Sue Bradford Edwards's Blog, page 258
November 19, 2015
Backstory: How to Avoid the Infodump
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, I love books and movies that manage to hide something, dropping clues until it all comes out. It’s a great way to give the reader the backstory a morsel at a time and avoid an infodump. I’ve written before about how Edward Bloor does it in […]
November 18, 2015
Revision Challenge
November is Picture Book Idea Month. I’m an idea person so this is great for me. And I love first drafts. Love. First. Drafts. The reason for that is simple, I often can’t fully process an idea until I get something on paper. As a result, I have a lot of early draft, first drafts, […]
November 17, 2015
Crafting Life Based Fiction
A friend of mine is writing a middle grade novel based on something that happened when she was in school. Another friend is writing a picture book based on a story she told her now-adult child each night. I’ve drawn on my relationships with various people when I create relationships between my characters. Many writers […]
November 16, 2015
Surprise Your Reader
Whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction it is important to occasionally surprise your reader. After all, you don’t want your writing to be predictable. Surprise endings and surprises at picture book page turns are two ways to do this. But the way that I’m most familiar with is to choose surprising facts for your […]
November 15, 2015
Idea Generation
As you know, I’ve been participating in Picture Book Idea Month. The goal is that during the month of November you will come up with 30 picture book ideas. So far, so good. On November 16, I have 17 ideas. Now, I’m not going to tell you that I come up with an idea a […]
November 12, 2015
How to make a picture book dummy
Since I’m in a bit of a picture book groove, I thought I’d do another post on that this week. This time I’m writing about a revision tool — the dummy. Just because you’ve made a story board doesn’t mean that you can skip the dummy. When I make a dummy, I am looking at the […]
November 11, 2015
How to use a story board
Given that it is PiBoIdMo and so much thought it going into picture books, I thought this would be a good time to discuss how we write them. One of my favorite tools is the story board. A story board is an illustrators’ tool that allows you to plan out an entire picture book spread […]
November 10, 2015
Writing Science
Recently I spotted a contest sponsored by Alan Alda in which he challenges scientists to explain sound to 11 year-olds. Admittedly, I was a little steamed that the contest wasn’t open to writers but whatever. I’m not really worried about scientists writing me out of a job. I don’t remember where I saw this quote […]
November 9, 2015
Finding Inspiration
It’s November and you know what that means — once again it is time for Picture Book Idea Month. The goal of this challenge is to brainstorm 30 picture book ideas in November. That doesn’t sound too bad. It’s only ideas. Not full books. Then again, November is also the month with Thanksgiving. And I […]
November 8, 2015
Writing Solutions: Be Flexible
Where do you like to write? I have my own office. That said, it is the home office with the home computers. Sometimes I have company. A friend of mine takes her laptop and writes in a coffee shop. For me, that environment is too distracting. How do you write? I have one friend who […]
