Breakout Session 2 - Plots, Bots, & Knots: How to fix your YA novel with Stacey Lee

Stacey Lee is the New York Times and Indie bestselling author of historical and contemporary young adult fiction, including The Downstairs Girl, a Reese’s Book Club Summer 2021 Young Adult pick, and her most recent novel, Kill Her Twice, a School Library Journal best book of the year.  A native of southern California and fourth-generation Chinese American, she is a founder of the We Need Diverse Books movement and writes stories for all kids (even the ones who look like adults). Stacey loves board games, has perfect pitch, and through some mutant gene, can smell musical notes through her nose. Connect with her @staceyleeauthor on Instagram, and @staceylee.author on Facebook.

Stacey will focus on the 3 core elements of plot: goals, obstacles, stakes.

Without these 3 elements your story lacks the gas your story needs to drive itself to its destination. 

1. GOALS

• Our character needs to want something
• Goals come in all sizes
• Goals need to be specific
• Goals change as the plot evolve

2. OBSTACLES

Types: physical, other people, a threat, internal struggle

There's no specific number of obstacle your novel needs. A rule of thumb: for every goal, your character needs at least one obstacle working against it. The more obstacles, the more interesting. 

3. STAKES

What is on the line for the character?

• what your character stands to gain or lose
• personal, shaped by the characters values
• internal stakes
• external stakes

So ask yourself:

What's at stake for your character? 

What is the worst that can happen?

What do they stand to lose?

If you want to view this session to hear the full content, along with the rest of the conference,

register at https://www.scbwi.org/events/virtual-summer-conference-2025. Replays of the

conferences will be available until September 14th, 2025.

Elana K. Arnold and Brandy Colbert: Survival Skills for Novelists

Photo of Brandy Colbert by Jesse Weinberg

Veteran, award-winning authors Elana K. Arnold and Brandy Colbert have a number of wonderful books between them (see the partial lists below).

Their session, intended to the published pros in the audience, contained a wealth of information about how to manage their time, creativity, and relationships at this stage of the publishing game.

Community becomes an important part of the process.

There are the bookstores where we do events—here, Brandy likes to send a thank you note every time.

And then there's social media and online communities. Here, a key thing to keep in mind, especially when you're committing stuff to print (even digitally): Remember that your work lives forever. So be careful in what you say, that you don't complain needlessly or without being aware of your audience.

Elana said social media isn't mandatory for writers. There are other ways you can connect with the world. "But if you like it, then great!"

Photo of Elana Arnold by Davis Arnold

Remember why you write

Elana said it can be scary to write when you're thinking about what someone else thinks. Instead, remind yourself why you write. These are her reasons:

• To explore the things that thrill, terrify and discomfit me
• To remind myself that I am a human being
• To remind myself that I am not alone

Challenge yourself

Brandy likes to write books that scare her. Her first MG scared her. Writing from two POVs scared her. But now she knows she can do it!

• Don't be afraid to start or take on projects that scare you
• Try something you haven't done before, or retry something you've failed to accomplish
• Write a book that you don't know how to write
• Stretch during revision into a new shape

Remember that publishing is an unpredictable business

We don't have control over a lot of things:

• If agents or editors will move or quit
• If our book will win awards
• If our book will "sell well"
• If people will "like" or "read" our book
• Almost everything else

Some of Brandy's books
Little & Lion
The Revolution of Birdie Randolph
Pointe
Finding Yvonne


Some of Elana's books
Damsel
What Girls Are Made of
A Boy Called Bat
The Red Hood
What Riley Wore

Lilliam Rivera - Tense & Sensibility: Ways to Tackle Tragedy in Young Adult Literature

Lilliam Rivera

Lilliam Rivera is an award-winning writer and author of the young adult novels Dealing in Dreams (Simon & Schuster, March 2019) and The Education of Margot Sanchez (Simon & Schuster, February 2017), available in bookstores everywhere. Her work has appeared in Elle, Lenny Letter, the Los Angeles Times, Tin House, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, to name a few. Lilliam lives in Los Angeles.

The estimable Lilliam Rivera is here to remind us that writing is a way of coping with tragedy, including so many of the events taking place today. She's a very character-based writer, and the way she writes about tragedy is rooted in who her characters are and how tragedy would affect them. You know what this requires, right? Intimate knowledge of our characters, of course. In a similar vein, techniques for doing this work are rooted in knowing teens, and understanding both how they experience YA books and what they want to experience when reading YA.

Dealing in Dreams by Lilliam Rivera

A lesson from author Richard Price: the bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Which is another way of saying we need intimate knowledge of our characters, because the personal moments and experiences we choose to write about come from knowing which of those moments would matter to our characters the most.

What does it look like when a character who's not us is experiencing tragedy? As is true in so many writing-related contexts, the first answer is research. Lilliam reaches out and talks to everyone - therapists, social workers, teachers, and most important, teenagers themselves. Most young people want to talk openly about a lot of things, so make the effort to talk to them about those things.

This is an author whose level of empathy and compassion for teens, especially teens who are experiencing trauma, is sky-high; her commitment to writing stories that honestly speak to those kids couldn't be more clear. Self-compassion matters too: Lilliam reminds us to remember self-care, because we don't have to directly experience trauma to have it embedded within ourselves.

Follow Lilliam Rivera on Twitter and Instagram, or get more info at her website.

Sara Sargent: Cutting Edge Young Adult Fiction

Sara Sargent is an executive editor at HarperCollins Children's Books. She's published Deb Caletti, Jennifer Echols, Julie Cross, Aaron Karo and Martina Boone, and she acquires everything from picture books through young adult.

YA editors are wondering what's next when it comes to trends. Books that are hitting shelves today were acquired 12 to 24 months ago. It's true that you shouldn't write to trends. Today's trends will be over when your book comes out. Also, books that aren't written from the heart won't be as good.

"My list is only as good as the books you write."

Sara started at HC a year ago to develop books teens really want to read. She wanted to know what made teens tick, and what drives their purchasing habits. "What could I do to make sure the books I was publishing today reflected the teens of today?"

Publishers were publishing books for millennials and Gen Z—the one that follows millennials. Here's some marketing data:

• First generation to be majority nonwhite
• Average attention span is 8 seconds
• They use on average five devices (phone, laptop, desktop, tv, table) 
• More tolerable of gender diversity than previous generations

It's good to research teens to understand what they want. There are a number of things to research: their music, their pop culture interests, their ideas about sex and identity, what they worry about, what their school lives are like (among many other things). 

What makes her reject a manuscript?

One that feels like it's a book the authors are writing for the teens they were. You need to make it your business to know what would make a teen want to buy it. 

Immerse yourself in teen culture. Watch a lot of YouTube. See what kids are watching. Read advertising industry articles. Subscribe to the AdWeek emails—they have lots of interesting articles on the topics. Download apps. Books are competing with other media for attention, and it's important to know your competition. 

She creates separate social media accounts she uses to follow people. You can use it just for work to follow celebrities and such. See what they're talking about and how they're galvanizing their fans. 

"We need to cozy up to our audience. We need to understand and know them, and—dare I say—love them." 

What does cutting edge mean? 

Among other things: Something that pushes the envelope as a taboo, something that experiments with form, something that makes adults uncomfortable, one that turns traditional relationships upside-down, one that portrays a broader set of experiences. "Innovative and pioneering. Those are great words." 

Rethink storylines. Surprise her. "I know I'm reading something cutting edge when I can feel my brain carving a new path, rather than going on autopilot."

Something innovative builds on the pre-existing canon. "Read, read, and read some more." 

You want to find a new way to express something universal. 

Find her online at sarasargent.wordpress.com and on Twitter and Instagram as @Sara_Sargent.

Liz Tingue: Writing Young Adult Fiction

Liz Tingue is an associate editor at Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Seven Things You Need to Know About Writing YA

1. Do read a lot, but don’t only read YA.

2. Do get a social media presence and network with other writers, but don’t spend so much time tweeting that you forget to write your novel.

3. Do get to know your characters—like, really well—don’t forget the difference between Wants and Needs.

4. Do write in the first person if a singular voice comes to you, but don’t force it.

5. Do make maps for your plot and structure, but don’t be afraid to stray once in a while.

6. Do join a supportive critique group, and don’t be scared of a little tough love.

7. Do persevere when the going gets tough, but don’t be afraid to walk away if a project just isn’t coming together.

Maggie Stiefvater Keynote: A Thief & An Artist, Stealing Stories from Life

The magical Maggie Stiefvater

Maggie Stiefvater is nothing short of astonishing. She's the author of many YA novels, including the bestselling Raven Boys series and the Printz Honor Award-winning SCORPIO RACES.

She talked to us about her life as a writer—which has more dimensions than that single word contains.

"I'm not sure if my job description is actually writer," she said. "It should be thief. Or maybe, if I'm being kind, artist."

"I used to think that my ideal job was to write. To make up stories. To lie for a living." Now that she's a professional writer, knows that she observes, steals, and stylizes for a living.

When she writes, it's not so much that she is creating new things out of nothing, but that she steals from the world and makes it her own. She used to be a professional portrait artist, something she had to practice a lot (much like writing). One challenge of being a portrait artist was that people would move. She learned to look for people being still.

She found one once in a window seat on an airplane—the seat she wanted—and she sketched him with delight. And then she found out he was watching her draw. She teased his life story out of him, or at least part. Specifically the hand part. He had an oddly shaped hand, so he told her the story of how he broke it. On someone's face.

He said he was defending his sister's honor, and she listened to him with her mind on record, as she planned to steal him and his soft southern accent.

Over the years, her thefts have gone from the surface much deeper. Faithful, accurate renderings aren't what she wants. These are mere copies. She wants the essence. The soul. Why that guy threw that punch, or why he never threw one earlier. His broken hand was broken for a reason. He could have been, and probably was, lying.

The truth: A boy had once lost his temper, much to his shame. He had to look at the memory of that moment every single day. Everything else was just details. Just noise. "That was the soul," she said. "And that was what I stole."

He became Adam Parrish in THE RAVEN BOYS.

She talked to us about what the old writing advice "write what you know" really means, charming us with the stories of her childhood horse, a former racehorse that wasn't ready to retire and very well could have killed her. This fed into THE SCORPIO RACES, a book about vicious horses that are very likely to eat anyone who tries to ride them.

The thief then hands the job over to the artist, who understands what details to keep, and what details to cut.  "If I do my thievery well, if I steal the truth and not the details, and then I add the details back in, then I end up with a book that is not just true, but specific, and in only the way I can write it," she said.

She said her most Maggie book of all is THE RAVEN BOYS, one rich with things she's pilfered from her childhood, and literally about someone who can summon things from his dreams, just as she summons from her own.

Maggie Stiefvater: Building Characters with Heart

Thank you to Marquita Hockaday for the photo. 

Maggie Stiefvater is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of the novels Shiver, Linger, and Forever. Her novel The Scorpio Races was named a Michael L. Printz Honor book. She has also written the Raven Cycle series among many books for young adults.

For Maggie her primary concern, above everything else, is character.

“For me what really pulls a book through are the humans.”

She notes that what is true for her might not be true for you.

She sees herself not a good writer but a better thief. She can’t create anything from scratch, not characters that actually breath and walk on their own.

She starts with people who have a real human heart and sees it more as creating portraits of people.

You need to know the rules of character building. You can't go around breaking rules without knowing the rules you're breaking. If you know the rules, and break them anyways, then it’s experimenting.

Some rules: 

·      The narrator should be a character who shifts the plot the most. (This rule is very central to commercial fiction.)

·      The narrator should be the character who changes the most. An intriguing character is one who is both internally and externally active.

·      Characters should be sympathetic and relatable ( a rule Maggie disagrees with). You should understand why a character does what they do, but it doesn’t have to be choices you would make.

·      It’s bad writing to write yourself into a character (Maggie also disagrees with this). She believes accidentally writing yourself in is bad writing, but doing it on purpose is creating a portrait of yourself. 

Maggie creates characters subtractively: when she's stealing from real life it’s often a matter of subtraction. From The Scorpio Races she stole from her brothers. One of the characters is very liked by readers, the other is not. So she has one happy brother, one not so much. But if she wrote them exactly as they are they’d be all over the place, so she focuses on the first idea she gets of them, developing the character from there.

Book Signing at Once Upon a Time Bookstore

Yesterday a few SCBWI members got together for a book signing at Once Upon a Time bookstore in Montrose for a YA Rising Stars event. Other SCBWI attendees made the trip out, and it was all a blur of books, laughs and cake pops! It's great to take the opportunity to visit local independent booksellers when you travel for other events.

Note that Nova Ren Suma is on the conference faculty and Suzanne Young is a member of TEAM BLOG.

Nova Ren Suma, author of IMAGINARY GIRLS (Dutton)

Suzanne Young, author of A NEED SO BEAUTIFUL (Balzer & Bray)

Cindy Pon, author of FURY OF THE PHOENIX (Greenwillow)

Holly Goldberg, author of I'LL BE THERE (Little, Brown)

The author with an bookstore staffer

A bouquet of cake pops decorated the YA author event

Carolyn Mackler (continued)

Carolyn is reading summer goals she wrote in her journal when she was in her early 20s. Among them:

• look in to psychology as a career
• become an au pair in Italy
• rent a house with a guy
• live in NYC with her mom
• get a dog.
• go to Africa

Instead she wrote her first book, fell in love with her husband, and wrote eight hours a day on THE EARTH, MY BUTT, AND OTHER BIG ROUND THINGS. The following January she won a Printz Honor, and suddenly she began getting big royalty checks and being asked to speak.

And then, she said, her words dried up.

She got to a point where she tought, I can't write a book.

After encouragement from her friend, and the passing of a little time, she got through her hard time and began writing again.

Then THE EARTH got pulled from an entire school district and got TONS of press. It was the 4th most challenged book in America in 2008, and continues to stay on the list. (And it made her father very proud.)

At first, Carolyn was stunted by the censorship, second guessing herself. Then she let herself go with her writing, and came up with her latest novel TANGLED.

KEYNOTE: Carolyn Mackler--For Richer or Poorer: Writing Through Good Times or Bad

Carolyn Mackler recieved a Printz Award for her novel THE EARTH, MY BUTT, AND OTHER BIG ROUND THINGS. She's currently working on her sixth YA novel. Her lastest book is TANGLED.

Carolyn said she spent her teen years tyring to blend in. ("If I were a J. Crew color, I would be ecru.") And the feeling never subsided that she had to blend in. This year, she decided she wanted to be "hot."

Marital vows, she said, are simialr to making the committment to be a writer. You have to stick with it even through the more difficult times.

As a teen, writing in her jounral and reading helped her from feeling alone or like a misfit.

After college she interned at Ms. Magazine, and did whatever she could to make money writing.

For her first book, she tapped into her own life and finished a draft of her first novel. She got an agent at age 25 and got her first book published.

The Real Deal About Writing Fantasy With Arianne Lewin

Ari Lewin is an Editor at Disney/Hyperion


She's edited a lot of fantasy books, picture books, chapter books, and the bulk of what she does is fantasy - which is in it's "Golden Age." In fact, 4 out of 5 of the books on her fall list are fantasy. So, she knows of what she speaks!

She's starting out defining the different kinds of fantasy:

there's high fantasy: swords, magic, dragons, midaevil, low technology

like Tamora Pierce's books

steampunk: alternate histories (often victorian england) often perfected technologies that we've abandoned

i.e., Levianthan by Scott Westerfield


Urban Fantasy (set in city) like Holly Black's modern fairy tales


Paranormal Romance:

lots of bestsellers

Blue Bloods by Melissa DeLaCruz and that book, you know... Twilight

Distopian Fantasy:

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Feed by M.T. Anderson

Then some that are hard to classify:

Percy Jackson?

everyone's reading fantasy that was meant for all age levels.

Now she's going into tips about writing fantasy and world building... oooh, some of these are great. Like this:

1. You make up your own rules
2. Have them make sense
3. Follow them consistently
4. You can never change the rules

--Posted by Lee Wind

Crossover Writing: Linda Sue Park, Lisa Yee, and Arthur A. Levine, part 2

L to R, Arthur, Linda Sue, Lisa

Lisa Yee gems:

If you've ever been to Red Lobster, I wrote the menu. Crispy Golden Fries? That's me.

(laughter)

Hey, a menu is a story: beginning, middle, and end.

Lisa said that she was working on a book, sure that the main character was 11. She morphed into being 12. And ultimately, telling the story that needed to be told, the character ended up being 17, and the book was a YA.


Arthur's advice to Lisa back then (and now):

Just write the story it needs to be.

Arthur:

In all the genres, the difficulty is letting go of the anxiety of what you percieve to be the rules of the form.

Lisa chimed in on that - she had a character who was a run-away, and her first instinct was that the character would swear a lot - the percieved rules of the form. But then she realized that her character DIDN'T swear a lot.

Linda Sue:

I want to write a story, and the best story I absolutely can. When she wrote "A Single Shard," she thought it would be an adult book.

When I write my novels, I don't know where it's going to be shelved when it's out.

And they shared so much more great advice and insight!

Crossover Writing: Linda Sue Park, Lisa Yee, and Arthur A. Levine

Lisa Yee (far right), Linda Sue Park (center),

and Arthur A. Levine (speaking as Sid Fleischman)

Since Sid wasn't able to attend, Arthur A. Levine graciously stepped in. Arthur read Sid's contribution for this panel, including these gems:

Most our lives are sequences of scenes - and in this respect, art is like life.

Emotion is common to all genres.

Without emotion to touch us, one is left with typing paper.

Linda Sue Park:

Still, today, when revising my novels, there are several run throughs on the language level, in which I revise my novels like a poem.

She even goes through the draft one time during revisions, focusing solely on where the period falls - like in poetry!

She writes poetry in the fallow times between novels.

Her first picture book was adapted from a poem she had written thinking it would be for an adult poetry collection.

More on this great panel to come! Hey, people keep coming in - it's standing room only now!

Posted by Lee Wind

Kathy Dawson: Summing Up and Q&A

She told the audience of writers that editors really don't know what they're looking for until they see it.

She was asked what she looks for in picture books. Wordplay, humor, new perspectives.

She was asked about the effect of the economic downturn in her experience in publishing. She just left Harcourt after it's takeover from Houghton Mifflin. What it means is that there are a smaller number of people to do the same amount of work. But, she says, people working in publishing are passionate about it and will ride out the storm. She feels it's tougher on picture books than MG and YA. She says the pace of change in how the publishing industry works is more rapid than ever. There are things happening now. she says, that are changing the way publishing works. A lot of what happening is the industry correcting itself.