Barbara Gregorich's Blog, page 10

The F Words: The Hate U Give

I love Angie Thomas’s YA novel, The Hate U Give. I read it when it was published and felt as if I  had been living in a stuffy room and now, at last, somebody opened the windows and let the light and the fresh air in — somebody was talking about the truths of racism, oppression, police  brutality, and resistance.

The success of The Hate U Give emboldened me to continue with my own YA novel, The F Words, whose first draft I had just finished. I strongly wanted to write about the truths of work...

The F Words: Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing can be delicious, as in anticipating a birthday present. Or it can be terrifying, as in anticipating a hurricane. In literature foreshadowing works to indicate or warn the reader that something may happen. It’s never as exact as the date of a birthday, nor as specific as “Hurricane winds exceed 160 mph.”  

And — unlike a birthday or a hurricane — the happening that readers anticipate may not happen at all. Not everything is foreshadowing. However, when something is foreshadowing...

The F Words: Canva Posters

Sometime in July 2021, before The F Words was published, a maxim occurred to me: a picture is worth a thousand words. I thought about that. I was writing thousands of words: these blogs. And I was speaking thousands of words, too: podcasts.

But I wasn’t using many pictures. Other than the book cover, that is. I was getting maximum mileage out of the book cover, sharing it everywhere, creating bookmarks that feature the cover. 

So I decided to make some posters about The F Words and...

The F Words: Friendship

A friend is a close companion:  a person we confide in, are intimate with, play with, work with, and associate with on a regular basis. Life without friendship would be very  lonely. Friends help us look at things in a different way. They’re there when we need somebody by our side. They give, they share, they understand.

One of the subtexts running through The F Words is the power of friendship. We see the friendship between Cole and Felipe in the second chapter, when Felipe insists on helpin...

The F Words: The Rondelet

The rondelet is a French form of poetry. It contains a refrain, a strict rhyme scheme and a distinct meter pattern. Before I get into that distinct meter pattern, I want to explain that the rondelet derives from the rondel, which is  a poetic form that originated in France during the 1300s. 

The rondel, which originated in French lyrical poetry of the 14th century, made its way from France into other languages, such as English and Romanian. Its structure is a complex pattern of quatrains foll...

The F Words: Educator Guide

This blog first appeared as an article in the SCBWI-Illinois journal, Prairie Wind.

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During the 1980s and into  the 1990s I used to write educational materials: activity sheets, teacher guides, parent guides, flashcards, scripts for audio how-to instructions, and teacher guides and parent guides.  At one point I was doing freelance work for educational publishers  in twenty-nine different  states! I had a cork board US  map on my wall and had a pin stuck into each state I had ...

The F Words: Humor

I’m a person with a sense of humor, and I enjoy humor in writing. Not insulting humor, and I’m not a big fan of slapstick humor. The types of humor I enjoy when I’m reading a book are:

the unexpected happens
witty self-deprecation
situational humor
understatement
hyperbole (overstatement/exaggeration)

The use of humor is a literary tool, just as the ability to foreshadow is a literary tool. But few writing teachers talk about or teach how to use humor. I’m guessing this would be difficult to d...

The F Words: A Stranger Comes to Town

In literature the stranger-comes-to-town motif is quite common. In films, for example, there’s In the Heat of the Night. There’s Shane. There’s The Brother from Another Planet.

Stranger-comes-to-town is a type of plot, just as seeking revenge is a type, and going on a journey is a type. It’s the skeletal structure on which a writer hangs a story.

The stranger coming to town changes everything. For better or for worse. Definitely for the town, and sometimes for the stranger. In In the H...

The F Words: Publication!

Publication is very exciting — a book which may have been in the works for many rewrites and several years is finally available for the public to read. In my blogs I’ve talked a lot about the writing and rewriting of The F Words. Now that my book has been published, I’d like to talk about the many, many steps that went into preparing the book once I signed a contract with the publisher.

2020 — City of Light Publishing did all the hard work. This included editing the manuscript, designing both...

The F Words: Circular Ending

Generally a work of fiction has one of two kinds of endings: circular or linear. You can think of a circular ending as one in which the hero returns home: back to where he started from. You can think of a linear ending as one in which the story conflicts come to a climax and then the story ends: nobody returns home. 

Two of my favorite classic novels are Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The ending of the first is circular, that of the second, linear.

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