7 Tips On How To Locate Junior Editors for Your Children'sBookWritten by Catherine Franz
Are you writing a children’s book -- nonfiction or fiction?Here are a few tips on how to test your almost final draft. And test your manuscript on same audience that is going to read book. Make them junior editors. 1. Talk with a teacher at your local school that has a classroom of your book’s age group. Ask for permission to come in and read book to class. Video tape children’s reactions or ask two people to accompany you to record children’s reactions to direct parts of story. Give each of recorders a copy of manuscript that they can write comments on in exact location of children’s reaction. They can make smiley faces of J L to save time. 2. Or maybe ask teacher if she is willing to give manuscript to students to read as an assignment then ask for children’s opinion. Have a class discussion about book afterwards with you present. 3. If teacher doesn’t like any of these, let her make some suggestions.
| | Write Strategy: Think, Believe, AttackWritten by Shery Ma Belle Arrieta-Russ
Think of writing like karate...it's about DISCIPLINE.Writing, like other forms of art, work or talent, requires discipline. It won't ever be enough that you say to yourself that you are a writer. Only when you write and write with discipline can you call yourself one. Before you can earn a black belt in karate, you have to dedicate yourself, practice and instill discipline in yourself to learn moves and techniques. The same goes for writing. Don't just read books. Devour them. Ray Bradbury, author of Zen in Art of Writing, suggests books of essays, poetry, short stories, novels and even comic strips. Not only does he suggest that you read authors who write way you hope to write, but "also read those who do not think as you think or write as you want to write, and so be stimulated in directions you might not take for many years." He continues, "don't let snobbery of others prevent you from reading Kipling, say, while no one else is reading him." Learn to differentiate between good writing and bad writing. Make time to write. Write even though you're in a bad mood. Put yourself in a routine. Integrate writing into your life. The goal is not to make writing dominate your life, but to make it fit in your life. Julia Cameron, in her book The Right to Write, sums it best: "Rather than being a private affair cordoned off from life as rest of world lives it, writing might profitably be seen as an activity best embedded in life, not divorced from it." Believe that EVERYONE HAS A STORY -- including you. Extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. As a writer, your job is to capture as many of these things and write them down, weave stories, and create characters that jump out of pages of your notebook. Don't let anything escape your writer's eye, not even way old man tries to subtly pick his nose or way an old lady fluffs her hair in a diner. What you can't use today, you can use tomorrow. Store these in your memory or jot them down in your notebook.
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