Keynote: Stephanie Garber

Stephanie Garber is the #1 New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of THE CARAVAL SERIES, which has been translated in over 25 languages. Her newest book, ONCE UPON A BROKEN HEART, came out late last year and is the start of a brand new series.

Before being agented or published (and at the time also unemployed) Stephanie tells us the story about being on a date and getting asked what she wanted to do with her life. When she replied that she hoped to be on the NYT best seller list one day... The date went sideways. She felt so ashamed, embarrassed, and rejected that she stopped sharing her dream out loud. And when Stephanie learned about SCBWI, these same feelings kept her reluctant to join and fearing the worst until she attended her first conference which Stephanie described as life changing.

Some of those life-changing keynotes from SCBWI conferences were given by Lin Oliver, Richard Peck, and Mac Barnett. And from those inspiring keynotes Stephanie started to gain confidence again in having her big, NYT list dream. Though Stephanie had a full-time job at a college, the writing she was doing in her spare time as her passion project turned out to be a much better match than that original jerky date and she found herself falling in love with writing stories. For her, pursuing publication was the only way she could see being able to afford to write full time.

Stephanie is a big fan of big goals and dreams and says, "Goals and dreams don't need to be explained or justified, but they should be big and out of reach. Big, impossible dreams make for big goals and big writing... Have a dream so big that it makes other people laugh, those are the dreams that bring stories to life."

Stephanie found that burying her big NYT dream made her writing suffer and made her feel like she wasn't herself. When she tried to make her dreams "more practical" she found she stopped having fun and was writing from a place of fear. Great, big-goal writing needs three things. Here are the first two:

1."You have to banish fear," says Stephanie, "Fear shrinks your brain and makes you less creative, even if we don't know the science behind that we know we can feel that. Look for the fears you may not know you have but that may be holding you back, discover your fears so you can banish them." 

2. Write with your superpower, but do you know what that power is and are you currently using it? Stephanie was compared to Anne Shirley a lot as a kid, she was very dramatic—crying wasn't just crying, it was wailing in the depths of despair. But there's more to Anne than emoting, it's how she sees the whole world through a lens of romance and drama. Stephanie loves that lens, too, and writes romance, drama and settings that feel beautifully alive. Your superpower might not be something you love about yourself, at first, but try fully embracing it and see how that changes your writing.

Stephanie says 50% of writing and publishing is simply failing, so accept that and then ask yourself: 

If you knew whatever you wrote would succeed, what would you write? What kind of story would you want to tell?

Kat Brzozowski: Writing YA Romance

Kat Brzozowski is an editor at Swoon Reads/Feiwel & Friends. She acquires YA for Feiwel & Friends and edits crowdsourced YA manuscripts for Swoon Reads. Previously, she was an editor at Thomas Dunne Books, a division of St. Martin’s Press. She has worked on a wide range of young adult fiction, including Anna-Marie McLemore's When the Moon was Ours, which was longlisted for a National Book Award, and the new Fear Street books in R.L. Stine’s best-selling series, which has sold over eighty million copies worldwide. 

Kat starts her talk by sharing some romance writing basics:


You need tension between your characters, things can't just be easy, and you can't throw in an easy obstacle. Odds are if a character sees somebody cute on the first page, they are going to fall for each other, and we do love that familiar beginning, but you still need to insert real obstacles.

Examples of good obstacles include: Families at odds; different social or economic classes; past heart breaks that are impeding current relationships; different priorities and goals or values (college bound or not for example). What hangs in the balance if they do or don't get together? The whole world ending or just their relationship?




You can't just have romantic longing in a story, Kat says, there needs to be actions that unfold in the book that the romance is tied up in. What sacrifices or changes are they going to make to stay or begin that relationship?

The emotional states of the characters will also need to change from beginning to end, and you'll need to be able to describe physical attraction appropriate to your audience's age.

Kat has us read some meet cute scenes from two books, Kim Karalius's LOVE CHARMS AND OTHER DISASTERS and Cindy Ansley's LOVE, LIES, AND SPIES.




The group discusses the similarities and differences between the two scenes, and then Kat invites everyone to take a setting and a meet cute prompt which she's provided and do some hands on writing.