by Chihuaha Zero |
Have you ever been trapped?
Not just physically, like in a prison cell, but also emotionally or metally, where someone, or something, imposed control over you. You wanted to get out, but those handcuffs were too tight, that chain too short.
Being trapped is among the recurring themes in Young Adult literature. While it pops up often in general fiction, the theme hits hard and low in teenage fiction, probably because the teenage are often so full of this feeling of being trapped.
by Joe Bunting |
“Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas,” says Frank Warren, “of frailty and heroism playing out silently in the lives of people all around us.”
In November 2004, Frank Warren gave out a few hundred postcards to strangers with simple instructions: write a secret you’ve never told anyone before, and mail it back. It was supposed to be a small, community art project, but then something strange happened. All the postcards came back. And then something stranger happened, he kept getting new ones.
Secrets went viral.
Since then, Frank has received over 500,000 postcards, many of which are available on the project’s blog, postsecret.com, or in one of his five books of secrets. The remarkable thing is not how widely Postsecret has spread. What’s shocking is that no one thought of it before.
by Dan Schmidt |
We give names to most everything around us: our pets, our kids, our cars, the products we use, the food we eat (it’s not ‘frozen dairy-like substance’, but Frosty), the games we play. And, as writers, we name our characters, too. In fact, next to the physical characteristics we try to describe, the names of our heroes, villains, band leaders, and shopkeepers are about the most important tool we have for identifying and tracking who is doing what. Good names help both writers and readers move through a story smoothly; bad names put us in a stagecoach on a washed out dirt road.
by Joe Bunting |
I used to think you should start a novel on page one with a bang, that you should throw the reader straight into conflict. I heard agents and publishers want a novel full of conflict, one that immediately hooks them, and I thought, I can do that. So I cut out all my world building and backstory and focused on the central plot from the very beginning.
Now I know how misguided I was. While it’s true you can take too long to introduce conflict to your novel, there is such a thing as too much, too soon.
by Joe Bunting |
Have you ever thought about that? Detective stories, murder mysteries, legal thrillers—these are among the most popular genres in popular literature, but have you ever thought about why people like them so much?
by Joe Bunting |
My name is Anna and I am from Filer, Idaho, where the men fight over water rights and the women over 1st place ribbons for peach pie. I lived with my four sisters in the attic of my parent’s barn-red farmhouse with purple and orange shag carpet. When I was fifteen, I would sneak out my window to meet Brett. Brett sang me songs on his guitar and shared his dreams about becoming the next John Lennon. Two years later, on the night Brett left, he gave me a pale green sapphire ring with delicate flanking diamonds. A ring which—two years after that—my mother made me throw in the trash because she (who’d married a man who’d given her a twenty year-old daughter and a nineteen year-old marriage certificate) had found the man I would marry.
