Okay, you’re glued to your keyboard and the words are coming out fast and furious! You’ve decided your genre. You even have a great topic in mind. In fact, you have a great character, a great beginning, and a knock-’em-dead ending. This book should be finished by dinnertime, no problem! Well, just as soon as you figure out what goes between the beginning and the end, that is!
How long does it take to write a masterpiece? A day? A weekend? Ten years? Yes, yes, and yes. There’s no telling how long it will take to write a really great book. Author Margaret Wise Brown wrote Goodnight Moon in a weekend, and it became one of the bestselling children’s books ever written. On the other hand, some writers spend their whole lives writing just one book.
There’s no right way to write a book, and there’s no time limit either. Every writer discovers a process that works best for him or her, and each writer’s process is unique. Yours will be too. But as you begin writing your masterpiece, keep in mind:
1. You will rewrite it later. No matter how fast they wrote it or how great it is, all writers polish their work.
2. You may get stuck. Every writer hits writer’s block sometimes. But don’t worry . . . the tricks in chapter 5 will help you get unstuck.
3. It’s okay to start all over again. Sometimes an idea just doesn’t pan out, and it’s better to move on to something new and fresh. That doesn’t mean you won’t come back to your old idea again, though, so don’t throw it out! Stick it in one of your files to look at later. You never know—there may be something there after all.
When inspiration strikes, you should begin writing immediately. Getting your initial thoughts recorded while the creative juices are flowing is critical. Otherwise, you may forget that amazing flash of brilliance. In fact, you probably will . . . that’s why it’s called a flash. Don’t worry about anything besides putting your thoughts on paper: let the writing flow no matter if your words are misspelled or your punctuation is wrong. You can go back and fix these details later. Finally, always carry a notebook or a cell phone (most models have several options for capturing notes) in case the inspiration comes when you are not free to write.
The term first draft sounds pretty serious, but it’s not. It’s just your first attempt at writing a story. Your first draft may be the framework of a story that you will fill in later. Or it could be a complete work that you won’t change much during your rewriting process. Your first draft can be handwritten on a pad of paper, typed on a computer, or even spoken into a voice recorder—whatever works best for you to get your thoughts out. Go for it. One writer wrote the first chapter of her book on a bunch of napkins on an airplane!
That’s up to you, and again there is no right answer. Your first draft is for getting your thoughts down. Later drafts are for polishing your story—adding details, reworking scenes, making dialogue more realistic, and so on. Once you’ve written your first draft, put it away for a while—a day, a week . . . however long it takes until you can read it as if it were the first time you were reading it. You want to be able to come back and read it with fresh eyes. This will help you see where your writing needs work. Many writers also find it helpful to have a friend, teacher, or writer’s group read their first drafts and give them comments on what is good and what could be improved (more on this in the next chapter).
Most writers will do at least two drafts before they feel their writing is finished. When you go back and reread your first draft, you may find a scene that just doesn’t work or a character that doesn’t quite fit in. Don’t be afraid to cut material that doesn’t work. It will make your writing stronger. But don’t throw it away—that cut material may be the beginning of another story!
In writing this chapter of our book, for example, we started by writing the first draft in pencil on a big yellow legal pad. Next, we read it over and made notes and changes in the margin before typing it up. Then we put the first draft away for a week. When we came back to it, we made more improvements and fixed the grammar and spelling mistakes (we love spell-check!). After two or three drafts, we finally had a final draft of chapter 6 ready to send to our publisher.
We certainly don’t want to tell you exactly how to write—that’s the fun, creative part. But if you notice that your story doesn’t really grab the reader and you want to add some zip to it, take a look at these basics of story structure:
If you’re writing a story, script, opinion piece, or essay, chances are that your writing needs a conflict—or a problem—to keep your reader’s interest. A conflict is a struggle between two opposing forces. In a story, the conflict is usually between the main character (also called the protagonist) versus something external or internal:
External conflict: the main character is in conflict with something concrete, like another character (the Wicked Witch of the West, Darth Vader, annoying little sister, bully, and so on) or a force of nature (a tornado, the perfect storm, quicksand, and so on).
Internal conflict: the main character is struggling against something abstract, like a parent’s expectations, peer pressure, society’s morals, or even his own conscience. An internal conflict is a struggle within a character’s heart or mind. Here are some good examples of internal conflicts your character might have:
• Whether or not to steal the leather jacket that he or she can’t afford to buy but really, really wants.
• Being the first boy to join the school dance team or the first girl to join the football team.
• Going out with someone his or her parents hate.
Your story should have a protagonist (the main character) and an antagonist (the person, thing, or idea that causes the central conflict). You might also have minor characters who come in and out of your story as it progresses and who might even supply some minor conflicts. It helps to write down your characters’ traits. Draw sketches of them to keep all their characteristics in mind as you write. As your story progresses and goes through revisions, remember to update those sketches too.
Here’s a great form for remembering the important traits of your characters. Fill out a character sketch for each character in your story.
Character Sketch (Fill in the blanks)
Once you have sketched out the character of each person in your story, you can use these descriptions as details in your writing. Each trait can become a source of conflict in your story as well. You don’t have to describe your characters directly to the reader to get their traits across. In fact, it’s usually more interesting if your readers learn about a character in more subtle, indirect ways—by how other characters react to her, what they say about her, or by what the character says and does. Developing your characters is called characterization. Here’s an example of how you might describe a character directly or indirectly:
Description: Dorothy was a thoughtful girl who yearned for a more interesting life filled with adventure, friendship, and love.
How others react: The Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodsman, and the Scarecrow left everything and followed Dorothy, knowing she might lead them to what they wanted and needed.
What others say: “Don’t worry,” said the Tin Woodsman to the Cowardly Lion, “Dorothy won’t hurt you.”
What the character says or does: “Why, you poor thing,” Dorothy said. “You are all rusty. I’ll help you. Where’s the oil can?”
The setting is the time and place in which your story is set. Go back and add as many details about your setting as you can. You might think your reader sees the same things you see in your head, but add the details anyway. Stimulate the senses: put in smells, tastes, sounds, feelings, and sights. Be sure that your reader has a clear sense of your story’s setting from the beginning, or she will feel lost while reading it.
One young writer went back and added a fall setting to her story late in her writing process. By describing the red and yellow colors of the season, she was able to emphasize the fiery dangers lurking in her story’s central conflict. Writers often use their setting as a metaphor or symbol for their conflict or their characters’ feelings. For example, you may wish to have a storm brewing outside your main character’s window to symbolize her struggle over what to do next and her feeling that trouble is coming.
Setting can be a great source of drama. Have you ever felt mysterious while walking through a fog? Or peaceful while basking in the sunshine? Your setting descriptions can be effective parallels to your character’s feelings.
As with your characters, creating a setting sketch can help you better describe your setting.
Setting Sketch (Fill in the blanks)
year ________________________________________
time of day ___________________________________
location _____________________________________
sights/scenes _________________________________
weather _____________________________________
smells _______________________________________
noises/sounds ________________________________
physical feelings _______________________________
(scratchy sand beneath toes, biting wind against cheeks, stifling heat in the waiting room, and so on)
Unless you want your reader to be left unsatisfied, you should make sure that your story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And those three elements should be balanced. Too often, a writer starts out with lots of details and description at the beginning of his story, but by the end, he seems tired of writing, and the whole story gets solved too quickly to be interesting or believable.
The Beginning
Often called the exposition, the beginning is the part that gets the reader familiar with the basic characters, setting, and conflicts. You want to include an event that shows the reader what the conflict is (also called the inciting incident). Can you figure out the inciting incident in The Wizard of Oz?
Dorothy is bored on her farm in Kansas, has an unpleasant encounter with the witch-like librarian, and then a tornado whisks her and her house to the Land of Oz.
The Middle
The middle is usually the longest part of the story and has three parts to it:
The build-up: This is the part of your story where you create tension (also called the rising action) and hook your readers into reading more. After the inciting incident, include some events that develop the conflict.
Dorothy lands in Oz, sets off on her journey, meets and befriends the Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, and Cowardly Lion, battles the Wicked Witch, and so on.
The climax or turning point: At this point, something big happens that brings the central conflict out into the open and gets other characters involved in it. Your reader should really know what the problem is and wonder how it will be solved.
Dorothy and her friends discover that the Wizard is a fake and may not be able to grant their wishes after all.
Falling action: This is a fancy term for everything that happens after your climax. Your falling action should show that the conflict is winding down. Don’t skimp on this part, and don’t rush it—your readers deserve to know just how things get worked through.
Dorothy and the Wizard work out solutions for each of her friends’ problems. Then the Wizard tells Dorothy how she can get home to Kansas.
The End
The end is also called a conclusion or a resolution. At the end, you need to settle the conflict. Be sure your characters say and do believable things here. Go back to your character sketches and look for clues that may help you create things they do or say to solve the problems in realistic and believable ways. You might also set your ending in the same place as your beginning—this helps your reader feel that the story has come full circle.
Dorothy clicks her red shoes together, chanting, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home,” and is back in the original setting—her farm in Kansas. Her family and friends, who closely resemble her friends from Oz, surround her. Their comments and loving concern prove to her that there is no place like home.
The writing process is a series of steps that the writer goes through before his writing is considered finished. Writers sometimes stop writing in the middle of the process, put it away, and then pull it out later to start writing again. Some writers finish an entire piece over the weekend. No matter how long it takes, most writers go through the following steps for each writing piece:
1. Pre-write or freewrite. This can mean writing in your journal or using writing prompts and exercises.
2. Write a first draft.
3. Revise the first draft.
4. Get responses and comments from people who you think will give you helpful feedback (see more about this in the next chapter).
5. Revise it again, based on reader responses you agree with.
6. Check the piece for spelling and grammar mistakes.
7. Decide where the piece might be published and get submission guidelines. (Sometimes this is the first step in the writing process—we’ll talk more about this in chapter 8.)
8. Finalize the piece, making sure it fulfills the publisher’s guidelines. Make a copy to keep for yourself.
9. Submit your writing to a publisher.
10. Wait for their answer . . . and wait . . . and wait . . .
Phew! You’re finally at the point where you feel your story, poem, or play is just right. Guess what? You’re still not done. Now it’s time to share it with the world! Let others whose opinions you value read it. Although not everyone will like what you have written, that’s okay. You can’t please everyone, right? But other people’s opinions can be very helpful, as you will see in the next chapter. Letting people read your writing, and then listening to their opinions, can be hard, but it will make you a better writer. And it’s totally up to you whether or not you take their advice. You are the final judge of your writing.
So, whether you’re ready to have others read your writing or are ready to submit it to publishers, read on!
Inspired by her home state’s long history of subtle, tragic literature, eighteen-year-old Alexandra Franklin won the national 2010 Scholastic Art and Writing Award before leaving Mississippi to attend the University of Alabama to study poetry and creative writing.
Editor, Best Teen Writing 2011
Editor’s Introduction
I wanted this job a lot. I was pretty brassy about it too; I can admit that. I had just graduated from high school in Jackson, Mississippi. I was in New York, I was a Portfolio Gold Medalist, and I had this idea that everything I ever wanted was falling into my lap. I spent most of the awards week begging Alex Tapnio to let me be the editor of the next year’s Best Teen Writing anthology. I sent emails. I was, basically, very annoying.
Exactly one year later, I was in Manhattan again, at dinner with the Alliance staff after the awards ceremony at Carnegie Hall. I had a brand-new name tag with my name above the word staff (I took pictures of this and sent it to my parents, who were suitably impressed). “You know what I remember most about you?” Alex said, referring to our encounter in 2010. “You were totally gunning for that editor’s job. I mean, you really wanted it.”
I really did. I wanted to be involved. I wanted to be the one who got to wade through the manuscripts, meeting the new writers, soaking up the new voices.
I started going through the pool of award-winning writing in March, and I didn’t surface for months. My three roommates got used to waking up in the morning to find me already sitting at our kitchen table, fixated on a piece of short fiction or a collection of poetry, my coffee cold and untouched at my elbow. I couldn’t tear myself away. I wanted to read everything twice. The vastness of the job revealed itself later, when I had to start narrowing down the manuscripts from the original stack. I had spent hours every day with these exquisite pieces of writing, falling in love over and over. I couldn’t imagine selecting only a few pieces. I suggested a multivolume set; the Alliance politely rejected my suggestion. At least I tried.
The writing in this collection represents a few of the strongest voices from 2011’s writing award winners. It’s a complicated spectrum of stories—shockingly funny, devastating, wry, tragic—but regardless of genre or tone, each individual voice is stunning. These writers handle words with an expert touch that is rare for their age. They are very, very good at their craft, and this is only the beginning. I am immensely honored to have been among the first to read the new literary voices of this generation.
Particularly in a career like writing, you never get anywhere alone. I’d like to first thank the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers for the years of opportunities, encouragement, and affirmation. Thanks to Lisa Feder-Feitel for being such a warm and motherly source of comfort, to Katie Babick and Michael Vinereanu for more than I can list here, to Kerri Schlottman for keeping me on track, and to Alex, Danniel, Nick, John Sigmund, John Kollmer, Nora, Dominic, Kat, and Virginia for making me feel at home and helping me in countless ways every day. Special gratitude goes to Dr. Paul Smith, for being wise, encouraging, and in love with words; and to my family, who has come to accept that maybe this writing thing isn’t just a phase. Specifically, thank you to my mother, who helped put together my first book when I was four. (We’ve come a long way since then, haven’t we?) I also owe a lot to Dan, for his infinite patience when I hit the workahol a little too hard, and to Claire, whose chai lattes got me through plenty of days of nonstop reading.
And finally—most significantly—thank you to all of the young writers whose work was under consideration for this anthology. I know your names and your stories, and I have no doubt that I will encounter them again. Let this be the beginning and not the end. Find out what drives you to write, what gets under your skin, what makes writing feel like a compulsion and not a hobby, and chase that inspiration. But even if you decide that you are not, ultimately, a writer, I truly believe that you will each do great things. I can only echo what Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet: “Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.”
Cheating at Cards
Short Story
I cut myself shaving this morning. I wasn’t paying attention, and I let the razor slide sideways, and it opened up a deep, narrow seam in my shin. I didn’t even notice it until I stepped out of the shower and the blood ran in diluted pink rivulets between my toes. Now, already, the skin is just beginning to meet and weave together again.
I paid $400 for a roundtrip ticket home. I cannot begin to calculate how far behind I am in paying the rent, but I paid $400 to come home, to sit on the bed I slept in until I was seventeen, and to play gin rummy with Mary Elizabeth. We’ve been playing cards like this for as long as I can remember, and I don’t think either of us knows how to play without cheating.
“I’ve taken her to doctors,” Mary whispers. Our conversation started at normal volume but has gradually slipped until we are inexplicably whispering. Neither of us wants to be the first to speak up. It reminds me of when we were small and staying up too late, holding hands across the gap between our matching twin beds. “I’ve taken her to doctors and I’ve even made doctors come here to see her. They all say nothing is wrong.”
“If she says she’s sick . . . ” I shuffle the deck flashily, Vegas-style, and pull out ten cards for each of us. I rifle shamelessly through hers before presenting them with a flourish.
“I don’t know what to do anymore.”
“I’m glad you called me.”
Mary sizes me up. “I’ll pay you back for the ticket.”
“Yeah,” I say, humoring her.
“Maybe I should go check on her.”
“She’s fine, she’s asleep.” My sister worries too much. “Just sit. Play this hand.”
But she’s distracted now, her baby-fine, corn-silk hair swaying back and forth over her shoulder. Her narrow body is curved tensely over her lap, and her fingers hover above the cards like a tarot reader’s. I remember when I could pull her against me, rub her shoulders, and calm her down. Now I sit and watch her, motionless and dreamlike, only half-invested in this particular scene.
Mary is flipping through cards now without strategy or purpose. She presses two kings together, turns a queen’s back on both of them. She spins a jack away from the pile and several mundane subjects—a three of hearts, a seven of clubs—slide haplessly under the bed. I feel terrible for leaving her here to cope with our mother’s compulsions. My fingers drift to the cut on my shin. “You’re enabling her.”
“I’m taking care of her,” Mary maintains. She obscures her face with a curtain of hair, but her back stiffens dangerously. When she was eight and I was twelve, I told her what I knew about the legitimacy of the Santa Claus story. I haven’t thought about it until now, but I remember that her reaction was the same. Regret tastes salty in my mouth. I always know the right thing to say, but I can never bring myself to say it.
She sighs and collapses onto the pillows, reaching up to turn off the lamp. I push a dozen teddy bears to the floor and curl up beside her. Our hips nearly touch; our fingers are so close I can feel the static between them. The green plastic stars that we stuck to the ceiling ten years ago glow dimly.
“Do you know,” Mary slurs sleepily, “that the stars we see are just old light from stars that died centuries ago?”
Within minutes, her breathing becomes deep and long. I slip out of bed and down the hall to our mother’s room. The door is ajar. A long, thin slice of light falls across the carpet.
I creep into the room and stand beside her bed. The sheets are tangled and twisted; she is not a silent sleeper like Mary. Instead, she thrashes and groans and cries. Her hair is already damp and curling around her forehead. I can feel the heat rising from her bulky form. I am still stinging from the criticism she offered during dinner—shouldn’t I be head editor at the Tribune by now? After all the time I’ve put in? After all the tuition she paid? The truth is that I have forgotten what it would mean to advance a career. Like scuba divers who become disoriented and swim away from the surface when their oxygen is low, I am sure that one day I will advance myself right out of the copyediting cubicle and onto the street.
Something is crawling up my leg. No, down my leg. Jesus! I swear silently, which feels wrong to do in my mother’s room, even though I am an adult and she is asleep. I am bleeding, but it takes a moment for me to realize that I have been scratching the razor cut on my leg.
I cannot imagine where my mother keeps the Band-Aids. For a hypochondriac, she keeps her first–aid kit woefully bare. It consists of a bandage for sprains, syrup of ipecac, and a pair of tweezers. I sit on the bathroom counter pressing a fistful of Kleenex to my cut and feeling sorry for myself. When the bleeding has slowed, I rummage through her medicine cabinet. She has stocked it like a drugstore. I pull down dozens of bottles of pills for depression and pain and insomnia. There are no Band-Aids. Wearily, I wrap the sprain bandage around my shin and reach up to the tiny window near the ceiling. It’s painted shut, but I force it open and take long drags of the cold air. The lights from the city reflect against the clouds, projecting a smoky cap over the horizon. They drown out the stars that traveled for centuries just to be seen tonight.
At a Dinner Party the Night Before the Divorce Is Finalized
Poetry
In crowded rooms I stand alone,
leaning on my whittled bones.
Their brittle laughter spears me through,
as biting as your cheap cologne.
Last fall we needed something new.
You bought six pints of robin blue;
we painted through a week of nights
and hung red drapes to block the view.
We thought the paint would make it right,
and though we tried, it wasn’t quite
enough to seal the growing split
that led us here. You’re so polite
and calm. You kill them with your wit.
You’re charismatic, I admit—
you charmed me once. God, what a sin;
I once thought I could shrink to fit
your standards. I was lovely then.
Tonight they press my icy skin
and whisper that this poor girl’s grown
as hollow as a violin.
