Stories, plays, books, articles and classes for children, teachers and writers.
Posted in A Writer's Life, Children's Theater, Self-publishing, Uncategorized, Writing for children, Writing for the Web on Jul 24th, 2008
One of the things I’ve noticed at writer’s conference is the tendency for successful writers to talk about how many rejections they got before finally having something accepted. Sort of like old soldiers comparing war wounds. The message is that you have to be tough and able to handle rejection if you’re going [...]
Posted in A Writer's Life, Writing for the Web on Jul 17th, 2008
Well, I’m no longer a news reporter. Informify is a great site, but also a start-up company running on a shoestring, and the shoestring just snapped. So, it’s back to focusing on writing for children for me. What are some of the things that I learned during my brief sojourn in the [...]
Posted in A Writer's Life on Jul 3rd, 2008
There is a weird kind of alchemy which makes characters come alive on a page. It has to do with what I think of as the “five dimensions of character.”
In geometry, the four dimensions are breadth, depth, height and time. In writing, this translates to the following:
Physical setting–does the story take [...]
Posted in A Writer's Life on Jun 28th, 2008
I’ve been on both sides of an editor’s desk and have thereby gained some useful insight into the editing process, which I hope will be useful to you.
My editing experience was three years as assistant editor for a local monthly arts newspaper. All our writers were volunteers, so the articles we got had a [...]
Posted in A Writer's Life, Self-publishing on Jun 25th, 2008
Warning: I’m feeling a bit grumpy today, so the following post will contain a certain amount of ranting.
One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in writing for the informify web site is having to learn a whole new style of writing with a whole new set of more-or-less- incomprehensible rules. Now, instead of [...]
Posted in A Writer's Life, Self-publishing, Writing for the Web on Jun 17th, 2008
I’ve just started a new job, writing for an online news webpage, Informify.com.
I’m learning a lot about the difference between writing for print and writing for the web. It seems that reading on a computer screen accesses a different part of the brain than reading from a page. This is why it’s so hard [...]
Posted in A Writer's Life, Educational Writing on May 31st, 2008
Though I got my degree in Writing for Children, if an idea occurs to me I don’t try to make it fit into my “speciality,” but look for the best way to express it. This is often, but not always, as a children’s story. And, when it comes to making money, if someone [...]
Posted in A Writer's Life on May 29th, 2008
Admitting that I wanted to be a writer took me twenty-five years. I thought, at the time, that giving myself permission to be a writer was the hard part and that actually becoming a successful writer would be easy by comparison. I knew I was a good writer. Hadn’t my teachers always told me so? Didn’t my kids love the bedtime [...]
P.S. McFadden (Miss Pat) writes
award winning
fiction and non-fiction for and about children, as well as teaching materials
for various educational publishers.
Read Miss Pat's full bio...