What to Take on Your Writer’s Journey: #1 Find Your Communities of Writers

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SCBWI community, SCBWI members, writing community, writing tips

by Rieko Mendez

Editor’s Note: This is the first of three installments on What to Take on Your Writer’s Journey. Look for the next article next month, that explores the question of “Why Must You Write This Book?” 

I write YA fiction and started writing seriously in the last five years. As a writer, there are craft books, workshops and conferences to hone your writing and I recommend using them. Here though, I want to share what I found crucial in my writing journey—what upped the game so to speak. 

Write for Kite Tales!

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editors, illustrators, SCBWI community, SCBWI members, translators, writers

Have a topic you’d like to share with your fellow kidlit community? Want to share your process and inspire other writers or illustrators? Or maybe you have a list of incredible authors you’d like to interview but no idea where you can publish it? Let Kite Tales be your outlet for creative community and discussion!

10 Inspiring Kite Tales Quotes from 2020

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Christian McKay Heidicker, Claire Annette Noland, Creative Life, Emma Trithart, Grace Lin, Harold Underdown, inspiration, Mary Ann Fraser, Monica Sagaser, Nancy Whitesides, quotes, Sherry Shahan

Photo by Tairon Fernandez on Pexels.com

As the year draws to a close, it’s always a good time to go back and reflect on the things that have moved and inspired us along the way. Especially in trying times, going back to the moments that brought light into our world can help us continue to be inspired and come up with new ideas that might not have occurred to us before.

Creating may have been tough for most of us this year, but we had many encouraging authors, editors, agents, and illustrators sharing with us their insights on how to keep going when the times get tough. Sometimes the reassurance that giving ourselves a break was indeed what was needed. And sometimes we just needed to let our stories come out on the page.

Community Corner with Barbara A. Bagwell: How to Own the Name Writer

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Barbara A. Bagwell, poetry, SCBWI Annual Summer Conference, SCBWI community, SCBWI members

When you dream something and envision it, goals drive you onwards.

At the encouragement of my childhood friend, I became an SCBWI member and attended the 2013 Los Angeles summer conference. Although I wrote marketing copy or non-fiction often at work, and had developed stories and poems for fun, I never considered myself a writer. In my misbelief, only English majors became authors. That was not me. I could not write like them.

Regardless, I attended the 2013 SCBWI Summer Conference.

Community Corner with Monica Sagaser: SCBWI Critique Groups and Taking the Leap

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critique groups, critiques, Monica Sagaser, pandemic, SCBWI community, SCBWI members

At the start of quarantine, I checked in with my writer friends. All of them reported they simply couldn’t write or open a book. They berated themselves, something painfully easy for writers. The anguish of loss and uncertainty during this global pandemic was taking a toll on their creativity. Feeling no different, I was terrified of even glancing at my half-baked manuscript. I feared it would go unfinished.

I didn’t want that to happen, so I took a leap.

Community Corner with Melody Mansfield: How Faeries (and SCBWI) Saved My Life

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A Bug Collection, cancer survival, Melody Mansfield, SCBWI community, SCBWI members, Sue Alexander Grant, The Life Stone of Singing Bird

When a rabbi-friend urged me to “share my story,” my heart sunk in my tumor-riddled chest. Did the world really need another story about breast cancer? And if I wasn’t willing to tackle this “important” topic, then why did I write, anyway?

Community Corner with Susan Lendroth: From the Sue Alexander Grant to Publication

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awards, published, publishing, SAG, SCBWI community, SCBWI events, SCBWI members, Susan Lendroth, Working Writer's Retreat

By Susan Lendroth

In 2010, I submitted the picture book Not So Loud, Natsumi! to the Sue Alexander Grant contest sponsored by SCBWI-LA. Little did I realize the winding road my story and I would take over the next eight years from contest entry to manuscript submission to eventual publication.

Community Corner with Author Ann Whitford Paul: Socializing with a Purpose

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critique groups, SCBWI community, SCBWI members, writing tips

By Ann Whitford Paul

*Editor’s Note: After a successful SCBWI Los Angeles Writers Day, whether you attended or not, we thought you might be looking for more ways to “level up” your writing, no matter the stage of your career, so we asked author Ann Whitford Paul, who belongs to a lot of groups, to share some community-building, group-oriented ways you can do just that for this quarter’s “Community Corner.” Read on for her fabulous insights!

You’re a writer. You prefer to be alone in the peace and quiet of your home, creating ideas, developing and revising them. Still you know you should (and you want to) make time to be with others, just not so much that it interferes with your writing. What about joining or creating groups that may take you away from your computer, but also enhance your career?

SCBWI Community Corner with Patrice Karst: Learning About Kid Lit After Becoming a Best-Seller

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Patrice Karst, SCBWI community, SCBWI members, The Invisible String

By Patrice Karst

I fell into the children’s publishing world by accident.

Doing well with my first two adult books, God Made Easy and The Single Mother’s Survival Guide, I had sold 70K copies combined and was a popular speaker in the self-help, spiritual, New Age world. But I was also a single mom to my special needs son.

Elijah was so sad when I had to leave him in the mornings, I began telling him about an “invisible string” that connected us all day long. It so comforted him that we told his other friends. When I saw the calming effect, I thought, why not “put story to paper?”

Volunteer as a STAR Reader, Keep Kids Reading

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literacy, reading to kids, volunteering

Most folks in kid lit were big readers, and writers, as soon as they could string together sentences, myself included. But literacy among children isn’t a given. Kids’ book sales have been rising, which is great news, but there are still huge populations of kids who are underserved and overlooked when it comes to literacy. And that isn’t just bad for kid lit sales, it’s bad for society at large. According to the NEA, “…poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement…And deficient readers are less likely to become active in civic and cultural life, most notably in volunteerism and voting.” Nobody wants that! So I decided to do something about it, and there’s an easy, fun way that you can too: