More brainstorming!

It's time to get back to outlining! I'm working on a very strange outline this week. I'm writing a book where you get to choose which way the story goes. At the end of every page or two, there's a choice--do you do this, or that? The story turns out very differently whichever path you choose! It's been fun to come up with all the branching stories--but it's a very different way of thinking too! I'll have to photograph my crazy notecard board for this one and post it here.

Once I finish that outline, which I should this week, I have some manuscripts other people have written that I have agreed to read and critique. That and the outlining will take up all my office hours this week!

What I'm reading:

I finished Seraphina (terrific!) and The One and Only Ivan (which was also terrific!), as well as the next Hercule Poirot mystery by Agatha Christie--Peril at End House. My family bought that and the next one, Lord Edgware Dies, for me for my birthday. I'm already a few chapters into that one. So, a good lot of reading done last week! Not sure what I'll read after that, but I'll let you know!

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Mash it up!

A friend of mine loves to combine Nancy Drew with other stories, like Nancy Drew vs. Dracula, or Nancy Drew in the Tomb of the Cybermen (see the picture he made, above). The Tomb of the Cybermen is an old Doctor Who serial.

Throwing two things together like this is called a "mash-up." What are two of your favorite stories, series, or characters you could mash-up? What would a story about Nancy Drew battling Dracula be like? (I'll bet it would be awesome.)

Take one of your favorite characters and put him or her in the world of a different story. How would Percy Jackson do at Hogwarts? What if Turtle from The Westing Game joined The Mysterious Benedict Society? How would Meg Murray and Charles Wallace from A Wrinkle in Time defeat Darth Vader? Get mashing!

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What's Your Hook?

All right. You're ready to start writing your story. Where do you start? That's a really good question. Some of the best stories start with a hook--something to get you interested right from the start. Sometimes it's a great first line, like

"Where's Papa going with that axe?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

That's the first line of Charlotte's Web. That's a great first line! Who is Fern, and where is her father going with that axe--and what's he going to do with it? It turns out he's going out to kill a pig--and Fern is going to stop him. That gets the whole story going right away!

To take a very different example, consider the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Here we've got Indiana Jones heading into the jungles of South America, looking for an artifact. He cleverly makes his way past lots of deadly traps, finds what he's looking for--and then has it taken away from him! None of this has much to do with the rest of the story, where he goes looking for the lost Ark, except that it shows us who this guy is and what he's all about.

But better than all that, it's exciting! We're immediately drawn into the action. It tells us we're watching a movie that will have high adventure in exotic places. That's the hook. When Indy licks his lips and wiggles his fingers over that statue up there, nervous but excited to swipe it, we're sitting on the edge of our seats with him.

Think about where your story needs to begin, then think about making that beginning as exciting as possible. That will hook your reader. And once you've hooked your reader, they'll be with you for the rest of the story!

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Stories From History (Kind Of)

This week, I'm working on coming up with the story for the second book in a trilogy. A perfect time for a "Where Do You Get Your Ideas?" post!

This book is alternate history--that is, it takes place in a past that didn't exist. But I still want the past to look like our past, and to feel like our past. So some of the places and people of the past are still there, they're just...different.

Two of my characters are chasing a woman who claims to be a mystic. Looking at the map of the alternate United States I've made, I saw a region I hadn't explored yet: the independent country of Louisiana. Louisiana has a fascinating past. New Orleans was a major center of trade in the colonies, due to its position on the Gulf Coast at the bottom of the Mississippi River. It became a melting pot too, when thousands of Haitian slaves fled there after a revolt against their French masters.

Those Haitians brought their Vodoun religion and beliefs with them, giving rise to what we today call Voodoo. Awesome! I'm already having lots of great ideas about how my two characters can enter a world of Voodoo mystery. I see a lot of reading about the history of Voodoo and New Orleans in my immediate future.

Pick a time and a place in the past, and read about it. Then think about how you could tell a story of something that didn't really happen--but might have if there was magic. Or aliens. Or computers. Or if a major event happened differently. History is a great place to look for story ideas--especially if you're going to change it!

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The Bestest Part!

What am I working on this week? Well, I just finished some things last week that I had to turn in to editors, so this week is all about making up a new story! This might be my most favorite part of writing--coming up with the story!

This will be book two in a trilogy, which means I know some of the characters really well already. And I know big things that have to happen (and be revealed) in this book, so that's helpful.

But what happens from chapter to chapter? How do the characters grow and change? What fun can I have with them, getting to the big stuff? That's what I get to sit around and dream about all afternoon!

Did I mention I get paid to do this?

What I'm reading:

I finished my latest Patrick O'Brian sea tale, Desolation Island, and now I'm reading Seraphina by Rachel Hartman. It's fantastic! I'm only 25 pages or so from the end, and I already want to read the next one. (Which isn't out yet, of course!) After that, I have Newbery winner The One and Only Ivan in the stack. Good stuff awaits!

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Writing Fanfic

 What's your favorite book? Your favorite movie? Your favorite video game?

My answers to those questions change as I read, watch, and play new things. But one thing always remains the same: each time, I think what would happen differently if I got to control the characters.

When I was a kid, my friends and I would pretend to be Star Wars characters when we played. Or we would play with action figures who were characters from the movie. But instead of playing out scenes from the movie, we invented new ones.

Sometimes we even wrote these scenes down. I have an old movie, shot on actual film, that I made as a boy using Star Wars action figures as the players on screen. The story has some elements of the films--Luke's injuries are healed in a Mason jar full of water, for example, just like Luke being treated after his exposure on the ice planet of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back--but many other things are new, like, for some weird reason, Luke, a Bespin guard, and Chewbacca riding a popsicle raft down a stream of water in my bath tub.

Try writing a scene--or even a whole story--based on characters from a book, film, or video game you love. It's okay if they do things kind of like what happens in the real story, just like it's okay if they do crazy weird stuff they would never have done in the official version. This is your story. This time, you get to decide what your favorite characters do...

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Adding Conflict

You're reading a story, but it takes a long time for anything to happen. Or maybe nothing happens. The problem is, there's no conflict.

All good stories have conflict. When you sit down to write, ask yourself: where's the conflict in this story? Where's the conflict in this scene?

Conflict doesn't have to be people punching each other in the face. It can be an argument, a difficult task that must be overcome, or maybe even something your main character is really scared of.

Let's say you're writing a story about someone who wins a race. She crouches down at the starting line, and the gun goes off. Bang! She runs very fast, faster than anyone else, and leans across the finish line. She wins! Things happen in the story, and you can perhaps make it exciting in how you write it. But where is the conflict? What challenges does the main character really face?

Let's add some conflict to that story about the runner. Let's say that she stubbed her toe that morning before she went to school. Her foot is killing her! She has limped around on it all day. That's a physical conflict she's going to have to overcome.

Now let's give the girl an external conflict--something outside herself. Let's say that her worst enemy at school is a girl who is also very fast, and she's in the race with our main character. She's in the lane right next to her. And instead of making our girl just run the race and win, let's say that after the gun goes off, our main character falls behind. Now she has to overcome the lead her worst enemy has already built!

We can add an internal conflict too--something inside our main character. Let's say she has lost her last five races--races she should have won. She has begun to doubt herself. She thinks maybe she's not good enough, not fast enough. That she'll never win another race, and maybe should quit running track all together. She has a stubbed toe, and her worst enemy is in the lane next to her, but the biggest thing she may have to overcome is her own self-doubt.

Now we have conflict. Lots of it! Rewrite that story about the girl in the race, adding all our new conflicts in. Are you more interested? Is it more compelling? I think so.

Every time you sit down to write something, ask yourself: where is the conflict in what I'm writing? Find the conflict in every scene, and you'll end up writing great stories.

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What's Awesome?

 A couple of years ago, I tried something new. I took a bunch of note cards, and I wrote down things I thought were awesome, one per card. I ended up with things like submarines, heads in jars, brass goggles, clockwork robots, dirigibles, rock giants, and ray guns. I pinned all these ides up onto a big board, and then sat and stared at them. How could I connect some of them? Could I connect all of them? What kind of characters would wear brass goggles and use ray guns? What kind of villains would be heads in jars (and how did they become heads in jars!?) How could my characters need to travel by submarine or dirigibles? What was my story?

I started with fun elements, and built a story out of them by asking questions. I wasn't able to use all my fun elements, but I did use enough of them to end up with a story full of awesome. It took me a while to write that book, and to revise it, but I'm happy to report that I recently sold it! It will be coming to a bookshelf near you next year--and it will b full of awesome.

If you're looking for a new idea, write down some things you love. They don't have to be sci-fi or fantasy things. They could be tigers, or football, or bicycles, or video games. Write down some things you think are awesome, and then practice making up a story that includes as many of those elements as possible. You'll end up with a story that--for you, at least--is full of awesome...

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What I'm Working on This Week

This week, I'm diving in to my first revision of my new sekrit book, which I finished last week. This is a really important part of the process. When you write something for the first time, you'll be very tempted to think that it's finished. If you're anything like me, you'll certainly want it to be finished, because you'll be raring to move on to the next thing you want to write! But everything gets better with revision. This is an important lesson in writing. The revision process is even more important than the first draft, so take it seriously--and don't skip it!

If I can get good revision work done early this week, I may have time to send out picture book submissions to editors. That's the one thing off last week's list that didn't get done. I did, however, get a newsletter sent out. If you're not signed up for my newsletter, scroll down on the page and look for the place to put in your e-mail address!

Also, at some point soon, I need to rescue my car, which slid off the icy hill and into a ditch on Saturday. But since we're still iced in, it doesn't really matter anyway...

Hope you have a good week. Get some writing done!

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Tell a Story About You

Inside Out & Back Again is Thanhha Lai's novel about a girl who flees Vietnam during the end of the Vietnam War with her mother and brothers, comes to America, and struggles to adjust to a new life in Alabama. The author isn't the main character, but a lot of what happens to Ha in the story happened to Thanhha in real life. She used her own experiences leaving Vietnam and coming to America as a child as inspiration for her story.

Most of us haven't had to go through such a dangerous and confusing journey in our lives. But all of us have had interesting things happen to us. What's the most interesting thing that has happened in your life so far? What's something that was not only interesting, but meaningful to you? An experience that changed you, even in some small way?

When I was in fourth grade, there were two boys in my class who were the coolest. Everything they said was funny, and everything they did was imitated. They were the most popular kids in class. When it came time to invite people to my birthday party, I put their names on my list. My mom looked at the list, and asked me who these people were. I'd never had them for sleepovers, and never talked about them as friends. I told her they were friends in my class, and she invited them.

They didn't come, of course. They weren't really my friends. I wasn't popular enough to be their friend. I had been so sure they would come that I was crushed when they didn't. I've always remembered that feeling, that disappointment. But also the understanding I came to that day: that I wasn't one of the cool, popular kids. There was us, and there was them, and I wasn't one of them. I'd thought of those boys as my friends, but they weren't. They weren't mean to me--they just weren't friendly either.

What's happened to you that gave you a deeper understanding of who you are, or how the world works? Tell that story. It doesn't have to be long--I just told mine in two paragraphs. Find a story in your own life, no matter how big or small that story is.

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Are You Rich?

On almost every school visit I do, I'm asked, "Are you rich?" or "How much money do you make?" The teachers in the room often cringe when kids ask me something like this, because adults usually don't talk about how much money they make with each other, and think it's impolite to ask.

But I always like getting the question, because it means somebody is thinking about what it would mean to have a career as a writer. I went to school to learn how to be a better writer, but nobody in school ever told me how to make a living as a writer. That's something I had to figure out on my own.

To answer the question: no, I am not rich. I'd love to be rich, but that isn't my real goal. My goal is to earn a comfortable living as a writer, one that allows my family and I to have the house we want, the stuff we want, travel the world a bit, and make sure my daughter has everything she needs for a great start in life. That might sound like a lot, but it's really not.

I make as much money now as I did when I was a full-time teacher. Perhaps a little more some years, and a little less some years. It's tricky, making a living as a writer, because you don't get a steady paycheck. In fact, most of your money comes in big lumps at odd times.

I get paid an advance for every book I sell. That's a big chunk of money. On top of that, I can earn royalties--that's a small bit of money for every single copy of the book that sells. But I only get that money after I've "earned out" the advance. It's complicated, and it deserves a blog post of its own, so for right now let me just say that I get paid a chunk of money for a book in advance, and then have the possibility of earning more money off the book sales, if there are a lot of book sales. Advances and royalties are the biggest part of my income.

I make money in other ways too. Sometimes someone wants to publish one of my books in a foreign country, and I get a little money for that. Sometimes someone wants to create an audiobook of one of my books, or thinks one would make an interesting movie, and I get a little money there.

I'm also paid to go and talk about my books, and about the writing life. Schools pay authors money to come visit, and there are a lot of writing workshops looking to hear from people who've written a book and had it published.

So there are a few more ways to make money writing books beyond the money the publisher pays you for the book, and all those things add up to me being able to write and talk about my books full time--which I think is pretty much the greatest job in the world!

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What's Your Dream?

Monday was Martin Luther King Day in America, which always makes me think about his famous 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech. In that speech, King said he dreamed of a land of slavery and hatred becoming a place of freedom and and equality.

Today, we're a lot closer to Dr. King's dream than we were 50 years ago. We still have a ways to go, but America is a very different place because Dr. King and others believed in the same dream, and worked to make it happen.

What are your dreams for the future? What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? Lots of people have dreams, but your dreams will never come true if you don't work for them. Dr. King and his friends knew that, and they worked very hard to convince the rest of the country that their dream was the right one.

Is your dream to become a writer? Mine was. But that dream wasn't going to come true just by wishing for it. I had to practice writing. I had to finish stories and books. I had to rewrite them to make them better. I had to send those stories out to editors. Then I had to keep sending them out again and again until I finally got a yes. Only then did my dream of being a published writer come true.

Dreams take work. What are you going to do today to make your dreams come true?

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I Love Wikipedia

I'm a big fan of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. I don't think there's a day that goes by that I don't get on there to look something up, whether it's for a book I'm writing, for the trivia game I run at the local pizza shop, or just out of my own curiosity. I love learning new things--but the best part is when I find a story idea there too!

Yesterday, I ended up reading an article on Aqua Regia. Aqua Regia, or "The King's Water," is what alchemists called nitro-hydrochloric acid. Nitro-hydrochloric acid is unique in that it can dissolve "noble" metals, like gold and platinum, where other acids can't. That's why it was called The King's Water--because royalty could use it to see if something was really gold or not. (See? I learned all this from Wikipedia!)

So, I'm reading all this interesting stuff, and then I see this at the end:

When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The German government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation. They re-cast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.

You get what happened?  Two German scientists won Nobel Prizes for their work in science, but the Nazis wouldn't recognize the award for political reasons. The medals were made for the winners, but they were kept in another country, in hopes that they could be given to the winners some day. When the Germans invaded that country, they looked for the medals--but a clever scientist dropped them both into jars of aqua regia, dissolving the gold. The Nazis who went in looking for the medals only saw chemicals on the shelf, and left. Then, after the war, the scientist took the gold back out of the aqua regia, and they recast the medals for the winners! How awesome is that? It's a great scientific answer a real-life problem.

I read that, and I immediately thought: story idea! I could write a mystery where something golden is stolen--but it really isn't gone. It had just been dissolved, and it's sitting right there in the room! That would make a great twist in a mystery.

Wikipedia has a nice feature on their home page, where they link to a random article every day. They also have links on the home page to people, places, and things that happened on this day in the past. If you're looking for ideas, you can find a lot of them just by reading one new article a day on Wikipedia. And if nothing else, you'll learn something. :-)

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What I'm Working on This Week

This is the week I finish the first draft of the new book I'm working on! I've been able to get a lot of pages written, thanks to focused time at the keyboard and a really good outline, which tells me what I'm writing, leaving me only the work of figuring out how to write it. (See this post for more about that.)

I'll still have a lot of work to do on this book after I'm done with the first draft, but just getting something down on paper for the first time is a big deal! I'm pretty excited to have something I can hand off to my first readers.

Also this week, I'd like to send out a few more picture book submissions. I have two picture book scripts I've written that I'd love to find a home for. I may also send out a newsletter this week!

What I'm Reading:

I finished the The Tomb, the Repairman Jack novel I was reading. I enjoyed it. Now I'm reading The False Prince, by Jennifer A. Nielsen.

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The Unreliable Narrator

I finished Rebecca Stead's Liar & Spy recently, and really enjoyed it. It's about a boy who moves to a new apartment building in Brooklyn and meets another boy, who considers himself an ace spy. There are mysterious things happening in their building, but some of the book's best mysteries are hidden right under the boys' noses.

One of the best things about Liar & Spy is that it features an unreliable narrator. A story has an unreliable narrator when the story is being told from the point of view of someone who maybe isn't telling you everything you need to know all the time. The best example of an unreliable narrator I've ever read is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. (An awesome book!) Books like this are often told in the first person (I did this, I did that, etc.) but you can pull it off in third person too (he did this, she did that, etc.)

The trick is to think about everything that happens in the story, and then choose which parts of it you're going to tell the reader, and which parts of it you're going to hide. You have to be pretty tricky about hiding things too. If you're too obvious, people will see that you're hiding something, and begin to doubt your narrator. If you're too tricky, people might feel cheated at the end.

Give it a shot. Try to write a story in first person, where the narrator is the main character. He or she is telling us a story--but leaves out some important things. Like...maybe he was the one who stole that GameBoy. Or maybe she is already dead when the story begins, and we just assumed she was alive. Or maybe everything your main character says is a lie, and we only see that at the very end, when another person reveals to us that your main character hasn't one any of those things. It's a fun way to have some fun with your narrator--and your reader!

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Did you read a lot when you were a kid?

I'm embarrassed to say it, but no, I didn't read a lot when I was a kid. I remember a few of books from that time, so I know I did read. I just wasn't the kid who always had a book in his hands the say some kids are. I was usually playing video games, or sports in the back yard, or building forts in the woods. My best friend and I had an imaginary country we invented called West Columbia, and we made up maps and flags and had a constitution and official edicts. We even drew up our own money. We also role-played a lot--not table top role-playing, with dice (though I did that in college)--but instead me and my friends pretending we were characters from our favorite movies, having new adventures.

Even though I wasn't reading, I was always coming up with some new invention, or scheme, or new way to play. I think all these things made me into a storyteller as an adult.  I do wish I'd read more as a kid though, if only so I wouldn't feel so very far behind with all the books I want to read now!

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Beating Writer's Block

You want to write. You have time to write. You have a great idea for a story. You sit down, and you start, but then...you hit a brick wall.

You don't know what happens next.

You've got what people call Writer's Block. Trust me, all writers get it. I get it.

But not as much as I used to. Here's how I deal with Writer's Block:

Writer's Block happens when writers try to do two things at once: figure out WHAT to write, and HOW to write it.

WHAT to write is your story. The stuff that happens. That's always tough, right? You may have an idea about how your story starts, or an idea for a great scene along the way, or even a great ending. But how do you get from point A to point M to point Z?

The trouble is, too often writers sit down to write without knowing what happens next. We're all set to write--we have the word processor open, or a notebook in front of us--but we can't figure out what happens next. So we sit there, staring at the blank piece of paper, as time ticks by. Maybe we get lucky, and an idea hits us. Yes! We move forward. Or maybe we never think of anything, and a couple of hours go by, and we come away with an empty sheet of paper.

We never even got to the HOW.

HOW to write something is the words we choose, the sentences and paragraphs we write, the dialogue we craft, the settings we describe, the metaphors, the similes, the adjectives, the allusions--all that stuff we learned about in English class. That's a big job right there, figuring out how to tell a story in a fun and interesting way! That's enough work without having to figure out what's happening at the same time.

So here's what I do. I never write one word of a story until I have the whole thing mapped out.

I know. I know. That's a lot of work before hand. But trust me, it will save you a LOT of work in the long run.

This method doesn't work for everybody, but if you're regularly experiencing writer's block, try this. Stop writing your story. Instead, sit down and think about what happens next. When you figure that out, write it down. It can just be a sentence, like "They find a haunted house." Then figure out what happens next, and write that down. Then do that again, and again, and again, until you come to the end of your story. It doesn't have to be very complicated, or very specific--it's just a road map for you to follow as you write.

Once your road map is finished, go back to the beginning, or wherever you left off, and start writing again. Now that you've figured out WHAT happens, you're free to focus on HOW to tell it. That's still a lot of work--but at least you won't be trying to do two very difficult things at once! And you'll still hit writer's block in trying to think of what happens next, I guarantee it. I do too. But you won't be expecting yourself to come away with 250 words written at the same time.

In the coming weeks, I'll go into more detail about how I outline WHAT I'm writing before I figure out HOW to write it. (And I'll talk about that too.) But for now, just keep it simple. What happens next? Keep asking yourself that until you come to the end. Then start writing...

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All That Surfing Is Work! (Sort Of.)

You know all that surfing you do on the Internet? That's a great source for ideas.

Yes, surfing around looking at things can be a huge waste of time too. But you're going to do it anyway, right? So you might as well be looking for story ideas there.

Here's an example of a story idea I got from the Internet: a blog I follow about comic books and gaming posted a link to a story about a man in Florida who was killed for a rare Magic: The Gathering card he owned, the Black Lotus. My Spidey-sense for story ideas immediately tingled! There are great old noir mysteries with titles like The Maltese Falcon and The Blue Dahlia, and The Black Lotus sounded like a great title for  a modern mystery story. This one wouldn't be about a jewel-encrusted statue or a swanky night-club. Instead it would be about a guy killed for his expensive Magic card, and the quest to get it back.

I'm going to write that story someday. For now, the idea is just written down in one of my idea books. But that one is going to get written. Trust me.

Want to know another secret? The book I'm writing right now was inspired by a real-life story I read on the Internet.

But I'm still not going to tell you about it!

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What I'm Working On This Week

As a professional writer, I have to set my own hours. That means I have to set my own deadlines too. While I'm waiting for an editor to get back to me with notes for the next revision on a book I've already writing, I have to be thinking about what's next. That's why I'm working on a new book this week!

I started last week. Last week I wrote 49 pages, or six chapters. I'd like to do roughly the same amount this week. So that's what I'm working on this week: pages 50-100 of a new novel-in-progress! And no, I'm still not going to tell you what it's about. :-)

What I'm Reading:

Last week I finished Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train, and also read Thanhha Lai's Inside Out & Back Again. I enjoyed them both! Now I'm reading The Tomb by F. Paul Wilson, an adult novel about a guy named Repairman Jack who "fixes" problems other people have.

Remember that reading lots of different books--in different genres and by different authors--is one of the best ways to find your own voice as a writer!

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Lost in the Woods

I've been really interested in stories of kids on their own lately, and there's perhaps no better kid-on-his-own story than Hatchet. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. In that book, thirteen year old Brian ends up on his own in the Canadian wilderness with little more than a brand new hatchet to help him survive.

Think about a character lost in the wilderness. First of all, what wilderness will you strand your character in? The woods? The desert? A jungle? The arctic? Then ask yourself, what resources does my stranded character have? What are they wearing, and what are they carrying? Will they have food? Water? A fire?

Pick a remote location and write a story about somebody lost there. Do they live to be rescued, or do they die in the wild? It's up to you!

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Start Keeping a Writing Journal Right Now

It's Thursday, and that mean's it's Ask Alan day. One of the questions I get asked a lot on school visits is, "What advice do you have for aspiring writers?"

Well, if you haven't guessed by now, I have a lot of advice. But one of the things I always start with is this: if you want to be a writer, start keeping a writing journal right now.

A writing journal is a notebook where you write down all your crazy story ideas, all your ideas for characters, all your writing notes you take in class or read in books, great lines you wish you'd written, inspirational quotes--in short, anything and everything about your writing life.

I started keeping a writing journal in college. (That's the first one there on the left, in the picture.) I now have seven notebooks full of writing ideas and notes. (There's one more I've filled since that picture was taken.) These notebooks are invaluable to me. If there was a fire in our house, these would probably be in my arms on the way out. All my books I've written I have backed up in the cloud, but these filled with more than twenty years of handwritten notes, are like gold.

Any time I need inspiration, all I have to do is go open one of these up. My Horatio Wilkes novels Something Rotten and Something Wicked were born from a note I wrote down in the very first one--"What if I turned Shakespeare plays into modern day murder mysteries?" Pretty much every book since then has had its origins in these notebooks, or has been developed there.


Get yourself a notebook right now, today, that you like the feel of. Get something smallish too, that will fit in whatever bag you carry, because from today on you're going to be carrying it everywhere you go. And any time you have one of those flashes of inspiration, or hear great advice, or read some terrific line in a book, you're going to write it down in that notebook. And when you fill that one, you're going to buy a new one, and start to fill that.

And then, one day, you'll be able to look at those six or eight or ten notebooks on your bookshelf, and you'll know that every writing thought you've had for the last twenty years is tucked away safely in those books on the shelf.

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Books Read in 2012

For a number of years now, I've kept a list of every book I've read. I don't list anything more than the title and the author, but it's still fascinating to go back and see what I read in a particular year. (And how much I read!) So before we get too far into 2013, I thought I would list all the books I read (or in some cases, re-read) in 2012. Here they are in chronological order:

The Flash: Rebirth by Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver
Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
20th Century Boys 01 by Naoki Urasawa
Three for the Chair by Rex Stout
Batman: The Gates of Gotham by Scott Snyder, Kyle Higgins, Ryan Parrott, and Trevor McCarthy
Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork
The Greatest: Muhammad Ali by Walter Dean Myers
The Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl
20th Century Boys 02 by Naoki Urasawa
'Salem's Lot by Stephen King
20th Century Boys 03 by Naoki Urasawa
Red Robin: The Grail by Chris Yost and Ramon Bachs
Heist Society by Ally Carter
Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus by Mike Mignola and Jason Armstrong
Flashpoint by Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert
Matilda by Roald Dahl
How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer
The Saga of the Swamp Thing, Book One by Alan Moore and Stephen Bissette
The 39 Clues: The Maze of Bones by Rick Riordan
Hulk Visionaries, Vol. 1 by Peter David et al.
Hulk Visionaries, Vol. 2 by Peter David et al.
Hulk Visionaries, Vol. 3 by Peter David et al.
20th Century Boys 04 by Naoki Urasawa
The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne
20th Century Boys 05 by Naoki Urasawa
Stink: The Incredible Shrinking Kid by Megan McDonald
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
Bossypants by Tina Fey
Psych: Mind Over Magic by William Rabkin
The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie
Red Robin: Collision by Christopher Yost et al.
Red Robin: 7 Days of Death by Fabian Nicieza et al.
Death of a Poison Pen by M.C. Beaton
Runaways: Pride and Joy by Brian K. Vaughan et al.
Runaways: Teenage Wasteland by Brian K. Vaughan et al.
Runaways: The Good Die Young by Brian K. Vaughan et al.
Runaways: True Believers by Brian K. Vaughan et al.
Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie
Arctic Rising by Tobias Buckell
Wait Til Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn
Mayhem in Mayberry by Brian Lee Knopp
Baby's in Black by Arne Bellstorf
20th Century Boys 06 by Naoki Urasawa
20th Century Boys 07 by Naoki Urasawa
Legends of Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatke
Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
The Mauritius Command by Patrick O'Brian
The Kill Artist by Daniel Silva
Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy by John LeCarre
City of Fire by Laurence Yep
The Second Confession by Rex Stout
The Honourable Schoolboy by John LeCarre
The White Mountains by John Christopher
Frindle by Andrew Clements
The Landry News by Andrew Clements
Swindle by Gordon Corman
Superfudge by Judy Blume
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
Clementine and the Family Meeting by Sara Pennypacker
Fletch's Fortune by Gregory McDonald
Hulk Visionaries, Vol. 4 by Peter David et al.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
Not Quite Dead Enough by Rex Stout
The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
The White Mountains by John Christopher
The Art of Nonconformity by Chris Guillebeau

That's it! 68 books, with one repeat for a total of 69 books read. That might be a record for me!

Here's to all the great books of 2012, and all the great books to come in 2013. What are you reading?

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A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words (or more!)

One of the questions I always get asked at school visits is, "Where do you get your ideas?" So today begins a regular feature about coming up with ideas.

See that picture of the samurai throwing a baseball? That's the picture that gave me the idea for Samurai Shortstop. I was reading a book about baseball in Japan, and I was already thinking that a story about the early days of the game in Japan would be great. But who would my main character be? What was the actual story?

Then I ran into that picture. The caption told me the man in the photo was throwing out the first pitch at a 1915 National High School Baseball Tournament. He was certainly interesting. Why was a man wearing traditional Japanese clothes throwing out the first pitch at a modern game? Because clearly the two men behind him were more "modern," at least in their dress. And who was the boy? Just the pitcher, who had stepped aside? Or did he have some other connection to everyone?

I started to put together a story in my head that led up to the photograph. The boy, I decided, was the man's son. The man was a traditionalist. He didn't like the West, which was why he chose to wear Japanese clothes, right down to the geta on his feet. So how had we come to the point where the boy had convinced his father that baseball was all right?

Those questions became the heart of Samurai Shortstop. Samurai Shortstop is the story of a 16-year-old boy in 1890s Japan who learns to blend bushido--the samurai way of the warrior--with his baseball practices, to prove to his father there is still room for ancient traditions in a new and changing Japan.

I did a lot more research from that point, and I added a lot more story. But that one photo kickstarted the idea process that led me to write Samurai Shortstop! If you're eager to write, but you can't think of an idea you want to write about, go to the library and start flipping through magazines and books of portraits. Ignore the captions, and ask yourself questions about the people in the photos. Who are they? Why are they there? What happened before this? What happens right after it? The more questions you ask, the more your mind will fill in the blanks for you, and soon you'll have a story idea!

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What I'm Working On This Week

This week, I'm starting a new book!

I spent the last few weeks of December outlining a new book I want to write. (I'll talk more about outlining soon.) Now I'm ready to get to actually writing it. I'm very nervous! I always get nervous before writing the first sentence. What will it be? How will I start? What will the main characters voice be like? I already have some ideas about all of that (that's what the outlining is for!) but some of it I'll make up on the spot. Then, when I finish the first draft and go back to do revisions, some of it will stay, and some of it will go.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Monday morning, right after I bathe and have my breakfast, I'll be writing the first words of a brand new book...

Which I'm not going to tell you about.

Not until it's finished.

--

What I'm reading: I've been on a mystery kick lately, so I decided to read all of Agatha Christie's novels starring detective Hercule Poirot. I'm on book #5 (out of 33!). It's called The Mystery of the Blue Train.

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A Night at the Mall

Have you ever read From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg? It's a great book about a sister and brother who run away and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

When I was a kid, I wanted to run away and live somewhere cool and interesting too. But I lived a long way from New York, and my town didn't have much of an art museum. So the place I dreamed about running off to was...the mall!

Why not? The mall has everything! I could get food in the food court, play video games in the arcade, and sleep on the beds in the department stores. I had it all figured out. I even swiped a map of my town from the glove box of my parents' car to see how to get to the mall. It was too far away to walk, so I figured I would take a taxi, like the two kids do in From the Mixed-up Files... That was going to be expensive, I figured, so I started saving up for the trip.

I never did run away to the mall. (And I'm glad I didn't!) But what if I had? What do you think would happen if you ran away to the mall? How would you get there? What store would you hide out in? How would you avoid the security guards? What would you eat, where would you sleep, and what would you do with your free time? I don't want you to actually do it. (Really. Don't do it.) I just want you to imagine what would be great about it--and what would be not so great about it.

Here's a first line to get you going:

The only thing that stood between me and spending the night in the mall was a tall, thin security guard named Elijah Sinclair.

There you go. Get to it! Write a story!

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How many books have you written?

A question I get asked a lot at school visits is, "How many books have you written?" And they don't mean how many books I have published. They mean how many books, published and non-published, that I've written all the way through. It's a great question, and one that always gets me counting.

Right now, as of January 2013, I have six books in print, with a seventh on the way in February. But that's not nearly all the books I've written. There's the awful college novel I wrote which shall never be spoken of here (my first attempt at a novel), and the two books I wrote and collected a pile of rejections on before I finally sold my first book, Samurai Shortstop. And since I was published, there have been... (let me count) one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.


Add those nine unpublished novels I wrote after Samurai Shortstop to the three I wrote before Samurai Shortstop, and I have written twelve books that have never been published. (Nineteen in total, if you're keeping score at home.)

Now, three of those unpublished books I hope to sell in the coming year or two, after I work on them more a bit. But that still leaves nine novels I've written that may never escape my hard drive.

Why did I put them aside? Sometimes they weren't working, and I had another book to write in the meantime, and I haven't gone back to them yet. Sometimes I sent books out and they were rejected across the board, so I gave up on them. Sometimes it was a combination of both things.

I hope I can sell some of those books down the road. But most likely I won't sell all of them. Does that mean they a waste of time? No! Because every time I write something, I get a little better. I find something that works, or something that doesn't work, and I can add or subtract that from my writer's toolbox.

So the first lesson is, if you want to be a writer, you have to write. A lot. And don't expect that everything you write is going to turn out the way you want it to and get published. Write one story, and when you're finished, write another. And another. And another. The more you write, the better you'll get--and somewhere along the way, you'll write something really great.

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Want to be a writer when you grow up? You can do that.

This is the desk in my office at home where I write books. For a living.

By the age of ten, I knew I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I just didn't know how.

I mean, I knew how to write. (Well, kind of. I've gotten a lot better since then.) What I didn't know was how people made a living writing books. Where did writers get their ideas? How did they write books? Who drew the covers? How did their books get to the shelf in my library? How could I do that?

I had all kinds of questions. But I didn't know any writers growing up. Nobody who wrote books for a living. And no writers ever visited my school.

But I really wanted to be a writer. So I figured it out on my own. I'm still figuring it out, but I learned enough to become a full-time book writer. But you, you don't have to figure it all out on your own.

Because you know me. (Online, at least.)

I'm going to tell you where you can find great ideas. I'm going to tell you how to write dialogue, and interesting settings, and all the things to make a great story. I'm going to tell you where covers come from, and how books make it into libraries and bookstores. I'm going to share what I'm reading, what I'm writing, and what I do the rest of the day. In short, I'm going to answer all your questions.

But we'll get to all that. Come back every day, and I'll teach you something new about becoming a writer. In the meantime, believe me when I tell you that if you want to be a writer, if this is what you want to do when you grow up, you can do it. I did, and I'll tell you how to get there.

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The End

Whoa! You've reached the last of the blog pages that talk about how to be a writer. You know what's beyond this?

It's all the pages about my books. See, to make this both a blog and a web site about my books, I just made a blog post for each of my books, and then back-dated them so they wouldn't come up unless you click a link to them. Ta-da! Blog and web site all in one. I didn't think anyone would ever read back through ALL the blog posts and get to those pages.

But YOU did. You're clever like that.

So you can hit "back," and scroll through the pages about my book. Or you could do the easier thing, and just click on the pictures of my books over at the right. Each one of them will take you to the blog page about it.

Thanks for reading!

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