I’m thrilled to join the faculty of the 2014 New England Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators annual spring conference. This year’s event will be held at the Sheraton in Springfield, Massachusetts from Friday, May 2 through Sunday, May 4. There is still time to register, so click on over to the conference website.
If nonfiction is your thing, check out my workshops. Both are scheduled for Saturday:
Crafting a Nonfiction Book Proposal, presented by Loree Griffin Burns
In today’s trade market, most books of children’s nonfiction are sold to publishers in proposal form. That is, the book idea is pitched in a specific abridged format and the final book is only written when a publisher accepts the proposal. This workshop is designed to shine a light on this process, to introduce attendees to the basic elements of the book proposal, and to provide tools for turning nonfiction book ideas into strong, sellable proposals.
Writers as Architects: Building Structure in Nonfiction, presented by Loree Griffin Burns and Alexandra Siy
Alexandra Siy and Loree Griffin Burns write nonfiction books that rely on a variety of literary structures to convey information. In this presentation, these award-winning authors will explore their view of structure as an essential guiding force in the creation of solid works of nonfiction, and share the processes they use to determine the best structure for a given project. Attendees will explore a variety of structural shapes as they are represented in contemporary children’s nonfiction, and will leave the hour with a stronger grasp of how these structures—from the straight line of chronologically-told stories to the circles, spirals, towers and constellations of more inventive approaches—can be used to gird their own works of nonfiction.