SCBWI Conference
I attended the Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators virtual summer conference last weekend, and I wanted to share some of my takeaways, both as a way to process everything I learned, and if there are any aspiring writers/illustrators reading my blog that might find it helpful. It was so informative and inspiring! I walked away feeling like I have SO much more to learn, but also feeling inspired to continue creating, to see what happens in this author illustrator journey that I’m on.
I attended a workshop with the YA author Stacey Lee (I haven’t read any of her books, but now I want to). The workshop was on three essential pieces to make every plot move along well, and I chose that workshop because my plot for the novel I’m writing feels ALL OVER the place right now. I don’t remember it being this hard when I was writing novels as a teenager! Stacey shared how three super important components of a good plot are Goals, Obstacles, and Stakes. She had excellent examples from shows and books (lots of references to The Princess Bride, which I loved). I do think that my novel has all of these components, but it made me think about how I could raise the stakes for the main characters. She also had us practice writing loglines, which are essentially a one sentence hook that summarizes your story. She uses loglines as a sort of compass while writing her books, so that if the plot starts to get a little haywire she can always return to that one sentence to remember WHAT she is writing about.
Here’s the logline I came up with for my novel! And, (fangirl moment) Stacey Lee just commented on this post on my IG!
I also attended a workshop on writing characters with mental health challenges, since several of my characters in this book struggle with their mental health, and I anticipate it being a common theme in my books because of my work experience and personal experience with mental health. I appreciated the authors perspectives on not writing about mental health diagnosis without having lived through what that experience is like. They also pushed the importance of mental health challenges not being a characters flaw in the book - characters should have flaws that are not only tied to that. They gave us an exercise to think about our characters difficult life situation, mental health challenge, and flaw. My main character Fern’s difficult life situation is that her mom dies from cancer (that’s only the first one… there’s more!). Her mental health challenge is struggling with anxiety, and her flaw is that she has trouble trusting people (especially adults). I think this is another useful tool for developing characters.
I did a group critique on my picture book about River, which I was nervous about, but all of the author/illustrators in the critique were really helpful and kind. Their biggest feedback on my River book is that it doesn’t have a story arc, which I knew when I wrote it, but my goal was to just show a snapshot of River’s life as a two-year-old rather than to really have a story. My workshop partners gave me the idea to make the story more about River’s struggle to communicate, so I played around with that and now have two versions of the book. I’m not sure which version I like better, as the original text could be a concept and character driven picture book (new terms that I learned in the conference!). Regardless, I’m still making progress on the book dummy and pretty soon I plan to switch over from using Canva to put it together to trying out Artstudio Pro, which is a drawing and photo software that I just learned about as well. Canva seems to have some limitations that are not working for me with the book dummy (unless I just don’t know how to use it properly - which is probably the case).
The sketch I’ve been working on this week for the book dummy.
A really nice and unexpected bonus to the conference was that someone created a spreadsheet for writers and illustrators looking for a critique group, and I’ve connected with a bunch of writers via email and will probably be joining some critique groups. I also met one of the people involved in Albuquerque’s SCBWI chapter, and so I hope to get more involved locally, too!
In other news, I’ve decided to switch out of the Phd program that I was in at California Institute of Integral Studies and into their MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing. Why and how I came to make that decision is a longer story, but the short version is that I really want to focus on my artist self and career and this feels like a way that I can do that, while learning lots more about writing, art, and publishing, and being involved with a community of people. I also think that one of my strengths lies in how interdisciplinary I am in my creative pursuits, and this program will really allow me to explore that. So many MFA’s seem to silo the different art forms without allowing any overlap at all, (I’ve done tons of research - I get a bit obsessive). Already in the MFA classes I took last year at CIIS I was able to explore how to overlap all of the creative projects that I’m passionate about. I want to continue to explore ways of doing that.
I can’t wait for classes to start again in September! In the meantime, I’ll keep plugging away at my novel (46 thousand words in now… which means it’s getting too long to be upper middle grade but my character isn’t old enough for YA. Ack! A problem for another day). And, of course, working on my book about River (which REALLY needs a title)!
