Celebrate With Me!

I think writing has helped me learn some life lessons. Some of these “lessons” have been forced on me. Things like patience, humility, and understanding the futility of jealousy.

One lesson I am trying to learn better, and to truly accept is to celebrate the little steps along the way.

I’ve had some very nice affirmations of my writing in the past – moments when I should have celebrated more. But I always had my eye on the next thing, the thing I didn’t achieve. But I realize more and more, that’s a slippery slope. There will always be something more to want.

So, please, celebrate a step with me.

My young adult novel, Like a Streak, has made it through the second cut of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award! An excerpt can be downloaded here.

A stranger, someone who doesn’t know me read – and liked – what I wrote.

Yay!

The first cut was based on the pitch – and I was truly thrilled to have made that cut. The second cut was based on this excerpt. The next one will be looking at the entire novel. It’s thrilling to be considered – to have a stranger actually read my words.

Sarah Wones Tomp

WRITING ON THE SIDEWALK

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One TEEN Story is coming! (And a deliciously spooky story to read right now)

One Story, the non-profit group that celebrates short fiction by publishing one short story each month for the last ten years, is now going to offer stories written about the teen experience for “young adult readers of every age” – they know YA has a wider audience than only teens. I’m thrilled!

I love their format – simple and ad-free, just the right size to slip in a pocket or purse – or to tuck inside a boring textbook…

Check out One TEEN Story – issues will begin in September 2012.

For authors, the submission guidelines are posted as well.

You must be pretty excited and impatient to read an excellent short story right now! Well, good news – You don’t have to wait until September.  Get thee to Hunger Mountain and read The White House – a deliciously creepy ghost story starring Amarilla Sarah Weathersby and including a “predatory piece of post,” by Jennifer Wolf Kam.

I’ve had the pleasure and the privilege to read some of Jen’s other works of fiction. Let’s just say, if you love spooky fiction, remember her name!

Sarah Wones Tomp

WRITING ON THE SIDEWALK

 

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Spice Up Your Writing- Include All 5 Senses

“I’m going to Old Town to smell the church.”

This was the response I gave my husband the other day when he asked me what my plans were for the day. He looked concerned until I explained that I was writing a scene for my current WIP that was set in an old church and wanted to include as many sensory elements as possible.

Often the first impression an author gives the reader is what a place looks like — what the narrator sees. But it’s just as important to  include all the senses: sounds, smells, tastes, and the textures of a setting add more dimensions to the description.

• Sound: What does your character hear? birds chirping, wind blowing, water dripping…
• Smell: What do they smell? perfume, sweat, dust, food cooking, wood burning…
• Taste: What do they taste? salty, sweet, sour …
• Texture/feel: What does your character feel?  smooth, dry, hot, slimy…

Using all five senses gives your reader a greater sense of the setting for your story, and will help them really have a feel for the story.

This was my intention when I went to the church in Old Town. I wanted to sit in the church and absorb the sensory images I hoped to discover: the feel the pews, the smell the wax from the candles, the quiet sounds of the the church…

Unfortunately for me, the candles were electric and they played a lovely Gregorian Chat in the background, so I couldn’t get all of the sensory elements I was hoping for. I’m planning to check out one of the old missions next week when son #2 is on Spring Break… he just doesn’t know it yet. I wonder what he’ll say when I tell him we’re going to go “smell a church.”

Happy Writing,

Suzanne Santillan

Writing on the Sidewalk

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Great Beginnings- Great Tips from Jody Hedlund

One thing I struggle with as an author is the opening. How can I pull my reader into the story and keep them interested. It’s a sad fact that if your opening is not interesting most readers will not continue with the story. So what’s a writer to do?

I found a great post by author Jody Hedlund that discussed this very issue.  Jody offers three things to consider for opening your story:

1. Find a life-changing DISTURBANCE.

Look for an incident that will push your character out of their comfortable life into a new problem or situation that will ultimately change their life.

2. Start with immediate TENSION and CONFLICT. 

Drop our characters onto the page into the middle of immediate conflict and assume the reader will catch on to what’s going on eventually. You can always go back and weave in important story details later if needed.

3. Use a PROLOGUE sparingly. 

Most readers (including agents and editors) don’t want to wade through a prologue (which is often just an excuse to fit in backstory).

If I have a scene that needs to happen before the big disturbance moment, label it as Chapter One and treat it just like a regular chapter, giving it a strong opening hook, immediate conflict, and the same page-turning quality I would with any other chapter.

So I turn this back to my readers. Do you have any great tips for beginning a story? I’d love to hear them.

Happy writing,

Suzanne Santillan

Writing on the Sidewalk

 

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The Way I See It

First of all – suburban pig sighting this morning! Standing in the living room, looking out the front door as Luna and I walked past. Yep. Pig in the living room. Enormous pink pigalicious porcine.

Secondly, my poem has has been submitted to the Poetry Madness contest – it should be posted for voting some time today. The youngest (and most competitive) boy has made it clear that he expects me to advance at least one round. Pressure! So, my poem is for him.

Thirdly… judging poetry.

I do not claim to be a poet. I’ve never formally studied poetry. But I do try to read it. At least one a day through Writer’s Almanac. Some I understand, some I don’t. Some I like, some I don’t.

The poems I like best make me feel like I’m using a different lens to see something familiar. Either a zoom in up close or a wide stepped-back distant view. I love to be surprised.

Like seeing a pig looking out his front door.

I think of poems being like music. I know what I like even if I don’t know the why. Or the how it came to be.

It’s some kind of magic that all the music we hear comes from variations of an 8-note scale.

And that all the poetry comes from 26 letters. (Or whatever number digits the particular alphabet being used has to offer.)

I think using a particular structure helps. For my madness poem I turned to A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms, selected by Paul Janeczko and illustrated by Chris Raschka.

My poem for the contest is a triolet: An eight line poem in which line 1 repeats as lines 4 and 7 and line 2 repeats as line 8. The rhyme scheme is abaaabab.

I hope I wrote it right!

Sarah Wones Tomp

WRITING ON THE SIDEWALK

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That Poetry Madness Thing

As I mentioned, I signed up to participate in Ed DeCaria’s Poetry Madness contest — maybe you never knew poetry could be competitive!

Please stop by and vote – you can help score points! Take ‘em to the hoop!

To recap from Ed’s website:

The Poets’ Challenge: Each poet is assigned a single word based on their bracket seed, ranging from 1 (intuitive) to 16 (seemingly impossible). Poets must write a kid-appropriate poem using the prompted word in under 36 hours. Once both final poems have been received, they will be pasted into the body of this post, and then the reader poll will be open for voting.

Voter Instructions: Read each poem as many times as you’d like. Then use the poll to express your preference. Votes are counted in real time and cannot be changed once entered. As a guideline for voting, consider the criteria on which the contestants on the cooking show “Chopped” are evaluated: presentation, taste, and creativity. Translated roughly into poetry terms, presentation might include technical aspects such as meter, rhyme, form/shape, etc.; taste might be the net effect — did the poem move you to laugh, cry, think, kill, etc.; and creativity might include the poet’s approach toward a certain subject, image evocation, clever wordplay, etc.

——

I’ve been given the 16th seed – the one he calls “seemingly impossible” so that’s confidence building!

With poetry in mind… for teachers of older – middle school and high school students wanting to teach a poetry writing unit, I highly recommend Kathi Appelt’s Poems From Homeroom.

This book has been divided into two sections. Part One contains poems written by Kathi Appelt. She explains that for this particular collection, she chose to write each poem about a person. She says in her introduction, “When we create a character, the essential thing we must figure out is what motivates that character, what drives that person to do whatever it is he or she chooses to do. “

In Part Two, Ms. Appelt provides background information about each poem – and the particular longing she felt motivated the character. Longing is an excellent place to start to write a poem.

Hmmm… wondering what seemingly impossible word I’ll be assigned!

Sarah Wones Tomp

WRITING ON THE SIDEWALK

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Behind the Scenes at a Book Festival

Six months ago I was asked to join a grassroots committee to bring a book festival to San Diego. The last book festival held here in San Diego was two years ago and they felt it was time to share the love of books with our community once again.

It has been a truly eye opening experience. I have never been involved in such a large event before and I am amazed at the number of details you need to consider:

• Porta Potties- Yes please. But how many?
• City Permits, Fire Marshall and Police- Need to be addressed early on in the process.
• Funding- This is a huge one. Since this is a grassroots effort, we have no budget. We have had to get creative in asking for donations and make barters and trades.
• Website, Facebook, Twitter- To get the word out. 
• Non-Profit or not?- There are benefits to becoming a Non-Profit organization, but it requires $500.00 and we have no budget.
• Logo and Letterhead for all correspondence- I designed that myself to help us cut down on costs.
• Tables, Chairs and Food for the authors- They have to sit and eat right?
• Authors and Entertainment- What are the people coming to see?
• Booths for Authors and Vendors- This is where we have to put our salesman hat on and try to fill those booths. 

Whew! And this is only a partial list of the things required to put on a book festival. There are at least a million and two details that still pop up. The Orange County Children’s Book Festival , just a few hours north of us, has been a tremendous help as we wade through this process. But there is still more work to do and very little time left to do it in (the event is on May 20th). I can see my life is going to get even busier in the next ten weeks.

I will share more about the event, as we get closer to the date or you can always check out the website.

Until then… Happy Reading,

Suzanne Santillan

Writing on the Sidewalk

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5 Elements of a Successful Revision

Revising your manuscript can be a difficult task. Where to begin? What to look for? What to cut?

In his recent newsletter, author Bruce Hale featured some great tips on revision. I asked Bruce if we could share those tips with our readers and he agreed.

5 ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL REVISION

So you’ve finished that first draft and let your story marinate in
its own juices for a while, and now it’s time for revision.  Only
question is: where to start?

With a picture book, that’s not too terribly daunting.  But with a
longer novel, you’d be well served to devise a strategy before
plunging into those narrative thickets that can swallow the unwary
writer.  I suspect everyone has his or her own favored approach to
revision.  Here’s the one I’ve found most useful…

1. FIRST READ
First time through, the hardest thing is to *just* read your story
and take notes.  No line edits, no grammar corrections, no
paragraph revisions — just reading.  But if you want to be able to
see the whole forest, instead of the individual trees, this
approach is vital.

By all means, take copious notes.  ”Tighten the opening on page
43;” “wonky sentence on page 12, first paragraph;” “fix the plot
logic in Chapter 18.”  These are all helpful.  And they prepare the
way for…

2. FIRST REVISION
Once you’ve waded through your story and taken copious notes,
congratulate yourself.  It’s not as bad as you thought, right?  (We
hope.)  With this optimistic thought, it’s time to roll up the
sleeves and plunge into wholehearted revision.

The first time through, work on larger issues: plot holes,
character inconsistencies, gaps in story logic, slow scenes that
need to be trimmed, and so forth.  You can always do the fine
polishing later.

Revise sequentially if you can, rather than skipping around.  For
any sections that require you to write new material, use the same
method you would in a first draft: write it fast and sloppy.  After
all, you can always fix it in the NEXT revision.

3. READ-ALOUD REVISION
Taking the time to read your work aloud may seem redundant at this
point, but it’s necessary.  You won’t believe how many errors
you’ll catch.  Homonyms, awkward phrasing, missing words, echoes
(unintentionally repeated words) — all these will pop out at you
like Halloween skeletons at a haunted house.

This is the revision where you can really focus on the sound and
rhythm of your writing.  Listen for those areas that sound clunky
and don’t really roll off the tongue — that’s your cue to break out
the belt sander and make things smooooth.

4. DIALOG REVISION
Once the story is as good as you can make it, and you’ve read aloud
to catch hidden glitches, it’s time to turn the microscope on your
dialog.  First, make sure each character speaks differently.  Have
them use different idioms, word choice and catch phrases –
otherwise, they’ll all sound like each other (or like you).

Top-notch authors like Elmore Leonard vary their character dialog
so deftly, they don’t even need attributions (he said/she said).
It’s that clear who’s speaking.  In real life, we all have our own
ways of putting things.  So just make sure your fictional
characters possess that same distinction.

5. FINAL CHECK
Before I send my story off to agent or editor, I usually try to let
it sit for a week or so, then do one last read-through, to make
sure all my changes fit, and to smooth out any remaining rough
edges.  This is an ideal time to search for words you overuse.
(And we *all* overuse certain pet words.)

For example, I know that I tend to drop in “just” and “only” too
often, and I tend to have too many characters shrugging and
nodding.  A quick search for these words shows me where I’ve
overdone it, and a quick fix guards against too much sameness in
the manuscript.

For more great writing tips be sure to check out Bruce’s website here. If you’d like to receive the monthly newsletter, you may sign up here.

Happy Revising,

Suzanne Santillan

Writing on the Sidewalk

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