Tag Archives: revision

What to Take on Your Writer’s Journey #3: Be Ready to Nix Your Darlings

09 Wednesday Feb 2022

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by Rieko Mendez

Editor’s Note: This is the third and final installment on What to Take on Your Writer’s Journey. 

Now that you are prioritizing feedback with your community of writers and hopefully scratching the surface on — if not digging to the core of — answering the question “why must you write this book?” from my earlier articles, let’s talk about the most important step in being a writer: revisions, many revisions.

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What to Take on Your Writer’s Journey #2: Ask Why Must You Write This Book?

05 Wednesday Jan 2022

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by Rieko Mendez

Photo by Anna Tarazevich on Pexels.com

Editor’s Note: This is the second of three installments on What to Take on Your Writer’s Journey. Look for the third installment next month that will explore deeper revision.

I’ve been writing YA fiction seriously for the last five years. Like many of you, I’ve immersed myself in books on the writing craft and consumed every minute of workshops I could afford. Early in the pandemic, I lived for those free SCBWI digital workshops. In these blog posts, I want to share something different — the less obvious, yet crucial insights that upped the game in my writing journey.

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#KTWriteOn with Author Elana K. Arnold: Before Revising Work, Consider Re-Visioning Your Core Beliefs

07 Wednesday Apr 2021

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Welcome to the Kite Tales Writing Challenge: #KTWriteOn. Each writing challenge is crafted by a kid-lit publishing professional to help spark ideas, renew creative energy, and get your work moving out into the world.

This exercise was created by Elana K. Arnold, author of critically acclaimed and award-winning young adult novels and children’s books, including the Printz Honor winner Damsel, the National Book Award finalist What Girls Are Made Of, and Global Read Aloud selection A Boy Called Bat and its sequels. Elana teaches in Hamline University’s MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program and lives in Southern California with her family and menagerie of pets. Today she’s challenging us to revise our work by first taking a look at what we believe about ourselves.

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Agent Jennifer Tran on Querying and the Agent-Client Relationship

10 Wednesday Jul 2019

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Jennifer-Chen-TranAgent Jennifer Chen Tran is on faculty for this year’s SCBWI-L.A. Working Writers Retreat (WWR).

She joined the Bradford Literary in 2017, and represents fiction and nonfiction. She’s interested in diverse writers and #ownvoices from underrepresented/ marginalized communities, strong and conflicted characters who are not afraid to take emotional risks, stories about multi-generational conflict, war and post-war fiction, and writing with a developed sense of place. In non-fiction, she loves books that broaden her world view or shed new light on “big ideas.”

Originally from New York, Jennifer was an associate agent at Fuse Literary and served as Counsel at The New Press before becoming an agent at Bradford Literary. She obtained her Juris Doctor from Northeastern School of Law and her B.A. in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

She took some time to answer our questions about her work, how first-time authors can shine, and her wishlist.

ERLINA VASCONCELLOS: What are the biggest mistakes made by first-time authors? 

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