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  • Do the Greatest Fictional Villains Come From Kid Lit?

    Mockingbird Author Kathryn Erskine named Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter series citing that “what makes him so creepy is that he and Harry are connected. The idea that we …

  • Beth Revis on the Importance of Representation

    “I know part of the reason why I’m more aware of the world around me, its diversity and its prejudice, is because of my friends, the ones I’ve made in …

  • E-Novellas Expand Popular Stories

    E-novellas, digital stories or short novels that expand on popular, traditionally-published YA books, have become increasingly popular — with writers such as Cassandra Clare and Lauren Oliver helping to further …

  • This Week on Girls Scouts’ The Studio: ‘My Life in Pink and Green’ Author Lisa Greenwald

    “Write every day, even if it’s just one sentence. Keep a journal and write whatever comes to mind. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling or punctuation. Just write. Read as …

  • 2013 Picture Book Month Champions Revealed

    Past participants include former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jon Scieszka, Newbery Honor Winner Kathi Appelt, and Chu’s Day Illustrator Adam Rex. This year’s champions are: David Adler, Dianna …

  • Are Nightly Bedtime Stories a Thing of the Past?

    “Just about every parent in the US has heard about the importance of regular reading with young children. Only one–third of parents with kids age eight and younger, however, make …

  • CBC Diversity: Authentically Me

    An It’s Complicated! — Authentic Voices guest post by author, Sharon G. Flake.

    Growing up I did not see the value in being my authentic self.  I was skinny, long-legged, and shy with big rabbit teeth.  Some adults and kids even called me Olive Oyl (Popeye’s Girlfriend) —enough said?

    I remember wanting to be like my neighbor Yolonda.  She could wear a blanket and look red-carpet ready.  I on the other hand, could never quite make fashion work, even today.

    By middle school comparing myself to others was a fine art.  There was the blond I sat next to who had the most exquisite handwriting.  For years I tried to emulate it.  In high school there was Pam. She absorbed information like a sponge.  Earning high A’s with ease or so it seemed.  I would study until my brain froze, only to end up with a lack luster B or C.

    Thank God for my freshmen college English class.  Before then, I do not recall feeling one-way or the other about writing.  Yet somehow my professor lit a flame in me. No longer did I need to be a carbon copy of others, at least on paper.  My writing was opinionated, fearless, and political. I was determined to use my work to give voice to the powerless.  And because I loved the community I grew up in, I never hesitated to draw on its strengths, challenges and uniqueness.

    Later on I found that being true to myself as a writer also helped me to appreciate the uniqueness of my writing process.  I kept silent about it for years.  You see, I do not write from an outline.  I do not know who my characters will be or what my story is or where it is going until the people and places emerge line by line. I get on my computer, like a cowboy on a horse, and ride.  I let the story take me where it will.  But like any good rider, I am in control of the reigns. Even using my boots to nudge the story in another direction if pushy characters or bad plotting try to take  over.

    I do know two things before I begin a novel, however.  I want to create memorable characters with strong connections to family and community. And I want everyone to find themselves in my stories.

    I have a reputation for creating diverse characters: A teacher with an unusual birth mark.  A 16-year-old boy about to be married. A struggling reader and star wrestler in love with a gifted, disabled student.

    My characters arise from my willingness to be authentic and my refusal to stereotype or limit them. In many ways, they probably have the courage I wish I had in my youth.  They voice their thoughts without reservations, in clever, understandable ways that keep readers engaged. Because of their forthrightness, young readers feel empowered to open up and be themselves also. Take the elementary school student who formed a group for gay students called The Skin I’m In.  Or the Caucasian girl who said one of my African-American male characters was her hero.  She felt he had given her advice about boys her absent father hadn’t.

    Here’s what I know for sure.  To be true to oneself and create authentic stories, a writer must begin from a place of love and appreciation.  Love for the craft.  Love for the characters and places she or he wishes to write about.  They must also develop an appreciation for imperfection and hard work.  For to create good stories, takes all of this and more, even using and coming to terms with the parts of ourselves that are still smarting.  That feels small, little and inauthentic—the real ‘us’ behind the stories we craft.

    Sharon G. Flake was born in Philadelphia, PA, and  have resided in Pittsburgh, PA, for  thirty years. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1978, with a B.A. in English. Flake was once a house parent, a counselor with youth placed in foster care, and a public relations representative. She is the author of eight books: Pinned (2012), You Don’t Even Know Me (2010), The Broken Bike Boy and the Queen of 33rd Street (2007), Bang! (2005), Who Am I Without Him? Short Stories About Boys and the Girls in Their Lives (2004), Begging for Change (2003), Money Hungry (2002), and The Skin I’m In (1998).

  • Common Core Standards Provoke Heated Debate

    Publishers Weekly’s Common Core Column launches with a survey of the new standard’s benefits and drawbacks, an interview with ALA President Barbara Stripling, and, given that “two-thirds of respondents to …

  • Ally Carter to Pen the Embassy Row Trilogy

    Levithan will edit the manuscripts. The first installment is set to be published in 2015. The story stars “a girl [who] goes to live with her grandfather – the most …

  • Children’s Illustrators Contribute to ‘We Art Boston’ Fundraiser

    Founded by author and illustrator Joe McKendry, We Art Boston is “an art auction showcasing the work of multiple artists to benefit the Boston Children’s Hospital Emergency and Trauma Fund” …

  • CBC Diversity: First, Know Yourself

    An It’s Complicated! — Authentic Voices guest post by author, Diana López.

    “Write about picking cotton,” my family said when they heard I wanted to be a writer.  “Write about how we used the fabric from flour sacks to make our dresses, and how Grandma hates fish because that’s all she ate during the Depression, since it didn’t cost anything for them to go fishing for food.”

    Closely examine my family, or any family, and you’ll discover all the drama of a telenovela.  Naturally, I wanted to write about being chastised for speaking Spanish, about living on a ranch in San Diego, about my grandmother being “Rosita the Riveter” during World War II.  I tried to write those stories.  But my only experience working the land comes from fifteen minutes in a field off Old Robstown Road where my parents showed us how to pick cotton.  It was interesting to feel the texture, so unlike a T-shirt, which is what I had imagined.

    My grandmother might have hated fish, but I loved it.  We had a boat that we’d take to Laguna Madre, where we’d compete to see who could catch the most, the biggest, or the strangest.  (Once, my brother caught a seagull when it chomped on the bait as he cast.)  Back home, Dad filleted the fish in the backyard, the cats begging and fighting over scraps. Then, Mom used cornmeal batter to fry the fish, and we ate, delicately picking meat off tiny bones.

    All this to say that my family’s experiences and the emotions associated with them are not exactly mine.

    So what do I know about writing from an authentic Mexican American perspective?  Of course, I do write from that perspective because that’s who I am, but one of the struggles I’ve faced is matching the expectations of two groups of readers—brown and white.  Interestingly, both often expect stories about characters who are recent immigrants, who speak Spanish, who are gardeners, maids, or nannies, and when I write stories about people who fall outside these categories, they are judged as “too mainstream” or “not Mexican enough.”

    While writing about the “authentic” Latino experience is important, I fear that sometimes other, equally authentic stories get overlooked.  For me, these are the stories inspired by my own childhood and by the experiences of my students and sobrinos.  Like me, they don’t know what it’s like to work in a field, to go hungry, to use the fabric from flour sacks to make their dresses.  Like me, they don’t know what it’s like to speak Spanish beyond a few phrases, and they feel saddened by the inability to have deep conversations with their Spanish-only grandparents but also proud to be fluent, even persuasive, in the English they hear at school, in the neighborhood, on TV.

    I used to worry that I wasn’t fulfilling my obligation to write what would be unquestionably categorized as Mexican American literature. But then I had this insight.  The Latinos in this country are wonderfully diverse.  They come from Mexico, Cuba, and Columbia; they come from San Antonio, Los Angeles, and Winston-Salem.  They are gardeners, maids, nannies, dentists, engineers, and mayors. 

    For those aspiring writers out there, accept that your experience may not fit neatly into a category because in order to write an authentic story, you must first understand and be true to yourself.

    Diana López, author of Confetti Girl, Choke, and Ask My Mood Ring How I Feel.

  • Four Actors Hired for the ‘Mockingjay’ Movie Cast

    Julianne Moore, a Golden Globe-winning actress, will play District 13 President Alma Coin. Natalie Dormer, regularly seen on HBO’s Game of Thrones, will take on the role of Filmmaker Cressida. …

  • CBC Diversity: It Doesn’t Have to Be True to Be Truthful

     
    An It’s Complicated! — Authentic Voices guest post by author, Alex London.

    Authenticity, that vicious guard-dog of truth, bedevils a teller of stories every step of the way. It is not enough to feel the truth of what you write or even to know it. The reader must feel you are right in the telling of it. An inauthentic voice can make even an honest memoir feel like a lie, while an authentic voice can make a whole pack of lies seem true. Just look to James Frey’s first book for proof of that.

    In writing my YA debut, Proxy, I struggled with authenticity early on. As a gay man who was once a gay teen, I had no trouble with my protagonist’s sexuality. I well-remembered the unrequited longings, the suppressed desire for a kiss that sometimes broke out as rage, and the feeling, ever-present, that my sexuality did not define me and that I could not let the world tell me it did.

    Syd, one of two main characters in Proxy, contains much of the truth of my own experience and the challenge there was the common challenge to all writing: to make sure I rendered him as vividly as I would want to be rendered myself. I had memories to draw on, fragmented conversations with my straight best-friend, felt truths that I could, with effort, put into words.

    The tricky parts were those other pieces of the puzzle that inform the identity of my protagonist, Syd. He is poor, orphaned, dark-skinned. I am none of those things. I share much more in common with the privileged pretty-boy of the story, Knox, who, other than being (quite) heterosexual, resembles young me far more than I’m comfortable admitting. I wrote his privilege to explore, question, reconcile, and problematize my own.

    But Syd…we share so little in common. Just because we might have the same romantic inclinations, I couldn’t presume his way of being in the world was anything like mine. To do so would have done the character, and the countless young people in our world whose lives do, to an extent, resemble his, a great disservice. Though set in a dystopian future, I drew much of the world of Proxy from my experiences as a journalist in refugee camps and urban slums around the world, where poverty, power, and competition crash into the free market and send earthquakes through the lives of millions of our world’s young. Syd shares more with those real-life children than with any ghosts of my own teenage years.

    So how to write him authentically? At first, I imagined myself a reporter, working once more with the young people I’d met and written about, the child soldiers in the Eastern Congo, the migrants along the Thai-Burma border, the isolated Roma of Kosovo and Bosnia. I began writing Syd for them, with as much empathy and imagination as I could. I quickly realized I could not write this character as a stand-in for any assumptions I had about any group. He’d be a hollow cut out of a person. While those years of research helped me capture the feeling of the slum I invented for Syd to live in, I had to make the character himself whole, with contradictions and complexities born of his circumstances but also born of his unique humanity. He would be ‘authentic’ if I could make him live.

    I found my way to Syd’s voice and to all the voices within Proxy the same way any character is conjured from the ether. I tried to imagine him fully. He was not me, nor a stand in for anyone else. He was himself.

    It was in writing Syd that I truly came to understand a secret to writing authentically is not to have lived the life your character inhabits—which is impossible in science fiction, and ridiculously limiting in all creative story telling—nor can it simply be produced by years of research—although research sure does help. Authenticity may be the guard-dog of truth, but it can be tamed by a simple technique that’s as challenging and necessary in fiction as in real life: empathy. Authenticity is the end result of writer putting in the work of empathy.

    Alex London, the author of Proxy, writes books for adults, children and teens. At one time a journalist who traveled the world reporting from conflict zones and refugee camps, he now is a full time novelist living in Brooklyn. You can visit Alex London at www.calexanderlondon.com

  • Two New YA Books Revisit 19th Century Classics

    Summer is officially over: two beloved Gothic novels, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are emerging from their graves just in time for Halloween. The Los Angeles Times reports, “Australian …

  • It’s Complicated!: Authentic Voices Series Continues

    One week down, one more week to go! 
     
    Last week this It’s Complicated! series highlighted authors who wrote brilliantly from outside of their perspectives including Graham Salisbury, Elizabeth Kiem, Walter Dean Myers, A.S. King, and Patricia McCormick. Some great takeaways?
    A writer writes, and doesn’t really worry much about complaints, anyway. We’re seeking the dramatic and emotional intricacies of life wherever and however we can find them. Our job is to explore them, enlighten ourselves, and try our best to move our readers. We may all look different, but we are all intimately and infinitely connected. We are one. We are beings with parallel heartbeats. The only race out there is the human one.—Graham Salisbury, Parallel Heartbeats
    My central characters all have some aspects of my personality. I don’t intend to write this way but it’s inevitable. I know I can use my personal view to create a character of depth, but I have to vary that character so that I’m not constantly writing the same book over and over again.—Walter Dean Myers, Character Development
    My characters are me. I couldn’t write them if they weren’t. None of my characters are autobiographical, but every one of them is human and so am I. In the end, we all have too much in common to go on separating ourselves. We eat and we poop. We are born and we die. We struggle through. While diversity is a celebration of every type of human, I am most interested in that humanness that connects us.—A.S. King, What is Personal Perspective, Really?
    It’s Complicated!: Authentic Voices continues this week by looking at insider authors who craft outstanding stories featuring protagonists that in some way relate to a part of their personal identity.
     
    First up? Alex London, author of the new dystopian novel Proxy. Get ready for some truth bombs later today. To get you started, here’s a teaser from his upcoming post It Doesn’t Have to Be True to Be Truthful:
    Just because we might have the same romantic inclinations, I couldn’t presume his way of being in the world was anything like mine. To do so would have done the character, and the countless young people in our world whose lives do, to an extent, resemble his, a great disservice.
    As always, we look forward to reading your comments and questions that are brought up by any of the posts you read on CBC Diversity. Let’s keep this conversation going, shall we?

  • 23 Top Illustrators Discuss Their Craft

    “I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. …

  • Author Meg Medina Recounts Censorship Battle

    “The timing could not have been more ironic. September is the month when the American Library Association celebrates Banned Book Week, our annual reminder about the importance of intellectual freedom.” Read the full …

  • Daily Beast to Announce National Book Awards Longlist

    “The National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards, will partner exclusively with The Daily Beast to announce its 2013 Longlists. The categories consist of ten books each from the genres …

  • New James Patterson Series on the Way

    2014 will mark the arrival of two new middle-grade series from the prolific James Patterson, bestselling writer of middle-grade, YA, and adult fiction. Homeroom Diaries, cowritten with Lisa Papademetriou, chronicles the life …

  • Publishers Weekly Provides Common Core Toolkit

    “As the beginning of the school year gets underway many are continuing to prepare for the Common Core. Schools across the nation are at various stages of implementation. Publishers and …

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