Imagine… Imagine having a student who hated writing. Whenever you said, “Today we’re going to write…” they groaned loudly for the whole class to hear. Now imagine you spend a 1/2 hour helping them—offering to scribe, creating sentence starters, brainstorming—and after all that you only managed to get 2-3 sentences out of them. Sound familiar?…
Read more
Have you been working on a novel or other large creative project for a while, and feeling like organizing and managing the project has become a big challenge? Have a million ideas captured in a million documents or none at all, just free-floating in your head? In this blog post, I’ll outline a method for…
Read more
Below is a a basic lesson outline that covers the “foundation” of English, or the rules and patterns that make up how words are made, their spelling and sounds. This lesson outline can be used for anyone who is developing their literacy. Almost 50% of people in Canada have low levels of literacy, so this…
Read more
I do a lot of writing about creative writing on this website, but never have I ever shared my own creative writing here. And never have I ever shared a poem, not here and not anywhere else, because, up until the past month or so, I wasn’t someone who wrote poetry. I had cut away…
Read more
Introduction Indigenous Speculations In this essay, I explore various Canadian Indigenous speculations, including the artwork of Sonny Assu, and science fiction of Cherie Dimaline, and Drew Hayden Taylor. Before I get into it, I’d like to acknowledge that…. I’m very grateful to live and work on the traditional, unceded and ancestral territory of the Musqueam…
Read more
Diversity, Multimodality & Comics Teaching children’s literature using sequential visual narratives Part 1: How comics were squeezed out of my life Until recently, perhaps the last five years, I looked down on comics and visual narratives. As a young reader, I read Archie and some Wonderwoman; however, I didn’t relate to the male protagonists of most…
Read more
Part 1: Lost in the Woods I am fascinated by the special kind of horror that can only be found in stories about and for children. Since the very first children’s books by Perrault and the Grimm brothers, and before that, in folktales and oral traditions, stories about children have so often been gruesome and…
Read more
Was I alone in my quest for adult reading materials? Around the age of nine or ten I discovered Stephen King, and I would never go back to the Sweet Valley of children’s books ever again. I recall sneaking my mother’s horror and thriller books from her bedroom bookshelf, one at a time, and reading…
Read more
Sitting down with Don Maass of the famous Donald Maass Literary Agency last week, I wasn’t all that nervous. Probably the lack of sleep and my impending major surgery scheduled for four days later had dulled my need for validation. Or maybe it was because I actually believe in the book I was pitching; I…
Read more
This review of When You Reach Me, a Newberry Award-winning novel by Rebecca Stead, is hopefully the first of a series on writing craft in middle grade science fiction. I’ll explore issues of writing craft, such as theme, tone, voice, plot, characterization, etc. in a few of my new favourite books. My aim is for…
Read more
Learn how to use Orson Scott Card’s MICE Quotient along with Mary Robinette Kowal’s adaptation of this technique to include nesting codes and try/fails to successfully plot your novel.
In her book, Mindset, Carol Dweck (2006) recounts an experience that cemented her fixed mindset—a teacher in elementary school organised her entire class around IQ scores. She doesn’t mention exactly where she fit in among her peers, but it doesn’t matter. The point is that by lining up the students according to IQ, the teacher…
Read more
In this article, you’ll learn a simple (takes only 30 minutes), yet powerful self-questionnaire technique to solve all your plot problems, and you can download the Solving Plot Problems Template free, no sign-up required. Especially in science fiction and fantasy, or in any longer story with a large number of elements or characters to keep track of, there…
Read more
Just got back from the Surrey International Writing Conference where I pitched my novel series successfully to three agents. Sounds great, right? Well, yes, it is, but there’s a big but. BUT, the agents have all basically made it clear that they want me to send them a standalone book “with series potential.” Not a…
Read more
This article is an update of my February 2011 article, It’s Time for Accountable Content on Blogs. Since then, I have learned three solid reasons to write accountable blog content: Your readers will trust you more Your site will rank higher in search engines You will make more money In this article I’ll cover these…
Read more
You might enjoy reading the top post on my site, The 7 Types of Sentence Fragments and How to Use Them.
This post is used every day by teachers and students around the world to teach and learn the art of building beautiful, advanced sentences in English.
The free pdf download of the lesson in shortened form is free to copy, alter and distribute for non-commercial purposes.
If you are using this lesson, please let me know how you have used it and how it has helped you. I’m curious!
Below you’ll find works of art that I lovingly crafted just for you!
FEAR & HORROR IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
In this essay, I discuss why children’s literature is often scary, and why that’s awesome!
In this essay I discuss how to use comics to teach Language Arts, and how diversity in comics can help students enrich both their literacy and their life.
In this essay I discuss my personal journey with anxiety and some of the ways I’ve learned to manage my anxiety.
PLOT YOUR NOVEL WITH M.I.C.E. QUOTIENT
In this post I share what I learned at a writing conference about plotting with Orson Scott Card’s M.I.C.E. Quotient, and Mary Robinette Kowal’s adaptations to this technique, including nesting codes and try/fails. All of these techniques help you evaluate whether your plot keeps the promises you made to your readers.
