Short takes from NTTBF: how do you write?

 Happy day! My book shipment from this month’s North Texas Teen Book Festival just arrived, including several from members of the festival’s Fantastical Tales panel, where B. B. Alston, Prince Joel Makonnen, Kwame Mbalia, Lisa McMann, and Shannon Messenger answered questions about every aspect of their writing lives. Including (for Messenger) “Is it true you still sleep with a stuffed animal?” panel moderator Kristen Dickson asked.

Messenger, author of the Keepers of the Lost Cities series, has no bones about admitting her devotion to an adorable stuffed toy which was the basis for one of her characters. “How do you sleep without a stuffed animal,” she asked. “I don’t know what to do with my arms!”

Fantastical Tales panel, NTTBF

Mbalia admitted to a less charming animal episode – falling through mats of swamp vegetation, then walking home through a forest crawling with copperhead (snakes). “That’s when I decided the outdoors was not for me!” (Luckily, he went on to become the New York Times best-selling author of the Tristan Strong series, which requires relatively little contact with venomous animals in the flesh.)

And Prince Joel Makonnen (pronounced “Yoel”)? Yes, he really is a prince. “People ask if ‘prince’ is my first name or just a cool title I like to use.” The truth is, neither of the above. He really is a member of the royal family of Ethiopia! But when he’s not running a real-life media empire, he collaborates with Mbalia on the middle-grade fantasy, Last Gate of the Emperor, due out May 4.

OK, so we had a panel of multiply published authors. Surely, their peers recognized them early on for their genius, yes? Well, not actually.  

B.B. Alston took his debut novel, Amari and the Night Brothers, to his writing group, “and they said, ‘you’re not going to sell a kid’s fantasy with a Black main character!’” (Luckily, his agent disagreed!)

Still, there must be some deep, dark secret to success. Maybe their early reading experience? (Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, mainly, Mbalia says, but also notes “an author I probably wasn’t supposed to read – Walter Mosley and his Devil in a Blue Dress, or basically anything in Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series.)

Or maybe the secret is their play lists?

“Panda cams!” is the favorite of McMann, another one of those NYT-bestsellers, with so many series to her credit she had to count them on her fingers to be sure. (Unwanteds series, Unwanteds Quests, Vision Trilogy, Going Wild series, Wake Trilogy, plus assorted stand alones.)

Messenger prefers Ambient Sounds (various versions available, including from YouTube). Prince Joel prefers Café Jazz on YouTube but also likes – just plain silence.

And Alston? His reply makes him an author after my own heart: “I have to have noise-cancelling headphones – complete silence at all times!”

***

Still to come – that secret, never before disclosed, begging to be exploited age gap in YA fiction I mentioned in a previous post? Stay tuned!

Short takes from NTTBF: how to write jokes

 I admit – I can’t think of anything harder to write than humor. But between the COVID-19 pandemic, economic catastrophes, and – in my part of the world – an apocalyptic power outage – I was desperately in need of a dose of good cheer.

The title of a session at the recent North Texas Teen Book Festival was “Jeff Kinney on writing jokes.” The Jeff Kinney, whose Diary of a Wimpy Kid book series could brighten even the gruesomeness of adolescence? I added it to my “must-see” list. And that was before learning it included junk food. (Double-stuffed Oreo cookies are among his inspirations.)

Asked how he writes stories, Kinney said, “I always start with the jokes,” but how he comes up with those has changed over time.

Jeff Kinney 

He originally started, as writers often do, with what he knew – collecting all the funny things he could remember from his own life. That aspect alone spanned nearly four years. But the series grew. And grew. And then the hard part came – creating new jokes.

He tried all the usual methods for juicing creativity: taking walks, mowing the lawn, (probably) devouring junk food. This actually got him through nearly a dozen books. Then he found a method. (Were Oreos still involved? Inquiring minds want to know.)

The method was called systematic creative thinking, a methodology originally designed for engineering problems, which can only show how truly desperate Kinney’s search for humor had become.

You can look it up. Or you can use the three-part cheat sheet Kinney devised:

1.     Take something and count its individual parts

2.     Take those parts and add, subtract, or divide them

3.     Ask whether the result is something is a product somebody could actually use

Here’s Kinney’s simplified illustration. Take a pair of eyeglasses, which have only two basic parts: lenses and frames. Consider taking away the lenses and ask, could anybody use a pair of eyeglass frames on their own?

Surprisingly, the answer is, yes. “How about celebrities who want to look intellectual for a camera shoot but don’t want those distracting reflections?”

Even easier, consider removing the frames from your eyeglasses. Shrink the resulting lenses down and you have contact lenses.

Useful, but not particularly funny. (Except in the case of the vain would-be intellectual.) But for a Wimpy Kid book, consider starting with a kid on an airplane and listing all the parts on that plane (“including the barf bags,” Kinney noted because, hey, he’s Kinney).

Then, think about what can be subtracted. How about the pilot? To most of us, a pilot-less plan would be the stuff of nightmares. Luckily for anyone with a fear of flying, in Kinney’s case, it became the basis for a joke in his 12^th book, The Getaway. From then on, systematic process became Kinney’s joke-generating mechanism of choice, the superpower that enables him to write two books yearly.

It’s not his only superpower, of course. There’s also his now-revealed secret COVID-era writing place – the local cemetery (nice and quiet!). And snacks. Plenty of snacks. Because writers got to keep their strength up! 

***

Still to come from the North Texas Teen Book Festival – what do fantasy writers sleep with (please, the PG version!), what’s great about reading things too old for you, the secret age gap of YA heroes, and more!

Writers conferences show the love, virtual or not

Will writers let a pandemic stand in their way? No way! Although many 2021 literary conferences are still treading water, sometimes pushing their events late into fall to allow in-person attendance, others brave the virtual waters. I’m presenting a selection of these – with emphasis on my own North Texas area – as well as tantalizing bits from further afield. Because, in the virtual world there are no boundaries. All times are in Central Time unless otherwise noted.

Now – March 13: The San Miguel Writers’ Conference continues a virtual season on Zoom. Still to come – Diana Gabaldon (Outlander series) February 13 at 6 p.m., Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman) March 7 at 6 p.m., and Jorge F. Hernandez and Margo Glantz on the Mexican tradition in literature March 13 at 6 p.m., more. Monthly passes $125, individual events generally $25. See the site for details and to register.

February 25: The Highland Park Literary Festival presents New York Times bestseller and multiple award-winning author Téa Obreht as keynote speaker at 7p.m. The event is free and open to the public but viewers must register. Obreht became the youngest recipient of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2011 for her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife. In 2019, Barack Obama named her second novel, Inland, as one of his favorite books of the year, unfolding in the drought-ridden Arizona Territory in 1893 and recreating the myth of the American West. To buy Obreht’s books and help support the HP LitFest, please visit the Interabang Books LitFest page.

March 5-6: North Texas Teen Book Festival 2021 now coming to you on YouTube! More details to come, but at this point, more than 80 middle grade and young adult authors, graphic novelists and YouTube celebrities are scheduled to appear. These include John Green (Fault in Our Stars), Taina Telgemeier (Guts), Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine series) and of course, more! Keynote speakers include Chelsea Clinton and Newbery Medal winner Katherine Applegate. Free. I’ll post more as information becomes available.

Image: Pixabay

June 21-27: Historical Novel Society North America’s 2021 conference will be virtual. Early-bird registration opens February 15-March, at $219 for HNS members, $249 for nonmembers. This year’s guest of honor is Lisa See (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, and more), with special presenters Libbie Hawker and Jane Friedman and master classes with Hawker, Friedman, Alma Katsu, Gillian Bagwell, Melissa Danaczko and Cate Harte.

June 28-July 10:  Thrillerfest XVI. Registration for this virtual conference is open although the website is still a little wonky. Options include master class ($399), consulting ($75) and pitching ($50) sessions and more, including a free “Best First Sentence Contest.” Deadline for registration by mail as well as entries for the Best First Sentence Contest is June 15. 

***

Meanwhile, some conferences normally scheduled for early summer have pushed their dates into late summer and fall in hopes of once again operating in-person. These include the DFW Writers Workshop Conference and the Writers’ League of Texas conference.

August 25-29:  Bouchercon, the world mystery conference, plans to hold its 2021 conference in-person in New Orleans. Registration is $195, with hotel registrations also available. See the site for schedules and guests of honor.

September 17-19: The Writers’ League of Texas conference in Austin is now scheduled for September 17-19. I will update as more information becomes available.

September 17-19: These are also the dates of FenCon, the Dallas-area science fiction/fantasy convention. More information to come.

October: The DFW Writers Workshop conference, as I learned at a recent meeting for members, is scheduled, probably for mid-October, although the conference website still shows the June 2021 dates originally posted with the 2020 conference was cancelled. Again, more information to come.

What’s still up in the air? Writefest in Houston, normally a week-long, late spring event, hopes to go in-person in the fall, but no dates are available as of this posting.

I don’t have any information about the fate of WORDfest, usually held in March. In 2020, this big-tent 'all-you-can-meet' literary event brought over 20 North Texas writers’ organizations and more than 300 writers together virtually last August. Still waiting to see if it will happen again.