Writing

“Creativity, Collaboration, and Cookies”

When you mention group projects, how many of your students groan?

With grades at stake, there’s so much potential for conflict: some people may battle for control, some may disagree about what the overall project should look like, and some might not even complete their assigned tasks. To some students, having to partner up often feels like extra work.

But group projects get a bad rap. Collaboration doesn’t have to mean more conflict or more work: it can be an opportunity to excel together. Learning how to work well in a team proved to be a vital skill when we embarked on our own group project: writing a middle grade murder mystery. In The Cookie Crumbles, two best friends must solve the mystery behind a celebrity judge’s collapse at a kids baking competition.

• Why did you choose to co-write THE COOKIE CRUMBLES?

Alechia: The Cookie Crumbles, in my mind, was the type of story that would be a blast with dual perspectives and voices. Add that I’ve been friends with Tracy for nearly eight years, and it made the project that much easier to develop together. Tracy and I have similar styles, we have the same work ethic, and we complement each other. Knowing that she will find the things I forget (descriptions are tough), and I’ll think of the things she might’ve missed, means we’re a good team. A lot of communication and establishing an order of operation made collaboration seamless.

• What do you think you each brought to the process?

Alechia: Food is a huge part of my life and is absolutely in my element. So bringing that to a story that features food heavily meant I could rely on the skills I learned in pastry school––creating fancy desserts, sure, yet also food writing. I have to add that when Tracy and I work together, we tend to laugh a lot. Many of our jokes ended up making it into the final version of this book. How much you enjoy the process seeps into the story and I think (I hope) the reader feels that too.

Tracy: I brought in my intense love of organization. I took notes on all of our brainstorming conversations and had spreadsheets mapping out everything from what happens in each chapter, what they’re baking, and who wins which baking competition round. Collaborating on a project requires a lot of clear communication, and I tried my best to use whatever tools we had handy to make the process run smoothly.

• How do your characters work together as a team?

Laila is a talented kid chef, and she’s invited to compete at the Golden Cookie Competition at the prestigious Sunderland boarding school. Her best friend, newscaster-hopeful Lucy, comes too, hoping to write a strong piece that will wow the Sunderland scholarship committee. But when one of the celebrity judges collapses after eating one of Laila’s cookies, there are whispers that Laila had something to do with it.

Together, Laila and Lucy work to not only clear Laila’s name, but to also figure out the real culprit. This means poking around for clues, tag-teaming interviews with the judges and other competitors, and covering for each other so they can thoroughly investigate. They do hit some stumbling blocks along the way, and you’ll have to read the book to see if this friendship can weather all the storms!

• What other co-written middle grade works do you recommend?

Alechia: Save Me a Seat by Sarah Weeks and Gita Varadarajan is adorable! Time After Time (Best Wishes #3) by Sarah Mlynowski & Christina Soontornvat is one of my daughter’s favorite series. Camp Sylvania: Moon Madness by Julie Murphy & Crystal Maldonado is going to be a blast, no doubt!

Tracy: I love The Secret of the Dragon Gems by Rajani LaRocca and Chris Baron and You Are Here: Connecting Flights, an anthology edited by Ellen Oh.

Published June 11th, 2024 by Quill Tree Books

About the Book: Best friend duo works to solve baking competition puzzle in charming story.

The Great British Bake Off meets a tween-friendly Knives Out in this fun and propulsive middle grade novel following two best friends who must solve the mystery behind a baking competition gone awry.

This sweet treat early readers are calling “completely sublime” comes from author buddies and Middle Grade favorites Alechia Dow, an American Library Association notable and Indie Next Kids pick novelist, and Tracy Badua, a Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators’ multi-award winner.

Laila gave Lucy a cupcake on the second day of kindergarten, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. But the summer before eighth grade, they find out that since they live on opposite sides of town, they’ll go to different high schools. Yuck!

Then Laila’s invited to compete at the Golden Cookie competition, which awards its winner admission and a full ride to the prestigious Sunderland boarding school, and it’s the perfect opportunity. Sunderland doesn’t just have an elite culinary program;
it’s also home to an elite journalism track, if only newscaster-hopeful Lucy could build up a strong enough portfolio to impress the scholarship committee.

But when one of the celebrity judges collapses after sampling Laila’s showpiece, rumors of foul play swirl, with Laila rising to the top of the suspect list. Even worse, a major storm has effectively cut off all access to the outside world. Can the girls find the real culprit and clear Laila’s name before it’s too late?

About the Authors: 

Tracy Badua is an award-winning Filipino American author of books about young people with sunny hearts in a sometimes stormy world. By day, she is an attorney who works in national housing policy, and by night, she squeezes in writing, family time, and bites of her secret candy stash. She lives in San Diego, California, with her family.

TikTok: @tracybwrites | Instagram: @tracybaduawrites | Facebook: U | Twitter: @tracybwrites | https://tracybadua.com/

Alechia Dow is a former pastry chef, a librarian, and an award-winning author of acclaimed young adult sci-fi fantasies, several short anthology pieces, and magical (sometimes mysterious) middle grade stories. When not writing, you can find her having epic dance parties with her family, baking, reading, taking teeny adventures, and exploring her local food scene.

Instagram: @alechiadow | https://www.alechiadow.com/

Thank you for sharing this fun interview and an inside look at The Cookie Crumbles!

“So What You’re Really Saying Is…”

By the end of the sixth grade, most students have been introduced to the concept of a thesis statement by their English teachers. That infamous sentence that typically appears in the first paragraph of an essay declaring the main point or purpose of the paper in a concise summary. It gives a paper direction and informs readers what the author intends to discuss. For years, I dreaded them. I found thesis statements daunting and believed their prescriptive nature took the fun and art out of writing and made it more formal, like science or math (never my strong suits). But while I loathed thesis statements as a kid, as a storyteller, I love a strong, clear theme. The irony is thesis statements and themes are essentially the same—it’s just a successful rebrand. Like Blue Ribbon Sports changing its name to Nike or a restaurant deciding their menu’s underwhelming fettuccini alfredo is actually amazing cacio e pepe. Let me explain!

A theme (or message) is the essence of a story—what it’s all about. Themes tend to be strongest when they’re simple, clear, and universal, so they’re relatable to everyone. A single sentence, often only a few words. They’re not always a line that’s written verbatim (or spoken in a movie) and rarely are themes stated definitively up front, but even buried in subtext all the scenes in a story with a strong thematic build to that idea. Themes are something that I learned to appreciate while developing and producing movies, which I’ve done for over twenty years. Early in my career, I discovered having a clear theme tended to be one of the things that allowed an audience (or readers) to have a strong emotional connection with a story.

When I’m beginning a movie or writing a book, one of the early goals I have is to get to that one sentence message. Again, preferably something universal. And it’s always something that my colleagues, the director, and the film’s writers have agreed to. A few examples: In Pete’s Dragon it was “Everyone belongs somewhere.” In Timmy Failure it was “It’s okay to be different.” In Peter Pan & Wendy it was “Everyone grows up at their own pace,” In A Wrinkle in Time it was “Everyone is deserving of love.”

When I’m writing, I try to figure out the theme before I begin a rough draft, so I can tie it to narrative and character as much as possible, because ideally, it’s the theme that the protagonist learns that ultimately allows them to get out of trouble and succeed in the end.

My first book, The Midnight Brigade, is about a shy boy named Carl with a big heart who has trouble sharing how he feels. The book is set in Pittsburgh and one night Carl finds a grumpy troll named Frank living under one of the city’s four hundred bridges. Carl decides to keep the troll a secret with his friends which leads to all kinds of trouble. Ultimately, the troll teaches Carl to be bold (the story’s theme), which sets the kid on a stronger path.

In my novel Outside Nowhere, the main character, Parker Kelbrook is an extrovert. He’s funny, and charming, and talks a lot. He’s a Ferris Bueller-type, the opposite of Carl and he doesn’t take life seriously. When the story begins, Parker is more concerned about himself than other people. So, as a character, he’s got a lot of room to grow. The kid loves pulling pranks, and in the opening scene, he pulls one that goes too far, pouring sixty gallons of fruit punch mix into a community pool. Afterwards, his dad sends him halfway across the country to work on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

The farm has three rules:

1. Do your chores
2. Stay out of the farmhouse
3. Don’t eat the crops

The other kids on the farm are roll up your sleeves, get the work-done-types. So, Parker doesn’t fit in. They don’t find him charming or funny because he’s not getting his chores done and he’s making more work for everyone else.

Parker needs learn how to turn things around for himself. And when he does, magical and mysterious events begin happening. For instance, one morning he wakes to discover a cow on the roof of a barn, which makes Parker realize that things on this farm aren’t as they appear. Eventually, when Parker accepts the story’s theme that it’s less important how you start something, and more important how you finish, he sets off on a quest to right his wrongs.

My new novel, This Again, is in the spirit of Back to the Future or Groundhog Day. It’s about an anxious, perfectionist kid named Noah who’s running for class president and has no shot of winning, until one day in a bowling alley he runs into a kid who looks exactly like him. The double explains that he’s Noah from nine days in the future and has come back in time to help Noah make all of his dreams come true. As long as Noah does everything he tells him to do no matter how silly and ridiculous it sounds.

This Again is about the funny misadventures of a kid who attempts to orchestrate the perfect day with the help of his future self and a time machine. It’s a story about fate and free will. But more importantly, it’s a book about a kid wrestling with anxiety and perfectionism, learning to accept that life doesn’t always go according to plan and that he’s good enough. And once again, the book is driven by a universal theme: No one can do everything. Much of Noah’s anxiety comes from comparing himself to others (family, friends, classmates), a fear of failure, and trying to do too much at once. Along the way he learns the importance of balance, and that sometimes people appear to have their lives more under control than they actually do. And by learning and accepting this theme, Noah just might have a shot to win in the end.

So, readers can go on these fun rides and take away the same lessons that the protagonists learn, because the themes are universal, but also, they’re so baked into the story, that they’re one and the same. Like the importance of a strong thesis statement that my wonderfully patient, darn-near saintly English teachers growing up attempted to instill on me. And while I didn’t appreciate thesis statements when I was younger, I’ve realized how important it is to define the core of a piece, whether it’s in a film or a book. It not only helps you as a writer to tell a compelling story, but helps readers connect with the material. The next time you read or watch something that you love, beyond the plot and in the subtext, take a step back and ask yourself what the creator was really trying to say. Chances are, it’ll be a message that resonates with you.

Published April 16th, 2024 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

About the Book: Noah Nicholson focuses on the could’ve-beens, should’ve-beens and wish-I-dids in his life. Still, there’s plenty to be grateful for— he gets solid grades, he has a nice group of friends, and he’s becoming closer with Lucy Martinez (who he’s had a crush on since the second grade). Most excitingly, he might have a chance to be voted class president next week.

But one day, Noah sees the oddest thing—he sees himself. It turns out, this lookalike is Noah from the future, and he’s here to make sure that Present-Day Noah snags the class president spot. It’s up to the two of them to make sure everything goes off without a hitch, but fate just might have other plans…

Perfect for fans of Finn and the Intergalactic Lunchbox and Operation Do-Over, This Again? takes readers on an incredible journey through time, mind, and middle school.

About the Author: ADAM BORBA is a writer and filmmaker from California who helps develop and produce movies for Walt Disney Studios. He is the author of The Midnight Brigade and Outside Nowhere.

Thank you, Adam, for tying together lessons and reality!

“Be Kind to the Language”

“Wee cliche.”

I have written those words in the margin of my students’ work so many times it is bordering on becoming a wee cliche itself (bordering on? I hear my students cough). To avoid that, I occasionally drop the “wee” part for variety. But the wee is in there for good reason; to call something cliche is among the most stinging critiques one can make of a writer. We are, after all, striving for originality at all times in our work, so to call cliche at somebody is tough stuff. That is one reason I added the wee in the first place—to soften the blow.

But there is another important reason, and that is the fact that I’m usually not flagging one of the big, whopping clichés like “It was a dark and stormy night,” known to writing students the world over. My vigilance is overwhelmingly applied to the small, apparently harmless, turns of phrase that pop up all over our writing without our even noticing. Yes, I include myself in this (boy, do I love editors and editing).

But they are not harmless, are they? As I am known to point out to my students as I attempt to talk them out of hating me: those very small over-common terms and phrases that infect our sentences are the equivalent of termites eating away at the foundations of our prose. They are insidious, and lethal. How many times do we read a piece and get to the end merely shrugging, thinking “That was okay, but it left no pleasant aftertaste”? Going back, you may well find that the language, the syntax, the rhythms (yes, there are cliches of pace and rhythm and theme) are so samey compared to what I have read before. If that is your own writing you are going over, look for all the easy choices, the phrases like broad daylight or a twinkle in his eye, that you almost certainly would not have fallen back on if you hadn’t already heard them a billion times in your life. As a dedicated mentor, I like to emphasize that having heard something a billion times is precisely why you do NOT want to repeat it. Even if it is not a literal repetition of something common, if you even feel like you have heard something before, then treat it as if you have. The joyful endgame here is that in almost every instance where I call out a wee cliche to my students, they come back at me with a fillip, a flipflop, a fandango that instantly stamps that sentence as theirs and nobody else’s.

Now, I am not a linguistic brute. I know these minor weakness of phrase are acceptable in everyday life. Social discourse is scarcely imaginable without them. But. Your creative writing is supposed to be your singularity. You get to lovingly labor over it and polish it until it fully represents you and your artful spirit. So, while you can say in conversation, it is what it is (if you MUST), once you have put it in writing you have expended five words to say exactly nothing. That is a fair description of what we aim to eliminate in a creative writing program.

And while we are at it, please stop using the word Dad as a pejorative? That hurts my feelings.

Publishing March 12th, 2024 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

About the Book: “Lynch is back and better, smarter, and funnier than ever.” —Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award Winner

A boy learns how to be a friend from man’s best friend in this funny and moving middle grade novel about humans being able to change and dogs changing us from acclaimed author Chris Lynch.

In a family of strong personalities with very strong points of view, Louis is what his mother lovingly calls “the inactivist,” someone who’d rather kick back than stand out. He only hopes he can stay under the radar when he starts high school in the fall, his first experience with public school after years of homeschooling.

But when a favor for a neighbor and his stinky canine companion unexpectedly turns into a bustling dog-walking business, Louis finds himself meeting an unprecedented number of new friends—both human and canine. Agatha, a quippy and cagey girl his age always seems to be telling two truths and a lie. Cyrus, a few years his senior, promises he’s going to show Louis how to be a better person, whether Louis wants him to or not. And then there are the dogs: misbehaving border terriers, the four (possible stolen) sausage dogs, the rest of Louis’s charges, and a mysterious white beast who appears at a certain spot at the edge of the woods.

Dogs and human alike all seem to have something they want to teach Louis, including his menacing older brother who keeps turning up everywhere. But is Louis ready to learn the lesson he needs most: how to stop being a lone wolf and be part of a pack?

About the Author: Chris Lynch is the award–winning author of several highly acclaimed young adult novels, including Printz Honor Book Freewill, Iceman, Gypsy Davey, and Shadow Boxer—all ALA Best Books for Young Adults—as well as Killing Time in Crystal City, Little Blue Lies, Pieces, Kill Switch, Angry Young Man, and Inexcusable, which was a National Book Award finalist and the recipient of six starred reviews. Chris is the author of middle grade novel Walkin’ the Dog. He holds an MA from the writing program at Emerson College. He teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Lesley University. He lives in Boston and in Scotland.

Thank you, Chris, for these pointers to focus students’, and our, writing!