Sue Bradford Edwards's Blog, page 246
June 13, 2016
Voice: The Many Faces of One Piece of Writing
When a new writer asks about voice, I always feel myself hesitate before I respond. What does she want to know? Is the talking about character voice? Author voice? The tone of an individual piece of writing? Because voice is all of this and much, much more. This past weekend at the Missouri SCBWI Advanced […]
June 12, 2016
How do you identify as a writer?
As we were coming home from the Missouri SCBWI Advanced Writers retreat Sunday, my friend Shannon asked me a question that surprised me. “When we were asked to introduce ourselves, you said that you were a nonfiction author. Did you leave fiction off on purpose?” I admit that I had to think about it a […]
June 9, 2016
I am on the road today with my writing buddy Stephanie Be...
I am on the road today with my writing buddy Stephanie Bearce. We are journeying over the river (I think there’s a river) and to the land of wide open fields and windmills to the Missouri SCBWI Advanced Writers Retreat. That means that my boys have to hold down the fort without me. Poor boys! […]
June 8, 2016
One Manuscript, Two Attempts
Have you ever had a manuscript that seemed to morph from one form to another? That’s been the case with “What’s Up Chuck?” As I did the research for a book about why animals vomit, it became obvious that there was a lot of information. In fact, there was probably too much for a picture […]
June 7, 2016
Finding Classes that Feed My Writing Bug
One of the things that I like to do is take online courses about topics that feature in my books. I’ve taken classes about evolution and dinosaurs, astro-biology and teaching through art and even the historiography of Thomas Jefferson. Several months ago, I looked for a class on the history of JFK. Nope. Couldn’t find a […]
June 6, 2016
Picture Books: A Wedding Between Text and Illustration
Picture books are strange hybrid beasts. They are part text and part illustration and both elements need to carry part of the story. This means that unless you are an author/illustrator, you only do half the job. For an author this means that you write a brief text that leaves room for illustration. You’re encouraged […]
June 5, 2016
Conducting an Interview
Recently, I had the opportunity to interview author/illustrator Wendy Martin about her work on The Story Circle. I used to do a lot more interviews than I do now but, for a variety of reasons, interviewing is an important skill for a writer. First of all, you might need to interview an expert source for […]
June 2, 2016
Writing for Children: Reality vs Something Else
One of the strangest things about writing for children is the reaction that I get from people when I tell them what I do. For a long time, the reaction I got most often was — you know, I have an idea for a book … This never came from people who wrote. It was […]
June 1, 2016
How to Create an Invoice
Recently, Duchess and I had to invoice for the first half of the NASA book. She had never had to do this before and it crossed my mind that maybe some of you have never had to invoice for a job either. It is really pretty simple. Here is my basic format: INVOICE From: […]
May 31, 2016
Writing the Senses: Sense of Smell
A number of years ago, I took a workshop with Darcy Pattison on rewriting your novel. One of the things that she taught us was to include three sensory perceptions per page. No worries. It’s easy enough to say how big something is, what color it is and describe its texture. But wait! There’s more! […]
