Sue Bradford Edwards's Blog, page 188

Writing Picture Books: How Much Dialogue Is Too Much?

“When writing a picture book, limit your dialogue.” This is a fairly common piece of advice given to picture book writers. The reasoning behind it is that talking heads make for boring illustrations.  Good illustrations contain action and emotion.  There are different characters and settings from spread to spread. And that’s not bad advice.  But […]

Book Binding

Those of you who have read my blog for any length of time know that I love to make things by hand. I knit and crochet.  I’ve started beading.  And I’m currently working on two old sewing machines. But here is a craft that relates directly to writing – book binding.  This video shows a […]

Rewriting: What to Do When You’re Making It Worse

One month.  I have one month to rewrite this picture book and turn it in.  After that?  Opportunity missed.  Bye-bye. I know, more or less, what I need to do. Create lyrical text on each spread full of sensory details and word play. Create an equally lyrical sidebar full of examples from around the world. […]

Writing Nonfiction for Children and Young Adults

If any of you are interested in learning to write nonfiction, I am teaching Writing Nonfiction for Children and Young Adults through WOW! Women on Writing.  The class starts on: Monday, September 10, 2018 Monday, November 12, 2018 This is an 8 week class that includes: Week One: Which Market Is Which. One of the most […]

Classes, Workshops, and Online Opportunities: What Do Writer’s Study?

I’m in an accountability group with several authors and one of my editors.  Yes, she also writes.  I love to take classes and it has been interesting for me the see what online opportunities other writers take advantage of.  Not surprisingly, a lot of writers take classes on writing.  Several of these ladies write essays so […]

Labor Day: Perspective

I hope everyone is enjoying Labor Day weekend.  We don’t tend to do the parade city event thing.  This is one of those weekends that we spend in rural Southern Missouri. We go to a small lake in Wayne County.  I was following them through the woods along a field and stopped to take a […]

STEM vs STEAM

My son is a STEM student.  In short, he’s working on an Associate degree in pre-engineering.  Then he’s going to go on for the four-year degree.  STEM has always made a lot of sense to us.  For those of you who may not be certain what the acronym means, it is Science, Technology, Engineering, and […]

Theme: Tying It All Together

Today I read two really good posts on theme.  The first, written by Becca Puglisi, reviewed a session on theme that she attended at a conference.  In her post, Puglisi discusses the difference between the theme statement and the theme topic.  Using the play Hamilton as an example, the theme statement was “You have no […]

Accessibility: Helping Your Reader with New Concepts

Sometimes concepts are hard to grasp because they are beyond our experience.  We need to be willing to reach out and hang on while the author builds the framework that we need to access these new ideas.  But this can be made more difficult if the reading level is too high. New concepts paired with […]

Design for Writers

Last week, I spent some time creating a handout with all of my books.  I got the idea when I saw a similar list that Peter Reynolds created.  How cool would it be to have something you could slip into books, post on your site and more?  So I came up with this.  The file […]