Creative Lab: Creating Characters Your Readers Love with Erin Entrada Kelly

Erin Entrada Kelly is the author of several NYT bestselling books, including THE FIRST STATE OF BEING, a Newbery Medalist and National Book Award finalist.  

What a treat to dive into character with the most recent recipient of the Newbery Medal.

Erin takes attendees on a journey back into childhood memories, character building, and the ways in which building character allows plot to unfold. 

The session was packed with gems. Here are a few:

Create conflict and tension using the contrast between your character's interiority and what they say. The reader will anticipate the moment when the character will finally speak their true thoughts. 

Make a list of "good" character traits (eg. honest, loyal, confident...)

And then find the flip side of that coin, for example:

honest ---> blunt

loyal ---> codependant

confident ---> arrogant 

This is where Erin starts. With a character name. And age. And a handful of these traits. Add some wants and fears, and then starting asking the most important question "why" and the whole plot unfolds. 

Creative Lab: Emily XR Pan - Storytelling Structure: Lining Up the Bones of a YA Novel

 

Sunday brings more excellent deep dives in the Creative Labs. 

Emily XR Pan explores storytelling structure with an engaged group of attendees who dive into a new structure for the classic Cinderella fairytale. 

A fantastic takeaway from this lab is the question: 

What am I reading for? 

We want our readers to always have an answer to that question. I'm reading to find out if they kiss. I'm reading to keep laughing. I'm reading to find out who did it. Etc. 

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Emily X.R. Pan is the New York Times bestselling author of THE ASTONISHING COLOR OF AFTER, which won the APALA Honor Award and Walter Honor Award. It was also a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, longlisted for the Carnegie Medal, and named by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 Best YA Books of All Time. Her latest novel, AN ARROW TO THE MOON, was an instant national bestseller, a Locus Award finalist, a CALA Award nominee, and featured on NPR’s Best Books of 2022. Emily is currently on faculty in the creative writing MFA programs at The New School and Vermont College of Fine Arts. You can find her on social media: @exrpan.

Creative Lab: TRUE REVISION with Elana K Arnold and Eliot Schrefer

Creative Lab: TRUE REVISION with Elana K Arnold and Eliot Schrefer

The plan ahead for our 7.5 hours together:

Session 1: What have I made? 

Taking a hard look at what we've actually made, rather than what we intended to make. We'll make a story map and looking at settings.

Session 2: What haven't I considered? We'll look at tension and scene building, as well at the rhythm of five pages. 

Session 3: The full novel diagnostic. We'll leave with a plan for working on the revision when we go home. 

So, friends, it looks like some productive work is in store. I'll give you a peek inside as we move through the three sessions. 

In this first session, we get a peek inside the way Eliot maps plot and Elena shares amazing insight to the ways setting can work even more for our stories. 

Here's a great suggestion and something you can try:

Elana and Eliot send off to consider what we love about our projects. This is an important consideration because we so often look at what's wrong with our work instead of what's right. Elana encourages us to lean into what we love and others love about our work. 

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In session 2, we are looking more micro-level; at sentences, openings, and scenes and how it all relates to the whole. 

Here's a takeaway that might be fun to look at:

Read the first paragraph of THE HUNGER GAMES. Note with each sentence what information it gave you and/or what question(s) has it made you consider. 

A tip from Elana: find what you think is the strongest scene in your book. Let it be the gold standard and know that all of your scenes can be just as good.

Here's a peek at the list generated of what attendees thought were key takeaways from day 1. (The last one will have to remain a mystery.) 

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In session three we are going into manuscript triage, making a list of all the things we need to do in order to get by the end of this draft, and ascribing deadlines that feel realistic. 

Here's a great tip from this morning's session: If you have family and friends who aren't writers, a great way to get feedback from them is to ask them to read the first half of the book and to report back on what they think is going to happen. Then you can decide what you want to fulfill and what you want to subvert. 

If you're wishing you were here in True Revision or were here and still want more, Elana will be teaching her Revision Season course online and she's offering a discount (Spring23). 

Creative Lab: Breaking the Frame: Exploring the Expanding Universe of Graphic Novel Illustration with Jen Wang

Jen Wang is the award-winning NYT Bestselling author and illustrator of several graphic novels for young readers including Stargazing, The Prince and The Dressmaker, In Real Life (co-written with Cory Doctorow), and Koko Be Good. She is also a co-founder and organizer for Comic Arts LA where she lives in Los Angeles.

She started off the graphic novel creative lab with Writing with Pictures: Applying Art to Narrative, a deep dive into the fundamentals of visual storytelling in comics. Jen shared how she uses her layouts, pacing, and panel composition to convey emotion, manipulate timing, and enhance the narrative. Jen doesn't consider herself an illustrator first. She really only illustrates for her stories, so she thinks of herself as a writer who does drawings to support her words.

Jen believes being a seasoned illustrator is not what makes for a great comic, it’s more important what you have to say. The combination of a personal style and voice is what makes it unique to that person.

Jen wants people to not feel intimidated to consider exploring, comics are a medium available to however you want to express yourself.

But they DO require an intensive amount of drawing, at minimum you’ll have done at least a hundred pages of drawing, if not more typically 200 pages! So by the time you’re done, you’ve basically Malcolm Gladwelled yourself into being a legit graphic novelist. Jen learned many things from her first forays into long-form comics, knowledge that continues to inform how she works even today.

Lessons on layouts, pacing, and panel composition are illustrated with examples from a variety of comic works, including Jen’s own books, as well as inspiration from film/tv and photography

Participants in the lab then did some simple drawing exercises to explore our voices and approach with the techniques learned during the lab.