Craft Articles

Join us in exploring others’ craft and building our own.

Here you will find explorations of mentor texts – articles that dive into specific craft elements in published books, interviews with authors, and tips on growing and improving as a writer.

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Crafting Characters: Getting to Know Your Character By Thinking and Listening
Middle Grade, Picture Books, Young Adult Anne-Marie Strohman Middle Grade, Picture Books, Young Adult Anne-Marie Strohman

Crafting Characters: Getting to Know Your Character By Thinking and Listening

Welcome to our second post in our Crafting Characters series. For some people, working out character before putting pen to paper is the best way forward. Others have characters show up nearly fully formed, or at least with enough substance to have something to say. Those people often make efforts to listen to their characters--whether through freewriting, through scenes, or through meditative daydreaming. These authors and our contributors share their favorite ways to develop their characters. Read on for some mindful strategies for uncovering character and letting the characters speak.

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Crafting Characters: Getting to Know Your Character Through Freewriting
Middle Grade Anne-Marie Strohman Middle Grade Anne-Marie Strohman

Crafting Characters: Getting to Know Your Character Through Freewriting

Welcome to our first post of our April 2022 series, Crafting Character. Character is the driving force of the story, but actually letting character drive our stories can be tricky. That's where KidLit Craft comes in. We've asked authors and our contributors to share their favorite ways to develop their characters--by getting to know them, exploring character desire, and focusing on core relationships.

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KidLit Craft's Comprehensive Guide to Character
Middle Grade, Picture Books, Young Adult Anne-Marie Strohman Middle Grade, Picture Books, Young Adult Anne-Marie Strohman

KidLit Craft's Comprehensive Guide to Character

Looking at voice, interiority, internal arc, character relationships, and more, our writers have analyzed mentor texts in all categories to discover strategies for creating characters that leap off the page and into readers' hearts. This list is one you can return to over and over to find just the post you need in the moment.

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The Heroine’s Journey in The Beast Player by Nahoko Uehashi
Middle Grade, Young Adult Jen Jobart Middle Grade, Young Adult Jen Jobart

The Heroine’s Journey in The Beast Player by Nahoko Uehashi

The Heroine’s Journey celebrates the gifts of the matriarch. It explores themes of family, community, collaboration, cooperation, and love. As an author, and as a person, it’s important to me to write books that support those values, so everyone who reads them can be inspired to evolve toward a more feminine, collaborative, resilient society. To illustrate the points I make in this post, I’ll be examining the Heroine’s Journey of Elin in The Beast Player, a Japanese YA fantasy by Nahoko Uehashi. Elin’s story is an excellent example of the Heroine’s Journey.

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Heroine Super Powers: Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls
Middle Grade Jen Jobart Middle Grade Jen Jobart

Heroine Super Powers: Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls

In order to understand how a heroine grows into her superpowers, I followed the heroine’s journey closely in three movies: Elsa in Frozen, Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Meg in A Wrinkle in Time. I identified a common pattern for a superheroine’s recognition of and acceptance of her superpowers. Then I applied what I learned to analyze CeCe Rios and the Desert of Souls, a middle grade novel by Kaela Rivera to translate what I found in films to what might work in a novel.

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Emotional Resonance Is Key: A Q&A with Tanita S. Davis
Author Interview, Middle Grade Kristi Wright Author Interview, Middle Grade Kristi Wright

Emotional Resonance Is Key: A Q&A with Tanita S. Davis

A lot of people want to be allies, or seen as friendly and open to the idea of friendship across races, cultures and social strata. This idea of “just talk to each other” may seem like it’s wildly oversimplified, but it turns out that if you want to know someone, it really is that simple. You may be nothing like a diehard gardener or wide-eyed tween, but if you’re willing to see a potential connection between the two of you, it will be there.

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KidLit Craft Goes to the Movies: The Emotional Antagonist in Eddie the Eagle
Middle Grade, Picture Books, Young Adult Anne-Marie Strohman Middle Grade, Picture Books, Young Adult Anne-Marie Strohman

KidLit Craft Goes to the Movies: The Emotional Antagonist in Eddie the Eagle

Some great stories make use of what Melanie Jacobson calls the emotional antagonist. The emotional antagonist is on the protagonist’s side, but the protagonist doesn’t have their approval or support.Jacobson believes emotional antagonist can be a powerful addition to a book because it gives a story an extra satisfying ending–a resolution with the emotional antagonist. We can see the emotional antagonist in action in Eddie the Eagle (2015).

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What We Read in 2021: Middle Grade
Middle Grade Anne-Marie Strohman Middle Grade Anne-Marie Strohman

What We Read in 2021: Middle Grade

This blog grew out of a middle grade book group for writers, held in Menlo Park, California, and we're still going strong. Each month, we discuss a middle grade book with an eye to craft. (Last year, I wrote about strategies for starting your own craft book group.) Here's our list of books from 2021, with a sneak peek at our first few books of 2022. We hope they inspire your reading!

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How to Write a Crowd Scene: Rita Williams-Garcia’s A Sitting in St. James
Middle Grade, Young Adult Anne-Marie Strohman Middle Grade, Young Adult Anne-Marie Strohman

How to Write a Crowd Scene: Rita Williams-Garcia’s A Sitting in St. James

Rita Williams-Garcia masters the crowd scene--a dinner at the midpoint of the book. In a movie, it’s easy to see the crowd and feel the energy in the room. In fiction, it’s more complicated--you need to balance the minute and individual with the group so that readers feel grounded in the environment and in the particular characters’ interactions.

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It Starts with a Daydream: A Q&A with Rita Williams-Garcia
Author Interview, Middle Grade, Young Adult Anne-Marie Strohman Author Interview, Middle Grade, Young Adult Anne-Marie Strohman

It Starts with a Daydream: A Q&A with Rita Williams-Garcia

I fully transport myself from my reality into the world that I seek to create. In a word, I daydream. Deeply. I put myself with the character, close to the character, sometimes in the character, to taste the dirt when they're in the dust storm or feel the scratchy bristles of cane stalk whip my face. Then I write it. Later, I make adjustments, because what I have to understand is different from what the reader should feel. Sometimes I have to rein it in or pull back. It's not always the point that the reader should feel each and everything—but the writer must!  

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Making a Mystery that Mystifies: Part 2
Middle Grade, Young Adult Erin Nuttall Middle Grade, Young Adult Erin Nuttall

Making a Mystery that Mystifies: Part 2

Good mysteries are fun because they keep the reader guessing. One of the most important keys of writing a mystery is writing the story so the reader can try to solve it. Nothing’s more annoying than not being given clues to solve the mystery unless those clues are so obvious that there is no real mystery to be solved. The best way to achieve both goals is to give quality clues but constantly keep the reader guessing so they don’t recognize the clues for what they are.

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The Wacky and the Unexpected: Q&A with Mary Winn Heider
Author Interview, Middle Grade Erin Nuttall Author Interview, Middle Grade Erin Nuttall

The Wacky and the Unexpected: Q&A with Mary Winn Heider

"The biggest leap for me in my writing life happened when I got comfortable with failure. I wrote some disastrous things in grad school. But before that, my writing had gotten stagnant because I was too anxious about getting it right all the time. Allowing myself to fail gave me the freedom to take risks and make mistakes. Those mistakes, in turn, taught me how to write the way I want to write."

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