Masterclass: E How to Hook and Keep Your Reader with Humour with Mira Reisberg

At Mira Reisberg’s keynote presentation at the beginning of the SCBWI Conference 2019 she said a lot of things that were not only true but also inspirational but one piece of advice stuck with me especially – always read picture books (or any kidlit book really) twice. The first time for pleasure and the second time for analysis. When you do this you will discover quickly what works and why.

Images of Mira’s Keynote presentation courtesy of Liz Anelli

A fantastic example for this is humour in picture books or middle grade. Fun and humour, if delivered well, will always make a manuscript better. In her masterclass Mira firstly separated the audience in picture books and MA analysists of humour.

Techniques considered to help induce humour to your writing (or illustrating) are:

- Anthromorphism (eg. A friendly duck doctor)

- Personification

- Dark humour

- Self-deprecating humour

- Irony/ sarcasm

- Hyperbole/ exaggeration

- Contradiction

- Incongruity or surrealism (talking fridge)

- Slapstick/ physical humour (slipping on a banana peel)

- Gross/ potty humour

- Contrast characters

- Parody

- Joke telling

- Mashups

- Surprise/ defiant humour

- Wordplay

- Visual humour

For full details on Mira’s presentation and a copy of the slideshow, click on this link, here.

Attendants were then asked to join an exercise by coming up with or using one of their own texts paragraphs and include the word “no!” as much as possible as an example of exaggerated humour.

Kids love when something they are faced with on a daily basis is incorporated and played with in texts. It hooks them in. The results were fascinating – loveable silly and funny texts that gave the original text a whole different, humorous approach.

The next group exercise was a fun play with fear. Attendants were asked to take an everyday stressful or fear-inducing event for kids and change the characters into Halloween genre characters. This character then had to tackle a fearful event and form a story of less than 500 words which showed the consequences, aftermath or celebration of this event, even including an end with a fun twist. This exercise was supported with a worksheet that introduced certain elements with the help of columns in a very structured way.

As an illustrator, I really enjoyed the exercise for introducing visual humour to a graphic novel excerpt. I chose contradiction as means to add humour and came up with the character of “King Ivan Important” – a tiny king who wants to be as significant as his big wife, the queen. In order to achieve this he buys himself a very long-legged horse and appears quite big now. Very much to the dismay of the queen who starts plotting against him. The play of contradiction between power and tiny body size could be very appealing in a children’s story. (Indeed! Can’t wait to see / read this one, Katrin. Ed.)

Attendants left this brilliant masterclass with a suitcase full of new ideas and worksheet material as well as Mira’s detailed slides.

by Katrin Dreiling

#SCBWISyd

Masterclass D: Picture Books with Essie White

Storm Literary agent/partner Essie White is passionate about creating beautiful and meaningful books for children. Her passion started as an educator when she learnt that providing children with exceptional literature was imperative in education.

Five years ago, Essie made the seamless transition from educator to agent – both careers harbour a true love for children’s literature.

“YOU NEED GRAB CHILDREN’S ATTENTION FROM THE VERY BEGINNING”

Essie’s masterclass was generous and thorough providing all participants with important takeaways.

• Title – make it good and alert the reader to the concept. The title must also set the tone, introduce the character and setting.

• First sentence – make it better than the title. It must snag attention and hold it immediately.

• Narrative Arc – start with a great plot and begin with a ‘bang’. Immediately alert the reader to the crisis and establish the character’s motivation. Motivation drives the story forward. The protagonist responds to the crisis or cause which results in ACTION. The Protagonist then overcomes!

• Create a satisfying ending – bring the story full circle. It must also resonate deeply.

• Unforgettable Characters – ensure they are fully developed and they are authentic, memorable and create merchandising opportunities.

• Language and word choice – Be selective – 500 to 750 words or less. Non-Fiction can be longer.

• Verbs – Vivid, Active, and Visual!

• Cadence – rising and falling of voice.

• Convey emotion – be authentic to the character

• Avoid rhyme (it does work occasionally).

Essie outlined some Universal Themes in picture books.:

• Firsts: First day of school, first pet, first birthday, first unicorn costume!

• Momentous Events: New baby, new pet, Doctor visit etc.

• Relationships: Parents, siblings, grandparents, neighbours, teachers, community members

• Animals and more!

“A GOOD BOOK EMPOWERS AND GIVES PURPOSE, IT KEEPS KIDS THINKING.”

The necessary collaboration between author and illustrator

Author –

1. Provide illustration notes but give artist room to breathe

2. Share research/background info

3. Offer feedback on sketches (when asked)

Illustrator –

1. Do your research (especially non-fiction)

2. Accuracy is imperative

3. Be selective

4. Sometimes your vision needs to be flexible.

Illustrations should:

• Help children understand what they are reading.

• They should enhance the text and move the narrative forward.

• Stimulate imagination and allow children to analyse.

• Help create the mood of the story.

• Must have storytelling capabilities and establish the primary character…especially in wordless picture books (very popular in the US right now).

Essie also spoke about the use of shapes and colours to create mood and feelings in illustrations.

• Yellow – hope

• Red – anger

• Blue – calm

• Grey – gloom

• Circle – warmth, completeness, wholesome

• Rectangles – ridgity, inflexibility, enclosed

• Triangles – Hierarchy, power, strong, solidarity, substantive

Click on the video for a visual snapshot of the session by Roving Reporter, Giuseppe Poli.

Essie’s final message was so important.

The goal of picture books should be to:

Provide a beautiful experience that leaves the reader impacted, empowered, challenged and changed. Good children’s literature is transformative!

by Rachel Noble

#SCBWISyd

Masterclass C: Writing Great Dialogue with Zoe Walton

How to take your MG and YA dialogue to the next level

Zoe Walton’s practical masterclass on Writing Great Dialogue provided an excellent opportunity to learn, reflect and ultimately improve our dialogue writing skills. Zoe mentioned that the dialogue in a story is often one of the first things that makes a book stand out to a publisher.

Zoe Walton with some of her favourite examples of books with great dialogue

Zoe’s top tips for writing great dialogue:

• Punctuation is important. Revision of basic punctuation rules and styles were addressed regarding attribution tags, when to use a full stop versus a comma.

• Currently, publishers generally prefer simple attribution tags as they essentially disappear and don’t intrude upon the story. For example, ‘said’ is most preferred, but also ‘asked’ ‘replied’ etc.

• Zoe recommended the book Self-editing for fiction writers and discussed the preference for strong verbs, and few/no adverbs.

• You don’t always need a dialogue tag, as long as the context clearly indicates who is speaking, however, it may be preferable to use especially with younger readers who are still learning the conventions of language.

• Use beats (actions to break up dialogue) effectively – to illuminate your story, control pacing, show context and who is doing what. Don’t overuse or insert irrelevant actions and keep consistent (e.g. if remove hat early in the dialogue, remember to pick it up on the way out)

• Find a balance between simple dialogue tags, no tags and beats.

• Search your writing for your bad habits in beats – e.g. actions you frequently overuse for your characters, such as everyone nods or shrugs or sighs or has many ways of smiling or you always talk about what people’s eyes are doing.

“THE PURPOSE OF DIALOGUE IS TO REVEAL CHARACTER AND SHOW INTENTION”

The purposes of dialogue include to reveal character and show intention in all our scenes. However, dialogue is not real speech, it is designed to give the illusion of real speech. Real speech has all sorts of filler words, half-finished sentences, interruptions, etc. Also, people don’t always say what they mean, or they lie. Use the things we do in real life speech, but wisely and sparingly, so that it sounds real (not like a pre-memorised speech). When writing dialogue, ask yourself:

• How can dialogue inform character and plot?

• What characters say (or don’t say) and how they say it tells a lot about them

• Can use dialogue to foreshadow, throw red herrings, propel plot, build suspense, precipitate the climax, etc.

• Authenticity

• Dialogue needs to be authentic to the character, e.g. age, era, socio-economic class, education level, etc

• What does the character like or dislike?

• What do they eat, wear, do, etc?

• Aim to write dialogue that shows a rounded character, e.g. not just bossy or formal etc, different elements just like in a real person.

When revising your dialogue, ask yourself:

• Would this character say this?

• Would a teen or child say this?

Zoe also recommended another book called The Magic Words by Cheryl Klein.

Zoe getting class members to ‘speak easy’ aka write dialogue

Exercises

There were many opportunities to practise skills during the masterclass. For example, attendees were asked to consider their protagonist and how they would have learned the language they use:

• What was the environment and household like that they grew up in?

• What is their favourite book, band, movie, song on the radio?

• Who do they hang out with – e.g. peers, adults, younger kids?

• Do they have distinct characteristics from their influences?

• What do they like to do? Remember characters like people, have multiple aspects, e.g. do they run marathons but also hide chocolate in the cupboard?

• Remember, your characters likes and dislikes will inform their dialogue.

Now create two columns:

1. in column 1, list things about your character (from the questions above and more)

2. in column 2, write some dialogue they might say that stems from the point in column 1.

Final tips

• Don’t overuse accents

• In general, don’t use odd phonetic spelling for a character’s dialogue – it can confuse younger readers and not always be interpreted as you intend

• Find words or phrases that are different from how other characters speak.

• Remember, the same character will act and speak a bit differently when they are with different people (e.g. with parent, friend, teacher)

• Be wary of using slang and do not use stereotypical language, e.g. if someone has English as a second language, do not use language that could be seen as insulting, in fact they may be more likely to have a formal manner of speaking depending on how and where they learnt English.

• When displaying a character’s thoughts, either keep in normal font or in italics, never in quotation marks.

• Be very aware to never use racist, sexist or ableist language (e.g. words like crazy, dumb, idiot, etc).

• Make sure your characters are unique individuals, not stereotypes. Never portray characters in a way that may be harmful to readers.

• Avoid info-dumps – weave back story in or remove it.

Zoe recommended another book called The Art of Editing.

The masterclass concluded with a reminder to listen to conversations all around us and some advice based on the work of Joseph Conrad: every word must carry the story forward, and it must be carried faster and faster and more intensely.

by Cherri Ryan

#SCBWISyd