Spotlight image: Authors A.S. King, Mitu Malhotra, Jane Houng and Heather Demetrios at the 2024 Highlights Retreat.
In the spring of 2024, I attended a Highlights Foundation In-Community Retreat organized by the Rebecca Dykes Writers. This transformative retreat, designed for authors crafting books for children and teens,
Sometimes it can be helpful to think about endings when you’re at the beginning of the process—not plotting the ending, but doing a bit of free, no-holds-barred thinking about your character’s emotional inner journey and where you hope she goes.
This is what you write towards,
For some people, starting a new novel is like that scene in “The Sound Of Music,” where Maria’s tra-la-la-ing on a mountaintop, arms spread out, spinning in delirious joy.
If you’re like me, though, that blank white page isn’t cause for bursting into song.
Bursting into tears,
