Get Your Kids to Write

When teaching kids how to write, it's best to make it fun. Even young children can get excited about writing if you approach it the "write" way.

1) The Bell Technique: For example, take a bright or colorful object, like a bell, and hold it up in front of your kids. You might even want to pass it around and let the children handle the object. Then, encourage them to write a story about it. Kids love stories. If they get to makeup their own tales, they will have a fun time while learning how to write better.

2) A Magic Crayon: Put several boxes of crayons in a bin and tell the children that these crayons are enchanted. Then, let them pick out a favorite color. On a large piece of paper, each child should draw a picture of something they want to write about. On the bottom, they write a simple sentence telling why they drew that particular item. This will make writing a true art form.

3) Musical Chairs: Start the music and have the kids run around the room, playing musical chairs. When the music stops, the child without a chair spells a word then rejoins the game. This way no one gets penalized and all the kids learn new words.

4) As Fast as You Can: Set a timer for five or ten minutes for a writing competition. (This can reveal all sorts of things about each child). Tell the kids that everyone gets a treat at the end when the timer goes off, but the child with the longest story gets to choose their treat first.

These are just a few ideas that may make learning to write more fun for our youth. Everyone can write...and most of us, especially when we are young and uninhibited, write with color and excitement. Encourage your children to write in any way you can. As adults, they'll thank you for it!

The Moral Viewpoint

Ten years ago, I dove into my storage unit with gloves, spider spray and clean boxes in which to repack the irreplaceable items for which I paid a monthly pound of flesh. To my surprise, I discovered boxes and boxes of half finished short stories. Over two hundred of them.

Why did these stories remain incomplete? What truth could I cull from their water spotted, and sometimes moldy, pages?

The problem wasn’t the writing. All humility aside, I write well. That’s why my fulltime freelance status as an editor and ghostwriter thrives. It wasn’t the topic or the characters or the “world building” skills. These were well done, if not finished. The problem was my moral viewpoint.

The moral viewpoint is the rhyme and reason for the story, itself. The purpose driving the tale. If you don’t have passion for the truth at the core of your story, you won’t be able to finish it. Or, if you do finish it, it will lack power and conviction.

Tim O’Brien said, “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”

Your quest as an author is to reveal truth as you experience it, whether in a throbbing heartbeat or a flash of insight, a slow revelation or a lifetime of dedicated study. When your moral viewpoint is on course, your story has a sure compass. Follow this compass and the passion that drives your story will carry you through to...

The End! 

The Ultimate Hero

There are many books that describe how to write about your protagonist. They describe the importance of writing their thoughts, transcribing their viewpoints and illuminating their feelings. But, I want to encourage that you give your attention to a different kind of hero or heroine.

You!

Delve into yourself. Are you facing a very real danger? Many of us battle challenges, daily, that may not threaten life and limb but do place us in uniquely stressful situations. Do you have a flaw or inner weakness that needs healing? Of course, you do. We all do. Acknowledging such a weakness makes us responsible for healing it and that’s a life changer. 

The more you understand and cope with yourself as a hero or heroine, the more authentic your writing about heroic characters will become. Not that you should think of yourself as some mythic god or protector. But, the personal intimate sides of “you” will rise toward the light. You will learn how to appreciate both your strengths and flaws. And, most important, you will see yourself as a real hero in important ways.

You are a writer. Embracing that craft, knowing that writing is more than a mere task, opens our minds to great ideas and accomplishments. Take a few moments to recognize the heroic qualities within and your heroic characters will gain depth and power on the page.

Marketing Before You Write - Part 2 - by David Farland

Still, every producer and director also wants to be the one who "breaks out big" for no apparent reason with a hit that is a critical and artistic success. The problem is, so few of those work. Recent trends--the last 5-8 years is what Hollywood looks at. But I've got a secret: they should be looking at historical mega-cycles, too. The last 80 years are really quite important as predictors of success, and those tend to get lost if you look only at recent trends.
Marketer: Some of the changes that will sweep movie making, like major motion pictures for women, are linked to macro sociological trends. As women control the money now and continue to begin to exert more power in every way in the marketplace, I think you are right that it is only obvious that women will begin to exert such control that major motion pictures will at some point in the future, be made predominantly for females. In fact, given the male-dominated studios you describe, it cries for a female-dominated studio to spring up and take them all by surprise. From that perspective it is obvious that this is beginning, and Twilight is the harbinger.
Dave: Yes, the female audience has long been under-appreciated. We saw precursors of Twilight with movies like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and we can even go back farther to hits like Thelma and Louise.
But if you really want to make a big splash, you have to be the first one into a pool that is big and wide and deep. When Scholastic asked me to recommend which book to push huge for the year of 1999, I told them to go with HARRY POTTER. Their marketing department thought that the book was “too long” for the middle-grade audience, and didn’t want to push it.
I argued that it was also written at a grade level that was too-high (over sixth-grade reading level, for kids who were supposed to be in the third and fourth grade). But it was fantasy, and so it catered to a child’s sense of wonder. It was about the terrors of school and growing up, and so every child would relate to it. It was written at a level so that parents and teachers—the gatekeepers for children’s books—would love it. Indeed, it was written as a family novel. So I advised them to push that book. Who writes books for whole families to enjoy together? That’s so out of date. So I saw HARRY POTTER as a “big splash” kind of book.
When Stephenie Meyer came to me in 2001 and asked “How can I become the bestselling young adult writer of all time?” I had a conundrum. Historical analysis shows that the bestselling books—like HARRY POTTER—all had male protagonists, and most were set in another world. I told Stephenie that she should write contemporary YA fantasy romance for girls. It bucked most of the trends of the past, but it did so in a way that recognized that there was this HUGE AUDIENCE that neither the book publishing world nor Hollywood even knew existed.
I also told her to make it a fantasy in a contemporary setting. In short, set it in our world, but create an “other-worldly” feel. I believe that there are a lot of readers out there who want a sense of wonder, but they’re not fully capable of enjoying novels set in other worlds. So I figured that would enlarge her audience.
Last of all, I warned her that it might be hard to sell. In 2001, young adult publishers didn’t have any YA fantasy lines. But I told her that as Harry Potter grew in size, the publishers would realize that they needed such lines.
The big question in my mind was, “Will publishers be able to embrace the idea of a book that is a romance that caters to minors?” If I tried to write such a book as a male author, I doubt that it would have seen the light of day.
So Stephenie wrote the novel, sold it big, and it became a monster hit.
In the same way, the Hunger Games movie is going to make this series huge. It combines all of the right elements in just such a way that it plays upon the burgeoning market for adventure/romances with female protagonists.
Marketer: It only seems logical that other macro-sociological changes will be predictive of future trends in blockbuster movies. For example perhaps it is formulaic that any successful blockbusters in the future will contain at least a token, non-stereotyped, male Asian, and will need to reflect every race and demographic you want the movie to appeal to worldwide, beings it will be some number of years between the inception of planning a book to the point where a movie based upon the book is released in theaters. So perhaps you can be timely in producing a blockbuster movie by examining worldwide social trends of today.
Dave: We're seeing this already--bring in the Asians and the Indians, along with the Europeans, and a movie will go big. A recent Kung Fu movie—I forget the name—has been a hit around the world because of the components of its cast.
I recognized this as a probable trend more than fifteen years ago, when I wrote the Runelords. It has Caucasians, but it also has Indians, Orientals, and a mélange of other races among the main characters. Hollywood is just beginning to wake up and recognize the potential return on multi-cultural entertainment--especially if it had a strong love story along with adventure. Avatar struck a lot of the chords right in its treatment of the “aliens,” drawing upon a lot of Asian and African influences, but still lacks something. I would have liked to have seen a more multi-cultural cast among the protagonists.
Marketer: One other minor thing is that you mentioned that big-budget movies get larger advertising budgets and therefore they are more likely to be successful. In actuality, if a movie isn't good, the more you advertise, a chain-reaction sets in that assures the bigger a failure it will become and the more it will destroy the reputation of everyone involved. So a big advertising budget will only help you if your product is good too. This is a marketing truism that as far as I know is universal. It's not exactly material to what you are saying, but it might be worth a mention that along with a big advertising budget they must have a good product or the result is career suicide.
Dave: Of course films get screened for test audiences to make sure that the film isn't a flop. Star Wars failed its screen test, so they had to go remake the ending. What's really important is to understand your demographics and then push the film or story to appeal to the audience. In short, you need to understand your audience and then create a beautiful film, one that is engrossing, emotionally nourishing, and entertaining. It’s only after you’ve done that that you should be able to go out and sell your book or movie. But by knowing this stuff, you can greatly increase the size of your potential audience, and push your sales out of the realm of the ordinary and into the realm of the fantastic.

Marketing Before You Write - Part 1 - by David Farland

I hate to talk about “how to market” your tales. It de-emphasizes the fact that you have to write a great book or movie in the first place, before you can market it. But marketing your work is a necessity.

My main concern is this: back when I ran the writing track for DragonCon, each year I would put together dozens of writing classes, and about the same 40 people would attend all of them. Then I’d put up a class on, “How to Sell Your Novel to Publishers,” and literally the biggest auditorium that we had—with over 2000 seats—couldn’t hold the spectators. (In other words, folks want fame without doing the work).

Very often, I will look at a book that is written well, and I almost want to weep. I’ll see authors trying to tell tired old tales that I’ve seen a thousand times before, and trying to no avail to set themselves apart or make their work come alive…on my last Daily Kick…I got a letter back from a professional marketer asking for a bit of clarification. (Part 1 of this email conversation follows): 

Marketer: First off, what you are saying makes a hell of a lot of sense, so much so that there must be a much more scientific, formulaic approach that has been done by each and every serious movie producer or studio and other entities involved, something they can put in the hands of their green-lighting specialists or producers… 

Dave: Each of the major studios, as I understand it, has some kind of green-lighting marketing division. Their techniques and research are kept under wraps. There are also some good green-lighting companies that cater to independent investors and filmmakers. I worked for a time with Entertainment Business Group (EBG), one such company, and learned a great deal. But there are others. Past employees are forbidden to reveal certain details, of course, and I only share information that the company owner would give out in seminars. I didn’t keep copies of the company’s research databases.

I can say that there are different approaches to green-lighting. For example, White Light Entertainment looks at a “formulaic” approach. They believe that each audience has an ideal movie that they’re paying to see, and one can study the elements of plot, cast, setting, and so on, in order to determine what the ideal combination might be. I’m mainly discussing the approach that EBG was using, along with some of my own observations, and those of book professionals that I’ve known.

Marketer: But my main concern is that having studied stock analysis somewhat, it occurs to me that looking for similarities in the top movies of all time is probably not just similar to but rather exactly like stock analysis methods. All but one or two analysis models are built by predicting what will work in the future based upon probabilities reflecting what has happened in the past, although it can be argued that what will happen in the future is not tied to the past...

You might also ask yourself, did that movie work because it capitalized timely and well on one trend, or did it actually compound several trends well? So in studying the biggest money makers, maybe you need to look not just at the all-time results, but also at the trends of the moment…

David: You've got it all right, so far. Movie makers look for trends to some degree, and they’ve always got one eye on “what’s popular.” Books that go big get made into movies because there’s a guaranteed audience. The Scooby Doo movies were a big hit because they resonated with adults who watched the television shows years ago, and now wanted their kids to enjoy them.

In the same way, the Hunger Games movie is setting records for pre-sales. The book wasn’t as huge a hit as Harry Potter, but it is riding a powerful trend. It plays upon the resonance of television shows like Survivor, American Idol, and other reality shows, but it also capitalizes on the resonance of movies like Gladiator. So one might predict that “reality-based” books should do well with YA reads now.

(End of Part 1)