Children's Lit Class

Wow. Hi. I've sucked at blogging lately. I have excuses- start of school, having bronchitis for a month (still got it), three trips to New York city in three weeks, my brand-new computer crashing (and taking a good 15 pages from my novel with it) etc. But I'm not going to detail them.

I want to talk about my children's writing class. I almost didn't get to take this class because it runs at the same time as my required stage make-up class. Fortunately, my advisor is letting me work around this and take the writing class. It meets once a week for three hours and I'm totally in love with it.

We cover everything from picture books to YA novels, including writing for magazines and non-fiction books. At the moment, we just finished reading and discussing The Tale of Despereaux, which I loved (and had never read before.) We're reading so many great books and I get so excited during every class. During yesterday's class, I had a bronchitis-related fever and I still thoroughly enjoyed myself.

The thing I love about it is that it inspires me not just to write, but to write what I love, and outside of it, too. Sometimes it's hard to be a YA writer in a school full of people (and a group of friends) who don't read YA, but my teacher is so passionate and supportive of children's lit that I feel I'm given permission to do my work. Also, after reading Despereaux, I think I'd like to write a middle grade novel some day.

As with my last writing class, it's a critique class part of the time. I'm not being critiqued until November, but I need to start getting my stuff together now. One scene that I wanted to present was deleted when my computer crashed, so I need to start putting the pieces back together. I'm excited to get their feedback, though. The response from my professor on my first (ever) non-fiction magazine article was much better than I expected. I was afraid to look at her comments, but aside from a few words suggestions here and there, it was received quite well. At the end, she wrote that she could see it being published, which caused me to happy dance in my brain :)

Speaking of things that cause happy dances and inspiration- if you haven't bought Maureen Johnson's The Name of the Star, DO IT NOW. I've always been a fan of MJ; she hasn't written a single bad book. This one, though, is simply amazing. She writes with a bravery I can only dream of. Plus, it takes place in London (almost exactly where I went to school, down to the street) and there are ghosts. What more could you want?

Taking the Plunge

Today was a day I've been dreading since my first day of Poetry & Fiction- the day that I had to compare a piece of my writing to an author that had influenced me. Though Libba Bray is my #1 favorite writer, I just couldn't compare my writing to hers, so I went to another of my favorite authors- Maureen Johnson.

Actually, MJ and I do have sort of similar styles, or at least the way we implement our comparable senses of humor into our work is similar. So even though I can only wish I was as good as her, I decided to do my project on that comparison.

When I got up in front of the class, I was shaking, I was so nervous. I always speed-talk, but when I get nervous, it's gets worse by about a thousand percent. So I sped through her history and why she ifluenced me and then read a short excerpt from Devilish, one of my favorites of her novels. And then I read my excerpt.

The snippet I read was one I showed you guys a long time ago, from Q when Eliza and Jonah first meet. But something you guys probably already know is that sharing your work over the internet, to live yet invisible people, is completly different from standing in front of a bunch of people and reading your own words to them. I was terrified and shook a lot and kept my eyes on the paper only like you're not supposed to do. Finally, I reached the end of the page, looked up at the class and was astonished.

Because guess what? They all looked interested, some even impressed. And during the question and answer session, one girl asked me if I was still working on the novel and how far I'd gotten, and the girl after her said she really wanted to read it when I was finished.

Now I know. This praise from my fellow college kids is not the road to publication, necessarily. But I was on such a high afterwards that it almost felt like it. People liked what I'd written. They liked my little WIP baby!

This makes me a little (though not completely) less scared for next week, when I have to turn in ten pages of my fiction for a class-wide critique.

Tonight, another writing class! I've been working on the assignment (a five-page script) and am stuck on page three due to my determination to choose a really hard style of writing for my first piece. Someone save me from myself :P

Copycat

I'm a bit of a copycat. When I read something I like, writing-wise, I always want to do it myself. While copying, I generally find my own style that encompasses what I like as well as my own style and I go from there, but there's one area where I've succeed at neither copying nor finding my own style: plotting.

I want to be a fan of plotting. I want to be an outlining wizard with notecards and charts and lists. I've always wanted to have a wall like Maureen Johnson's:



Unfortunately, this is not my style. When it comes to plotting, I have no style. I generally play it by ear; what feels right (or... what comes to me at the time) for the book/play/whatever is what I do. Sometimes it's trial and error. For example, I tried MJ's type of outlining* but it didn't work for me. I was advised to try a similar approach to parts of a play I wrote recently, but nothing clicked.

And after trying to copy and just plain trying, I still haven't really found my "method", but I do know that outlining is not for me, LOL. And actually, I'm usually okay with that because that's how the twists and turns happen for me- I start writing and things just start to come to the surface. I don't take all of them, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't even have them as an option if I had outlined in the first place. Libba Bray- another of my favorite authors- said something similar about the writing of my favorite book, A Great and Terrible Beauty... not that I'm copying her ;)

In other news, how do you like my new layout? I loved the other one, and a lot of the newer options offered were really cool, but I thought this one fit what I'm blogging about most.

I got home from work early today and thought, 'Great! Some time to devote some quality time to my novel revisions!' Want to know how far I've gotten? I've had the screen up for three hours now, have scrolled down a few pages and read a few sentences. *wipes sweat from brow* Now that's what I call work! *sigh* Scared, much? It's pretty much the same thing that I (and a bunch of my fellow students) were told in Shakespeare class last semester: "You're stopping yourself because it's easier and safer to fail than to go all the way and look silly while you move toward success."


Also, on the non-writing side, I'd like to ask any of the actors that read this blog if you have any tips on how to memorize Shakespeare. In the trend of copying, I do have my own methods, but I've never done an entire Shakespeare play and will take any pointers!


*Although MJ also recently said on Twitter that she only outlines these days to have something to laugh at later.