Categories
Kids Lit

Writing is a Group Activity!

I recently went to an in-person retreat – one of the few I have gone to since COVID-19. I was hesitant about the person-to-person training, but more conferences are dropping the virtual or hybrid model. Sometimes there are perks for those who show up.

And I remembered how much energy can be generated by like-minded people who have made an effort to drive to rural Iowa to learn and share. Plus my list of “writing friends” just got longer!

Q:    What brings a group together?

A:     Common interests

  • sharing groups who write for specific markets exchange ideas and encourage each other
  • critique group to discuss and analyze manuscripts
  • authors releasing books in the same year who swap launch ideas swapping
  • launch groups focus energy on new releases
  • authors represented by the same publisher or agency
  • subgroups of larger organizations like SCBWI
  • librarians of a particular genre
  • Teachers of a specific grade

Q:     How do you engage?

A:     You bring YOU!

  • support and contribute first, comment on posts
  • build relationships not customers, answer questions, volunteer to help
  • be credible, encouraging, supportive
  • pick 5 individuals or groups of like-minded people and follow them on every platform
  • pick one day a week and comment on every post on one platform

Something new…

I heard about a new group strategy for writers that can assist in publicity and sales but are not with other writers. Since my next book is on trees (specifically the Quaking Aspen), I thought I’d see where the tree lovers are.

INSERT NOV PIX 3

Google: Shot in the Dark

I googled: “groups interested in trees”. I had my choice of several umbrella groups, but I chose one that included national forests. I found not only a blog but also a list of grants and partnerships I might explore. I signed up for the newsletter.

I googled “Quaking Aspen” and one of the first hits was our local Morton Arboretum, 20 minutes away! Which has a gift shop. And library story time!

Selecting one platform: Facebook

I am pretty active on Facebook so I tried the same search “groups interested in trees.” This time I found there were more local to the Chicago area and had volunteer opportunities. And a blog.

Word to the wise: I was excited and did a FB search for Quaking Aspen. I scored a rock music group and a family farm. Not every search was a hit!

Hoped for results: By the time my tree book is published in 2026!) I hope my name is familiar to other writers and maybe even local and not-so-local tree lovers. Stick around to see how this plays out!

Multi award winning author Robin Currie led public library children’s departments as a preschool literacy specialist. With more than 1.7 M copies sold of 40 picture books, she writes stories to read and read again! She is pretty bummed the publication date of her next book was pushed back a year but will use the time to build relationships!

Categories
Mastering Middle Grade

Mentor Texts for Authors

I love having family and friends who teach at elementary schools for lots of reasons, but especially because of the opportunity to learn from them. One of the phrases I’ve heard but until recently was too shy to ask about was “mentor texts.” That phrase has flittered through a handful of conversations, usually when we are talking about children’s books we love.

Someone will say, “Oooh I love Kevin Henkes, I have used his books as mentor texts for using adjectives,” or “Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson is a perfect mentor text for teaching how to begin a story.” Teachers love using great books to spark a love of writing in children.

In her book Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature, Lynne Dorfman describes mentor texts this way:

Mentor texts are pieces of literature that we can return to again and again as we help our young writers learn how to do what they may not yet be able to do on their own…. Mentor texts help writers to notice things about an author’s work that is not like anything they might have done before, and empower them to try something new.

In other words, mentor texts showcase the lovely ways authors wield words as building blocks to construct stories.

Mentor texts are a valuable learning technique not only for our youngest readers and writers, but it holds up well for us, er, older writers too.

In a recent SCBWI workshop on preparing your manuscript for submission, Deborah Warren of East West Literary Agency recommended utilizing mentor texts to help authors polish their own work. Here’s how she explained it: “If you’re struggling with dialogue, find a scene you think handles dialogue well, and study it. What makes it work? Why does it work? Deconstruct it and learn how that author does it. Then apply what you’ve learned to your manuscript.”

Notice that Ms. Warren does not instruct writers to “copy what you’ve read” from manuscripts. Instead, she encourages us to examine the elements of writing that resonate the most with us. She encourages us to become writing students and practice our craft, using pieces of literature to, as Dorfman says, empower us to try something new.

For example, if I have a scene that needs help establishing my setting, I might look at this paragraph from the opening of Sara Pennypacker’s Pax.

The fox felt the car slow before the boy did, as he felt everything first. Through the pads of his paws, along his spine, in the sensitive whiskers at his wrists. By the vibrations, he learned also that the road had grown coarser. He stretched up from his boy’s lap and sniffed at the threads of scent leaking in through the window, which told him they were not traveling into woodlands. The sharp odors of pine-wood, bark, cones, and needles-slivered through the air like blades, but beneath that, the fox recognized softer clover and wild garlic and ferns, and also a hundred things he had never encountered before…

I am excited to keep learning and growing in my craft by using mentor texts to help me revise and strengthen my manuscript. Have you worked with mentor texts before? How has it worked for you? Let me know in the comments.

Kell McKinney earned a B.A. in journalism from the University of Oklahoma and an M.S. in documentary studies from the University of North Texas. She’s a part-time copywriter, double-time mom and wife, and spends every free minute writing and/or hunting for her car keys. Connect with her on Twitter @Kell_McK or kellmckinney.com.

Categories
Kids Lit

Query with Confidence!

A query letter is your chance to make a great first impression at a publishing house or a magazine, which is why your letter had better be amazing. After writing hundreds of successful query letters over the course of my journalistic career, I’ve come up with the following “quick query tips” to help you become the king or queen of queries.

  • Be professional: Use Times New Roman, 12-point type and keep your text flush left. Just because you’re querying a children’s magazine or a children’s book editor, don’t get all goofy. For example, don’t use glitter paper or baby farm animal stickers to jazz up your query.
  • Always address your query letter to a specific person: You’ll find that information in the various Writer’s Market Guides, on publisher websites, and from faculty listings of various conferences. As a last resort, call the publisher or publication to find out an editor’s name spelling and title just to be sure.
  • Indicate you’ve studied their publishing house or magazine: You might mention a book they’ve published or an article they have published or a section of their magazine that relates to your suggested text.
  • Show how your proposed book/story fits with their publishing program.
  • Go the extra mile: Always offer a little extra something in your query letter such as photographs to accompany your text or a parenting moment or “Fun Factoids” on the last page of your manuscript or a fun sidebar to accompany your main magazine article. The editors may not want all of those elements, but they will be impressed that you offered them.
  • Make sure the publisher/magazine you’re querying is currently accepting submissions: Some only accept queries from unagented writers during certain months of the year. Also, some magazines work from theme lists so check to see if the magazine you’re querying is working with such a list. If so, mention which month/theme your proposed story idea fits.
  • Keep it concise: Try to keep your query to one page.
  • Always include your credentials in your third paragraph: Even if you don’t yet have any publishing credits, and even if you haven’t yet won any writing awards, you still have something you can write in that third paragraph. Share why you’re the perfect person to write that particular article or book. For example, if you’re pitching an article about skin cancer, and you’re a melanoma survivor, you can include that in your letter. Or, if you have a really great source that you plan to quote in your article, mention that source.
  • Make your last two lines work for you: The close to your query letter is just as important as your opening paragraph. Thank the editor for reading your query letter, and then offer to take on story ideas that their staff may not have time to generate. Tell the editor you are open to “Work for Hire” projects and that you’d like to be included in their “freelance pool of writers.”
These tips help you write an awesome query letter

Once you’ve crafted an amazing query letter, make sure you keep good records, including the publication’s name, the editor’s name, the date you sent it, and when you expect to hear back from that publication.

If the magazine/publisher accepts simultaneous submissions, pinpoint five or so publications that would be a good fit for your story idea/book and  prepare letters for each one. I call this the “nail it and mail it” step. Just double check that you’ve changed the editor’s name and publication’s address for each letter. And, be sure you’re sending that query the way the publication’s guidelines instruct—via email or snail mail.

Lastly, try to keep ten things circulating all the time. I call this the “ten in rule,” meaning I always have ten submissions out. Now, I may only have two different story ideas that I’m pitching, but I will pitch each one to five different magazines or publishing houses. Make sense?

Ok, now go forth and query with confidence! 

Michelle Medlock Adams is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author of over 90 books with close to 4 million sold. Her many journalism and book awards include top honors from the Associated Press, AWSA’s Golden Scroll for Best Children’s Book, and the Selah Award for Best Children’s Book. Michelle currently serves as President of Platinum Literary Services, a premier full-service literary firm; Chairman of the Board of Advisors for Serious Writer, Inc.; and a much sought-after speaker at writers conferences and women’s retreats all over the United States.  

When not writing or teaching writing, Michelle enjoys bass fishing and cheering on the Indiana University Basketball team, the Chicago Cubbies, and the LA Kings.

 Michelle is celebrating the recent release of her books, Get Your Spirit On!, Fabulous & Focused, Dinosaur Devotions, and C Is for Christmas, and she’s anticipating the upcoming release of What Is America? (Worthy Kids) and They Call Me Mom (Kregel), a devotional book she co-authored with Bethany Jett.

Categories
Literary Women in Histor

Mildred Wirt Benson: Woman Writer Whodunit

I’ve decked the halls at the Ross Ranch with all manner of Christmas splendors, adorning trees and every random corner of the house for the holidays.

I have three Christmas trees, each dressed in a different theme: The Victorian, The Woodland, and The Vintage Childhood. I love them all but am especially partial to The Vintage Childhood because it reflects my personal memories of Christmas past in my 1960s youth. Vintage ornaments from the era drape the branches, while displayed underneath are some of the actual toys I received on long ago Christmas mornings. I enjoy them more today, decades later, than at the first.

One of the treasures I found each year under the tree during my elementary school days was a new Nancy Drew Mystery Story. My collection of titles still holds a place of honor on our library shelves. I knew I could count on Santa to have a Nancy Drew mystery waiting for me on Christmas morn. The cover and frontispiece prepared me for what to expect once I started reading. I was never disappointed.

Only inspired.

I credit Nancy Drew as my earliest writing mentor. Reading her mystery adventures became more than just the absorbing of a captivating story. It stirred the latent author within me. I wanted to be able to write a book just like Carolyn Keene.

But, if Nancy Drew’s life was full of mysteries, Carolyn Keene was a mystery in and of herself. I could learn nothing about her when I was young. Other authors might be featured in magazines with photographs and details of their personal lives. But not Carolyn Keene.

When I dug a little deeper on the subject through the years, I learned that Carolyn Keene was a pen name for an anonymous writer shrouded in mystery. In fact, she had been hidden from public view since the first Nancy Drew book was written in 1929. By the time I started reading them in the mid to late 1960s, dozens of her detective adventures had been published.

But not until a court case in 1980 regarding the publishers of the series, did Nancy Drew fans learn the secret behind the mystery of how these beloved children’s books came to be written by a journalist named Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson. After some 50 years, the woman behind the whodunits finally revealed herself to almost four generations of fans eager to meet her.

The Woman Whodunit

Born in 1905, Mildred earned an English degree in three years from the University of Iowa in 1925, and in 1927 earned a master’s degree in journalism. Seeking good pay for her writing, she answered an ad in the newspaper from the Stratemeyer Syndicate seeking freelance writers.

Edward Stratemeyer knew the book industry inside and out—especially the reading demographics of prospective book buyers. He zeroed in on engaging books for young people and created a host of characters and story worlds producing over 1300 titles in children’s fiction during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among them, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Dana Girls, Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, and more, catapulted the Stratemeyer Syndicate to over 500 million in sales.

Alone, Stratemeyer could never have accomplished such a feat. But working within a syndicate model, he had the power to create a publishing behemoth. He sought out young, talented authors as ghostwriters and tooled them with the framework for each individual book series. Storylines, plot twists, characters, and settings were outlined and assigned to a freelance writer under a pen name. The writer’s contract required that they never reveal themselves as the author of the book for which they were paid a flat rate of $125 to $250 per book—about 3 months’ pay for a newspaper reporter of the time.

In 1929, Mildred was handed the outline for a new mystery series for girls featuring a spunky young gal named Nancy Drew. In her able hands, Nancy’s personality materialized, setting in stone the specifics of her adventurous sleuthing character and story world in 23 of the first 30 books in the series. Each became a best seller.

As a ghostwriter of the series, Mildred had no rights to her manuscripts or the famous Carolyn Keene pen name. When Stratemeyer died in 1930, his two daughters took control of the syndicate, continuing to work with Mildred on the Nancy Drew series through 1947. The books gave girls of the depression and WWII era a heroine unlike any other in their time.

Each generation since, the books have had an editorial uptick. For instance, the original 1930s-1950s Nancy Drew stories and illustrations capture that time period in fashion and setting. But the books I read in the 1960s—the same stories—possessed minor edits in the manuscript and illustrations that brought Nancy into that current time. Fast forward to the 1980s-1990s-2000s-plus—and Nancy morphed into a mirror image of the changing juvenile/youth landscape.

Unfortunately, the Nancy of 75+ years after her 1930 debut has not been well received and is analyzed to pieces by contemporary feminists and literary academia sweeping her into the maelstrom confusion of identity politics and sexualized imagery.

Tragic.

The original stories were successfully developed under the insightful pen of Mildred Wirt Benson and the editorial prowess of the Stratemeyer sisters, until their deaths in the early 1980s. The founding genius behind the girl detective gave generations of young girls a strong, confident, and resourceful role model to look up to.

In 2001, twenty years after her identity was revealed, Mildred Wirt Benson was awarded a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America because of her work on Nancy Drew and contribution to the mystery genre in children’s fiction.

Though Mildred remained true to her contract anonymity behind the pen name of Carolyn Keene, she never lacked for writing under her own name. For 58 years she wrote as a weekly columnist for the Toledo Blade working until just before her death at age 96 in 2002.

In reflecting upon the popularity of Nancy Drew, Mildred once remarked, “I’m glad that I had that much influence on people.”

Her flat rate pay on those original Nancy Drew mysteries may not have been the financial windfall it had the potential to be had she written under her own name and in control of full royalties. However, taking a good paying job for the time in trade for anonymity over so many years found its lasting reward in the knowledge that she created a character and compelling stories that inspired generations of young girls.

Including me. Reading Nancy Drew cemented within my heart a passion for the written word and storytelling as a life calling.

It’s Christmas again. Fifty years after reading my first Nancy Drew mystery, I pay homage to the influence Carolyn Keene—Mildred Wirt Benson—had in my young life with a copy or two of her books tucked under my Vintage Childhood Christmas tree. Upon reflection, I am challenged to consider the humility it took to be the writer of world-famous stories and not be able to take credit for it for decades. In fact, had a court case not required it, Carolyn Keene might still be an author cloaked in mystery.

As a writer, I’ve often had to pen words for the enrichment of another with little to no financial reward and never getting the satisfaction of my own credited byline. There is a place of humility necessary to do so—a challenge to my writer’s ego to live there. But, in the end, the important thing is not who gets credit for the words written, but that the words written credit the life of another with wisdom, beauty, and inspiration.

I’d like my words to have that much influence on people.

Journal Prompt: For 50 years, Mildred kept her identity secret as the writer behind the million-dollar sales of Nancy Drew books. How did humility play a part in Mildred’s writing career? Have you ever written or done something significant but had to defer the credit to someone else? How did you learn humility with contentment in such a situation, and subsequently, grow in depth as a writer?

Writer-speaker, Kathryn Ross, ignites a love of literature and learning through Pageant Wagon Publishing. She writes and publishes homeschool enrichment and Christian living books for home, church, and school. In addition, she shepherds writers through the steps book development and production. Her passion to equip women and families in developing a Family Literacy Lifestyle, produces readers and thinkers who can engage the world from a biblical worldview. She blogs and podcasts at TheWritersReverie.com and PageantWagonPublishing.com. Connect with Miss Kathy on Facebook.

Categories
Writers Chat

Writers Chat Recap for September, Part 2

Writers Chat, hosted by Jean Wise, Johnnie Alexander, and Bethany Jett, is the show where we talk about all things writing, by writers, and for writers!

“Because talking about writing is more fun than actually doing it!”

 KidLit: Inspiring Children to Learn

With Annette Whipple

Many educational books for children have too much or too little on the pages causing a lack of interest or wonder in learning. Annette has a vision to make learning fun and inspire a sense of wonder through her educational works. She shares how to make a book signing into a memorable event. Annette also shares how to break into the children’s nonfiction market. There is a surprise guest appearance by children’s nonfiction author Michelle Medlock Adams.

Watch the September 17th replay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wogVgGqkBLo&feature=youtu.be

Are you interested in children’s nonfiction? Then come check out the information and resources on this week’s Show Notes and Live Chat Discussions.

https://mnstroh.com/2018/09/19/kidlit-inspiring-children-to-learn/

 

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook

Gary Vaynerchuck

In this open mic episode of Writers Chat, Bethany Jett and the Serious Writers Book Club discuss Gary Vaynerchuk’s book on how to understand the nuances of social media and grow a powerful platform. Gary also covers other topics like native storytelling, your brand, and much more.

Watch the September 28th replay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or1jIrYfOE4

To discover more of how to grow your platform and be heard above all the noise, see the Show Notes and Live Chat discussion.

https://mnstroh.com/2018/09/28/jab-jab-jab-right-hook/

JOIN US!

Writers Chat is hosted live each Tuesday for an hour starting at 10 AM CT / 11 AM ET
on Zoom. The permanent Zoom room link is: http://zoom.us/j/4074198133.

Participants mute their audio and video during the filming, then we open
the room for anyone who wishes to participate with our guests. The “After Party” is fifteen-minutes of off-the-record sharing and conversation.

Additionally, you can grow your network and add to the conversation by joining our Facebook Group. https://www.facebook.com/groups/writerschat/