Anna Staniszewski

I’ve been wrapped up in grading and writing, so I probably won’t be doing any craft-related posts this week, but I do have some tiny things to report.

-You can now subscribe to my blog posts via email. Just enter your email address in the sidebar (under “Subscribe by email”) and my “words of wisdom” will be delivered directly to your inbox. I know email subscriptions aren’t exactly new, but I’m still proud of myself for figuring out how to set up Feedburner all on my own.

-I have a shiny new brochure with info about my school visit and writing workshop programs. You can download it HERE or you can find a link to it on my “Resources” page. I used to be terrified of visiting schools, but now that I’ve learned I actually enjoy doing presentations, I’m excited to do more.

-Today is the last day to win a copy of Breaking Beautiful over on First Page Panda. All you have to do is comment to enter. (And hey, what do you know, there’s now a handy dandy “subscribe by email” option on that website, too.)

Happy Wednesday!

In case you missed me crowing about this on Twitter and Facebook the other day, Book 2 officially has a new title! My editor was afraid the original title, My Way Too Fairy Tale Life, might be too similar to the title of the first book. The last thing you want is readers not realizing there’s a new book out because the titles are too much alike!

So we put our heads together and came up with:

My Epic Fairy Tale Fail

I really like the new title. It’s funny and spunky, and it hints at the types of misadventures Jenny will face in the story. Now that we have the title, the fact that the book will be coming out in less than a year feels a lot more real. I can’t wait to see what the cover will look like!

The trick to writing a story that flows is making your plot move along without the reader realizing that you’re controlling the strings. Of course, this isn’t easy to do, and sometimes those strings start to peek out and the characters feel more like puppets than like organic beings.

I happened to notice this in a book I was reading yesterday. Essentially, the main character suggests a course of action to another character, and that character rejects it with a “why should I listen to you?” comment. This didn’t quite ring true to me because the main character had proven that she’s pretty intelligent. It felt like the character was rejecting her suggestion primarily for plot reasons.

So how do you keep your plot strings from showing? Ultimately, you have to make sure that each decision and action stems from the character and his/her motivation. If you’re imposing decisions on your characters, that means that you’re not letting them act out their own stories. And that’s when the strings can start to show.

I’ve been bouncing around between a few projects, but I was finally able to settle on a story I’ve been playing with for a little while. And this one is about g-g-g-ghosts!

It’s not my normal type of story namely because it’s a YA ghost story mystery, but so far I’m having a lot of fun with it. And–shockingly–I even managed to outline it, so hopefully that will keep me on track.

The main thing I’m concerned about with this story is making sure that it stands out from the other YA ghost stories already out there. I’m focusing more on the mystery and the character relationship rather than the supernatural element, which will hopefully help to make it unique. We’ll see how it goes!

How are you all doing with your WIPs? Anyone else working on telling a familiar story in a new way?

More and more I’ve been wondering if the blogging trend is fading, at least among the writing community. I’ve heard from more than one person (and I’ve noticed this myself) that blog traffic and comments have been steadily declining and people seem to be blogging less and less. I know everyone is busy–I definitely don’t have as much time to devote to reading blogs as I’d like–but I think it might be more than that.

For a while, I think writers were blogging because they were told that’s what you’re supposed to do in order to have a web presence. But now, there are other options such as Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Those are easier and don’t take as much time.

There’s also so much good info out there already about writing and publishing that people might feel like there’s no point in blogging since they don’t have anything original to add.

The thing is, if writers stop blogging, I’m not sure we’ll be able to get the same info or sense of community elsewhere. When I first started trying to get published, I learned so much about the business through blogs. I also met amazing people who have become real friends. I’m not sure I would have gotten that any other way.

While social media sites might be easier than blogging, I haven’t felt that same sense of connection through them. (The only other place I’ve been able to get a similar feeling is on Verla Kay’s Blueboard, a message board dedicated to writers and illustrators.)

Something else I like about blogging is that it gives me a chance to work out the things that are buzzing around in my head. If I read a book that really grabs me, for example, doing a post about why that books works pushes me to really analyze it. Many of my posts are as much for me as they are for other people.

If blogging is really on its way out then I guess I’ll just have to adapt, but I’m hoping that something else will pop up to help give writers a sense of community.

For those of you who don’t blog or have been cutting down on blogging, are you able to get that sense of community elsewhere?

I’ve been reading (and savoring) The Anatomy of Story by John Truby as I brainstorm a new project.

The book is full of wise tidbits, but this is one that stuck in my head:

Make the audience empathize with your hero, not sympathize.

It’s simple advice but so true. You don’t want readers sympathizing with what your character is going through. You want your readers to feel like they’re living the events with him. It takes a lot of work to make your readers empathize with your character–to make them feel like they’re right in the story–but it’s oh so worth it.

What was the last book you read that made you really empathize with the character?

When it comes to trying to get published, it’s pretty much a given that you’ll have to deal with a lot of rejection. There’s no easy way to get over having someone tell you “no.” The advice I give is to keep writing and try not to take it personally.

But sometimes you’ll hear success stories of people who seemingly sat down, wrote a book, and got it published with little-to-no rejection involved. It can be hard to keep those stories from affecting you if you’ve been slaving away, trying to get your work out there.

While I have a feeling those overnight success stories aren’t quite as rosy as they sound (there was probably a lot of rejection that we don’t know about) it’s funny that there’s almost a sentiment that those people don’t “deserve” to be published because they haven’t gone through enough stress and toil and rejection.

I guess when it comes to writing–as with any other craft–you have to put in your time and earn your success. But how much work is enough? At what point do you deserve it?

Remembering my own writing journey, I must say that I thought I’d gone through quite enough stress years before I actually got published. I went into it not realizing just how hard this business is. So when I found an agent, I thought I’d finally gone through enough. Um, right. Too bad it took a whole year to actually sell a book, with many rejections along the way.

So once I finally got that contract, did it feel like I’d gone through “enough”? I’m not sure. At that point, I could see why my previous projects had gotten rejected, why I needed to keep working on my craft. I had to earn getting publish, mostly because I needed to make my writing good enough and to find the right project to push me to the next level.

I guess that’s the trick: Making your writing good enough and finding the right project. For some people that might take decades. For others–the ones we’d love to hate–it might be a much faster process.

When it comes to writing fantasy, we talk a lot about the need for rules. You must give your fantasy world rules and stick to them. So if a character needs to eat a donut in order to be transported to another land, the next time he needs to go there, I expect him to have a donut. If he grabs a danish, instead, there needs to be a darn good reason for it.

Something I’ve learned about creating rules: The simpler the better.

If you have to spend a lot of time explaining the rules and making sure your readers “get them,” then you might be making things overly complex. And sometimes, that can be a big turn-off for readers.

For example, I was reading a book the other day and was suddenly pulled out of the story by a rule that seemed completely arbitrary. In essence, it was something like this:

If [X] occurs within [arbitrary number of days] then [Y] happens.

Emphasis here on “arbitrary number of days.” I sat there pondering why that number had been chosen. If it had been a 3 or a 7 (numbers which often seem to have power in stories) I might have overlooked it. But as it was, it seemed so unnecessary complex that I found it really distracting.

Ultimately, I think simplifying would have made the rule much stronger:

If [X] occurs then [Y] happens.

Cut out the explanation and the arbitrary number of days and the rule is much simpler to follow. This was a great reminder for me to keep rules straightforward. You want solid rules in your story, but you also want readers to have no trouble following them.

I had the pleasure of visiting my local middle school this week where I met with the sixth graders to talk about writing and fairy tales. I was very nervous going into it, but the students were great and the presentation I put together seemed to be a hit. (Of course, I completely forgot to take pictures.)

In case anyone’s interested, here is how I went about putting together the presentation.

Brainstorming

I knew there were certain things I wanted to include in my presentation:

-How I became a writer

I wanted to use lots of pictures, including some embarrassing ones from when I was young.

-The writing/publishing process of UnFairy Tale Life

I thought it would be useful for the students to see the book in its various stages.

-A group activity

My publicist gave me the idea of talking about fairy tale retellings since they’re so popular these days. Then the brilliant Heather suggest I do a Mad Libs with the students.

-A hands-on activity

The teacher who helped organize the visit asked me to include the origami frogs that I have as part of my bookstore/library visits, so I decided to make the activity into a competition.

Presentation Time

Here is what I did during the actual presentation:

-I started by talking about my path to becoming a writer, including examples of favorite books and the types of stories I wrote when I was young.

-Then I talked about writing and publishing UnFairy Tale Life. I read the first page of the very first draft I ever wrote of the story, and we compared it to the final version. We also talked about rejection, book titles, and book covers.

-Just as the students’ eyes were starting to glaze over, I shook things up by switching to Fairy Tale Mad Libs. As a group, we created a profile of a fairy tale character. Then we thought about what kind of stories we could put the character into. We came up with some great ideas for ways to twist the story around, including some interesting villains.

-Finally, it was time for an origami jumping frog competition! The students made jumping frogs and we had the frogs jump against each other until we came up with an ultimate jumping champion. It was mild chaos, but the kids got really into it and so did the teachers.

-At the end, I left a few minutes for students to ask questions and then I signed books.

-The whole presentation lasted just about an hour.

So that’s about it!

I had a lot of fun putting the presentation together, and I was glad the students got into it. The main thing I was worried about was losing the kids’ interest, but I think I managed to sneak in enough questions and interactive activities (and jumping frogs) to keep them awake.

Since I was presenting to the entire sixth grade, I wound up doing the presentation seven times over the course of two days. By the last one, it went very smoothly since I knew exactly what worked and what didn’t. So the more you can practice, the better!

I’m off being brilliant at a school visit today (ha ha) but I’ll be back on Friday with a recap. I might also talk about how I went about putting together a presentation for the school visit, if anyone’s interested.