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    Just Write: Here's How!
    Just Write: Here's How!
    Just Write: Here's How!
    Ebook131 pages1 hour

    Just Write: Here's How!

    By Walter Dean Myers

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    About this ebook

    After writing more than one hundred books, it still amazes me that I have been lucky enough to spend most of my life doing what I truly love: writing.

    What makes a writer? The desire to tell a story, a love of language, an eye for detail, practice, practice, practice. How well should you know your characters? Do you need to outline before you write? How important is length? Now Walter Dean Myers, the new National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and New York Times bestselling and award-winning author, walks you through the writing process.

    Includes:

    • Examples from his writing and reading experiences
    • Walter's six-box and four-box outlines for writing fiction and nonfiction
    • Excerpted pages from Walter's own notebooks
    • An afterword by Ross Workman, Walter's teen coauthor of kick
    • Writing tips from both Walter and Ross

    Anyone can be a writer, with a little help from Walter Dean Myers!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperTeen
    Release dateApr 24, 2012
    ISBN9780062203915
    Just Write: Here's How!
    Author

    Walter Dean Myers

    Walter Dean Myers was the New York Times bestselling author of Monster, the winner of the first Michael L. Printz Award; a former National Ambassador for Young People's Literature; and an inaugural NYC Literary Honoree. Myers received every single major award in the field of children's literature. He was the author of two Newbery Honor Books and six Coretta Scott King Awardees. He was the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults, a three-time National Book Award Finalist, as well as the first-ever recipient of the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement.

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    • 4/5
      Walter Dean Myers knows a great deal about writing. He has successfully written and published over 100 books, most targeting young readers.
      “Just Write” also seeks young readers as its primary audience, but like so many really good YA books, it appeals to older people, too, even really old people like me.
      The book is a great guide to writing. Simple, down to earth, well structured and enormously practical, “Just Write” offers tremendous help to young (or old) people who want to write but just don’t know how to get their ideas translated into something others would want to read. I wish I had read this book many years ago since one of the greatest regrets of my life is that I did not pursue a career in writing.
      Myers’ advice is divided into two primary areas: how to write fiction, especially a novel, and how to write non-fiction. The techniques and tools he describes are quite simple, yet there is a world of difference between simplicity and ease. In other words, the tools are simple and making them work in an actual application is not easy because being a writer is work, it is difficult no matter what tools are being used, and it takes perseverance.
      “Just Write” lays out a roadmap of the steps for how to go from idea to product, and the map is excellent.
      For me personally, I have written down lots of ideas and notes about things I would like to write about, and many I have even turned into compositions, stories and essays. My greatest challenge has not been what to write about or why to write it, but how to develop the idea fully. Even more challenging for me has been to see how to end a fictional piece. The tools in this book gave me very practical ideas about how to overcome these stumbling blocks of mine.
      Teachers in high school and even early college classes could easily find Meyers’ ideas excellent and practical tools for their students who hope to be writers.
    • 5/5
      Really quick read. gives good information and examples
    • 4/5
      13. Just Write: Here's How! by Walter Dean Myers (2012, 176 pages, Read Feb 21 - Mar 4)Looking for books on writing at my library, this came up in ebook format because I sorted by publication date. It was only after I started that I learned it was Juvenile book targeting teenagers, but I read it anyway because it was quite good. Myers, who was adopted and then watched his adopted father fall into unemployment and alcohol addiction, never went to college. Nonetheless, he has published over a hundred books since the 1960's, mainly juvenile and young adult books, many highly regarded and award winning. He brings in numerous personal stories, including his experiences co-writing a book with a 13-year-old admirer, the experience that probably led to this book. From a writing advice perspective, Myers focuses on beginning with the story structure. He has six "boxes" of aspects of a story he fills in before he starts writing. If he can't fill them in, then he knows the story won't work. Once he gets that basic structure, and fills in more detail and only once he has worked out the outline in some depth does he begin writing. I found it interesting that such a prolific writer writes five pages a day, everyday and no more. He talks about how he used to try to write ten, but the quality wasn't as good and he had to do a lot more re-writing. What I also found interesting was that once I started taking story ideas I had and tried to fill in those six boxes, I couldn't, and the weaknesses of the stories jumped out at me. His method seems very good.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      5Q - written in young adult vernacular without a speck of condescension. A very practical guide, and one with a hope of being followed. Lots of personal examples from the author.5P - fun to read but so good it could also work as a text for a creative writing course for teens. Anyone starting NaNoWriMo should have a copy of this.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      One of America's most accomplished authors shares his experiences, and excellent insights and advice on the art and craft of writing that young people (and adults, too) will find invaluable.

    Book preview

    Just Write - Walter Dean Myers

    title page

    Contents

    Cover

    Title Page

    PROLOGUE: Why I’m a Writer

    CHAPTER 1: Roll Up Your Sleeves

    CHAPTER 2: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue

    CHAPTER 3: Hello, Voices in My Head

    CHAPTER 4: Map It Out

    CHAPTER 5: Lights, Camera, Action!

    CHAPTER 6: Nice to Meet You

    CHAPTER 7: What’s Going On?

    CHAPTER 8: Where’s the Fire?

    CHAPTER 9: What’s It to You?

    CHAPTER 10: Get It Together

    CHAPTER 11: So What Are You Going to Do About It?

    CHAPTER 12: Then What Happened?

    CHAPTER 13: For Real?

    CHAPTER 14: Check It Out

    CHAPTER 15: Discipline

    CHAPTER 16: Leave Your Ego at the Door

    CHAPTER 17: Hey, Get Back Here

    CHAPTER 18: There’s Room on This Page for the Both of Us

    CHAPTER 19: Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Off

    CHAPTER 20: Writing Is Good for You

    CHAPTER 21: Who Are You?

    AFTERWORD: Now You’re a Writer by Ross Workman

    Top Ten Writing Tips from Walter Dean Myers

    Five Writing Tips from Ross Workman

    Suggestions for Further Reading

    Meet the Author

    All My Books . . . So Far

    Back Ads

    About the Author

    Books by Walter Dean Myers

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    PROLOGUE

    Why I’m a Writer

    I love what I do.

    After forty-three years and over one hundred books, it still amazes me that I have been lucky enough to spend most of my life doing what I truly love: writing. That people read what I write, that I have won awards for my writing, and that I have been able to make a living at it are extras for which I am very grateful. Success at writing simply means that I am able to continue to write instead of having to get some other job. The many returns my readers have given me for my efforts have exceeded my most ambitious expectations.

    I care about writing for young people because I remember how much I needed help and guidance at that time in my life. My own life showed me the value of stories, and I’ve spent my career trying to write the books I wanted to read as a teen.

    Books and writing have always been a part of my life. There is no substitute for reading. There are two elements I recognize as reading: decoding the letters or symbols that form words and phrases (what you learned to do when you were first beginning to recognize letters and sound out words), and the transition from the decoding process to ownership of the text (what you probably felt the first time you read a book you really loved).

    I was lucky to experience ownership at an early age. I’ll just tell you right up front that I was a mama’s boy. My happiest memories of my childhood are of spending time with my mother, Florence Dean, in our small Harlem apartment. There I first encountered stories. Mama and I would listen to her radio shows or she would read out loud to me. Then we would discuss the stories together and share what they meant to us. You probably do this in English class at school, or maybe with your friends. Ownership is when you really get into a book or a movie (or a video game), and you almost feel like it’s happening to you. You know it’s not really happening, of course—but the characters’ emotions feel real, and maybe you can imagine being part of the story yourself. Have you ever felt this way about a story?

    In my conversations at home with my mother, I became used to transferring information from one person to another and to the imaginative process involved. Long before I started school, I was reading ready and only had to worry about expanding the decoding process.

    I defined decoding just above as the mechanical process of reading, of recognizing letters and the sounds they make, and knowing what the words mean. These are the building blocks, but decoding involves more than just phonics or knowing the dictionary definitions of lots of different words. There’s a deeper aspect of understanding a story. Have you ever read a story in school that took place at another time in history, such as during the Vietnam War? Your teacher might have thought it was important to study a little bit about the Vietnam War to give you context to understand the story even better. Or maybe you’ve read a story about a character who is very different from you—maybe from another country with a unique culture. Being able to understand that character’s perspective is also part of the decoding process. There are a lot of ways to get better and better at decoding. The more you learn throughout your life, whether through reading, exploring, or experiencing new things, the greater your capacity for understanding will become.

    In many ways, I had a head start in decoding as well as in ownership. I got to travel around New York City with my church, gaining exposure to many different places and cultures. This made me more comfortable with the new ideas I would find in books. I had a relatively wide range of intellectual experiences, even at age seven, that served me well.

    My transition from being a reader to being a writer happened naturally. I liked to read and I liked to be sociable, but I tended to fight a lot in school, which limited my social network. The fighting often stemmed from my speech problems. The frustration I felt as I rattled off my ideas to bewildered teachers and fellow students often ended up with me punching someone. I was frequently admonished for not playing well with others. The problem was that the others didn’t always do what I told them to do.

    When I’m writing I create my own others, my characters, and I play very well with them. I went from creating another world in my head to doing it on paper. The discipline of forming the details that made up a poem or story was one I enjoyed immensely.

    I’m often asked why I write for young people. My own experiences as a teenager were so intense that I keep coming back to that period of my life to explore and to make sense of it in a way that defines who I am today. I’ve used my own experiences to understand the characters I write about. What I do is fairly simple. I write books for the troubled boy I once was, and for the boy who lives within me still.

    Why do I revisit that time in my life through writing? Why not through psychotherapy or interpretive dance? I think the answer has something to do with the power of the written word. I believe in that power deeply. Through literature, the reader and the writer are provided with a vehicle for direct communication. Every individual is unique, but through writing we can reach out and, hopefully, meet somewhere in the middle. We can understand a person we have never met and know a place we’ve never seen.

    Maybe even more important than transporting us to faraway places, reading and writing can also bring us closer to our own inner selves. As we identify and empathize with other people, we reaffirm our own abilities to make that human connection. We remember we’re not really that different. There are elements of the experience of living that we all share.

    Life is imperfect and often complicated. (If your life is perfect, congratulations. Seriously.) Usually the reason for the complication has to do with other people. When kids used to make fun of me when I had to read out loud in class, they were laughing because that’s what they wanted to do. When I punched them, that was what I wanted to do. If we went around doing whatever we wanted, the world would be sort of a mess. So outside of what I want and outside of what you want, we’ve agreed on some things that we all want. Some people call this morality, or the social contract, even common sense, but somehow we manage to get along with each other.

    Stories allow us to think about all this. We can explore how we would react to certain situations without actually having to live through them. We can imagine how we would feel and

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