After spending five years on a manuscript that still isn’t publisher-ready, I have learned the hard way that there’s a delicate balance you need to walk when writing a compelling teenage protagonist. Here, and I’ll be as brief as possible, is what I’ve learned…
As always, writing advice is subjective; do what works for you. But early on in my writing endeavors, I read a book that changed the way I thought about drafting and receiving critical feedback on my work, so I wanted to share my method…
So! If you follow me on Twitter you know I started writing a new novel…
So last week I said I wanted to talk about something super-important in novel-writing: voice. This week I’m talking about the same thing, and showing an example of a completely different kind of voice. In YA, you can sometimes read several books in a row all with similar voices. That’s why I love The Spectacular Now–the […]
So I’ve written a lot about what we can learn from the masterful writers who’ve come before us, focusing mainly on the first 250 words of the manuscript. Today I want to focus on something else: voice.
For my first novel, the only people I had reading and critiquing it were friends and family. Which was awesome for my ego–not so awesome for my work. For my second novel, I actually did what the internets have been advising me to do–I searched for critique partners. And I actually found two! More on […]
After an amazing wedding weekend (my boyfriend’s sister’s) it was hard to return to real life this week.
I’m still struggling with getting the beginning of my novel just right, so it’s time for another installment of this. (Installments 1 and 2 here and here). I’ve been getting more and more into YA contemporary. Jandy Nelson, Stephanie Perkins, Robyn Schneider, Gayle Forman, Rainbow Rowell, and David Levithan are all recent faves. But I’d argue […]
I’m currently revising the first book I ever wrote. After many years of debate, I’ve decided to definitively kill my darling of a prologue and start right away with the main story. I wrote before about the importance of the first 250 words of your manuscript and I’ll probably write about it again because it was […]
So in my contemporary YA work in progress, I’m finally finally at the point where the people I want to kiss, do. Yay! I wrote a draft of that scene. And then reread it. And it was … meh. I wanted the literary equivalent to fireworks, only less clichéd. I did not produce that. And though I know […]
