PROJECT MAYHEM

Shakespeare’s Romeo said that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But I wonder, would a character named Rose have the same pe...

I have to confess, I put little stock in personality tests. They seem too generic, like magazine horoscopes that, with a little finag...

Tomorrow is Beverly Cleary's 100th birthday. In celebration, I'm sharing a post that first published in 2011. Three cheers for the...

I'm a natural planner, but over the past year or two, I've been trying to loosen up and just write, as I've shared here befor...

Not every thorn has its rose. Nobody wrote prickles like Diana Wynne Jones. I'm reading her Dalemark Quartet for the first time, a...

Naming characters is one of my favorite things about the writing process. Sometimes characters pop into my head with a fully formed name. ...

I was reading HARRIET THE SPY the other day and was absolutely smitten with Harriet's writer's game from the beginning of the boo...

Recently I encountered a child named Anakin – a girl, in fact, and I mused what rabid Star Wars fans her parents must be to gi...

We writers for middle grade aged readers try to portray contemporary characters accurately in our fiction, but it takes careful work not...

There's a reason why I chose a French class student list for that image up there, and you can guess why by taking a peek at the titl...

My reading life began with a picture book called The Littlest Rabbit. I would solemnly quote the first page, “Everybody is bigger than I am...

There are lots of useful, interesting, and just plain odd character exercises out there, all aimed at helping you get to know your chara...

As writers, we hear a lot about the importance of consistency. A character who is cowardly on page 1 shouldn’t sudden...

Every once in a while, I notice patterns in the books I'm reading. Lately I've come across three that deal with foster kids and and ...