Imagine Your Story Through Writing a Children's Book

Anne Lamott returns to offer us a new gift: a step-by-step guide on how to write and on how to manage the writer's life. From "Getting Started,' with "Short Assignments," through "Shitty First Drafts," "Character," "Plot," "Dialogue." all the way from "False Starts" to "How Do You Know When You're Done?" Lamott encourages, instructs, and inspires. She discusses "Writers Block," "Writing Groups," and "Publication." Bracingly honest, she is also one of the funniest people alive.

Create engaging stories for the youngest readers! Writing picture books takes a unique set of skills. After all, you only have thirty-two pages to bring your story to life for readers ages two to eight, and the adults in their lives. Your text must be tightly focused yet leave room for illustrations to tell part of the story. And, of course, picture books should be a joy to read aloud. Award-winning author Ann Whitford Paul helps you develop the skills you need by walking you through techniques and exercises specifically for picture book writers. Whether you're just starting out as a picture book writer or have tried unsuccessfully to get your work published, Writing Picture Books is just what you need to craft picture books that will appeal to young readers and parents, agents, and editors.

The best children's and young adult novels take readers on wonderful outward adventures and stirring inward journeys. In The Magic Words, editor Cheryl B. Klein guides writers on an enjoyable and practical-minded voyage of their own, from developing a saleable premise for a novel to finding a dream agent.

\ In Write Away, New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth George offers would-be writers exactly what they need to know about how to construct a novel. She provides a detailed overview of the craft and gives helpful instruction on all elements of writing, from setting and plot to technique and process. To illustrate her points, George presents excerpts from a number of well-known writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Harper Lee, E. M. Forster, John Irving, Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway, and Alice Hoffman. She has a solid understanding of the craft and a storyteller's enticing way of passing along helpful information, all of which comes through marvelously in this informative book.

This stimulating and helpful book offers a sound approach to learning to write successfully for children. Jane Yolen, an experienced editor, teacher, and author of more than twenty outstanding children's books, describes the techniques which will help aspiring writers produce good books for children from preschool through teen age.

In Hooked, author Les Edgerton draws on his experience as a successful fiction writer and teacher to help you overcome the weak openings that lead to instant rejection by showing you how to successfully use the ten core components inherent to any great beginning.

With insight, humor, and practicality, Natalie Goldberg inspires writers and would-be writers to take the leap into writing skillfully and creatively.

"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write." On Writing begins with a mesmerizing account of King's childhood and his uncannily early focus on writing to tell a story. A series of vivid memories from adolescence, college, and the struggling years that led up to his first novel, Carrie, will afford readers a fresh and often very funny perspective on the formation of a writer. On Writing will empower -- and entertain -- everyone who reads it.

Ted Kooser has been writing and publishing poetry for more than forty years. In the pages of The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Kooser brings those decades of experience to bear. Here are tools and insights, the instructions (and warnings against instructions) that poets--aspiring or practicing--can use to hone their craft, perhaps into art.

Writing with Pictures is a step-by-step guide to creating children's books. It offers advice covering a book's preliminary stages through publication, and describes how to tell a story visually, develop settings, and draw characters.