Writing

“Using Objects as Inspiration and Ignition for Young Writers”

In my writing workshops with kids, I teach the older writers about the difference between a strong, hook-the-reader opening and an inciting incident. The inciting incident, I explain, is the event that not only changes the protagonist’s life but also makes them choose another one. They must be compelled to action that inevitably transforms their path.

In my most recent middle grade novel, Banned Books, Crop Tops, and Other Bad Influences, a book serves as my protagonist’s catalyst for change. While the opening involves a new girl parading into school and disrupting the setting’s equilibrium, my protagonist could still choose to go on living her life as is, albeit with a new person to gossip about. But after unexpectedly seeing this new girl in synagogue on Yom Kippur, the new girl hands my protagonist a book. This book tells the story of the MS St. Louis, a ship full of Jewish refugees that was turned away by North America and sent back to Europe during World War II. For my main character, this book shakes her to her core. It changes her sense of her country and the world around her. When she finds out the book is on a list of challenged books at her school, she’s incensed, and therefore her change of paths becomes inevitable. She must act, even if it takes her much of the book to figure out how or even exactly why.

As I worked on a manuscript that employs a physical book as a tool for the inciting incident, I found inspiration for a new writing exercise for students. Like a key in the door, in this exercise students use an object to open their story. Give each writer an object, either in words on slips of paper or from pictures – sometimes photos from magazines spark the imagination in a special way. Anything works! You can assign them a mirror, a lamp, the wooden plank of a raft, a cell phone, a family heirloom, a tennis ball, or even whatever they see around the room. The students must write two scenes. The first scene is the opening, and it does not involve the object. The first scene tells us who the character is, and it sets up their flaws and inner desires. This scene can be a paragraph or ten pages, depending on how long the class is and how much gusto the students feel that day.

At the very end of that first scene, students must introduce their character to their assigned object. The second scene reveals how that object instigates a new path for the character. I’ve had one student write about finding a text on a cell phone that wasn’t meant to be sent to them, and it informed them their best friend was betraying them. Their character had to leave her previous social life behind, despite being terrified of change, and from there a story began. Another was instructed to use “a piece of jewelry” as their object, and they took some inspiration from Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift! Their first scene placed the character at a Taylor Swift concert, and someone she didn’t take any note of slipped a friendship bracelet onto her wrist. Only at the end of the second scene did she realize that the bracelet held a code telling her where her lost mother might be. These kids are little geniuses!

As a modification for the younger writer, instead of asking for two scenes, give the writer an object and ask them to write a description of the object. Then tell them to end their scene with that object changing a character’s life. You’ll be surprised at what magic comes from this – often literally! Apparently, according to my youngest students, pretty much any object in our world can turn into a magical portal that takes people to alternate dimensions. Watch out the next time you’re picking up that soda can or turning on the night light…

So often the role of a writing teacher is to help young writers find an “in.” Kids just require a way to put pen to paper. They need a nudge to tap into that vast imagination already existing within them and ready to pour out. While there are hundreds of techniques to do so, I’ve been pleased to find one more. Put that book or mirror or friendship bracelet in their mind’s eye and allow the visceral muscle and sense memory of a literal object to ignite the events in their story.

Published September 17th, 2024 by Roaring Brook Press

About the Book: Perfect for fans of Star Fish and From the Desk of Zoe Washington, a nuanced middle grade from the author of The Prettiest about two girls—one “bad” and one “good”—who join forces against book banning and censorship.

Rose is a good girl. She listens to her parents and follows every rule. After all, they’re there for a reason—right? And adults always know best.

Talia, the new girl from New York City, doesn’t think so. After only a week at school, her bad reputation is already making enemies. First on the list: Charlotte, Rose’s lifelong best friend.

So why can’t Rose stop wondering what it would be like to be Talia’s friend? And why does Rose read a banned book that she recommends? Rose doesn’t know. But the forbidden book makes her ask questions she’s never thought of in her life. When Talia suggests they start a banned book club, how can Rose say no?

Pushing against her parents, her school, and even Charlotte opens a new world for Rose. But when some of Talia’s escapades become more scary than exciting, Rose must decide when it’s right to keep quiet and when it’s time to speak out.

About the Author: Brigit Young was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and now lives with her husband, daughters, gecko, and dog in New Jersey. Her debut middle grade novel, Worth a Thousand Words, was a Junior Library Guild selection as well as a Best Book of 2019 from The Bank Street College of Education. The Italian translation was the recipient of the Andersen Prize for Best Book for 12-14 year olds. Her sophomore novel, The Prettiest, received multiple starred reviews and was featured on several reading lists including Best Books of 2020 from the Chicago Public Library, Seventeen Magazine‘s 50 Books for Teens That You Won’t Be Able to Put Down, and NBC News’ 9 Books to Help Young Girls Build a Positive Image. Bank Street College of Education listed her third novel, Bright, as a Best Book for 12-14 year olds with the honor of outstanding merit. Her next middle grade novel, Banned Books, Crop Tops, & Other Bad Influences, is forthcoming in September, 2024. Additionally, Ms. Young has published short fiction and poetry in journals like The North American Review, 2 River View, Eclectica Magazine, and Burrow Press, among others. She has taught creative writing to kids of all ages in settings ranging from a library to a hospital.

Thank you, Brigit, for this awesome writing activity!

“Tackling the Blank Page with the WHY Method”

I’m extremely lucky to be able to run two writing clubs at the library where I work—one for TEENs and one for 9–12-year-olds. It’s so fun to sit there and soak in the young writers’ enthusiasm, their energy, their creativity. But while some of them are bursting with ideas, others have a hard time getting started. They stare at the blank page in front of them and don’t know where to begin.

I very much commiserate with this can’t-figure-out-how-to-start group. I also have the hardest time coming up with ideas. Nothing ever seems unique enough, interesting enough, engaging enough to bother turning it into a book that anyone but my mom would want to read. So how do I move beyond the blank page to get at least SOMETHING written down? I use what I call the WHY method.

What is this magical WHY method? It’s nothing more than starting with a shred of an idea—such as a character (like a girl with a peanut allergy), a place (like a haunted woods), a villain (like a vomit-breathed math teacher), or a theme (like evolving friendships)—and then asking myself “why, why, why, why” until I finally have enough of an idea to start writing. To walk you through this WHY method, let’s use my debut middle grade novel, A Bite Above the Rest, as an example.

The shred of an idea I started with was a character who just popped into my head one day: a boy who was walking around with a wooden stake in his back pocket because he was terrified he was about to encounter a vampire or witch or werewolf. I named this boy Caleb, I declared him to be eleven years old, and then I started asking why.

Why is Caleb afraid he’ll run into a vampire or werewolf or witch? Does he simply have a vivid imagination, so he sees a bat and thinks VAMPIRE or sees a full moon and thinks WEREWOLF? Or does he live in a world known to contain vampires and witches, and everyone around him is similarly terrified. OR… is he afraid he’ll run into a werewolf or witch because he’s seen them, and yet nobody else is afraid? That last option intrigued me the most… but I still needed to ask more why questions to flesh out the idea.

Why is nobody around him afraid? Are the vampires and werewolves somehow invisible to everyone but my main character? Are the creatures hiding, and my main character is the only who’s ever encountered them?  OR… does everyone around him also see the monsters, but they don’t perceive them as scary? Again, I went with option number 3. And then I asked why yet again.

Why doesn’t anyone else see the vampires or witches as scary? Are most werewolves and vampires friendly, and my character is alone in being afraid of them? Is everybody but Caleb a monster, so of course they aren’t afraid of each other? OR… what if everyone else just thinks the witches and vampires are regular people wearing costumes? Option three was the most compelling to me, but I had to keep going with the whys…

Why do people think the monsters are just regular humans in costumes? Is there a haunted house in town that employs oodles of costumed workers? Does my main character live in an alternative universe where costumes are as ho-hum as jeans and a t-shirt? OR… what if he finds himself in a Halloween tourist town—the Halloween equivalent of the North Pole? It can be a place where Halloween decorations are kept up all year long; where the bakery bursts with mouth-watering, pumpkin-flavored treats; where the library’s mascot can be something ridiculous… like a Book Banshee. How cool would that be?!? I only needed to ask one more why before I was ready to start writing.

Why does my main character come to this town in the first place?  Was he born there? Is he a tourist? Is he visiting his grandma for a week? OR… has he just moved there? As an outsider (and an anxious, fearful one at that), he’ll be more likely to notice things about the town that others overlook. That others take as “normal.”

I went with option three, and BOOM. After asking just five why questions, I had my character, my setting, and the start of an adventure. Did I have it all figured out? Not at all! Why, I still didn’t know if the vampires and werewolves were just costumed humans—and Caleb had it all wrong—or if they were actual monsters (and honestly, I didn’t figure out the answer to this question until I was half way through writing the first draft). But nonetheless, these why questions were enough to get me started. They allowed me to fill up that first blank page with something other than a blinking curser.

So, when you have students who can’t decide what to write—when they’re frustrated and stuck and just want to give up—maybe have them try the WHY method and see if it helps them too. Why does that hedgehog talk? Why do the woods feel spooky? Why did that girl’s best friend just call her a name? Why? Why? Why?

And hopefully, all these why questions will help them fill their blank pages too!

Published August 6th, 2024 by Aladdin

About the Book: A boy moves to a Halloween-themed town only to realize there may be more to the tourist trap than meets the eye in this fast-paced romp of a middle grade novel perfect for fans of The Last Kids on Earth and Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library!

When Caleb’s mom decides they are moving to her childhood home in Wisconsin, Caleb is not thrilled. Moving schools, states, and time zones would be bad enough, but Mom’s hometown is Samhain, a small and ridiculously kitschy place where every day is Halloween.

Caleb is not a fan of Halloween when it only happens once a year, so Halloween-obsessed Samhain is really not the place for him. How is he supposed to cope with kids wearing costumes to school every single day? And how about the fact that the mayor is so committed to the bit that City Hall is only open from sundown to sunup to accommodate his so-called vampirism? Sure enough, Caleb becomes an outcast at school for refusing to play along with the spooky tradition like the other sixth graders. Luckily, he manages to find a friend in fellow misfit Tai, and just in time, because things are getting weird in Samhain…or make that weirder.

But there’s no way the mayor is an actual vampire, and their teacher absolutely cannot really be a werewolf—right? Caleb discovers Samhain is so much stranger than he ever could have imagined. As one of the only people who realizes what’s happening, can he save a town that doesn’t want saving?

About the Author: Christine Virnig (she/her/hers) is a fan of books, candy, spooky stories, poop jokes, and coffee…in no particular order. As a former physician, Christine now spends her days writing books, reading books, and working at a library where she is surrounded by books. Christine lives in southern Wisconsin with her husband, two daughters, a ridiculous number of dust bunnies, and one incredibly lazy cat. You can visit her on the web at ChristineVirnig.com.

Thank you, Christine, for this hint on how to get started when being taunted by that blank page!

“On Writing the Unexpected Narrator”

My debut middle grade novel, Theodora Hendrix and the Monstrous League of Monsters, follows the adventures of one Theodora Hendrix, who isn’t your average ten-year-old: her best friend is a talking, top-hat-wearing tarantula named Sherman. She reads torat cards (think tarot cards, but magical). Oh, and she lives in a haunted mansion full of monsters, breaking Headquarters’ Number One Rule: Keep Monsters Hidden from Humans.  When a series of anonymous letters threatens to reveal her secret, Theodora must follow a series of clues to track down the source. If she fails, Theodora will be sent to live with humans (the horror, the horror!) and her family will end up in the Deepest, Darkest Prisons of Transylvania. Forever.

Like many authors, I’m often asked where I got the idea for this book. The story goes like this: my mom and I were watching one of our favorite movies, “My Cousin Vinny”.  Fred Gwynne, who played the judge, also played Herman Munster on “The Munsters”, a black and white television show from the 1960s. That fact must have been in my head – probably because my mom mentioned it a dozen-odd times – when I went to sleep, because I woke up the next morning with the idea for a story about a ten-year-old girl being raised by a bumbling family of monster superheroes. I jumped out of bed and grabbed my laptop; two hours later, I had written the book’s opening chapters. Over the next few days, I outlined the plot – at least, I knew where the story started and how it ended, sketched out my ensemble cast of characters, and sorted out the book’s main themes. But what I hadn’t sorted out was my narrator.

Choosing the narrator is one of the most critical decisions an author makes when crafting their story, as this is the vehicle by which your tale is relayed to your reader. There’s much to consider:

For starters, who is the narrator – who’s telling us this story? It can be anyone, really – the main character, a third party, an animal sidekick…When thinking through the various options, considering point of view can be super helpful: most novels typically employ first or third person point of view. In first person, the narrator is directly involved in the story, sharing the events that occurred according to their own recollection or experience, using “I” or “we” to describe the action. A well-known example of this is the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan. In third person, the narrator isn’t directly involved in the story, using “he”, “she”, or “they” to describe the action. Third person is often (but not always!) omniscient, meaning that the narrator is all-knowing. A (very!) well-known example of this is the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. Along with point of view, the narrator’s perspective – i.e., their individual perceptions of and interactions with the world at large – should also be considered: a narrator whose perception differs from that of the main character will provide a different experience than one in which a similar worldview is shared. Together, point of view and perception can help to define the best narrator for a given tale; the former tells us the “what”, the latter the “how”.

I had no clear sense of my narrator when I first started writing Theodora Hendrix and the Monstrous League of Monsters. So, I started thinking about perspective and point of view – and kept waffling between the two. I liked the intimacy of first person as it allows readers to experience events with the main character – a technique which is particularly successful with young readers who can, perhaps, more easily envision themselves in that character’s shoes. In contrast, I liked the omniscience of third person as allows the narrator to hint at things yet to come which the main character couldn’t possibly know; this works especially well in novels in which there’s some degree of mystery, which I knew my story would have. In the end, I decided to take a (perhaps not so small) risk and combine the two. The result is a rather unexpected narrator:

In the prologue and the epilogue, my narrator’s point of view is first person. He often breaks the fourth wall, speaking directly to the reader. He’s also mysterious: he declines to introduce himself at the beginning of the tale, stating that his identity is for him to know and “for you to find out”; it is only on the very last page that he finally reveals himself. In contrast, the main body of the novel is largely relayed in deep third person, where the narrator closely mimics Theodora’s perspective. To bridge the gap between the two, he occasionally interrupts the story, breaking the fourth wall to share his own thoughts and insights directly with the reader.

To make this process a little less painful going forward, I’ve made myself a “narrator checklist” which I peruse whenever I begin a new manuscript. Some of the questions I consider are:

1. Who is telling this story? Is it one person or multiple people?
2. Why are they telling it and not someone else?
3. Where do they stand in relation to the story – are they directly involved in the action or observing it from the outside?
4. What information do readers need to follow the plot, and who can best convey this to them?
5. Comparatively, what information should be withheld or obscured or obscured from readers, allowing for potential misdirection?

Sometimes, choosing a narrator is a matter of trial and error. If the plotting is tight, the characters well-developed, and the pacing appropriate, it may be worth taking another look at your narrator. Changing the point of view and perspective can feel more than a little overwhelming, but it’s worth it in the end: the right narrator can make all the difference.

Published July 16th, 2024 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

About the Book: If you think monsters don’t exist, just ask Theodora Hendrix. The start of a brilliantly funny new series, perfect for fans of Amelia Fang.
The first rule of the Monstrous League of Monsters is: Keep monsters hidden from humans. But when zombie George and his cat companion Bandit find an abandoned baby, they can’t leave her to be eaten by hobgoblins. So they spirit her home where she quickly becomes part of the family. Fast-forward ten years, and young Theodora doesn’t seem too scarred by her monstrous upbringing. But now a series of anonymous letters suggest that someone is about to reveal their secret. If Theodora doesn’t act fast, she may lose her family for ever…

“Readers will be irresistibly drawn into the captivating world of Kopy‘s monster-filled middle-grade novel, where the promise of tantalizing secrets sets the stage for adventure. …a delightful blend of whimsy and mystery … lively characters and light mystery, the narrator imparts a particularly mischievous charm, with cheeky asides…With playful, comical illustrations reminiscent of the Addams Family that vividly bring the scenes and characters to life, this delightful, cheeky romp is ideal for those who relish eerie tales with a humorous twist.” – Booklist

About the Author: Jordan Kopy is a born and raised New Yorker who now lives in London with her husband and poorly behaved (but lovable) cat. A financial services professional by day (no idea how that happened), Jordan spends her nights with ghouls, witches, and the occasional evil hag. She’s also the author of Theodora Hendrix and the Curious Case of the Cursed Beetle and Theodora Hendrix and the Snare of the Shadowmongers.

Thank you, Jordan, for this post looking at the process of choosing a narrator!