for kids and teens, graphic novels, novels in verse, manga, short stories for kids and teens, nonfiction and memoir. I listened to 20 audio-recorded VCFA lectures and a handful of critical theses.
I wrote short essays about how to use humor to maximize reader engagement with emotionally taxing characters and how to use micro-level tools to focus emotion in a scene. At the request of my advisor, I wrote a personal essay on why I’m drawn to write monstrous characters like Bog, since one of my works-in-progress has a monstrous character in it. I also wrote two long essays about power relationships and group dynamics in kid-lit families and peer groups.
I researched for my upcoming critical thesis, which I’ll write in my third semester, and I wrote a proposal for it. I’m super-stoked to start writing this!
For my creative writing, I wrote side writing about my works-in-progress as well as new manuscript pages. I focussed on two projects: a revision of a YA novel and first draft of an MG novel. My creative was focussed on depth of characterization and understanding the story that occurs off the page as well as on it.
I emerge from this first semester with this big-picture takeaway: how I can transform my writing process to achieve greater depth of character emotion and use that emotional depth to form the inner arc of a story. I’ve now got a handle on my characters from both my novel projects, and I’m ready to write them in a way that is both honest and deep.
My third semester starts in January with a residency filled with workshops, lectures and readings — and a new faculty advisor. I’m so grateful for what I’ve learned so far and I’m excited for the next steps!
