That’s the topic we’re going to tackle today. Since it’s spring, I’ve got spring cleaning on the brain and I thought I’d do a quick rundown on how to go from brainstorming ideas to planning out a concrete story.

This process works best if you have a manuscript started and have at least a few scenes already written. In other words, if you’re a “pantser” (i.e. you write by the seat of your pants) this approach could be a great fit for you. That said, if you’re a “plotter” and you like to pre-plan your story before you write it, you can also use this step-by-step system and use it to plan your story from scratch. And, of course, if you’re a mix of the two extremes, this process is also a great fit for that “plotter-pantser” middle ground. 

1) Take an Inventory

If you’re a pantser, and you’ve already written part (or all) of your story, this step will be easy-peasy. Basically, all you have to do is sit down with a blank sheet of paper and make a list of every single scene you’ve written. If you’re a plotter and you haven’t started writing yet, just sketch out the scenes you think your story needs.

As you do this exercise, don’t worry about including a ton of details, just jot down a few words for each scene that will help you identify which scene is which. You also don’t necessarily need to list all the characters for each scene, but in some cases you may want to include initials with the scenes so you remember which key characters are in play.

For example, your list might look something like this:

• Scene with B alone in the park
• Dinner party (B, V, C, P)
• Scene where B shares the bad news with V
• Etc.

Don’t panic if you can’t remember each and every last scene you’ve written (or plan to write) and don’t worry about listing things in order. The goal here is just to do a quick inventory so you get a sense for all the different scenes that are part of your story.

2) Make Scene Cards

Once you’ve taken an inventory of scenes, the best next step is to make scene cards. You can do scene cards with index cards or sticky notes (hooray for office supplies!) or virtually by using a program like Scrivener.

Here’s what I put on each card:

• Scene Name (usually taken directly from the inventory)
• Major Players (just the most important characters)
• What Happens (1-2 sentences max.)
• Setting (when/where the scene takes place)
• Purpose (why is the scene in the story?)

Make cards for scenes you’ve already written as well as scenes you think you might want to write in the future. The reason I love this method is because if you haven’t written all your scenes, you can use the scene cards almost like cue cards: pick one at random, then write that scene.

I personally like index cards the best because I love office supplies and they are the most portable option, but you should use whatever method works best for you. The goal here is for each scene to be its own separate unit (sticky note or index card) so you can move things around.

Some writers like to do a more detailed inventory (or outline) where they list out characters and events for each scene in a more granular way than just a list. If that’s the case, you can just print out your inventory and cut it up so that each scene is a separate piece of paper. Voilá! You’ve got instant scene cards.

3) Lay Out Your Scenes

After making scene cards, lay everything out on a table or other larger surface. The goal is to be able to see the whole story at a glance. The reason for doing this as scene cards (rather than a static outline) is that it allows you to move things around if need be.

Leave the scenes laid out for a couple of days and look at your story from time to time. If any scenes seem out of place, try moving them around to see if they work better somewhere else. Let the story “settle” for a few days before moving on to the next step.

4) Mark the Landmark Scenes

Once you’ve laid out your scene cards, it’s time to mark your story landmarks. This includes the three acts, two pivot points (where the acts transition from one to the next), as well as the midpoint, climax, and denouement. Use sticky notes or a brightly colored pen to mark those key points in your story.

Next, it’s time to consider pacing. How long are each of your acts? On average, Act 1 is usually around 20-25% of the story, Act 2 is 50-60%, and Act 3 is 20-25%. This is not an exact science, of course, and some books might have an Act 2 that is 80% of the entire story while others might be broken up almost into thirds. The goal here is to get an overall sense for where those transition points fall and how long each of the acts are relative to the size of the entire book.

You’ll also want to look carefully at the placement of your midpoint. Usually this point in the story falls right at the halfway mark, give or take a few scenes. Sometimes, though, the midpoint might actually span multiple scenes. For example, in Pride and Prejudice, the midpoint begins with the False Failure and Mr. Darcy’s failed proposal, then spans until Elizabeth reads Mr. Darcy’s letter, and finally culminates with her famous line: “‘Til this moment, I never knew myself.”

In addition to marking the midpoint, you’ll also want to note where the climax falls in your story. Usually, the climax falls around the 85-90% mark, though there is plenty of wiggle room. The key is that the climax must occur somewhere in Act 3 and there should still be a scene (or two or more) following it as part of the closure that follows. You don’t want the climax to be the absolute last scene because the story may feel truncated. You want to make sure you leave room for that “sigh of relief” that is the denouement.

5) Map Out Your Story

By the time you reach this point in the process, you should have a pretty good idea of the shape of your story and how everything fits together. Still, if you’re a visual person (like me) you may want to take this one step further and draw a story map. To map out your story you must first identify the Major Dramatic Question (MDQ), which is the main question that drives the primary thread of your story forward. You’ll also want to identify 1-3 Lesser Dramatic Questions (LDQs), which are questions that drive the subplots. Once you have the MDQ and LDQs identified, assign each thread a color and mark the scenes that belong to that thread with a dot in that color pen.

For example, if we were doing this exercise with The Hunger Games we might say the main thread of the story (“Will Katniss survive the games?”) is orange, while the subplots might be blue and pink. Then we mark the scenes with a dot indicating whether they belong to a particular thread. For instance, the Reaping scene, which belongs to all three threads, would have dots in each color: orange, pink, and blue. If a scene does not have any dots on it, then you need to consider seriously whether that scene belongs in the story at all, since it doesn’t contribute to any of the story threads.

After you’ve identified which thread(s) each scene belongs to, you can map your story out like a subway map. Each scene is represented by a stop on the map and each thread is a subway line. The “local stops” are scenes that only appear in one story thread, while the “express stops” are scenes that appear as intersections between two or more threads. You can map out your story like a subway, like this example from The Hunger Games. It might look something like this:

Why do we map out our stories in this way? Aside from making a pretty diagram, what’s the point? The reason we do this is because once you’ve mapped out your story, you can separate out the subway lines and look at each story thread individually. This allows you to make sure whether there are any places where a particular thread sags. When we tease apart the three threads in The Hunger Games map, we get something that looks like this:

As we can see, in the pink line there is a long gap where there are no scenes. Now, in the case of this particular story, it works because that stretch of the story is when Katniss is training for the Games and then the first part when she is in the Arena. For that section of the book, it makes sense that she’s not focusing on her family because her own survival is front and center. It’s only later in Act 2 of the story, where she connects with Rue, that the family story thread becomes more important.

What’s the purpose of this exercise? When we tease apart our story threads, we can see if there are places where a bunch of scenes lump together or if there is a long gap between scenes. Once we identify those places, we can make an informed, artistic decision. It’s possible that we decide to leave it exactly as is because it works for the story… and that’s okay. But the point is that this becomes an intentional choice, rather than a haphazard outcome that “just happened that way.”

Instinct to Intention

At DIY MFA, we talk a lot about making the shift from instinct to intention. If you’re part of our word nerd community, you’ve already got good instincts. I say this with confidence because I know that DIY MFA attracts writers like you, who are dedicated to learning the craft and becoming the best writers they can be.

But instincts alone are not enough. We can write stories on instinct alone, but that would make our process random. Sometimes, we’d get it “right” and other times we might miss the mark. But once we take the time to understand what’s going on in our story and really analyze the breakdown of all the parts, we can start to make intentional choices.

When we shift from instinct to intention, our process goes from random to precise. We are no longer making decisions through trial and error. Nothing in our book will be there by accident, but because we consciously put it there. This gives us artistic control over the outcome and allows us to make our book the best it can possibly be.

There you have it: a step-by-step process to help you get your manuscript organized. You can use this process whether you are a “plotter” and you like to pre-plan every detail of your book, or if you are a “pantser” and you write by the seat of your pants. The goal of this method is not to pigeonhole you or impose a set structure and squash the life out of your story. Rather, the purpose of this exercise is for you to gain clarity on what you’re already doing so you can make intentional choices about your book. 

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.

The post Writer Fuel: Spring Cleaning – Get Your Manuscript Organized appeared first on DIY MFA.

Mapping Out the Calendar

Before I set goals, I do a calendar exercise where I put a copy of the upcoming year’s calendar all on one page. Each row represents a month, and the numbers in that row are the individual days. Using a marker or highlighter (or a more high-tech option, an Apple pencil and app called Paper), I block off windows of time that I need for various projects. I also color-code things so that each type of DIY MFA project (workshops, courses, HUB) gets a different color. This way I can see at a glance where my calendar is already full and where I have space to play.

I used to do this exercise on paper with different colored markers, but nowadays I use the more high-tech option, which makes it easy for me to edit things as plans ebb and flow throughout the year. My team and I call this the “kooky calendar” and it’s not set in stone, it gives us an overall roadmap for the year ahead so we have a general sense of what’s happening and when.

Climbing the Mountain

I like to think of writing books as being like climbing a mountain. Now, truth be told, I’ve never scaled a major mountain myself (the most I’ve done is hike up to the top of a small hill near campus when I was in college). Still, I think the analogy holds true. When you think about a big project—like climbing a mountain—there are a couple of different considerations.

Choose the Right Mountain

Your mountain is your “big vision” and the first thing you have to do is make sure you’re climbing the right mountain. After all, it does you no good to scale Everest if what you really wanted to do was reach the top of Kilimanjaro. The same thing is true with a big project. You have to make sure you’re tackling the right project, and for the right reasons. Writing a book is a big project, one that should not be taken on out of obligation or guilt. If you want to write a book, you need to want to write that book.

You also want to make sure you’re writing the right kind of book for you. Sure, it’s important to consider the market and what may or may not sell, but if you write a book solely based on market trends, you are fighting a losing battle. First off, things that are trending now won’t be trending two or three years from now (when your book finally hits the shelves). Plus, you have to live with your book for a long time, reading and rereading it throughout the drafting and revision process. If you don’t love the project, it’s going to be painful.

Plant the Flag

When people climb mountains and they get to the top, what do they do? They plant a flag to signal that they were there, that they reached the peak. Planting a flag is a symbol that you’ve conquered one mountain and are ready to pursue the next goal.

Writing a book is very similar. It’s important to have a symbol, something that signals that you’ve reached your goal and are ready to move onto the next thing. This plant-the-flag moment is going to be different for every writer. For one it might be holding a printed copy of the book in their hand. For another, it might be doing their first author signing. For still another it might be getting an award.

Regardless of what that plant-the-flag moment is, it should be a tangible, concrete event. Something that you can point to and say, “Yes! I did that.”

Determine the Milestones

The milestones are the big phases of your larger project, kind of like the places you set up camp when you scale a big mountain. You don’t try to climb the whole thing bottom to top, you just focus on getting to the next place where you’ll set up camp for the night. In terms of goal setting, basically you take your larger project and break it down into three-to-five overarching steps. For example, if your goal is to write and traditionally publish a novel, your milestones might be:

1. Finish a rough draft.
2. Do revisions.
3. Query agents.
4. Go through the publisher’s editorial process.
5. Launch the book.

These are not small action steps, but larger sub-projects leading to your big vision of writing and publishing your book. It’s important to break the big vision into smaller milestones because it makes the overall project feel more manageable. After all, “write and publish a book” can feel overwhelming to many writers, but finishing a draft—though still a big task—can feel a little less daunting.

Still, it’s important to recognize that these milestones are not small steps that can get done in a day. Rather, they are sub-projects that might take weeks or months to complete. This is why we must break our milestones down into action steps.

Break Things into Action Steps

Here is where the rubber meets the road. The key to completing your milestones (and thereby also reaching your big vision) is to break those milestones down into manageable action steps. These should be bite-sized steps that you can start and finish in one sitting. The idea is for you to feel that sense of accomplishment when you complete an action step. This is why action steps should be small, concrete, and easy to complete.

For example, let’s suppose your milestone is “finish a rough draft.” Unless you’re incredibly prolific (or are willing to sacrifice your sleep and sanity), you won’t be able to finish a draft in a day. But what you can do is break that draft down into manageable chunks.

Let’s suppose you can easily write 1,000 words per weekday. That means that in one week you’ll have 5,000 words. If a typical novel is 80,000 words, then it’s just simple math: 80,000 divided by 5,000 is 16. This means it will take you 16 weeks of writing (or a little under four months) to complete your draft. Then, all you have to do is stick to the program and knock out those 1,000 daily words.

Or as another example, let’s imagine you’re gearing up for your book launch and you want to weave podcast appearances into your launch strategy. First you may want to do some research on how to give good podcast interviews. (Here’s a post that walks you through the before, during, and after.) Next, you need to make a list of potential podcasts you’ll want to pitch. Making the list might be quick, but researching the various shows may take more time, so you may want to break that task into small batches of 2-3 podcasts.

After that, you need to start pitching. One action step might be to write a pitch letter template. (While you’ll want to personalize each pitch, it can help to have a template to work from.) Then you’ll need to start sending out pitches, one at a time.

When it comes to tracking complex action steps, I’m a big fan of using project management software. Currently, my team uses a program called Asana. It’s a great piece of software and has a lot of bells and whistles, but for many writers it’s likely much more than you need. Other software I’ve used in the past is Trello and ToDoist (both of which offer free plans). For many, even just a simple spreadsheet tracking daily word count can be sufficient. The point is, that it’s incredibly easy to lose track of how much progress you’ve made if you don’t keep a written record. So, find a way to record your progress and keep track of how far you’ve come.

Here’s a diagram showing the big vision broken down into milestones and then further separated into action steps:

What If You Hate to Set Goals?

Many writers—particularly “pantsers” who write by the seat of their pants—tend to resist goal setting. They want to throw themselves into their projects and write with abandon, not worrying about where that project might lead.

This is all well and good, and some creative exploration is important, particularly at the early stages of a career. But at some point, you’ll need to have a plan if you want to make good progress. It’s important to plan and set goals, especially if you’re juggling more than one big project at the same time.

At DIY MFA, we often have multiple projects in the hopper simultaneously. We might be gearing up to launch a workshop and have a course on the back-burner, ready to be launched soon thereafter. Plus, I often have multiple writers I’m working with one-on-one, and we have regular “maintenance work” we need to keep up with, like producing these Writer Fuel newsletters and the subsequent posts on our website.

Without setting goals, it’s hard to tell what’s important and will make the most impact, versus what’s just urgent and needs to get done right away. There’s a concept in time management called the Eisenhower Matrix, which looks at projects in terms of their importance and urgency.

Things that are neither important nor urgent can be removed from your task list altogether. Similarly, things that are urgent but not necessarily important can get delegated. The problem is, we often conflate urgency with importance and we’ll get tied up doing unimportant-but-urgent tasks when we should be focusing on the tasks that really matter.

This is where things get tricky. The temptation is to swat flies and focus all our energy on the urgent tasks that need to be done right now. But what about those important long-term tasks? They may not be urgent right this second, but they are often the things that move us closer to our goals.

Writing a book is an important-but-not-urgent task. Unless you’re under contract and on a deadline, you probably don’t have anyone waiting with bated breath for you to finish your manuscript. The task may not have an immediate deadline and it’s up to you to keep moving the ball down the field. With important-but-not-urgent tasks, the key is to schedule the time. You have to make sure you carve out room in your schedule and break that big project into small, manageable tasks so you can. Get. It. Done.

This is why goal setting matters. Without goals, we don’t know what tasks are important and what tasks are just urgent. Goal setting allows us to see the difference.

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.

The post Writer Fuel: Set Goals the DIY MFA Way appeared first on DIY MFA.

Early Decisions with Long-Term Impact

When we write, we often have our eyes on what’s right in front of us: the current project or even the current chapter. What we often don’t realize is that decisions we make right now with one project might have a ripple effect long after that project is done.

For example, when I first started DIY MFA, I had the opportunity to submit my Masters thesis for a contest. I decided to opt-out of the contest altogether because I had too much on my plate getting DIY MFA off the ground. I can’t help wondering, however, whether that choice to put DIY MFA ahead of my fiction writing hasn’t had a long-term impact on my writing career, pushing me in one direction rather than another.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my work at DIY MFA, but I’d be lying if I said that it afforded me tons of time for writing. That early decision to put DIY MFA ahead of my fiction has had a ripple effect that has lasted until now and will probably continue well into the future.

The same is true with renovations. It boggles my mind that we haven’t even started on demolition yet and already I have had to make choices about what tiles go in the bathroom or what the lighting in the living room will look like. Of course, I understand that there are things that have to happen at the gut level of a living space (electrical and plumbing, for example) that have a ripple effect on everything else. Still, it blows my mind that I’m making choices now that I’ll have to live with for thirty or forty years. It’s a little bit terrifying, to be honest.

Similarly, at the draft level of a book project, we might make choices early on that will have an impact far beyond what we would expect. Suppose you decide to combine two characters into one, or you choose to have your character do one thing instead of another, those things can change the entire shape of a story. Think of the movie Sliding Doors, where the story explores what happens when one simple twist of fate—making a subway or missing it altogether—can have a huge impact on a story’s direction.

Realizing that small decisions can have a massive impact can sometimes leave us stuck in our tracks. We become so afraid of making the wrong choice that we don’t make any choice at all and our story flounders. In the words of Maimonides, “The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.” This means that sooner or later we have to take the leap and make a choice or risk being stuck in decision-making limbo forever.

The thing to remember is that unlike home improvements, that messy first draft is supposed to be in flux. Sure, we might make the wrong choice at first, but we can always backtrack, something that’s not quite so easy to do when it comes to construction. Rather than think we are locked into our choices, we must think of that messy first draft as an experiment, where we try out different ideas to see what works. Then we can always course-correct down the road.

Understand Gut-Level Structure

I’m not a contractor, an architect, or an engineer. I don’t understand the inner workings of construction, but with this renovation I’ve had to develop a basic working knowledge of how things are put together. This means being able to look at construction drawings and make sense of what I see. It means trying to visualize what the finished product might look like, even if I don’t have an example in front of me. It also means having a basic understanding of the timeline and what steps need to come at what different points in the process.

The same is also true with writing. We may not need to be experts on the three-act structure and know all the story beats down to the scene-by-scene level, but we need to have a basic sense of what comes first and what comes later in the story trajectory. Whether we are plotters and like to plan every inch of a novel, or we are a pantsers and write by the seat of our pants, there are certain fundamental storytelling elements that we need to know. These are:

Act 1: The Status Quo. Whether your Act 1 is only a few chapters long or takes up half the novel, the purpose of it is to establish the status quo. The idea is to give the reader a sense for what “normal” is like for your main character, so that when you shake things up, the reader will notice the difference. This is important because it bakes the idea of transformation right into the heart of your story.

Pivot Point 1: The Point of No Return. At some point in the story, some external event will happen that will force the character’s hand and push them to make a choice. That choice often operates as a one-way door, where once the character makes it, they can’t go back to how things were. Think of Katniss Everdeen volunteering to take her sister’s place in the Hunger Games, or Dorothy’s house getting picked up by the tornado and plunked down in Oz. Once these events happen, the character can’t go back the way they came, they can only move forward.

Act 2: The Quest. This part of the story is where you deliver on the premise. If your story is about a girl magically plunked down in a strange new world called Oz, then this is where you have her exploring that world and making new friends. If the story is about a girl fighting in a tournament called The Hunger Games, then this is the part where the games play themselves out. Act 2 can be as short as a third of your book and as long as 80-90%. Really it’s all about what you need to happen in your story and how much space those plot events will require. Just keep in mind that the longer you make Act 2, the shorter Acts 1&3 will have to be. Also, remember that it can feel like a long slog to get through Act 2—there’s a reason some people call it the “muddle in the middle.”

Pivot Point 2: Dark Night of the Soul. At some point, the character must hit their lowest point. Things need to get bad before they can get better, and this is the darkest moment before things turn around. At this point, the character must legitimately feel that it’s okay for them to give up. (Of course they don’t give up, but it has to feel plausible.)

Act 3: The Ending. This is the point where things start ramping up and building momentum toward the climax. The Climax is the scene where the central conflict of the story comes to a head and gets decided one way or another. Either Katniss wins the Hunger Games, or she does not. Either Dorothy gets back home to Kansas or she does not. The climax is where we get a sense of resolution.

This is the basic foundation of how stories are built, but this structure should not be constraining. Think of it as a basic framework… like a floorplan. Different apartments might have the exact same floor plan, but it’s the design and detail that gives a space its own unique flair. Similarly, this basic structure can serve as a guide while still giving the writer ample space to build their story their way. Just as in home improvements it’s important to understand basic structural concepts, the same is true with writing as well. The three-act structure can serve as a framework for us to build something magical.

Hurry Up and Wait

I’ve talked about the publishing process in the past and the realities of what it takes to get a book out on the market. One thing that cannot be stressed enough is that the pace of publishing is weird. One minute you’re scrambling to make a deadline, the next you’re stuck waiting for months before you get any updates. We can sum up the pace of publishing with one phrase: “Hurry up and wait.”

The same is true with home improvements. It can feel like the construction is dragging on forever, and then the next minute you have to scramble to make some fast decisions or else you’ll hold up the whole process. Publishing and home improvements both require us to become phenomenal jugglers, being able to hop from one task to another without missing a beat.

When I first published the DIY MFA book, I got flustered with this feast or famine timeline. Why couldn’t things get planned more slowly and methodically? Why did I always have to drop everything and rush? Of course, what I didn’t realize is that just as I was having to hurry up and wait on my side, everyone else who was part of the process also had to do the same thing.

When you have a lot of different moving parts to a project and each section is done by a different person, everyone has to hurry up and wait or the whole process would grind to a halt. Yes, it means that sometimes you have to drop everything and focus on that one thing that demands your attention right now, but once your step is done and you hand things off to the next person and take a breath… at least until you have to hurry up and wait again.

Everything’s a Mess… Until It’s Not

When I was 14, my parents decided to renovate their living room, dining room, and kitchen all with us still living in the apartment. It was a fiasco. If you’ve ever gone through a major renovation while still living in the place, you know exactly what I’m talking about. We ate nothing but takeout for months on end. Everything was covered in dust. Plus, my parents wanted to redo the living/dining room floors so we had to walk across those areas on planks like it was something out of a pirate movie.

Home improvements are messy and you have to make a mess before you can clean things up and make it all look beautiful. The same is true with writing. That first draft you write is going to be garbage. It will be embarrassingly terrible, and that’s okay because it gives you a starting point where you can build something wonderful. That first draft doesn’t have to be pretty. It just has to do one thing: Exist.

Other forms of art—like sculpture, pottery, even painting—have raw materials. You have stone and clay to shape or empty canvases to fill. In writing, we need to create our own raw material and this is our first draft or “draft zero.” The raw material doesn’t exist before we make it, and we have to embrace the fact that this initial draft will be a complete mess. The artistry comes from what we do with that mess, how we shape it and mold it and make it beautiful.

Remember, writing is a slow and steady process. A book doesn’t get written in a day and it’s all about putting in a consistent effort, one word at a time. So keep taking those baby steps and in a few months, you’ll see the miles of progress you’ve made. 

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.

The post Writer Fuel: How Home Improvements Are Like Writing a Book appeared first on DIY MFA.

For folks who may not be familiar, let’s define what DIY MFA means. We all know that DIY stands for “do-it-yourself” but what about the MFA part? No, it’s not short for “mafia,” though we do get that a lot. Actually, MFA is the abbreviation for “Master of Fine Arts” which is the graduate degree most frequently offered for creative writing.

Why would you DIY your MFA?

I got a traditional MFA myself, and while I absolutely loved my graduate school experience, I also recognized that I was in a very privileged position to be able to get that degree. At the time, I was married with no kids and lawyer-hubby was working at a big, fancy law firm, so it was okay for me to take two years off work and go back to school. We also lived in NYC, where there are dozens of schools with traditional MFA programs right in our backyard. I could go back to school without having to move.

Today’s Gabriela (by the way) would never be able to do that. Between running DIY MFA full-time and having two kiddos, ages 10 and 12, there is no way I would ever be able to go back to school at this stage in my life. I’m grateful that I had that opportunity at the time and I loved every minute of it, but I also recognize that the traditional MFA is not feasible for everyone.

DIY MFA grew out of this realization that while traditional graduate programs are wonderful and can serve some people very well, they are by no means the best fit for every writer. What I discovered in developing DIY MFA is that there are many writers out there who want the rigor of a graduate education, but the logistics are just not in their favor.

For some, it might be a matter of geography. Many writers don’t have a school with a writing program within commuting distance. Or it might have to do with the time commitment and other logistics. For a lot of writers, day jobs and family responsibilities need to take precedence, and they have to fit their writing around all these things.

For others it might come down to the type of writing they want to do. Most traditional MFA programs emphasize literary fiction, so folks writing children’s books or genre fiction would be out of luck. Yes, there are some rare programs that offer genre or writing for children concentrations, but they are few and far between.

And, of course, there is the matter of tuition. While there are some schools that offer fully-funded MFA programs, it’s certainly not true of all programs by any stretch. And if you were to pay full freight for some of these schools it could end up costing you $80,000+ per year. Unlike medical school or law school, where there’s a clear career pathway after graduation and odds are reasonable that you might be able to recoup that tuition, things in the writing space are quite a bit fuzzier. You might get a great book deal, or you might work for years and years and never pay back those loans.

With tuition rates increasing faster than inflation and the tricky state of publishing (what with the advent of AI), now more than ever, writers need a do-it-yourself education option. We need ways to build that academic rigor into our lives without the major time commitment and the ridiculous costs. DIY MFA offers many workshops and courses to help writers deepen their knowledge of the craft, but today I wanted to make the fundamentals available to everyone and walk you through—step by step—how to DIY your MFA.

How to DIY Your MFA

This is a topic I get asked to speak on all the time and it’s one of my favorite things to discuss. I love giving writers the tools they need to succeed and my favorite thing is seeing my fellow word nerds reach their goals. This is why I started DIY MFA, after all.

So, how do you do it? How do you DIY your MFA?

The key is understanding DIY MFA’s three-pronged approach. There are three pillars of DIY MFA and these are: (1) write with focus, (2) read with purpose, and (3) build your community. If you’re going to DIY your MFA, you need to build all three components into your author life.

I developed this framework after studying many different traditional MFA programs. I visited several MFA websites and looked at how they laid out their curricula and what courses they required of their students. From all this research, a pattern emerged. There were three elements that kept coming up again and again, and these were writing, reading, and community.

From this, I deduced that in order to create a DIY version of the traditional MFA you needed to have these three things. First and foremost, you need to write and practice your craft. Second (and equally important) you need to learn how to read with a writer’s eye. Finally, you also need to engage with your community, both that of fellow writers as well as your readers.

Write with Focus

Writing with focus means writing with an end-goal in mind. Sure, it’s great to noodle around and try out different ideas, but sooner or later you need to decide on a project, then knuckle down and write it. Finishing projects is probably one of the most important skills a writer will need to develop.

When you write with focus, you also take the time to study the craft and improve your skills. Lately, I’ve been revisiting the book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, who I interviewed for DIY MFA Radio some time ago. In this book, they talk about how to use deliberate practice in order to improve your skills. Just as a top athlete or accomplished musician needs to practice in order to reach a level of excellence, so too is it with writing. If we want to reach a higher level with our writing, we need to practice.

Finally, it’s important to track your progress, because you can’t modify what you can’t measure. Many writers make a note of their word counts every time they write. Other writers might track the amount of time they spend writing. I find that word count and time are both good measures of writing progress, but they apply to different situations. Word count is best for measuring how much progress you make when first drafting a manuscript, whereas time might be a better measure if you’re in the revision process.

Read with Purpose

One of the first things I recommend to people when they ask me about how to read like a writer is I tell them to build a reading list. Just as a professor puts together a syllabus with all the books you need to read in a given semester, you need to do the same thing if you’re going to DIY your MFA. The key is understanding what kinds of books to put on your list.

When putting together a reading list, I like to think of the 4Cs: comps, contextual books, contemporary books, and classics. Comps are books similar to the one you’re writing. Imagine your book sitting on a bookstore shelf; the comps are the books on the shelf next to it. Contextual books are your research, books you read in order to inform your writing. Contemporary books are any books in your genre published within the past two years. These books do not need to be similar to your current project. Finally, classics are self-explanatory, but these are books that have stood the test of time. A good reading list is like a well-balanced diet and should include a couple of books from each of these categories.

Once you’ve selected your books, you need to practice reading them with a writer’s eye. This means not just considering what the book is about or why the author wrote it, but also focusing on how the writer crafts the story. The key to reading like a writer is to ask yourself two questions: (1) How did the writer achieve this effect? and (2) How can I do that in my own work?

Build Your Community

Finally, we come to the community piece of the puzzle. To build your community, you need to consider three different groups of people with whom you need to connect: fellow writers, your readers, and the industry as a whole. In other words, it boils down to 3Ps: peers, platform, and publishing.

When it comes to connecting with your peers, you want to consider many different questions. Do you want feedback on your writing? If so, maybe a workshop or critique group might be your best bet. How will you build support and accountability into your writing life? To do this, you may want to surround yourself with writer friends, be it via social media, a writing class, or some other type of community. Finally, do you have advisors to whom you can go for help? All writers need advisors of some kind, whether it be a mentor you admire from afar or someone you work with closely.

Building your platform is a subject that comes a little bit later in a writer’s development, but it’s good to have it on your radar so you know what’s coming down the line. Remember that as you build your platform, you want to develop an audience of readers, not necessarily of fellow writers (though writers can be readers, too!). This means that as you develop your platform, you need to do so in a way that attracts the ideal readers for your book.

Finally, at some point, you will want to get your writing out in the world, and to do that you will need to publish. There are a lot of experts out there helping writers get published, but not all are of the same high caliber. One expert whose work I highly recommend is Jane Friedman. She has two newsletters, one called Electric Speed (free) where she shares digital resources for creative people, and the other called The Hot Sheet (paid) where she reports on the publishing industry. I read both, and highly recommend them.

Putting It All Together

So, you’ve got plans to write with focus, read with purpose, and build your community. Now what? How do you know if you’re “doing it right”? The truth is, there’s no one right way to DIY your MFA. There are just two guidelines I can offer you:

1. Make sure all three elements are present in your writing life at any given time.
2. Be flexible and allow for ebb and flow between the three elements.

The way I like to think of the writing life is as a pie, where writing, reading, and community each make up a slice. You could have a perfectly balanced pie with each element taking up one third, or you can vary the sizes of the slices. Personally, I like my DIY MFA pie to look like the diagram below, where half of the pie is dedicated to writing and the other half is split evenly between reading and community.

This pie isn’t static, though. For example, if I were at a conference, the community slice would probably take up 90% of my pie, and the last 10% might be split evenly between writing and reading. The key is that all three elements are represented in some capacity, and the pie proportions can shift depending on what’s happening in my author life at that moment.

HOMEWORK: Try this experiment for one or two weeks. At the end of each day, draw a pie that represents what you did that day as part of your writing life. Over the course of a couple of weeks, you’ll start to see a pattern and you’ll get a sense for your writing life’s natural balance.

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.

The post Writer Fuel: How to DIY Your MFA appeared first on DIY MFA.

Writing dialogue is a fundamental and essential skill that writers need to develop, but first and foremost we need to consider why dialogue is important to storytelling. There are three primary reasons why dialogue matters.

(1) Grounding in a Scene

Dialogue grounds us in a scene and makes us feel like we are right there with the characters. It gives the scene verisimilitude, making it feel almost as though it’s really happening right in front of us. Dialogue puts us where the action is. Instead of being told what’s happening, we see the scene unfold as the events occur. Dialogue makes a scene feel real.

In addition, when we read dialogue we feel like we are part of the characters’ conversation, especially when we are in a first person or close third person point of view. In that type of point of view, it is as though we are inside a character’s head, so the dialogue feels almost participatory, like we are the character having that conversation. Ultimately, dialogue makes us feel like we’re part of a scene and like that scene is really happening.

Without dialogue, it would be that much harder to craft a compelling scene, and scenes are the fundamental building blocks that make up a story. Scenes are like a microcosm of a full story, and as such, they need to have the three basic elements that a full story must also have. These elements are: character, plot, and world.

If one of these elements are missing, we don’t have an actual story, nor do we have a true scene. If there is character but no plot or world, then what we have is a character sketch, not a story. If there’s a plot, without world or character, then what we really have is a newsreel. And a world without character or plot is a wonderful world building exercise, but again, not an actual story.

Like a story, a scene also requires all three of these elements, and dialogue—when done well—brings character, plot, and world into play. For starters, in order to have dialogue, you need to have characters present. Not only that, but great dialogue also grounds us in time and space, making us feel like we are in a specific place, watching the scene unfold. When written well, dialogue also helps to advance the plot and move the story forward. Unlike real-life dialogue, where people might make inane small talk, story dialogue exists to ratchet up tension and move the plot along.

(2) Showing Character

I’ve often talked about the TADA method and the four main ways of showing character. These are thoughts (T), action (A), dialogue (D), and appearance (A). When you do all four of these things… tada! You have a well-rounded character.

Dialogue is a fundamental way of showing your character and letting them come alive on the page. Without dialogue, we wouldn’t be able to hear the voices of the characters and we would be left with only description and narration at our disposal. This would make it all the more difficult to bring your characters to life and make them feel like real, three-dimensional people. Without dialogue, we are left without an essential tool that would otherwise help us bring our characters to life.

Dialogue also allows you to create subtext, which is when somebody says one thing but they mean another. Subtext is a powerful storytelling tool because it forces the reader to “read between the lines” and that draws the reader further into the story. When the reader has to make inferences and intuitive mental leaps, they become more engaged, which means they are more immersed in the narrative.

(3) Primary Layer of Voice 

In addition to being a primary way of showing character, dialogue is also one of the primary layers of voice. You see, I believe that voice occurs in layers. At its most basic level, we have the voices of the characters in the story, and these voices come across in dialogue.

In addition to the characters’ voices, we also have the narrator’s voice, which operates almost like a frame or container, holding the story together. The narrator’s voice can be a character’s voice (like when you have a first person narration) but it can also be a third person entity, telling the story like an outside observer looking in.

Finally, you have the author’s voice, and this is that essence of voice that is the same from one book to the next. This is how we know when we’re reading a Jane Austen novel versus one by Stephen King. The voice of the author feels unique and specific to that one writer.

With this layered structure in mind, we realize just how important dialogue is. Dialogue allows us to hear the characters’ voices, so we can better understand who they are. Without the voices of the characters coming across in dialogue, the story would be pure narration, and while that can certainly work (think of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart) it can also feel a little hollow, as though the story is being told to us but we don’t really have a sense of the people in it.

Note: The Tell-Tale Heart works as a story made up almost entirely of narration because we are in a deep first person point of view. This point of view allows us to experience the protagonist’s thoughts, and those thoughts almost feel as though the narrator is having a conversation with himself. The story works as pure narration, but it’s a form of narration that allows us access into the character’s mind. In TADA terms, we may not have a whole lot of D, but the story makes up for it with a lot of T instead.

It’s Like Real-World Dialogue, Only Better

There are a lot of things we can do (and mistakes we should avoid) in order to write great dialogue. The most important thing, though, is to remember that story dialogue is not the same as real-world dialogue. The latter often has a rambling nature and goes off on random tangents, sometimes never to return. The truth is that story dialogue is like real-world dialogue, only without the boring parts.

Exercise: Go to a public place like a park or a cafe and sit near some people who are talking. Pull out a notebook (or computer) and start to write down verbatim everything those people say. (I know, I know, eavesdropping might be a little weird… but it’s in service of art! Plus, if their subject is something super-private, it’s their fault for talking about it in a public space.) Sit and take dictation for 5-10 minutes, then go back and reread.

My guess is that while there might be a great one-liner or two in there, the majority of the dialogue you captured will be unreadable. It will probably go off on weird tangents or change subjects randomly. There will likely be a lot of ums and ahs and other filler words that make the dialogue feel clunky. That’s normal. Real dialogue is not supposed to be polished like story dialogue.

The truth is, story dialogue flows smoothly in a way that real-world dialogue never does. It stays on point and doesn’t have a lot of fluff to it. Story dialogue is designed to develop the characters and also move the plot forward, so it has to be focused and purposeful. Real-world dialogue doesn’t need to do any of that so it can ramble on and on or loop around in circles.

As you think about writing dialogue, think about how you can make it smoother and more focused. Sure, in some cases the characters might talk around each other, but this is always done with a purpose—usually with an eye toward creating subtext or developing character in some way. Ultimately, dialogue is an important tool to have in your writer’s toolbox and it can accomplish many different things at the same time. Great dialogue advances the story but also deepens the characters, and sometimes uses subtext to pull the reader further into the story.

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.

The post Writer Fuel: Why Dialogue Is Important in Writing appeared first on DIY MFA.

Living the Author Life

The life of a writer isn’t easy. As you may recall from my last newsletter, publishing is a tough business and you have to be resilient to stick with it for the long haul. There’s a lot of rejection and heartache on the path to publication, and sometimes we lose sight of why we’re doing all of this in the first place.

It’s also a challenge to balance writing against all the other things we have going on in our lives. Most of us don’t have the luxury of writing full time and doing nothing else. Even if we are able to make writing our “day job” there’s a lot of other peripheral stuff we have to do, like marketing our work, building our platform, etc. And this doesn’t even take into account all of that personal life stuff that can sometimes get in the way of our writing dreams.

Many of us have families and home responsibilities. As you may already know, I’ve got two kiddos of my own, Little Man and Lady Bug. Little Man is now 12 (so turning into a “Big Man”) and Lady Bug is 9 (going on 19… yeesh!). Between music practice, school concerts and homework help, this spring has felt like a marathon of “kid stuff.” Don’t get me wrong, I love these kiddos more than anything, but all that love doesn’t make it any less exhausting. (If you’re a parent, you know exactly what I’m talking about…)

I know for a lot of folks in our community, caring for aging parents and relatives is a big part of their lives. Those responsibilities can take up a lot of time, energy, and mental bandwidth. And a lot of word nerds have extremely time-consuming day jobs that make it hard to work writing into their schedule. Many of them have to get their writing done in the wee hours of morning or night, or eke out a few words during their daily commutes.

All in all, we have a lot on our plates. And that’s life.

Honor Your Reality

At DIY MFA we have a saying: “Honor Your Reality.” This means that yes, life is part of our reality and sometimes it gets in the way of our writing. But we also have to acknowledge that writing is part of our reality. Without writing, we don’t feel complete. Our creative work is not just a luxury we squeeze into the off hours between items on our schedule. It matters. It’s important. When we are not writing, we are not being our authentic selves.

A lot of people talk about writing-life balance as though it were something rigid and precise. They act like our existence is a set of scales, with our life responsibilities on one side and our writing on the other. According to this model, the only way to find “balance” is if both sides of the scale are perfectly level.

But life isn’t like that. It’s messy. It’s weird. It’s constantly throwing things at us that we least expect.

I think of “balance” as being on a boat. If you try to stand rigidly upright, the rocking of the waves will knock you off balance and make you fall flat on your face. Instead, the way to stay on your feet is to rock with the boat. When a wave pushes one side of the boat up, we lean into that side. When the other side rises, we lean that way. We can’t fight the waves or make them go away, so the only way to deal with them is to lean in.

This means that we have to acknowledge the role that life plays in our reality, but we also have to attend to those writing “waves” when they come up. If we never address the waves on the writing side of our boat, then our lives will be lopsided and the boat will capsize. The way to find “balance” is to recognize that writing and life are a messy mix, but somehow we’ve got to fit both things into our reality.

One way to do that is…

Don’t Write Every Day

(At least, not unless you want to.)

A lot of big-name authors and writing experts say that in order to be a “real” writer, you have to write every day. Personally, I beg to differ. I don’t think that writing every day is necessary—or even healthy—for some writers. Sure, some writers might clock in a precise number of words every single day, but for others (like myself) writing is more like feast or famine. There are days when the muses smile down on me and I knock out thousands of words in one go, and then there are others where a hundred words feels like a slog. If I had to clock in an exact word count every single day, I’d probably have given up on writing a long time ago.

I’ve also heard of many writers who need thinking time before the writing can occur. One writer friend of mine says she spends a lot of time thinking through her book and mapping out each scene in her head. Then when she sits down to write, all the words pour out in a rush. For me, thinking time is also crucial. It’s where I work through different ideas—sometimes sketching them out on paper, sometimes just in my head—and it’s how I discover ideas for new projects as well.

For me, a lot of this thinking time is spent journaling, which I don’t really consider writing per se, even though I am putting pen to paper. I journal just about every day, in the morning before I get out of bed. Most of my journaling is whiny, boring, repetitive stuff, like me complaining about mundane things that probably won’t matter beyond that instant. Yet sometimes, in my journal, I hit on a random idea that I can mine for gold. If I didn’t spill all that whiny, boring garbage onto the page first, I probably never would land on that golden nugget of an idea.

But let’s get back to “write every day” and why maybe it’s not the best strategy. Another thing to consider is that there’s a certain luxury associated with writing every day. Many of us have messy, busy lives that make writing every day an unrealistic goal. Sure, for some writers, writing every day is doable, but we shouldn’t beat ourselves up if we can’t do it.

Let me tell you a story about writing every day. I remember reading the book On Writing by Stephen King many years ago when I was just beginning to take writing seriously. This was back in 2006 or 2007, and this book had a huge impact on my writing, but not in the way you would expect. Now, let me be perfectly clear: this is a wonderful book that paints a picture of what it really takes to be a writer. I love this book and constantly recommend it to new writers. But… there’s one tiny spot that I have to quibble with. This is the place where Stephen King says you have to write 2,000 words per day and read 80-100 books per year, or else you’re not a “real” writer.

When I first read that, I thought I had stumbled on The Answer. After all, if Stephen King said it, it had to be true, right? Well, the truth is, that method might work for Stephen King, but it didn’t work for me. I started out okay, writing 2,000 words per day for a couple of days. Then I had a major rush of inspiration and poured out 4,000 words in a day. Yay! But after that I hit the wall and had a bunch of 200-400 word days. That’s when I started to spiral.

You see, I had this idea in my head that I had to write 2,000 words, like clockwork. Every. Single. Day. But I couldn’t do it consistently. Some days I exceeded my goal; others I could barely eke out a tenth of the required word count.

So, I started to beat myself up. Thoughts popped up in my head, like: “Well, if you can’t do 2,000 words every day, you’re not a real writer.” Or “See? I knew you couldn’t do it. You’ll never publish anything.” Or “Sooner or later, people are going to find out you’re a fraud and you can’t write anything.”

Here’s the truth: Beating ourselves up for not writing does not make the words magically appear on the page. I know. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.

Not everybody writes with Stephen King precision. I admire the people who do, but I’m definitely not one of them. And that’s okay, because the writing still gets done, it’s just a messier process.

So if we shouldn’t “write every day,” what should we do?

The key is to write some days. Maybe it’s not every day, but a few times a week. Or maybe your weekdays are a hot mess and the only time you have for writing is on the weekends. Some writers might clock in word counts with laser-like precision. Others (like me) may have more of a rollercoaster process. All of this is okay.

We all have different lives, with different goals and challenges. To assume that one method would work for every writer is shortsighted. Instead, the key is to find the method that works best for you.

What Makes an Author Life?

The author life consists of a lot of things—productivity, motivation, mindset, time management, and more—but it looks different for each person. Of course we have to write. If we never wrote anything, we’d have to reconsider why we’re even trying to do this in the first place. The writing itself is non-negotiable. If we want to be writers we have to write. The place where things get messy is in the “how.”

For a lot of us, it takes trial and error to find a process that works. When I first started writing the DIY MFA book, I had a newborn and a toddler at home, so I knew that the only way I would be able to do it was if I could get out of the house. At first, I thought the most efficient way to do this was to go to a hotel, check in early, check out late, and write write write for the hours in between. We had some points from a hotel chain so I figured I’d give it a shot.

The first time I did that, I knocked out over 7,000 words. I did my happy dance, went home, then came back a few weeks later to try a second time. That session didn’t go so well and I only made about 4,000 words. Not bad, but not as good as the first time. Then the third time I tried this I only managed about 1,500 words, plus the hotel points had just about run out. It became very clear that if I had to hide away in a hotel every time I needed to write, this was going to be a very expensive book.

So I tried a different method. Every weekday, after dropping Little Man off at preschool, I started going to the local coffee shop around the corner and writing for a few hours until it was time to go pick him up. Another mom from his class was also a writer, so we teamed up and started hanging out at the coffee shop together, working side-by-side. I didn’t knock out 7,000 words at a time, but I made respectable progress on the book five days a week, eventually getting it done. Plus, knowing that I only had that short, preschool-time window to do my writing motivated me to stay focused. Also, having a writing buddy also helped make the process less lonely.

Keep in mind, this approach worked back then because my life was the way it was at the time. Now, it would be a different story. The kiddos may require a lot less grunt work these days, but there are other challenges, like activities and schoolwork. Plus, DIY MFA is in a whole different place now than it was in 2015 when I was writing the book. Back then, the business was just getting started and we didn’t offer nearly as many courses or programs. Now, DIY MFA truly is a full-time job, and taking away an entire morning five days a week would not be feasible. Instead, I have to sneak in my writing during those nooks and crannies between other DIY MFA stuff.

I share all of this because I think it’s important to realize that there’s an ebb and flow to the writing process. You can’t just take writing advice at face value. You have to try different things out and see what works for you. You also have to recognize that what works at one stage in your writing career, may not carry over to a later stage. Your process for writing book one will be very different from the process for books two and beyond. In the end, we have to acknowledge that the author life is unpredictable and we have to embrace the wild, messy adventure that it is!

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.

The post Writer Fuel: Living the Author Life appeared first on DIY MFA.

Creative Routines from the Masters

Traditionally, January is a time to reset, which often means looking at your writing routine. This is the time to re-evaluate how long projects may take, tighten up the specifics and, of course, try and get the best work out of yourself, despite your actual life.

For centuries, creators have asked the eternal question authors still sit with today: How do I do my best work while trying to do everything else required by life?  

This infographic provides a visual for how W. H. Auden, Benjamin Franklin, Maya Angelou, and many other artists and composers planned their days on this pale blue dot. According to these creative luminaries, an artistic life mainly consists of:

• deep work
• taking care of the body (food, drink, exercise)
• time spent with other people
• trying to make ends meet
• personal development / learning
• sleep

See how close your ideal writing day compares to the standards of these legendary creators. Moreover, get inspired by the evidence that long, wandering strolls are central to an artist’s life work. 

The Library That Dolly Built

Dolly Parton is one of America’s most well-known figures, quite literally. Her chest is internationally famous for its dimensions, and her wholehearted spunk could easily serve as a trademark of Americana.

This country music queen has a reputation for “doing good things” with the money she has earned through her success. Dolly grew up in a family where her father didn’t have a choice in trading his own education for hours of work in the fields of Appalachia. Her father couldn’t read or write, and Dolly is passionate about ensuring American children have a foundation for literacy.

In 1995, Parton started The Imagination Library as a local, early-literacy program in Tennessee. Since then, it has expanded to where it now provides 10% of America’s children, from birth to age 5, with free books every month. This notable statistic was obtained, unfortunately, because Covid sent the program into overdrive. 

The importance of reading in the home is a key predictor of how well a child will thrive in school. These books constitute some of the child’s first very owned property, and the experience of getting mail adds to the idea that books are something important and special.

The Library That Dolly Built provides more information about this unique non-profit. However, it is for nostalgia and sentimentality that I am recommending this selection. It’s a 68-minute documentary that shows something everyone should be seeing more of: children falling in love with reading.

DIY Your Ultimate Literary Canon

On the opposite end of serving literary needs sits Benjamin McEvoy, graduate of Oxford University. McEvoy earned his degree in English Language and Literature, an experience that taught him to hate reading.

Fortunately, after a few years in the real world, books called to him once again, and he realized that what he was seeking at Oxford was a way of living the lessons he’d learned in books.

That’s the excitement about reading the Great Books: they change you for the better through thoughtful contemplation, rumination and (ideally) action.

In this YouTube segment, McEvoy reveals assignments Kurt Vonnegut formerly gave his students to cultivate a love of literature that they could carry throughout their entire lives. McEvoy builds on these as well as his own education to show how one can practically and passionately approach literature by making one’s own literary canon.

Even if you choose not to DIY your own stack of required reading, Vonnegut’s instruction and commentary about the reader’s state of mind will change how you read and deserves a watch.

Take a Tour of The Charles Dickens Museum

Last month, I doled out Dickens recommendations for a warm and cheerful December. To get an even better idea of Dickens’ version of Christmas, take this short tour of his former home, now The Charles Dickens Museum.

Find out why Ebenezer specifically brought a turkey to dinner, learn what pseudonym Dickens’ wife published her 1851 cookbook under, and see how the English Christmas pudding collided with hygiene in this charming house-turned-museum on Doughty Street.

Writers and Their Notebooks by Diana Raab and Peter Selgin (ed)

For writers, notebooks serve as our studios. Whether you’re committed to paper, have gone digital, or (like myself) are somewhere in between, a writer’s notebook is essential when you work in words. If there is any rule of writing that authors can actually agree on, it’s that you must keep a notebook.

Easier said than done.

Many people are starting 2023 with the intent of keeping a writing notebook…but what exactly goes in there? A writer’s notebook is part gym, part wilderness, part gobbledy-gook, and 100% affordable therapist.

Writers and Their Notebooks is a collection of essays on how writers have learned to use their notebooks over the years. It’s about the relationships they’ve formed with this often embarrassingly messy tool. It is not an instructional book, nor is it a visual look at anyone’s Moleskins. It’s about how authors figure out what they think they want to say on the road to figuring out precisely what they need to say.  

This book is a worthwhile read for authors of all genres and levels of experience. Contributors (aka people who talk to themselves via notebook) include John Dufresne, Sue Grafton and Kyoko Mori.

Whether you are starting a notebook or giving your own a re-evaluation, this is a terrific dive into what a writer’s notebook can be. 

Melissa Haas is the author and illustrator of Catula: The Misadventures of Dracula’s Cat and The Night Before Christmas (NOW WITH CATS), among others. Follow Catula’s whereabouts on Instagram @CatulaTheCat. If you’re interested in downloading free coloring pages or seeing Margaret Atwood with a blowtorch, check out more Leisure Learning related content at www.MelissaHaasCreates.com.

The post Leisure Learning, December 2022 appeared first on DIY MFA.

You’re in luck! I’ve compiled several key questions into a survey and asked parents, grandparents, and teachers for their input. Based on their responses, I’ve summarized the top five best tools recommended for writing a children’s story.

I asked those in the survey what their favorite picture book was of all time and why they loved it. In asking my participants to recall their favorite picture books from their childhood, their responses came from a time when they were children and from that warm, cozy place of reading bedtime stories with their own children and grandchildren. That’s the feeling all children’s book authors want to invoke in their readers.

1. Characters and Their Interpersonal Relationships

Magical, resilient, powerful, clever, and sometimes hilarious characters, and the friendships between them are an integral part of creating a beloved children’s story. Every person surveyed mentioned character development. It was that important.

But how do we create these types of characters? My best advice is to get out into the world, look around, and listen. Don’t forget to bring a journal so you can write your observations on how children interact with each other and their world. 

Write down how they speak. I find children have such rich dialogue and a lot of it is worth writing down. Write down how they resolve conflict with each other and the adults in their lives. Write down the wonder of discovering new things. So much in this world is new to children. 

2. Rhyming and Repetitiveness

While I’ve read from many professionals that writers should ditch the rhyme, parents in the survey disagree. They adore stories with rhyme and repetition. Those books from their childhood are imprinted upon their hearts and minds.

Writing in rhyme is complex. You’ll need to make sure it has rhythm and meter, and this is done by understanding syllables and where they are stressed in the words you’re creating to tell your story. When writing rhymes for children, avoid near rhymes because at a young age, children should first learn the predictability of rhyming words through their phonetic relationships.

Don’t be afraid of repetition or redundancy in children’s picture books. Just think about how young children watch their favorite movies over and over and you’ll learn that children enjoy and need repetition in order to make connections and remember patterns. Repetition is simple; and, according to those surveyed, it’s an important element in a children’s story.

3. A believable Plotline

Parents and teachers commented that a believable plotline was also key to determining their favorite children’s story of all time. Let your story draw from real life and identifiable characters from which they can learn something about themselves. 

Many in the survey said their favorite children’s book taught a moral, and they felt that was important. As a children’s writer, study folk tales of various cultures and then consider writing one of your own. There are so many great morals for children to learn. Weave a moral into your story.

4. Great Artwork

It’s important as an indie author to collaborate with an artist who shares your vision and captures in their art your voice, uniqueness of the characters, and the story setting. Your readers rely on a balance between text and illustrations to develop their story comprehension skills. 

That brings me to another point.

When I skimmed the pages of the favorite picture books of all time listed in my survey, the illustrations had one thing in common: they were realistic. This might be just as important as a believable plot. Consider colors and lines when collaborating with an illustrator, and keep it realistic.

5. Give your reader an adventure

The final tip I gleaned from the survey: your reader is looking for an adventure. You’ve developed unique characters and outlined a believable plot illustrated in captivating colors and lines. Now, through concise, repetitive, and perhaps rhyming words, take your reader by the hand and lead them on a wondrous adventure to a place they’ve never been before. 

Tell us in the comments: What’s your all time favorite children’s story? What did you love about it?

S.J. Rosson is releasing her first children’s picture book, The Lamb, in May 2022. She believes this story comes at a time when children need to hear a positive message about unconditional love and its redeeming work. She weaved in math counting concepts for fun. To learn more about pre-orders and exclusive, limited-time rewards, visit her website at: www.sjrosson.com.

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