Craft Archives - Page 11 of 26 - Kerry Gans, Author

A Powerful Message to Our Children

August 25, 2016 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

When you are a parent of a young child, you often have the pleasure of watching the same movie over and over and over. The one good thing about this is that you get the chance to dissect the movie into itty-bitty parts in a way that you never thought possible. (I could write a doctoral thesis on some of the movies my daughter has binge watched.) Sometimes, even if it’s a movie you’ve seen before, you suddenly see a message or theme you never did before.

That’s what happened lately with me and Disney’s The Rescuers. That movie was one of my favorites as a child, so I thought I knew it pretty well. But after seeing it for the 100 billionth time, I suddenly realized it had a theme I had never noticed before. (SPOILERS BELOW)

Small people can make a big difference.

Now, perhaps that should have been obvious—I mean, it does star mice who rescue people. I just never saw it before. In the beginning, Rufus the cat asks, “Two little mice? What can you do?” And when the mice first talk to Penny, she asks, “Didn’t you bring somebody big with you? Like the police?” And the mice themselves, in their darkest moment, wonder if they are capable of helping at all.

But, of course, they are perfectly able to save the day—with a little help from other small animal friends.

This theme of being small but capable may be why I loved the movie so much as a child. My author theme is that every child has the potential to change the world—an extension of this very theme. It seems this theme has been in my heart for a lot longer than I realized.

I’ve talked before about another good message kids can take from The Rescuers, but I think this one is something all kids need to hear:

You are small, but not helpless.

In a nutshell, giving kids the idea that they can change the world for the better sends them perhaps the strongest message of all:

You matter.

And isn’t that a message we all need to hear from time to time?

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Children: Not Just a Mini-Me

August 18, 2016 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I know many parents joke about their child being a “mini-me”—so much like them that it’s scary. And sometimes it’s actually true. But just this week I was struck with the opposite realization: my daughter is very much NOT a mini-me.

We were playing with my Breyer horse collection when it occurred to me (not for the first time), that this child of mine is almost nothing like me. She plays with my horses in a way I never did. I played that they were horses—they lived in a corral when not running in their pasture (my carpet was green), I had a doll who could ride them, and saddles and bridles for them. My daughter puts them into family groups and has them getting married and having children.

In fact, she has everything she owns get married. Horses, stuffed animals, dolls… She re-enacts marriage scenes from Disney movies. I can’t remember ever playing getting married when young.

I only ever had 2 dolls that I can remember, while Kinder-girl loves her dolls. They are often her babies (making me a young grandma!), until she gets tired of that, then they become her sisters and I suddenly have many more births to my name than I remember.

She is in love with all things pink—a color I have spent a lifetime rebelling against.

Playing dress-up and changing her outfit multiple times in a day is the norm. I couldn’t be bothered with tiaras and necklaces and rings, and if I had my choice I’d be in jeans and T-shirt all the time—both then and now.

Our most obvious difference (aside from our polar opposite physical appearance) is that she is an extrovert, and I am an introvert. She loves going out, and everyone she meets is her friend. If I never had to leave the house, I would be happy.

I do see some glimpses of me in her. She is artistic—although I lean toward realism and she likes her art colorful and full of fluid shapes. She’s a creative, and enjoys writing—something she gets from me, and not from my husband, who is a great reader but dislikes writing. She has a tendency to over-think, to be a disorganized mess, and to get lost in a book she’s reading or a project she’s doing. She can be stubborn, argumentative, fiercely loyal, and scary smart. She is a complex mix of fear and courage, confidence and timidity, and joy and sorrow.

In other words, she is fully human, and fully herself.

She is not just a mini-me.

While this makes parenting her a challenge—I am not sure if it is harder to parent the parts of her most like me or most unlike me—as a writer I can take a lesson from this. When I create children, I mustn’t make them carbon copies of their parents (unless the story demands it). Certainly, some of the child’s characteristics will reflect their parents, but those characteristics will refract through the lens of that child’s uniqueness.

So I go back to writing while raising not a “mini-me”, but a fully-realized “her”.

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Beta Readers: A Vital Part of the Process

August 11, 2016 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

I met with most of my beta readers this week for my middle grade manuscript The Curse of the Pharaoh’s Stone. My daughter’s wonderful school librarian put together an amazing local team of readers—4 kids, 2 teachers, a librarian, and a mom of middle grade kids. I also have 2 other incredible teachers and authors reading it. I am so excited to get their feedback!

Yes, I said excited. I know many writers get butterflies when they send their manuscript babies out to beta readers. Some writers are downright terrified. And I agree, when you let your work out into the world, even in beta, it can be scary. You’re opening yourself up to criticism, to the possibility that people won’t love your story as much as you do. Sometimes writers even see criticism at this stage as a failure on their part.

But I am strange—I love honest feedback. I think it comes from how my writing process evolved in a collaborative model with my best friend Donna Hanson Woolman. Then when I got my Master of Arts in English, my advisor was a blunt yet positive critiquer. Of course, if the criticism is personal or nasty in nature, I don’t like that any more than the next writer, but in this post I am talking about thoughtful and honest feedback.

I enjoy the red pen on my manuscript because of my mindset. I am confident that Pharaoh’s Stone is a good book. Its plot is solid, its characters rounded, and the prose is clean. I have read enough middle grade—both published and from an agent’s slush pile—to know my book is good. I am excited to get my beta readers’ feedback because I know that their feedback will get the book from good to great.

That’s how we writers have to approach any constructive feedback—as a way to make our manuscripts better. A challenge to dig deeper and raise our craft higher. After working so long and hard on our stories (I’ve been with Pharaoh’s Stone for 11 years), we can lose the objectivity we need to make the final adjustments that will make our work shine.

That’s why beta readers are such an important part of our writing process. They bring fresh eyes, fresh brains, and a fresh perspective. I am so lucky to have an enthusiastic team reading my book, and I am so grateful to all of them for making the time and effort to help me.

Do you use beta readers? Where does their feedback fit into your process?

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Productivity and Expectations

August 4, 2016 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

Worst. Month. Ever. July’s word count scraped the bottom of the barrel. My productivity hit the lowest monthly number since I started tracking in January. So, naturally, I have beaten myself up over this failure for many a day.

I managed 11,700 words in July. Which is not nothing, by the way. 11,700 words either drafted, revised, or copyedited. Not a terribly small number. Many writers would be proud of that number.

But.

Among all my data, for the month of July sits a big goose egg next to Veritas, my current work in progress. Zero. Nada. Nothing. Not a single word on my WIP. For an entire month.

It’s killing me.

I went to the Writer’s Coffeehouse in Willow Grove over the weekend, and afterwards got to talking with Marie Lamba. I lamented to her about my lack of productivity, that I had not worked on my WIP all month, and how upset that made me. She said:

“Your problem is that you expected to work on it.”

That stopped me. Because she was right. I knew my writing time would be almost nil. I knew I had other obligations that would take up what writing time I had. I knew I’d have a small shadow pretty much 24/7 for July. And yet I had somehow expected to work on my WIP in some significant manner.

Because I always expect too much from myself.

I always think I can do more in a given time frame than I can. I always think I will have more time than I do. I always think I will have more energy than I have. I always think life will not throw me obstacles the way it does. Always.

In other words, I have unrealistic expectations.

And that will always lead to disappointment.

Now, I don’t mean not to push myself to the fullest or to use this as an excuse to get lazy. Because, yes, I need to up my productivity where I can. But I need to get better at understanding when I actually CAN increase productivity and when I merely BELIEVE I can. Successfully parsing those two will result in a much healthier attitude.

By adjusting my expectations, I hope to gain more contentment in spending time with my daughter, lose the guilt of work left undone, and stop beating myself up so much.

So what about you? Do you lay unrealistic expectations on yourself?

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Learning From Teaching: 5 Lessons My Students Taught Me

July 14, 2016 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I completed my first teaching job this week—I did my Build Your Own Story workshop for the kids at my daughter’s day camp. I don’t mind admitting that I was pretty nervous. I knew the material, but could I handle the kids? I fully expected to be learning from teaching as much as sharing what I knew.

I met the kids for an hour each time—some I only met once a week, some more than once. They came in 5 groups: 1st/2nd grade, 3rd, 4th, and 5th/6th/7th. Quite an age spread! I came prepared (but not as prepared as I thought I was), and tried to adapt my teaching on later days to compensate for the mistakes I made in the early classes.

I learned 5 things from teaching:

1. Always have more material than you think you’ll need.

Originally, I expected to see each group once per week, and had planned accordingly. I found out when I arrived that I was seeing some groups twice the first week AND then at least once the second week.

I thought I had figured out how much material I needed for the first hour workshop—but I was wrong. Mostly because the kids had almost no questions, so my Q&A time was unnecessary!

And even though I planned to have extra material the 2nd week, I STILL ran under time with the 3rd and 4th grades! The 4th grade I ran short because I underestimated how long it would take each group to share the stories they had written, and the 3rd because of a mistake I made that I will address later in this post.

2. Active kids are happy kids.

Although this was a workshop, it was also summer camp. I didn’t want it to be a school lecture. The first day I screwed that up with the 4th grade—many of them seemed disinterested, so I panicked and started lecturing rather than trying to engage them.

The second day that I met the 1st/2nd graders, I had them right before lunch. We reviewed what we had learned the first time we met, and then I let them go to writing their own stories. They had a blast, writing and drawing. But when the time came to share their stories, I couldn’t get them back. Their attention had gone. I had the kids who wanted to share come and tell me their stories, so that was all good, but I wondered what I could have done to engage the others. Their councilor said that they had been sitting all morning and really needed to move at that point.

I remembered this for my last day of teaching, when I created a get-up-and-move game for the younger kids called Wiggle Words. It worked well for getting them up and moving and keeping them engaged.

3. There’s a fine line between being flexible and being overrun.

Since I was learning from teaching, I wanted to be flexible. I tried to engage the kids on their terms, to find out what their interests were. And I discovered that being flexible should come with limits.

The second week, when I had the 3rd grade for the 3rd time, I used all three of the activities I had planned, but still somehow ran short. Any one of those three activities could have been expanded, but I made the mistake of asking, “Do you want to do X? Y? Z?” To which they all replied “No.”

So we played Red Light, Green Light for the last 15 minutes of class.

I realize now that I should have phrased it as “Which do you want to do—X, Y, or Z?”, thereby eliminating the possibility of them saying “No.” Or I should have chosen myself.

When the next group came in, I didn’t make that mistake again. I also did one extra round of each activity to start with because I knew I would need to.

4. Kids will surprise you.

I admit, I had the most trouble with the 4th grade. The first day I had them I freaked out when they weren’t all enthralled. I may have had similar troubles with the 5th/6th/7th grade if I hadn’t been learning from teaching. Because of the disinterest of some of the 4th graders, I planned a different activity using the same material for the middle grade kids—and it worked much better.

So when I saw that I had the 4th graders again on my last day, I worried that they would not be willing participants in the planned activity—which was to take what we had learned and write their own story. They proved me wrong. I allowed them to work in groups, and the kids I thought least engaged came up with the best-thought-out story!

Another moment that surprised me was when I did Wiggle Words with the 1st/2nd graders. Wiggle Words involves me reading a book, and the kids doing different movements when we encountered an element of story we talked about (character, goal, obstacle, setting). The 3rd graders had participated as expected but the little ones…well, they all wanted to see the pictures in the book, so I ended up surrounded by them and running doing all the movements with them to keep them moving!

5. Be humble, learn from your mistakes.

I learned as I went. I knew going in that I didn’t know much about teaching, so I tried to keep an open mind. I made sure I had more material for the 2nd and 3rd days of the workshop than I thought I would use. I planned an active game for the younger kids. I changed my interaction with the 4th graders. I improved over the course of these 3 workshops, and I have gained some valuable insights for when I do school visits in the fall.

Overall, I had a great experience with the kids. They taught me probably as much as I taught them. I learned to come over-prepared, to be flexible within reason, to keep the kids active and social, and to stay open to what the kids will show me. And, after being chided by three separate children (including tears from one) upon hearing that I only had pencils to draw with, I learned perhaps the most important lesson of all…

Always bring crayons.

How about you? Any tips for teaching and engaging kids you can share?

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My First Teaching Experience

July 7, 2016 By Kerry Gans 1 Comment

At the time of this post, I am teaching my second day of Build Your Own Story workshops at a local day camp. I will freely admit that I never wanted to be a teacher. I haven’t the temperament for it, nor the calling. While I have been told I am a good teacher, I find that true mostly in one-on-one situations. Put me in front of a group, and I get the jitters.

This is a reflection of my own weaknesses—I am an introvert, and I hate being the center of attention. Of course, as most teachers know, there are always some kids who are not paying attention to you, and that makes it worse. When I feel like I am not connecting with my audience, I wonder what I am doing wrong, how am I failing them?

Perhaps I am not doing anything wrong, but simply have to find ways to engage the kids better. In my first teaching experience, I taught (separately), 1st/2nd graders, 3rd graders, and 4th graders (I have the 5th/6th graders today). The 1st-3rd grade classes were fun—the kids were eager, they had ideas, they wanted to be heard. And since I have a 6-year-old, I could relate easily to them.

The 4th grade class was harder. About half the class actively participated, the rest sat and watched silently. At least they were polite and didn’t talk through the class. And a few of them sparked up a bit by the end. Truthfully, I think I panicked when they didn’t all seem eager and turned the class into more of a lecture than a participatory event, which may have caused them to further withdraw.

I am going to try something different with the 5th/6th grade today. A Jigsaw Story. Once we discuss the 5 basic story elements, I will break them up into 4 groups, and give each group a few minutes to come up with one of the first 4 elements—without knowing what the other groups are thinking. Then we will put what I hope will be 4 wildly incompatible and therefore funny elements on the board and strive to make a coherent Plot out of them. At least it will get them talking and being social and hopefully help loosen them up. We’ll see.

The experience so far has been a rewarding one. My most memorable moment came when I had finished with the 1st graders and one little boy started to cry. I asked why he was crying and his friend told me that he was sad because he had not gotten to write his own story about lions and tigers (today they get to write their own stories). So I got down on his level and asked him to tell me his story.

I had to ask a few leading questions, but in just minutes his hands were no longer covering his face and the tears had dried. His story spilled out of him (and it was a good story, too!), and his passion and eagerness wiped away the disappointment. To me, this was a pure lesson in the power of story. All this little boy wanted was to share his story. For his voice to be heard.

On the whole, my first experience teaching kids has been a good one. The kids have been creative and eager and I hope I can learn from them how to be a better teacher.

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Summer Slog: A Writing Parent’s Dilemma

June 30, 2016 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

My child and husband just arrived home from a 10-day vacation. I cleaned the house, but I also wrote a lot. Now that they are home, I am preparing for the summer slog.

Any writing parent dreads summer—that time of year when your carefully guarded writing time vanishes into the hazy air. Our school-time schedules no longer apply, as we alternate between running our children to activities and spending time with them at home.

Some writing parents handle the summer by simply giving up on writing. They put it on hold until September and take any writing time they get in summer as a gift. Perhaps this is a smart way to handle it—low expectations mean no disappointment. Also, it puts no pressure on you to find time to write. This may be the healthiest approach, overall.

However, some of us have deadlines. We cannot afford to take 3 months off. Others of us simply cannot go that long without writing. I know personally that taking 3 months off would make me crazy. The lack of creativity would affect my mood, my outlook, my interaction with my family. I would, in short, resent this absolute curtailment of my writing, and the last thing in the world I want is to resent my child.

So what’s a torn writing parent to do? How do we find time to write while spending quality time with our child? I have come across several suggestions for dealing with the summer slog:

Get up before everyone else.
Go to bed after everyone else.
Day camp your kids.
Babysitters.
Kids entertain themselves.

I imagine most writer-parents do some combination of above, based on age and needs of the child and financial means. For me, number 1 is laughable—my brain is not creatively functional (or at all functional) before about nine AM. Number 2 is more viable, since I am a night owl, but since I already do this I cannot use it to increase my summer writing time.

I’ve got number 3 in hand—a few weeks of day camp are paid for. Some writer-parents hire babysitters to come and take care of the kids in the house while the writer locks herself in the office or bedroom to work, but my number 4 will most likely be in the form of grandparents coming over to take my daughter out to places and the occasional play date.

When my child entertains herself

Number 5 can be tricky depending on your child’s age and needs. At six years old, my daughter is now capable of entertaining herself for several hours if needed. Number 5 is often a judicious mix of TV/computer time, reading to herself, and simply being told to fend for herself until a certain time while mommy works. Number 5 has not worked very well in the past, but I think this year will see a more successful attempt.

So writer-parents, how do you handle the summer slog and make time to write while your kids are home?

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Anticipating the 2016 Philadelphia Writers’ Conference

June 9, 2016 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

At this time tomorrow, I will be at the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference (PWC), immersing myself in craft, business, and writerly inspiration.

The three-day event always gets my creativity moving, and I always come away with something valuable. Whether it’s conquering pitching fears, discerning weaknesses in my writing, reviving my creativity, making business connections, or learning how to organically raise the stakes in my novels, I always walk away with something that more than pays for the price of admission.

This weekend looms large in my mind. The calendar in my head has a neon “PWC” sign flashing over these three days, as if nothing outside the conference happens. As if I will not need to eat or sleep or battle traffic. Like my duties as wife and mother will vanish (which they pretty much will, since awesome husband will be dealing with wonderful child while I’m away from home).

There’s something about preparing for the conference that seems herculean to me. The packing looms large, even though in reality it will take 20 minutes. How much does one need for 3 days, right? The travel to and from the conference each day stretches like eternity before me, but it will be all right (Friday is usually the worst day). But I think the reason this weekend always feels like heavy lifting to me is because it’s three straight days of near-constant interaction with people. For an introvert like me, that is a daunting and draining proposition. So I think mentally I am shoring myself up for the task.

Herculean task or not, I am looking forward to this year’s PWC—my 6th in a row. And why wouldn’t I be eager for it? Good things happen to me every year at the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference.

I can’t wait to see what I will take away this year.

The Art of Second-Guessing

May 5, 2016 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

My massive revision of Veritas (a YA sci-fi) is moving apace. Some chapters fight me hard—I have so much to revise and add that I virtually (and sometimes literally) rewrite them. But some chapters I tweak. Perhaps add a sentence or a few phrase. Those chapters provide a break for me, but when I get several “tweak” chapters in a row, I start second-guessing myself.

After struggling with a chapter that knocks me down, talks back to me, and generally kicks me around, when I get a tweak chapter I feel like I must be missing something. I mean, it can’t be that easy. Not when the last chapter was so hard. There must be some glaring mistake I am not seeing.

So I scrutinize and I poke and I prod, but I end up back where I started. I think this chapter is all right. But am I right? Second-guessing.

Luckily, this is where critique partners come in. They will look at my chapters, the fighters and the tweaks, and tell me if I’ve missed something. If weaknesses hide beneath the polished surface. They will tell me what doesn’t ring true, what doesn’t feel real, and what knocks them out of the story. Hopefully, this revision will have fixed most of those things.

Once I get their feedback, I will no longer second guess myself. Until then, I will continue to plod through the revision. I’ve just finished chapter 36…of 83. So there is plenty of second-guessing ahead for me!

What about you? Do you find yourself wondering what you’ve missed when revisions seem “too easy”?

Research and Citations: Save Time, Get It Right From the Start

April 28, 2016 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I’ve written a family history book for my father’s side of the family, and I am now at work on one for my mother’s side. The book for my father’s side took forever, but not because of the writing—because of the research.

Obviously, genealogy takes a lot of research. Over 20 years I have documented evidence from everything from tombstones to letters to photographs to legal documents for birth, death, and marriage. I have a genealogy program where I enter all the data, and cite my sources for each data point.

The problem? My citation entry proved insufficient.

As I wrote my father’s book, putting the data into readable prose fell smack into my wheelhouse. But I wanted other researchers of those lines to have a fully sourced genealogy at their disposal. When a genealogist finds a source (such as this book) where you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, that provides a paper trail, and has sources so you can judge for yourself the reliability of the data, it’s like striking gold. I wanted to give this information to people gift-wrapped, as a way of paying forward all the help I had gotten from those who researched before me.

Since citation-supported research was a main goal of the book, I needed to have clear citations for every piece of data. I found in going back into the data that I had often been lax in my citations. While more prevalent in the early days when I often didn’t know better, I also found other places where I had taken shortcuts.

I had vague citations: “Tombstone.” Well great, except I didn’t say what cemetery. “Marriage License.” Whose? Issued where?

I found incorrect citations: “Scotland Birth Registry.” No such entity exists. I either meant the Scotland Old Parish Records, or the Scotland Statutory Records Index (depending on the date).

I had no citation at all. This baffled me the most because I clearly did not make up the information. I got it from somewhere. Often it required me to dig through the information I had to finally find the source.

So the biggest time-suck writing my genealogy books is the source citations. I often have to stop and track down the original source so I can properly source it. Then I have to fix it in the genealogy program before I add it to the book. The upside, of course, is that when I am finished the books my genealogy database will also be in tip-top shape.

What does this mean for your writing research?

I know most of you are not writing genealogy books. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from my mistakes.

If you write historical novels, have a database where you list every historical detail you use and where you found it. That way you can defend that detail if needed, and it gives you a go-to list for more in-depth research if needed.

If you write contemporary novels and people helped you out with details of setting, character, or culture, write it down. In the many years it can take from first draft to publishing, you may forget who told you what, and when it comes time for the acknowledgements, you don’t want to forget someone.

If you write fantasy or science fiction, track every bit of real science or history you used to inform your world. Not only will you be able to discuss and defend your points, you can then go back to those sources later to see if there are updates to the science or cultural history that you can use in future books set in the same world.

If you write thrillers, mysteries, or police procedurals, you’ll need insider knowledge of the justice system and perhaps technical knowledge for things such as planes, submarines, and weapons.

Another advantage to all these research notes is that you can use that information to support blog posts and presentations, non-fiction works about the same subjects, and as resources to refer readers to if they want more information.

We writers pull information from everywhere, and we collect data on a wide variety of subjects. We need to know where all that research comes from. Don’t waste time later having to go back and retrace your steps to double-check a detail. Get it right from the start.

Do you keep track of your research? How do you organize the data and sources?

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A Powerful Message to Our Children

Children: Not Just a Mini-Me

Beta Readers: A Vital Part of the Process

Productivity and Expectations

Learning From Teaching: 5 Lessons My Students Taught Me

1. Always have more material than you think you’ll need.

2. Active kids are happy kids.

3. There’s a fine line between being flexible and being overrun.

4. Kids will surprise you.

5. Be humble, learn from your mistakes.

My First Teaching Experience

Summer Slog: A Writing Parent’s Dilemma

Anticipating the 2016 Philadelphia Writers’ Conference

The Art of Second-Guessing

Research and Citations: Save Time, Get It Right From the Start

What does this mean for your writing research?

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