Chris Baty's Blog, page 175

From the Come Write In Stacks: A Transformative Library

Our Come Write In program provides libraries, bookstores, and other neighborhood hubs the resources to build and support a local writing community. We dig through the stacks to bring you our favorite stories:

The Setting: NaNoWriMo started at the Durham County Public Library in November of 2011. At that time I had been working on a novel for about a decade, and was struggling with finding the motivation to finish. I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo, and as a librarian, thought I might be able to convince some of my patrons to take the journey with me.

Having a community writing space is incredibly important. Writing is usually a solitary exercise, and it’s the fellowship of NaNoWriMo that makes it so special. Being able to meet in person, connect with other writers, and affirm that you’re not in this alone is what makes this event great…

The Plot: I’ve been very lucky to have tons of support from the Durham County Library, as well as my local Municipal Liaisons, when it comes to putting on events. Every year now, we host planning workshops in October, Kick-Off and T.G.I.O. (Thank God It’s Over) parties, and of course write-ins.

My library has set aside an annual budget for NaNoWriMo events, and the MLs attend and promote our events on the NaNo website. It is an awesome partnership, and we have hundreds attend our events every year—and it’s only getting bigger.

The Characters: The most exciting thing about hosting NaNoWriMo events is meeting the other people who share in this transformative experience. Once we leave school, such opportunities are rare, but they remain very fulfilling. Doing something difficult while sharing the experience with others is a very powerful thing.

I usually let the MLs handle writing challenges, but my favorite is when we all draw three random words from a hat and then have to find a way to incorporate them into our novels during a writing sprint. It really gets the creative juices flowing, usually leads to something humorous, and can be just what you need to start thinking in a fresh way about your story.

The Dare: Write a scene where individuals leave covert messages for one another, perhaps in shelved library books.

Phillip Locey graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a Bachelor’s in English, and a minor in Creative Writing. Seeking a synergistic “day job,” he started working in public libraries in 2002, and has been an Adult Services Librarian in Durham County, NC, since 2010. Phillip is participating in NaNoWriMo for the fourth time, and was a first-time winner in 2013. He loves working at the library and providing a space for the local writing community to engage one another and their work.

30 Covers, 30 Days 2014: Day 14 with Designer Jamie Suvak

30 Covers, 30 Days is back! What is 30C30D? We match up 30 professional designers with 30 NaNoWriMo participants, and challenge the designers to create a book cover in 48 hours or less, based solely on that participants’ 2014 NaNo-novel synopsis.

The NaNo-novel: Rainbow

A rainbow has seven colors. Seven colors with strict borders set between them. Seven colors within their own worlds. Seven colors that need one another, even if they won’t admit it. Seven parts of a whole. Seven shades of a soul.

The Rainbow Project was formulated to decipher the secrets of a soul. Namely, by splitting the soul of a human being into seven parts, then placing each into a different body. The soul was cut precisely, with each part named after and possessing the traits associated with a color of the rainbow.

Part of this research includes having each of the seven write their experiences in a journal once a week. These are their stories.

The Genre: Science Fiction

The Author: Sophie Myrick in USA :: New Hampshire

The Designer: Jamie Suvak is a visual artist and potter from Akron, Ohio. She has a degree in fine arts and is currently stuck in employment limbo. You can find some of her current work in ceramics here.

High-Resolution Book Art:

Young Writer Chronicles: Wearing the Writer's Badge with Pride

Every November, our Young Writers Program works with 100,000 students and educators, and 2,000 classrooms around the world. Today, Nicky Adkins shares how the YWP helps transform individual students at Roundwood Park School in Harpenden, England into a community of creators:

Discovering the Young Writers Program in 2010 was a game-changer here in our school library. It’s impossible to quantify the impact the YWP has had on our students.

The commitment they show to their writing is truly humbling, and the experiences they have while writing will stay with me forever. There was M, who couldn’t speak out loud but wrote a huge, brash, blood thirsty epic; K who wept for a whole day when she killed off a loved character, then crushed another with a narwhal; W who wrote his whole 50,000 words in four days and had to wear bandages on his wrists; and KT, who hit her 50,000 days in advance, despite revising for exams and having her appendix taken out.

Their confidence as writers, and their sense of themselves as creators is huge. They love the freedom to write whatever they want, which doesn’t really happen in secondary school. To be able to write, with no one marking their spelling or punctuation, is a great liberty. None of these students will ever fear coursework or a dissertation again!

The YWP creates a community of writers here at school, and there’s a real sense of them valuing this identity—they wear their badges (some from several years ago) all year round and greet each other around the campus. Several of our writers have social difficulties, but the YWP has helped them to find their people, and the support structure this gives them is invaluable.

Throughout November, our writers have celebrity status around school. They have early lunch passes (big deal), can bring food up to the library to eat while writing (huge deal), and they wear their badges, given out when they hit their 10%, with such pride (biggest deal ever).

Their teachers ask how their novels are going and bulletin notices go out to all students telling them how many words our writers have written. The progress wall chart takes a place of pride, and the stickers are added with a sense of great ceremony and, often, a smattering of applause. Lunchtimes and after school are spent writing. Then, on the last school day of the month, we take them out of lessons to spend the day in the library writing and writing and writing. And snacking. Always snacking.

NaNoWriMo has become a major part of our year and students start asking about it as soon as term starts. Our writers would like to pass on their thanks to all at NaNoWriMo, YWP, and all those on the forums who have helped their characters out of sticky situations!

Nicky Adkins is the librarian at Roundwood Park School in Harpenden, UK, and has been doing NaNoWriMo since 2006. She likes books, writing, cats and lots of coffee.

30 Covers, 30 Days 2014: Day 13 with Designer Josh Silverman

30 Covers, 30 Days is back! What is 30C30D? We match up 30 professional designers with 30 NaNoWriMo participants, and challenge the designers to create a book cover in 48 hours or less, based solely on that participants’ 2014 NaNo-novel synopsis.

The NaNo-novel: The Dove’s Return

In the realm of Ionad Domhain, two hundred years have passed without a hint of color anywhere… until two children are born with bright blue eyes.

Carolan and Felix Beckett, the Princess and Prince of the kingdom of Capercaillie, always knew that they were special, but they do not realize just how special they are until they hear of Linaria, the girl responsible for bringing beauty to the realm.

Carolan and Felix learn that an evil sorcerer named Sylen trapped the immortal Linaria for all eternity, thus dooming the world to a colorless existence. Together with Linaria’s younger brother, Morghan, they must battle Sylen and fulfill their destinies to bring beauty back to Ionad Domhain.

The Genre: Fantasy

The Author: Chessielover, Young Writers Program participant in the United States.

The Designer: Josh Silverman is a designer, serial entrepreneur, and relentless optimist. He’s the Founder & CEO of Startnership, a business delivering design and marketing tools to entrepreneurs for a fixed fee and on a fixed timeline. Josh is also bridging the professional communities of AIGA and StartOut (for LGBT entrepreneurs) in a series of conversations called Designtrepreneurs. He lives mostly in San Francisco, and occasionally in New York.

High-Resolution Book Art:

NaNo Coach: 13 Prompts to Trigger Character Building

This season, we’ve brought on published authors to serve as NaNo Coaches to help guide you to reaching 50,000 words. This week’s NaNo Coach, Kelly Loy Gilbert, author of the forthcoming novel Conviction, shares her favorite character prompts:

It’s two weeks into NaNoWriMo, and a topic that’s come up time and again in our NaNo Coach chats is inspiration: what do you do when you just aren’t feeling inspired—when it feels like you’re stuck and your story isn’t going anywhere?

If you’re starting to feel like things have been derailed, you’re not alone! With every story I write, I wind up getting stuck somewhere (or many, many somewheres) during the process. There’s always a point where I can’t see ahead to what happens next, and I’ve lost the heart of the story…

It’s easy to panic. But when that happens, it’s usually a sign that I need to return to the characters—to develop more clearly what it is they want and what drives them and what they’ll do next.

So when I’m feeling stuck, I step back. I try to remember I’ve been here before, and I’ll be here again. And I turn to trigger prompts that I write in my characters’ voices to get to know them more deeply, building the foundation for the story I need to tell.

Here are some of my favorites. You can use the prompts below or come up with your own; you can write them as standalone scenes or incorporate them into existing scenes; you can write them for your main characters or minor characters. As with all things NaNoWriMo, though—the most important thing is to just write.

Some of my favorite trigger prompts:

This is the worst thing I ever lost.
If I could go back to any moment in time, it would be:
Everyone knows ____ about me, but what no one knows is this:
The one thing I’ve never told anyone is:
This is the thing I hate most about myself.
If I could change just one thing about my life, this is what it would be.
This is what an ordinary day looks like for me.
I didn’t say it aloud, but what I wish I’d said was:
I am so afraid of ______ I can’t even talk about it aloud.
This is what my perfect life would be.
I have always wished I could:
This was the moment when everything changed.
________ was always wrong about me.

My first novel, Conviction, began for me as a character question. I had a person in mind—a star high school pitcher named Braden who’d found himself in a situation he considered unforgivable—and the question that drove me all through my fast-and-furious first draft was to what lengths would he go to seek redemption?

After I wrote the first draft, though, I could see the plot wasn’t working, and I gutted the entire thing and started over. It was terrifying. This time, though, because I knew Braden intimately, and knew the people around him, I could see more clearly how he would enter into the situations that would push him into a complicated, unthinkable moral crisis. It was knowing the characters that inspired the truer, better story.

Writing often doesn’t go to plan. And it’s tempting sometimes, especially when I’m racing the clock for my word count, to feel like every divergent path is a break of momentum—that any digression that doesn’t fit into my plot outline are taking steps backwards.

When I use these trigger prompts, I don’t always know where they’ll fit into the story. I don’t even always know if they will—some might wind up as backstory. Some might wind up getting tossed out altogether. But some will hit on something that gets at the very core of who my characters are.

In the end, it’s these character moments that propel your story forward—your characters’ motivations, their deepest desires and fears and secrets, that drive them. These moments are the beating heart of the story you want to tell.

Kelly Loy Gilbert is the author of the forthcoming YA novel Conviction (Disney-Hyperion, May 2015), about a small-town, 16-year-old boy who faces an unthinkable choice when his celebrity father is accused of murder. She believes tweets should count towards your NaNo word count (Just kidding. Kind of). She would love to hear from you @KellyLoyGilbert.

30 Covers, 30 Days 2014: Day 12 with Designer Felix Sockwell

30 Covers, 30 Days is back! What is 30C30D? We match up 30 professional designers with 30 NaNoWriMo participants, and challenge the designers to create a book cover in 48 hours or less, based solely on that participants’ 2014 NaNo-novel synopsis.

The NaNo-novel: Animals

Roman Flores finds himself living the day-to-day life of an intern for an executive firm and college student. He feels as if something is missing, until he receives a package in the mail that contains a wooden mask in the shape of a wolf, and an invitation to an underground society of unknown, masked artists known as “The Animals of Society”.

After meeting the Society, he realizes that the acts of vandalism and art through which they defy corporate America are becoming more extreme over time. Roman will have to choose: return to his normal life of cubicle and school work, or lead an extraordinary one filled with excitement and danger.

The Genre: Literary Fiction

The Author: Jordan Blaze Trevino in USA :: Texas :: Houston

The Designer: Felix Sockwell is an avid futboler and ornery Texan who honed his skill as a promotional and advertising art director before moving from Texas to San Francisco, then later to New York, co-founding B.I.G., Ogilvy’s Brand Integration Group. In 1999, Sockwell forged his own practice, concentrating solely on the art and science of identity design and illustration. He is also a partner in WhoWeUse—a free app that friends use to share information on local businesses. 

High-Resolution Book Art:

Wrimos Around the World: Of Cemeteries, Life, and Writing for Fame

One of the best parts of NaNoWriMo? The incredible community of writers that gathers every November. Today, we spotlight Chiqui Perez, who’s writing from an… unconventional cemetery :

On the first day of NaNoWriMo, I found myself writing from the family mausoleum in the town’s cemetery in Gasan, Marindique, Philippines. The bustle of the All Saints’ Day celebration, which happens every year on November 1, can be both distracting and stimulating. Since I was little, I was endeared to the tradition of devoting an entire day to visiting the family’s dearly departed despite the heat and noise; I was amidst the still lively chatter of family and friends, colorful flower bouquets, and candles which adorn each tomb.

This November 1, I brought my trusty notebook. I was spending time with my grandfather, who had loved stories. To begin my novel at his tomb-side would do him an honor…

The thought of setting a story in a cemetery can conjure spine-tingling encounters: lunatic gravediggers who know little about the living, or a bereaved relative who visits a fresh gravesite everyday, forgetting everything else. But the All Saints’ Day atmosphere I encounter every year can bring about entirely different stories: slices of life, including odd family reunions. That’s the strange thing about the cemetery I’m writing from—it doesn’t evoke a sense of desolation at all! It’s too vivacious for that.

There’s always something about each place we visit, every encounter with a person that can trigger a tale in one’s mind. Contrary to popular belief, writers shouldn’t stay reclusive to brood over their next masterpiece. They should experience the world for all it’s worth—even when it’s among the tombs on All Saints’ Day!

The nooks and crannies of the world all have stories tucked inside them. But don’t observe everything in order to take perfunctory notes. Don’t forget to sit back, relax, and feel alive.

I write mostly at night, when there are fewer distractions. I’ve always been nocturnal ever since I began writing at ten years old. I’ve been berated many times for staying up late, but I persisted, because a finished chapter is always worth it. I can also say that I am a planner, though I still leave some room to be surprised at what I can come up with when I don’t strictly follow my outline!

Now, I want to leave you with some food for thought as you write your novel: Is writing for fame always a bad thing, or can it be a great motivating factor?

30 Covers, 30 Days 2014: Day 11 with Designer Josh Gallagher

30 Covers, 30 Days is back! What is 30C30D? We match up 30 professional designers with 30 NaNoWriMo participants, and challenge the designers to create a book cover in 48 hours or less, based solely on that participants’ 2014 NaNo-novel synopsis.

The NaNo-novel: Bangkok Blowdryer

Alina’s younger sister, Indira, has gone missing. Indy has alway been the wild child, and this time she’s run away from home. Her last known location? Bangkok.

Alina takes it upon herself to find her sister as their parents have long since written Indy off, but as she searches, Alina falls into a mysterious underworld where nothing is what it seems.

The Genre: Chick Lit

The Author: Maya Highland in Asia :: Singapore.

The Designer: Currently living in New York by way of Arizona and Maryland, Josh makes things, usually with a combination of his hands and some pixels. When not looking to expand the narrative, Josh is likely out on an adventure, trying to win the battle of work/life balance. 

High-Resolution Book Art:

"Okay. You’re at the point that marathon runners call “the wall.” It’s quit or finish and you’d..."

“Okay. You’re at the point that marathon runners call “the wall.” It’s quit or finish and you’d really rather quit, but you have all these words, and friends, family, and those nasty people at school or the office are waiting to see if you’ll finish.


Try something small.


Your character finds a box, a book, a message, a painting. It fascinates them until they have tracked down its history and meaning. These things can lead to a talisman for good or ill, something that carries you into your planned climax, something that helps your character meet a person they need to know for that climax to happen, something perilous that brings them to the climactic action wounded and full of doubt.”

- Tamora Pierce, on finding the cracks in the wall.

30 Covers, 30 Days 2014: Day 10 with Designer John DeGore

30 Covers, 30 Days is back! What is 30C30D? We match up 30 professional designers with 30 NaNoWriMo participants, and challenge the designers to create a book cover in 48 hours or less, based solely on that participants’ 2014 NaNo-novel synopsis.

The NaNo-novel: The Seasons

When Imani, a senior in high school and student extraordinare gets pressured to apply for a job, she decides to try the small-town diner, assuming she’ll be bored out of her mind most of the time. But things aren’t as calm as they seem at the Seasons Diner. 

Instead of the boring world she imagined, she finds herself caught up with a crazy staff, the story-filled customers, an irritable poet, late night shifts, and a health inspector with a thirst for revenge. This is the story of the Seasons Diner, where the waiters are fast, the music is slow, and the pie is delicious.

The Genre: Mainstream Fiction

The Author: Michelle Williams in USA :: New York.

The Designer: John DeGore started out as an in-house graphic designer before transitioning to interface and user experience design. He co-hosts the Creative Briefs podcast, chatting with people about their creative endeavors. He is also a student of Carnegie Mellon’s Masters of Human-Computer Interaction program. Some of his favorite things include the art of Jack Kirby, mac & cheese, and the music of Stevie Wonder.

High-Resolution Book Art: