Thursday, May 28, 2009

Glendale Writers Illustrators Schmoozin



Our Topic was "Crafting Your Characters"
Have you ever taken your main characters to therapy?
Have you tried figuring out what's playing on their iPods?

We shared insights and wisdom collected from various sources.. discussed tips, strategies, and techniques on how to make our characters multi-dimensional and get readers to care about them.

We discussed the importance of different phases of Character Conceptualization and the Realization Phase... understanding your character and then bringing it to life. Jen found a great article about that here.. http://www.amateurillustrator.com/articles/?p=144

We shared and discussed some popular characters and what we believed made them so successful and lovable.

Also had this site shared for all.. Just one more book- A website about travel and visiting children's book authors and illustrators…
http://www.justonemorebook.com/ -Thanks to Frank Hansen for this info.

We reviewed our assignments for our show... they are turning out so wonderful!
We also Shared our Goals from last month and made more for next months meeting. We found that a lot of us strived for goals a little beyond our reach... which is awesome... go go go... but we talked about setting one or two and keeping it simple for new goals that we can accomplish. Don't forget to keep them OUT where you can see them ALL the TIME! This way you can try to avoid them but they will just yell out at you.. "Hay, REMEMEBER ME... I am still here.. you could do it tomorrow but... hey JUST DO IT. (not endorsed by Nike)"

We have picked up a few writers... Yay :) It was a writers and illustrators evening.
We had a great meeting with new faces.

For our goals we used this guideline:

GOALS – GUIDING – OUR – ASTONISHING – LIFE - SKILLS
If you don't know where you're going, you may not like where you end up.
Determine your illustration goals so you can get where you want to be…

• Where am I now? • What is my ultimate goal?
• How do a gain the necessary knowledge, skills and abilities to get there?
• Assume personal responsibility for your own development
• Identify and prioritize goals and objectives
• Provide focus to observations, critique feedback and learning objectives
• Provide a framework for your destination

• Goal / Objective
• Steps and/or strategies
• Time frame for each step
• Evaluation of each step/strategy
• Success measures of step/strategy / Outcomes – what was actually achieved
• Goal completion date
• Comments (These are detailed remarks about what was learned, difficulties encountered
obstacles that were overcome, the relevance of the goal, etc.)

1 month goals - 6 month goals – 1 yr goals – 5 year goals – 10 year goals
(this is where we drew a box and divided it into 4 sections for what ever month/yr plan you want to start)
"What's Your Motivation?"…make things go from a ‘should or could do’ to an ‘I must do’?
Don’t know where to start… Start by listing one TO DO… and make that ‘one thing’ happen.

Next Month Schmooze
June 18: “Straying from our Comfort Zone…”
Exploring the Ideas of Experimentation and Adventure. We really want to experiment, explore and expand our horizons! This means spontaneous creativity, undying creative energy, dealing with deadlines and taking criticism. What if we try something new… and FAIL? What if we actually SUCCEED? How do we even know where to START? Let’s discuss these topics, share our trials and tribulations, success’ and weak points and moving on to the next level.


Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Illustrators' Schmooze in the O.C., June 27

Illustrators' Schmooze in the OC
Saturday, June 27
10:30 am at the studio of Marilyn Scott-Waters

Let's get ready to rock the SCBWI Summer Conference! Bring your portfolio, postcards and business cards to receive comments and encouragement from your fellow illustrators.

Contact me if you need directions to Marilyn's.

See you there!

Veronica Walsh
green2cats@yahoo.com

May schmooze at B & N in Irvine Marketplace

We discussed the market and what's selling. We read examples (first pages) of books like FANCY NANCY & ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN to look at the voice and how it hooks the reader. 

We also talked about conferences and critiques, and getting the most out of both.  It's often easier to go in with fewer expectations--and being happily surprised if you make a connection or get positive feedback. Try to approach all workshops and conferences with one goal in mind: becoming a better writer. And, if anything else happens along the way, then grab that good karma and run for the end zone! Take your critiques with a grain of salt. Put them away for a while. Then take a peek. It might surprise you how the comments you received, no matter how painful at first, actually make a lot of sense. But don't forget, in the long run, go with your gut. It's your story.

For just a bit of craft, we worked on developing new or existing characters. Writing from first person, we tackled three different emotional situations (joy, embarrassment, sadness) and shared them aloud. Some great writing emerged from these brave writers...

Stay focussed. Optimistic. And connected!

Thanks for schmoozing with us.

Lori

Monday, May 18, 2009

Revision Roundup - Westside Schmooze Edition!

Howdy, pardners!

Upwards of 35 cowpokes and writer folks gathered to ride herd on some ornery manuscript revisin’ on Wednesday night, May 13.


Some of the cowpokes and writer folks!

The night was jam-packed with ideas for revising our manuscripts, and was organized to move from BIG Picture tips (on plot, character, structure), to MEDIUM Shot issues (research, setting, drawing maps), to CLOSE-UP line-editing and wordsmithing. (In this we were inspired by a great article, "Revising a Novel: The Importance of Structure" by Jennifer Jensen, which you can read here.)

Here are some highlights and links:

BIG PICTURE TECHNIQUES

We talked about “The 9 essential drafts of your novel“ John Ritter spoke of at Writer’s Day 2005. He gave his process of 9 drafts as:

1. Dream Draft
2. Back and forth Draft
3. Dare to share
4. Surprises
5. Dialog
6. Problem solve and intensify
7. Fine tune
8. Polish
9. Send it off to Editor


Inspired by Linda Sue Park's discussion of Novel Structure at her web site --and in particular how she broke her main character's quest into Internal and External Quest, we did our first writing exercise of the night. Go ahead and lasso it for your story, too!

WRITING EXERCISE #1

Write down in a simple sentence your main character’s external arc and internal arc. Do they intersect at your story’s climax?



Example: The Picture Book “Knuffle Bunny,” by Mo Willems
External arc: Knuffle Bunny lost to Knuffle Bunny found
Internal arc: Trixie can’t communicate to Trixie says her first words
Yes, both arcs resolve at the story’s climax.

Airborn” by Kenneth Oppel was our Middle Grade example.
Fat Kid Rules The World” by K L Going was our Young Adult example.

Another way of thinking of this is The external arc is what happens. The internal arc is why you should care.


Lee shared a SHRUNKEN MANUSCRIPT of one of his picture book drafts.




Glitter, colors, stickers... It helped him look at pacing, consistency, internal and external arcs... and from this Lee figured out he was telling the wrong character’s story!

Here are some links to bloggers and authors talking about the shrunken manuscript process:

Darcy Patterson on Shrunken Manuscripts

and

Cheryl Rainfield sharing Sarah Miller's video on Sarah's Shrunken Manuscript


Rita talked about an alternate tool to view your novel in miniature: doing an OUTLINE of what happens, chapter by chapter--or scene by scene--in a table or spreadsheet. One of the writers in Rita’s groups did this with just three columns: the first column contained the chapter number or title, the second described What Happens, and the third was blank, for making notes or comments—either for herself or for the people she was getting feedback from.

You can expand this table by adding columns, perhaps for external plot and internal plot, or for your themes. Nancy Lamb gives her own version of this in The Writer's Guide to Crafting Stories For Children.


Karol shared Jeffrey Kitchen's technique of writing backwards--as a way to check whether each event in your story is truly caused by what came before. (We found a link about this here)

Lee compared this idea to a fun picture book by David LaRochelle called The End!


We talked about why one might choose 3rd- or 1st-person--or even 2nd-person--to tell their story, and attendees volunteered insights on what their own manuscripts gained when they changed from one to the other. (For a basic rundown of what the differences are, this Wikipedia article is useful. It lists some examples of books written in each narrative mode.)

Rita also gave examples of books that use first person AND third person in the same novel:
The Bartimaeus Trilogy, by Jonathan Stroud (middle grade fantasy)
Skin Hunger, by Kathleen Duey (YA fantasy)

Linda Sue Park's advice on this and other dilemmas is to write scenes BOTH ways, if you can't figure out which way to go. Her point is that, “The price of good writing is time.”

We also shared a few highlights from a talk given by Firebrand Literary agent Michael Stearns at SCBWI-LA Writer’s Day, this past April 18th, titled "The Plot Thickens: 13 Questions to Ask of a Way Too Wimpy Storyline."

1.) Do you have a clock in your story?
2.) Have you buried the ends of your chapters? (End chapters on cliffhangers!)
3.) Have you structured your story to create suspense?
Is the straightforward telling the BEST way for your story?
(Check out Michael's blog entry on ABDCE: Action, Background, Development, Climax, Ending.
5.) Have you taken full advantage of using subplots?
Subplots provide camouflage for your main plotline, to distract the readers from what you’re really up to.

Rita expanded on this, sharing the Using “B” Plots and “C” Plots concept Kathleen Duey spoke about at the summer conference years ago, on how to use subplots to solve pacing issues and deal with “the sagging middle.”

10.) Have you taken advantage of how everybody but everybody lies?
12.) Have you followed through on every consequence of your characters' acts?
13.) Have you been as mean as possible to you characters?
Michael quoted another author's idea of always asking, while writing, “Does it hurt yet?”

(For a full summary of Michael Stearns's talk from Writer's Day, check his blog, where he promises to post the material soon


More than half-way through the rodeo...
And look, people were still smiling!


When we got to the CLOSE-UP, Line-Editing portion of the night, still more great suggestions abounded, including:

Another great article by Jennifer Jensen, titled Structural Support and Line Editing for Novels (© Jennifer Jensen Oct 8, 2008), which you can read here

LEE mentioned the idea (from many authors) of recording yourself reading your manuscript aloud

And Lisa Yee's revision advice to change the font and margins, to make the story Look new to you, so you can see it fresh.


Finally, Rita also shared the idea of the One-Pass Revision, from an article by Holly Lisle. This author suggests you can make all levels of changes at the same time--from big-picture themes and characters to line-edits and word choices.

Holly Lisle also wrote a helpful article on scenes, titled “Scene-Creation Workshop—Writing Scenes That Move Your Story Forward," which you can read here.


Specifically, she defines a scene as containing these basic elements:

a place,
a time frame,
and a change that moves the story forward.


Robert McKee’s book on Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting--which you can also get as audio CDs--also talks about how to analyze scenes. (This book targets screenwriters but is a great resource of all of us.)

In this, he brings up how every scene should be able to be defined as bringing out a change in some Value. For example: a character goes from happy to sad, or from no knowledge to knowledge, or from being an outsider to an insider, etc. (Other examples, as provided by Holly Lisle, included hate-->love, fear-->trust, etc.)

This led us to our

WRITING EXERCISE #2 - and go ahead, you can grab this one by the horns now!

Write a scene in 5 sentences or less where some value changes. Where something unexpected happens. (After all, if what you expect to have happen does happen, you don’t have much of a story, right?)

As adapted from “Scene-Creation Workshop


Thanks for riding into the sunset with us on this review of our night talkin’ ‘bout revision!


Oh, we started the night with a *disclaimer*, which we'll end with here:

Just as there are lots of ways of writing a first draft, so there are infinite ways to tackle revision. Everyone works differently, and not EVERYTHING is going to work for everyone — but we hope the ideas discussed inspire and help everyone on their revisions!


We hope to see you next month, on Wednesday June 10, 2009, when our Schmooze topic is... How to get the most out of the SCBWI Summer Conference – including tips for doing your homework, networking, and having a blast!

Namaste,

Lee and Rita

All photos by Rita Crayon Huang


p.s. - While we didn't put up a separate post for our April Middle Grade and Young Adult Critique Night, as you can see below a good and productive time was had by all!



Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Come Schmooze with us!


Please join us...8-)
The Westside Illustrators Schmooze
Monday evening, May 18th

7pm - 9pm
11624 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90064


It's 'portfolio night'...

So dust it off, fix it up, get started,
complete it, or hell... just come without it!

1) We will 'round robin' our portfolios for some honest
feedback from our peers.
Critiques are both private and anonymous...
a most valuable assessment of our work.
(Please bring post-its, scissors, & pen or pencil)

2) ALSO...Those of you that have participated
in our 'Westside Art Project', share your
latest work with the group...


Looking forward to seeing you all!
xoxo...suzy:-D


WHERE???... 11624 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90064
This is a large gray building with ivy & bamboo on the facade.
The sign near the door reads - "Alliance Francaise."

DIRECTIONS???... http://maps.google.com/maps?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLR,GGLR:2006-05,GGLR:en&q=11624+W.+Pico+BLvd,+Los+Angeles,+CA+90064&um=1&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&resnum=1&ct=title

PARKING???
... Street parking only. You don't have to feed meters after 6pm. Do NOT park in the electrical warehouse parking lot next door OR the parking lot behind the building on the corner of Federal Ave. You will be towed...FAST.

?????? SoozyEB@aol.com suzy's cell... 818 389 1950
come visit me at... http://www.SuzyEngelmanBlock.com