Show how the surroundings affect her in order to help the reader feel through her. The emotional impact will come from showing, describing, sensing, not telling.
Describe sparingly. Describe only what the character sees.
Show how the surroundings affect her in order to help the reader feel through her. The emotional impact will come from showing, describing, sensing, not telling.
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Show how a young girl would look at things. Forget about the way you see things, and put yourself in her shoes. Take her age into consideration. Kids would forget to pay the taxi driver or think twice before jumping into danger or leaving their stuff behind, thinking that adults would clean up after them. Some strangers appear scary to them. Kids would not think they have another option than just go inside.
Make your reader care about the character’s feelings. Show her true self though the way she manages these emotions. To make the story exciting, add unrealistic, farfetched emotions from an over active imagination. After all, kids that age are typically afraid of the things that go bump in the dark. Monsters crawling under their bed are still vivid.
Have a strong sense of setting in order to paint a vivid image.
The first few minutes you introduce your character, show how special she is, how she fits in this setting, and what things are important to her. Connect the reader to your character. What are the things they can relate to? And start in the middle of the action. Pfew! So much to do in your fist lines. Kids have a natural instinct for storytelling.
They know how to make a story come to life, how to add funny twists and add magic to it. They might not know the bells and whistles of writing, but they have a sense of pace and drama. Many kids can act naturally; they have a sense for theatrics. Don't they? Especially when they want something. Kids have a wild imagination that allows them to have a clear picture of settings, of the way the characters look and the objects that surround them. They give personality traits to the characters that stick and will comment when your hero does something out of character. They want to know what will happen to your heroes as if their life depended on it. They won’t let go of a story easily. In brief, they are the best resource to test your plot because, if you disappoint them, they will reject your story on the spot, without a second thought. At least, my kids are that way. They are the best critique partners around, if you are lucky enough to have them. So, I’m writing a Middle Grade air pirate story for my son. Kids from 8-13 want fast-paced, adventure, cool-unusual magic, characters that sound true with quirks and weaknesses, lots of humor. They hate internal thoughts and want to stay away from deep themes. In brief, they want to be entertained, but in a clever way. Not that easy! I learned it the hard way. When I read him my first draft, my son started by telling me that pirates are overdone (yeah, even air pirates) and when he thinks of pirates, he thinks about the Caribbean pirates, not North Africa. “You’ve got to give another name to your pirate,” he said, “and he must look different.” So, my pirate is now a “privateer” (north African pirates were actually called corsairs. Some were privateers, but really privateers were a joke). We found a better name for the captain, the name of an actual pirate: Barbarossa (a name that fitted a character from a Berber tribe). Our captain has to speak in French because he is well rounded. He is half-mechanical, half-human, because he is from the Victorian era. And the captain is not allowed to gather gold, but artifacts that gives him magic powers. He is not allowed to idle and think, less alone take a break. However, his magic has to fail, because, up to my son, magic that works all the time is boring and we’ve got to give our heroes weaknesses. So, the giant with a robotic arm, the swearing rugged man with the heart of a bird is gone and replaced by the wannabe indestructible cyborg privateer who loves to collect artifacts but is clueless as to how to use them. He has a jetpack that fuses to his shoulders and allows him to fly. He is also multi-lingual and pious. The makeover sounds radical, but that allowed more depth into the story without actually getting inside the head of the captain. So now, if he hates being a privateer, he just has to remind himself he does that for the power the artifacts give him, and if he doesn’t succeed in controlling magic, at least we understand he is human and we can relate to him. He is more of an explorer with big dreams than a merciless bandit with only riches in mind. Barbarossa has much more to offer now. He used to be a pawn on a chess game. Now, he is an important piece in a puzzle. Kids do not like pawns; they like well-rounded characters they can identify with. So, even if Barbarossa is still a secondary character, he needs his own story, his own quirks, his own twists and his ow dreams. No matter if his sailors are there to do the ugly job of chasing the heroes for him, Barbarossa is the centerpiece of that story and he doesn’t even know it. Lesson learned? In Middle Grade stories, never make any character insignificant, static, stereotypical, or a thinker. Never make a secondary character totally secondary, but makes him a pivot, a part of the scheme. More than a villain or an obstacle, he’ll be humanized and given back his own rights to be in the story. We might even like him. Ahoy, captain! Hig five, son. You might consider yourself well-read, which is until you discover that “Despite census data that shows 37% of the US population consists of people of color, only 10% of children’s books published have diversity content.” [Multicultiral Children Book Day]
Isn’t that a huge cultural blind spot? It has been speculated that the white race will not be a majority anymore in 2040 in the US! It has also been speculated that in the next century, most people will be bi-racial. What an incredible change if you know that 17 states had laws against bi-racial marriages still in the sixties! So, it’s time to face our blindspots. The way I look at this fabulous picture (see up) is asking myself how many books should actually be represented knowing the percentage of US ethnic groups in 2010? Native: 1% (books represented: 0.9%) Latinx: 17% (books represented: 2.4%) Asian: 5 % (books represented: 3.3%) Biracial: 3% (n/a) African-American: 13% (books represented: 7.6%) White: 61% (books represented: 73.3%) What this chart does not show is that a good number of the books were actually written by white people, through the eyes of a white person. Now, these writers might live with minorities or know them well (at least they thought about our diversity and tried to include it in their books, which is wonderful), but minorities and #ownvoice are still under-representated. This month many bloggers, publishers, and book lovers are gathering to review multicultural books. You can too! They are giving a FREE diversity children's book to anyone who will review on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or blog. As for me, I am very excited about the wonderful book I have been assigned! Here is more info about the event: “Multicultural Children’s Book Day 2017 (1/27/17) is its fourth year and was founded by Valarie Budayr from Jump Into A Book and Mia Wenjen from PragmaticMom. Our mission is to raise awareness on the ongoing need to include kid’s books that celebrate diversity in home and school bookshelves while also working diligently to get more of these types of books into the hands of young readers, parents and educators.” Join the fun! RESOURCES: The Brown Bookshelf. <https://thebrownbookshelf.com/> Miss T's Book Room. <https://askmskt.blogspot.com/> Skipping Stones Magazine. <http://www.skippingstones.org/> Changing Faces." Nationa Geographic. <http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/10/changing-faces/funderburg-text> ♥♥♥ Multicultural Book Day. <http://multiculturalchildrensbookday.com/multicultural-childrens-book-day-sponsorships-2017-are-open/> Hashtag: #ReadYourWorld. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MulticulturalChildrensBookDay Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCChildsBookDay |
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March 2017
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