Posts Tagged writing tips

STEM TUESDAY: Zoology – Craft & Resources

By on November 21, 2017   /   For Writers, STEM Tuesday, Zoology  

Reading Like a Writer

I am a student of nonfiction. If you hope to write nonfiction well, you have to be. When studying a book, I prefer to read it three times:

That first read is for pure enjoyment: letting the writing wash right through me and learning cool facts – did you know that venom is used to control diabetes!?!

On the second read I focus on the craft and writing techniques I can learn from.

By the third read I’m looking for specific examples of a technique that caught my eye on the second read, like how the author used sidebars to include material that is supportive but not critical to the main text.

This approach is not much different from my scientific approach to observation. When I recently came across two beetles wrestling, I first watched from above, impressed by their phenomenal horns and robotic legs; then I knelt to get a closer view and wondered why the smaller one was winning; finally, I held each one in my hand to use a magnifier. When I felt the little one’s extra spiky legs grip my finger, my questions were answered.

Want to read like a writer?

Focus on one element at a time. Reading the STEM books the first time, I noticed that many included dialog.

I wondered: Why does an author use dialog in a nonfiction book?

Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.org

 

To get a closer view, I focused in on Sy Montgomery’s Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World’s Strangest Parrot.

 

  • Chapter 4, page 21, starts with a direct quote, “Codfish Base from Lisa’s nest.”

That quote caught my eye and had me asking questions: What is “Codfish Base?” Who who is Lisa? Why does she have a nest? It’s a fantastic hook and has me diving into the chapter.

  • Chapter 5 includes dialog at the beginning as well, from page 29:

    “There’s a penguin in the freezer,” she announces.”

    “Really?” asks a volunteer. “What kind?”

I wondered: Who says that? Where is it “normal” to have a penguin in the fridge? If that doesn’t have you wanting to get to know these characters, I don’t know what will!

  • The dialog on pages 44-45 is entirely different. It is a tragic scene – the death of a kakapo chick.

I wondered: Why did the author choose to use dialog to show this particular scene? For me, the words of the characters played out the scene so well that I was reacting emotionally right along with the characters.

Compare how other authors use dialog. Just like with the beetles, my next step was to put texts from two different authors under my magnifying glass.

I asked myself: What are the most effective ways to use and frame quotes?

  • Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgFirst I read the “Wild Rhinos” section on page 8 of Emi and the Rhino Scientist which uses snippets of quotations embedded within a paragraph:

How do you describe a rhino?

You’d probably start with size. “Rhinos are really big animals,” says Terri. Only elephants are bigger land animals. Their wide bodies are propped up on short, thick legs that end in three-toed hooves. Rhinos have thick necks with giant heads and one or two horns. A rhinon may look like a slow-moving tank as it lunmbers around, but don’t be fooled. “Rhinos can move quickly,” says Terri. They can whip around in an instant and run as fast as deer. Rhinos share speed with their close relative the horse.

I noticed how Mary Kay Carson has used dialog but the paragraph is also chock full of other information. What impact do the quotes impart? Why did Carson use quotes here instead of pure expository?

  • Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgI compared Carson’s technique to other texts which make use of quotes in a similar manner. An example is the passage about bearded lizard venom on page 92 of Caitlin O’Connell’s Bridge to the Wild.

I listed ways in which O’Connell’s and Carson’s use of quotes were similar.

  • Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgI contrasted those texts with a different framing, a full scene played out using primarily dialog. An example can be found on page 55 of Pamela Turner’s Gorilla Doctors: Saving Endangered Great Apes.

I asked myself: How did the framing of the dialog change the impact? In what ways were the techniques similar? Different?

What did I learn? When an author uses direct quotes from an expert, the quote often provides information and lends authority to the text, but quotes can also work to generate curiosity, create rounded characters, add humor, etc. and, how an author frames those quotes can dramatically change their impact.

Try it Yourself!

After reading and analyzing other writers’ use of dialog, try it yourself.

  1. Audio record a conversation.
  2. Write a text using quotes from that conversation.
  3. Write a different text using the quotes in a different manner.
  4. Compare the impact of the two texts. Compare to a friend’s draft.

Many people don’t think about the craft of nonfiction, but I learn heaps when I study works of gifted writers who carefully craft their text. Happy reading! Happy Writing!

What other STEM texts have great examples of dialog techniques? Share in the comments below!

—

Heather L. Montgomery writes for kids who are WILD about animals. She reads and writes while high in a tree, standing in a stream, or perched on a mountaintop boulder. Visit her at: www.HeatherLMontgomery.com

 

 

The O.O.L.F. Files

One way to really understand STEM is to illustrate the subject of interest. Our Out of Left Field (O.O.L.F.) STEM Tuesday topic this month is science illustration. Visual science allows accurate interpretation of an object by combining knowledge of the subject, visual and tactile study of the subject, and artistic skill. Learn more about science illustration and careers, see some cool examples, and even explore a free online course at the links below.

Links:

 

 

Back to Top

The Bullet Journal: A Tool for Writers

By on November 17, 2017   /   For Writers  

Maybe you’ve got a calendar on your computer and/or phone, and maybe your desk or wall or refrigerator. You might have a bunch of lists–shopping, packing, tasks. There are slips of paper where you write story ideas scattered around your home or on your bedside table. Your desk has stacks of research notes. You may even keep an exercise log, a gratitude journal, or a meal planner.

You can have them all–in a bullet journal.

I first learned about bullet journals from a post by middle-grade author Kate Messner in early 2015. Here’s the way she describes it:

“One thing you’ll notice here is the serendipitous nature of the whole thing – story ideas live side by side with phone call notes, brainstorming charts, grocery lists, and jobs I need to do in my role as a skating club parent volunteer. . . I am a particularly task-oriented person, so this system makes me more productive and less likely to fritter away time on social media, which is great, but it also forces me to own what’s important to me each day. If it goes in the bullet journal, it matters, and I’ve found that I’m more likely to honor my exercise plans and small writing goals when I write them down here. I’ve always kept paper to-do lists, but this is different, somehow, in its permanence. Today’s list doesn’t get tossed in the trash tomorrow, and for some reason, that adds to my motivation to keep those commitments.”

I won’t go into the details of the bullet journal here. The basic premise is described on the originator’s website, but that’s just a jumping-off point. The great thing about a bullet journal is that it can be whatever you want it to be. Every BuJo is unique. You can even change the way you use it from day to day, week to week, or month to month.

This one is very fancy, and not mine. (http://studytildawn.tumblr.com/)

Some people use separate journals for work and home and writing. As a freelancer, I have to organize one or more freelance gigs, my personal life, family obligations, and my Zumba teaching along with my creative writing. These tasks flow into each other during a given day.  I do keep a separate journal for conferences, so that all those notes are together.

I use a simple composition book with a 4 square per inch grid. No need for fancy, expensive books, unless you’re into that kind of thing.  I write the dates on the cover, also noting on the cover if this journal contains important things that I might look for later, like tax information or research notes you took on a visit to a museum.

These are mine. I attended a lot of meetings about college and financial aid between May and September 2016.

Some people purchase a journal with numbered pages or number the pages themselves, then list those page numbers in an index. I don’t bother; I color the edges to help me find things, like this.  I use paper clips instead of fancy ribbons to make it easy to flip to today’s page. There are lots of other ways to keep track of pages.

Each daily page in my own BuJo includes the date, appointments, and Zumba classes I’m teaching right at the top. If I have an upcoming deadline, I’ll note how many days are left here.

At the top right, I list who will be home for dinner (it gets complicated) and what will be on the table. Down the right side I list people I need to contact by phone or email. Bottom right is errands.  I used to put exercise below the dinner plan, but since I’ve been teaching Zumba, there isn’t really a lot of need to log that.

The main part of the page I divide into sections based on the writing projects I’m working on (freelance assignments, blog posts, manuscripts, talks, etc.), Zumba tasks, and home stuff.

This one is very neat. Also not mine. (PenPaperSoul Instagram)

 

Sure, I can do most of this on a computer or smartphone, but writing stuff down has some cognitive, creative and meditative advantages, some of which are listed here and here. I like to sit with my journal just before bed and go over what I need to get done tomorrow. Sort of like downloading my brain onto paper so those thoughts won’t be floating around keeping me awake.

The BuJo can be as basic or complicated as you want. There are Facebook groups for those that want to keep it simple and for those that take it to the extreme, with art, calligraphy, stickers, stencils, and washi tape. 

There is also a Facebook group for writers, who have lately been sharing how they use their BuJos for NaNoWriMo. Bullet journals are a natural for writers, many of whom already keep journals.

In addition to keeping track of daily tasks, there are some writing-specific spreads you can add to your BuJo. You can add inspiration, motivation and organization. You can track word counts and map productivity. You can list books you want to read and check them off as you finish them, perhaps adding notes or reviews or ratings. You can set short-term and long-term goals. You can keep track of submissions (and rejections). You can build worlds and diagram plots. You can list writing prompts and do a daily free-write. You can brainstorm titles and character names. You can plan revisions and track edits.

This is not my book list, although I have read some of these books. (currently studying Tumblr)

Megan Rutell has compiled lists you can use to “supercharge” your writing and offers some great tips and hacks.  Several writers have written about the ways they use bullet journals in their writing, including Laura Shovan, Amanda Hackwith, Victoria Fry, Lyndsay Knowles, and Claire Bradshaw.

Here is a spread used by Kara Benz to prepare for NaNoWriMo.

If you are looking for videos of writers giving tours of their bullet journals, you can start here and here and here and here. Keep looking until  you find what you think can work for you.

There are more ideas than I can list here, but I encourage you to give it a try. Start simple. Explore the ways other writers have used their BuJos. Add features that you think might help you. Feel free to delete features that aren’t as useful as you thought they’d be.

Do you use a bullet journal? Do you have any special spreads, trackers, or techniques that you find especially useful? Share in the comments.

Back to Top

Digging Deep into History: Sources for Historical Research

By on September 15, 2017   /   For Teachers, For Writers  

I love getting random notifications from our county library system. Yesterday’s was an invitation to a free lecture on the local impact of the 1918 Spanish Influenza epidemic. My writer’s wheels started turning right away and I added the event to the calendar. Though I have no plans to start drafting a flu epidemic middle grade novel anytime soon, I think it’s safe to say that the more your writer-head knows about a historical time period–and history in general–the more inclined (read: less terrified) you become toward actually drafting a historical.

Historical research can be daunting, even for lovers of history, even for lovers of research and research paper writing. We have so much info available to us now…and yet, sometimes a seemingly easy answer eludes us. And then there’s the very real trust issues we writers have with the online world, and justifiably so; though the internet has certainly made it easier to quickly access reading material, it has also made it crucially necessary to question, check and double check, confirm and re-confirm sources. Random Googling can be appropriate for a brief overview of a historical event, person, or time period in MG historical writing; for example, clicking around for short, valid articles is great when you are still in the throes of a new crazy idea and are exploring the topic to gauge your own interest in it. The question “Is this something I want to learn more about?” is just as important as “Is this idea any ‘good’ for an MG novel?” at this stage of the game, and quick search engine results can help you start to answer these basic questions.

But once you’ve decided to dig in and try your hand at a new historical middle grade, to what types of resources do you turn?

I thought I’d share here some of the more interesting and trusted sources of historical info I’ve used in recent years. This is, of course, just to get your own wheels turning, the way that library notification did mine, and to hopefully start some comments from you all with other source ideas to inspire our whole community here at The Mixed-Up Files.

Go local:

Your local library might surprise you, and have a great resource on hand all about the preparations for a medieval feast, or The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, or the first-ever passenger rail car (England, 1825). If your own library doesn’t, search your county or statewide library system, and enjoy the benefits of interlibrary loan (free, real books, delivered to your local library, just for you!).

Local museums, local historical societies, local college and university libraries. Librarians, docents, and historical society volunteers share your passion for info and history, and chances are, they will be eager to help a writer towards historical accuracy.

Go online:

Don’t forget to try your public, state, or university library’s online aggregated content databases of articles and reference books. As a card-holding library patron, you should have access to these databases, often a mix of academic and popular culture resources. For example, my town library is part of Pennsylvania’s electronic library system (called PowerLibrary), which I can access from my home computer by inputting the patron number on my library card. This morning I found a recent Smithsonian article through PowerLibrary perfect for my WIP.

Primary source documents, like digitized newspapers, magazines, and periodicals—some from centuries ago–are amazing pieces of actual history that convey the aesthetics, attitudes, and atmosphere of the time period as well as info.

Online digital libraries. Digitized libraries can be huge aggregates of centuries’ worth of books and serials, many of them full-text… or they can be an individual’s personal web site of images of the local ferry service’s crossing schedules from 1955. And depending on your book idea, either of these or any in between might be equally helpful.  Try your luck with Hathi Trust Digital Library for out-of-print books and resources, Project Gutenberg for works in the public domain, or this site…when you have a few hours free:   http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/250-plus-killer-digital-libraries-and-archives/ I liked how these were organized by state (alphabetically) with multi-state resources listed at the end.

Photographs, of course. I like the search results I get (and the amount of info for citations) from the Photo Archive at the Getty Institute: http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/photo/

Here, for inspiration, are Life magazine historical photos by decade hosted by Google: http://images.google.com/hosted/life

Don’t forget the daily details in all your hard-core historical info. Food, footwear, furniture…depending on your setting, a sales resource like a digitized Sears and Roebuck catalog might be helpful (not to mention fascinating). Today I looked at this  one on Hathi from 1918. Middle-grade-aged girls’ clothes start on the third page, with prices and descriptions.

Grocery store ads with prices, movie posters, war propaganda literature…all telling signs of the times. From a special collections library at Emory University, here’s a 1947  ad for women’s high heels for $5.99 (!!).  How interesting that the ad utilizes the fun, adventurous lifestyle of circus performers to catch the consumer’s attention.

Specific to American history research, try the National Archives (great educator section here, by the way!): https://www.archives.gov/  and the site of the American Antiquarian Society: http://www.americanantiquarian.org/  (for info and primary sources through 1876).

The Library of Congress has an abundance of free reference materials, including an International Collections section as well an American Folklife Center: http://www.loc.gov/rr/ .

Books on historical topics that are especially cool for writers:

The Writer’s Guide to… Series. The Wild West, Prohibition through WWII, the 1800’s, Colonial America, Renaissance England, and more.

If you have kids, you probably know the DK Eyewitness series of books. Written for elementary through middle graders as visual encyclopedias, these books present great overviews on a wealth of topics and time periods. They contain the perfect amount of info if you are just getting started on a research topic—enough to catch your interest and start notetaking, but not so much as to overwhelm.

An illustrated costume history text. You can page through possibilities at bookstores on university campuses with theatre departments, or try a book like What People Wore: 1,800 Illustrations from Ancient Times to the Early Twentieth Century by Douglas Gorsline.

I hope you found this to be a fun and possibilities-ripe list!  Please chime in with comments on what creative and helpful sources you’ve used in the past. Thanks for reading and good luck with your future research!

Back to Top