Mary Amato's Writing Tips Blog is moving

My Writing Tips blog is moving to my new website.

You can find me at:

www.maryamato.com

Writing Tip # 18: New 3-minute Video on the Writing Process

I'm hoping teachers and librarians will enjoy using this in the classroom.

Question About The Power of Story

Kids write the best fan letters. “It made me feel verry alive.” That’s how a fourth grader from Middletown Elementary School described the experience of reading. From time to time I find the same comment, though not always spelled the same way, in my fan mail, and it always makes me stop and marvel about the power of story. Why does reading a story about someone else make us feel alive? Want to explain your theory?

Illustration by Eric Brace for Please Write in This Book by Mary Amato

Writing Tip#17: Plotting Your Way

I often use index cards to keep track of my plot. I try to write short statements related to the action of the story on cards. Sometimes I spread them on the floor to "see" my plot. Sometimes I tape them to a display board.

In addition to using the cards for plotting purposes, I also use them to keep track of important bits of information, such as my character's school schedule. These are the cards for the novel Invisible Lines. I have a new set of cards for the book I'm working on now.

Creative Teaching Idea #1: Toy Travel Diary

Learn a little something by sending your toy pet into the world...

My name is Inch, and I’m from Wilmette, Illinois. Recently, I traveled to Maryland to visit author Mary Amato (you can see me on the bottom of her rather messy desk holding her pencil). She was surprised to see me and read the tag attached to me. My card asked her to send a note, photo, or postcard to the school about what it’s like where she lives (her geography, culture, climate, population, interesting facts, etc.). Then she is supposed to pass me on to someone else. I’m hoping to travel all around the country. Maybe even the world. Cool, hunh? Thanks to 5^th grade teacher Teresa Dobson at Highcrest Middle School for inspiring her students to follow through with such a great idea.

Do you have a creative teaching idea to share?

Writing Tip #16 Kids Deserve Rich Vocabulary

Sometimes adults ask me if I am conscious about word choice when writing for children: Do I deliberately choose a “small” word so that it doesn’t go over the reader’s head?

I shoot for the best word, no matter how small or large.

I believe that there is an organic process of learning language, which is called exposure. How do we learn “big” words? By hearing or seeing them used in context. I still recall the thrill of learning the word “salutations” when reading Charlotte’s Web. Imagine if E.B. White had deprived me of that thrill?

Kids are remarkable creatures and can handle just about anything.

While walking to the outdoor pool last week, I passed two boys, about seven years old, sitting on a fence, legs dangling. One boy’s flip-flop sandal fell off his foot, and he turned to his friend and said, in absolute deadpan, “I just lost my dignity.”

Writing Tip #15: Listen to Leonard Cohen's Advice

Spend a full day writing, painstakingly layering in word after word, only to discover that it all needs to go into the trash at the end of the day. The process is agonizing and depressing and…essential.

How do you keep doing it day after day? By accepting the fact that you have to write in order to write. (I'm still working on this.) The great songwriter Leonard Cohen, captured in a documentary by Lian Lunson, said it this way: “You have to write down what you have to abandon. You’ve got to see how it works with the whole thing and then throw it away.”

Question about Writing in School

Why don't our schools embrace creative writing more consistently?

Last week, at the suggestion of a mom, I offered a three-day creative writing workshop for middle schoolers. The seven kids who came to my studio with notebooks and pencils were on fire. The quality of the writing and critiquing was thrilling.

After the class, a mom told me what I feared: During her daughter’s sixth gradeyear there was only one opportunity to write a short story. Why? Is it because it's hard to "grade" creative writing? Is it because making people laugh or cry through your writing isn't on a standardized test? What do you think? And what kind of support can I, as a writer, offer to teachers out there who want to do more? Any ideas?

Writing Tip #14: Letting Go to Let Voice Flow

If you were a "good student" in school, you may sometimes find your creating writing strangled by the long-ingrained impulse to write correctly. Sometimes I forget to allow my characters to stumble, to speak in fragments, to say what comes out. Speech, thankfully, is not robotic and grammatically perfect; it’s sometimes rushed, sometimes painful, often quirky or unconventional. Author M.T. Anderson is a master of capturing authentic voice. Am I legally allowed to pull a quote from one of his books and post it as an example? I don’t know. Every time I read him, I'm reminded how much I need to let go.

Writing Tip #13: The Essential Wiring

Identify your climax (the ultimate showdown between your protagonist and antagonist). Think of it as the moment when all the lights and sounds go off. Basically, you want all the wires to be connected in such a way as to enable the climax to work. You don’t want any broken circuits. You also don’t want lots of unnecessary wires tangling up the scene. Follow each element of your story back from the climax to the beginning as if you’re tracing the wires. Take a good hard look at anything that doesn’t connect to your climax. Either get rid of it or re-engineer it so that it adds more power.

Writing Tip #12: Maintain a Flexible Imagination

I’m on fire writing a new children’s book, and yet one important character—a kid named Daniel—has been flat in every scene. I haven’t been able to conjure up a distinctive picture of this character, and it shows. Today, out of the blue, I realized that Daniel could be a girl, and I wondered if this would be an improvement. I picked up a pen and began writing possible names. The moment I chose her name and began re-writing her first scene, a wonderful, dimensional character appeared.

Whenever I’m inching my aching and tight muscles into my yoga routine, I’m reminded how difficult and crucial it is to maintain flexibility. Flexibility of the imagination is difficult and crucial, as well. Somehow you have to allow yourself to consider all the options that you never allowed yourself to consider.

Writing Tip #11: What Rhymes with Pomegranate?

My songwriter friend David Christman (http://www.myspace.com/haolewolf) sent me the lyrics of a new song about pomegranates, which was bursting with fun, juicy rhymes. An unexpected rhyme is such a pleasure.

I like to consult my rhyming dictionary when songwriting to make sure that I haven’t overlooked any gems or to get out-of-the-box ideas and was encouraged to keep doing this in a songwriting workshop I took with Pat Pattison (Berklee School of Music). Pattison said that his beginning students mistakenly assume that using a writer’s tool, such as a dictionary, is cheating; but relying only on the rhymes that are in the alphabet of your own brain doesn’t prove anything. He says that your creative talent emerges by choosing the best rhyme possible, so it makes sense to comb through as many rhymes as possible.

David told me that he uses www.rhymezone.com on the web after first tapping his own inner rhyme-maker, which he imagines “to run much like an ice cube maker in a funky old hotel.” Love that image!

Writing Tip #10: Writing through the Wrong

When working on a new book I try to get a few chapters down. Then I print it and read it to see what I’ve got. Last week, after having done that, I realized that I had to throw away everything I’d written so far and start over. Too much was happening in the story. The main character had the wrong motives.

My first thought: what a waste of effort, time, and keystrokes! My second (and wiser) thought: what necessary writing! As my playwright friend Richard Washer (www.chartertheatre.org) says, “I gotta keep writing through the wrong to get to the right.”

Writing Tip #9: Gift-Wrapped Surprises

Kids love surprises. Remember this when you write. Are you revealing everything in your story up front or are you concealing some surprises for the reader? Give your readers surprise gifts along the way.

Writing for Children Quote from L'Engle

"You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it's going to be too difficult for grown-ups, you write it for children."

- Madeleine L'Engle

This great quote came to my attention from Melissa Henderson, Head of Children's Services, The Glencoe Public Library, Glencoe, IL.

Writing Tip #8: Seeing Opportunities

On the final edit of a manuscript, my editor writes each question or request for a change on a post-it note and folds it over the page. Let's just say there's a post-it note on almost every page. This photo shows the final edit of Invisible Lines, a book I spent six years writing and rewriting. After having wrestled with this manuscript so much on my own, I could be overwhelmed to see so many comments at this last stage. Instead of getting depressed or defensive, I try to look at each suggestion as an opportunity to make the book better. It's the only way to survive.

Writing Tip #7: Entrances and Exits

Think of your book as a stage. The curtain opens. How does each character enter? If you have developed a dramatic character, make sure the entrance does your character justice. And pay attention to how your characters exit, too. Is each entrance and exit perfectly crafted to suit the character and the story?

Writing Tip #6: Listen to Fifth Graders

Here's just part of the two-page letter a fifth grader from Bordentown, NJ, wrote after reading my book, The Naked Mole-Rat Letters:

“I liked that you made the main character, Frankie, so bold and brave. If she was boring, it would make the book boring. By the way the character acts, it can make a story either really interesting or really boring. Since she was so bold, it gave the book action. I hate boring books.”

I think my reader hit on the reason why this book actually made it. Frankie's story begins with an autobiographical detail: she finds a love letter written to her father. The same thing happened to me when I was Frankie's age; however the autobiography ends there. I was timid and kept all my anxieties to myself--not such interesting material for a book. I deliberately gave Frankie the boldness that I didn't have.

Is your character passive or active? Ask yourself: what does the main character actually do in the story? It's an important question to ask.

Writing Tip #5: Be Open to Serendipity

When I am stuck in the snowdrift of writer’s block on a book that I am either writing or revising, I will reach for some non-fiction to read that seems unrelated. I think of it as a temporary distraction, something to take my mind off the frostbite that has gripped my imagination. But—when the muse is smiling on me—whatever I’m reading will trigger an avalanche in my brain that completely changes the landscape of my own work.

This happened with my forthcoming book Invisible Lines (Egmont USA, October 2009) in a big way. I was giving up on my novel, and I happened to read Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World by Paul Stamets, and the avalanche began.

Thankfully, inspiration comes at unexpected times, from unexpected sources.

Writing Tip #4: Offering a Critique

A playwright and dramaturg for Charter Theatre, Richard Washer emphasizes that instead of telling a writer how to fix a manuscript, it’s more useful to simply tell the writer how you experienced the story (or play, or poem). What did you picture in your mind as you read/heard the story? Were any parts unclear? What popped out? Summarize the story that you read/heard. This more than anything will help the writer to understand what he or she has actually communicated. Through Charter's open-to-the-public reading series, I have been able to participate in this type of critique firsthand, and I try to remember it when I am asked to critique a writer's work. Richard points to Peter Elbow’s book Writing Without Teachers as his inspiration.

Writing Tip #3: XXX Marks the Spot

If I'm revising a novel, chances are that I'm not revising it straight through from beginning to end. I'm jumping around a lot, because changing one factor will have a ripple effect on the book. Sometimes I'm working on a scene in the middle; sometimes I'm struggling to get an ending right; and sometimes I'm going back to some dialogue at the beginning. One thing is true: When it is time to quit for the day, I always put an "xxx" wherever I have stopped. In the morning when I begin work again I search for the "xxx" and start there. Otherwise, the temptation is to keep starting over at the beginning of the story every day, and that can get me into trouble. If I keep perfecting the first chapter of a novel, I'll grow too attached to it and that will make revising so much harder.

It's a funny thing: You really can't be attached to your writing if you want to be a writer.

Writing Tip #2: A Character with a Sense of Humor Can Lighten a Serious Book

I think of my book The Naked Mole-Rat Letters as a serious book (it’s about a girl coping with her widowed father’s first romance) and yet fans write to me about how much they were drawn to the book because of its humor. Serious books need humor. Seriously.

I just finished revising my ninth book, Invisible Lines, which will be out in October 2009. It is a serious book about a 7th grade boy who is one step away from homelessness. My first draft was too depressing for anyone to want to read. I decided to give my main character, Trevor, a sense of humor, and that vein of humor that now runs through the story won over my editor, even though the draft she read had many plot problems. She says she “fell in love” with Trevor.

As soon as I decided that Trevor would take pleasure in being funny, I began to “hear” his voice more distinctly. Here it is in Chapter One: “If there’s one thing I’m good at it’s making my mom laugh because when I’m standing up I’m what you call a Stand-up Comedian and when I’m sitting down, I’m just plain funny.”

I often tell my students if they are struggling with a story that is dark, make sure to look for the light. Often simply giving one of your major characters a love of being playful or funny can be just what the story needs.

Writing Tip #1: Carry a Writer's Notebook

A student in a class I'm currently teaching on writing humor for children asked if there were any great exercises to generate ideas. The best "exercise" that I know of is to carry around a writer's notebook with you all the time. And I mean all the time. Get in the habit of being continually open to ideas. I get my best ideas when I'm taking walks. Of course, sometimes that means I bump into trees!