Howdy all! I am back from the SCBWI Florida conference in Miami, which took place this past weekend. I’m exhausted (but in a good way)! The entire conference was an amazing experience. I met some awesome people, including the lovely Karen Strong, and I learned a lot. A lot a lot. I’m excited to share everything I leaned—interesting tidbits, tricks of the trade, and revision tips galore! But if I did all of that today, this post would be entirely too long, and your eyes would gloss over (and my fingers likely would fall off). So I’m going to take it slowly.
Today, here are three helpful (and clickable!) links shared over the course of the three-day conference. Every writer should check these out.
Are you about to start revising your novel? Are you in the middle of revising but feel completely overwhelmed and lost? Then you should definitely check out this easy-to-use roadmap for revision. I wish I’d known about this one a few months ago!
This was a conference presentation given by Scott Westerfeld a little while back. Fortunately, a blogger who attended the conference gave a run-down of the speech. According to Scott, using teen slang is important to creating an authentic voice but using it can be tricky. Get it right and you’re golden. Get it wrong, and you can sound inauthentic and dated. Scott tells you how to do it well.
Wow. You guys. This is the motherlode. Patricia Wrede came up with a list of HUNDREDS of questions to ask yourself about the world your story takes place in. It covers everything from climate to coming-of-age rituals to religion to government to architecture, and so on. This is the most comprehensive list you’re ever going to find. It was written specifically with fantasy in mind, but it can work for contemporary stories as well. Obviously you’re not going to want to include every single answer in your novel, but if you can answer these questions for yourself, chances are you’ve built yourself a pretty believable world.
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