The SCBWI 2021 Winter Conference Manuscript Gallery Offers Writers An Opportunity To Be Discovered!

 

Illustrators have the Portfolio Showcase, putting their illustrations in front of the top publishing professionals working today. And the winners of that portfolio showcase have gone on to have significant careers as illustrators!

Now, on a scale the SCBWI hasn't done before, there's a parallel opportunity for writers:

Registered Winter 2021 conference attendees who are SCBWI members can post up to 500 words of ONE children’s book manuscript, PB text, PB dummy or manuscript synopsis to our online manuscript gallery. Over a hundred editors and agents will be invited to peruse the gallery starting on February 19, 2021. These agents and editors will then reach out to authors whose work is a good fit for their lists. This is a fantastic opportunity to get your work in front of industry professionals!

The deadline to submit your manuscript is February 12, 2021. Find out all the details here.

The full conference information is here - it's going to amazing!

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee

The Elephant in the Room: To Include COVID-19 In Your Contemporary Fiction or Not?

Over at the BookBaby Blog, in the post The Coronavirus: The Elephant in the Room, Steven Spatz asks:

"As a writer, what do you do if your book is set in the present, but the Coronavirus pandemic thwarts your story?"

With over 80 comments, there are a range of strategies, from adapting your work to include the pandemic, mentioning it in passing, ignoring it all-together by backdating or future-dating your story, and variations of all three.

If nothing else, it's good to know many other authors are thinking about how the current inflection points (of both the COVID-19 pandemic impact and Black Lives Matter being centered) will affect what they create.

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee

How Solving a Problem with the History of Her Historical Novel Opened Up The Novel's Characters and Story: Samantha Harvey in Publishers Weekly

In "Bartering with the Facts: How a Novelist Solves a Historical Problem," Samantha Harvey shares what happened when research revealed that the confession box she had scoffolded her 1491-set novel around wasn't in line with the history of confession boxes in Catholic Churches in England- she was off by about fifty years.

“I decided that I could keep the confession box in my novel if I could acknowledge and explain how it was that a small, inconsequential village called Oakham—itself made up—could be the first in England to have such a thing. What conditions could make it possible, and what social, cultural, psychological, religious detail could make it plausible? In terms of novel writing, plausibility seems to me the more interesting cousin of truth. It’s where facts are arranged in such a way that they align to form a feeling of truth—a truthiness—that infuses the novel and becomes part of its internal logic.”

She also writes,

“Writing is a form of spellbinding. Anything amiss will break the spell—anything that seems wrong or off-key or untrue or disingenuous or, ironically if fiction, made up. (Of course, fiction is making-up by and large, but the trick is to make it seem not so at least while the reader is reading.) The spell is cast when there is a feeling of truth about what’s happening—whether that’s come about by adhering closely to facts, or by subverting, manipulating and coloring the facts. To me this isn’t a moral question about fiction’s responsibility to the truth, as some would have it, but only an aesthetic question. You do whatever you need to do to sustain the spell.”

Samantha shares two other examples of things that were "off" about the history of her book, and how in one case, she corrected it, and in the other case, she didn't—and explains why.

It's a fascinating look into the “ the strange dance between fact and fiction that we call research” and writing historical fiction.

 Well-worth reading.

Illustrate and Write On, 
Lee

Kate Hannigan tells us about her Golden Kite Award-Winning "The Detective's Assistant"

In which Kate tells us about how she first heard of the first female detective to work for the famous Pinkerton's National Detective Agency...


Thanks, Kate! And cheers for winning the Golden Kite Award for fiction for your MG historical novel, "The Detective's Assistant."

Congratulations also to blog reader Christina Wilsdon for the great question! Christina, please email me your mailing address at leewind (at) roadrunner (dot) com so I can mail you the copy of "The Detective's Assistant" that Kate signed right before recording our interview!

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee

Neal Shusterman tells us about "Challenger Deep" and answers a blog reader's question

Here's my interview with Neal...


And cheers to jpetroroy for asking the winning question, and for winning the copy of "Challenger Deep" that Neal signed just before our interview.

And of course, congratulations to Neal for winning the Golden Kite Award For YA Fiction!

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee

ps - jpetroroy, please email me your mailing address at: leewind (at) roadrunner (dot) com.

Barbara Kingsolver on the difference between fiction and nonfiction

This is brilliant.

"The best way I can describe it is to use a metaphor my brother gave me one time.  I used to live in the desert, and I gardened in the desert, and the first time he came out to visit me in Tuscon and he saw this beautiful little garden that I was forcing to grow out of the desert, he said,

'The way you make a garden in the desert is you point to a spot and you put all your energy into that and you water it and you make something grow. Back East,' where he lived and gardened, 'the way you make a garden is you point to a place -- a scrubby, raggedy, weedy, brambly hillside -- and you remove everything else except what you want.'

And that is exactly the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction. A novel is like a garden in the desert. You choose this spot and then you water the heck out of it and you work and you work and you make this simple single thing -- you force this plot where there was nothing and you make it all come out of that barren place.

Whereas, a nonfiction narrative is to begin with this scrambly, weedy thing we call our life, or some subject, some aspect of life, and then you pull out everything that doesn't belong. That's the challenge.

And it's much harder in a way because you have to pull out so much and just throw it away.

The temptation, when you're writing, especially something that's like a memoir, something about your own life, is to leave things because that's how they really happened. That's irrelevant. The fact that it happened is irrelevant. The fact that it's funny or entertaining is irrelevant. The only reason to leave it in is that it adds to the story."

She goes on to say that a nonfiction narrative requires all the same elements as a novel: plot, suspense, an arc, and then resolution. You have to create all those things, but you can't make them up.


This excellent metaphor is from the interview at the end of the audiobook version of Barbara Kingsolver's first person non-fiction narrative, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year Of Food Life. (Disc 12, track g, starting at 6:15) and is also cited here.

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee