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Do you want to learn how to write a children's book? Make money writing for children's magazines? Every Friday the Writing for Children podcast publishes from The Institute of Children's Lit...
AN INTERVIEW WITH HANNAH HOLT In this rebroadcast, we talk with Hannah Holt, a children's author with an engineering degree. Her books, The...
FOUR WAYS TO LEARN TO LOVE NONFICTION Many writers view nonfiction as less: less creative than fiction, less fun than fiction, less interest...
LAUNCHING A STORY FROM A TITLE Chances are you fall into one of two camps when it comes to titles: You either love creating them or you drea...
TOP THREE NARRATIVE NONFICTION MISSTEPS Nonfiction is basically broken into two broad types. Expository nonfiction describes, explains, and...
INTERVIEW WITH A CONTEST JUDGE In this rebroadcast, we interview frequent ICL contest judge and longtime instructor Nancy Coffelt. As well a...
TIPS FOR YOUR WRITER WEBSITE Every author needs a website—yes, even if you're not published yet. In the Internet age, your website acts as y...
5 QUESTIONS ABOUT AUTHOR PLATFORM A while back I sent out a one-question survey. Writers could submit any one question about author platform...
INTERVIEW WITH VICTORIA BOND Victoria Bond is a writer and professor. Her novel, Zora and Me , co-written with T.R. Simon, won the John Step...
FINDING YOUR CHILDLIKE VOICE Voice is the number one thing that can make or break your children's story. So, let's see how to find a childli...
AUTHENTIC KID VOICES A while ago on the Institute's Facebook page, someone was asking about dialogue, which made me think again about this i...
INTERVIEW WITH MAGGIE TOKUDA-HALL & JAMIE TAN Katie interviews award-winning author Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Candlewick Senior Publicist Jamie...
ACTIVE AND PASSIVE VOICE Voice can be a tough thing to define and a tougher thing to master, but when I ran across this article about active...
INTERVIEW WITH TALIA BENAMY Talia Benamy is an associate editor at Philomel Books (an imprint of Penguin Young Readers), where she focuses o...
THINGS THAT MAKE EDITORS CRINGE Nobody wants to make an editor (or anyone) cringe when they read your manuscript. Inspired by a post from Ja...
INTERVIEW WITH AGENT ADRIA GOETZ Adria Goetz is a Literary Manager with Seattle-based Martin Literary & Media Management. She primarily repr...
SUBMISSIONS It's the beginning of a new year. A time that we as writers like to set goals for our writing success and dream about what our w...
YOU'RE THIS CLOSE We're wrapping up our five part series on National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) with special guest Jamie K. Schmidt. Ev...
NANOWRIMO SUCCESS PART 4 - THROW IN A DRAGON? We are continuing our November National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) celebration with tips...
NANOWRIMO SUCCESS PART 3 - GET PAST THE SLUMP We are continuing our November National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) celebration with tips...
NANOWRIMO SUCCESS PART 2 - DIGGING IN Welcome to Part 2 in our 5-part series to help our listeners get through NaNoWriMo with support, encou...
NANOWRIMO SUCCESS PART 1 - PREPARE National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is about to start. Every November, writers from around the world...
TIPS FOR YOUR MYSTERY OPENING CHAPTERS The first page of your mystery needs to intrigue your reader. It has to pull them in and make them wo...
PLANTING CLUES You're in a race with your readers. The readers are trying to guess what will happen. You're trying to spring that 'whodunnit...
INTERVIEW WITH KATE MILFORD Kate Milford is the New York Times bestselling author of The Thief Knot , as well as Greenglass House (winner of...
PLANNING YOUR NOVEL At any time you speak to a writer, they may easily be either planning a novel, writing a novel, or revising a novel. Alw...
FOR THE LOVE OF GENRE Anyone who has been writing for children for any length of time knows that folks have a tendency to see writers for ch...
REAL SPEECH FOR REAL PEOPLE Today's episode is adapted from one of our lessons in the Shape, Write, Sell Your Novel course. This course will...
INTERVIEW WITH JAMIE K. SCHMIDT Today's guest expert is USA Today Bestselling romance novelist Jamie K. Schmidt, who also blogs for us on oc...
8 STEPS TO PERFECT DIALOGUE FORMAT Formatting dialogue in any manuscript can be perplexing. This rebroadcast of a popular episode has 8 guid...
HOW STRUCTURED IS YOUR PICTURE BOOK? One of the major problems editors encounter when reading picture book submissions is the lack of plot,...
BECOME YOUR OWN EDITOR Today's episode is an excerpt from our Writing for Children and Teens course at the Institute of Children's Literatur...
COMMA LONG WITH ME I admit I love punctuation. I love all the little rules surrounding periods, commas, and quotation marks. Maybe it's beca...
INTERVIEW WITH EDITOR PAULA MORROW Although Paula Morrow has written more than 70 books and hundreds of magazine pieces (fiction, nonfiction...
BASIC STORY ELEMENTS Today, we're discussing three basic story elements: characters, setting, and theme. Learn how they all work together to...
INTERJECTING HUMOR INTO YOUR WORK We constantly hear that agents and editors are looking for humor. If they don't say "humor" outright, we h...
HOW TO WRITE FUNNY Is laughter really the best medicine? I don't know, but I do suspect that laughter is a great way to get published. If yo...
PLAYING FAIR WITH PLOT Good stories have lots of moving parts. Inspired by an article from our own Jan Fields, this episode challenges us to...
INTERVIEW WITH NANCY COFFELT Author/illustrator Nancy Coffelt began her career as a fine artist, but when she found that the titles of her w...
PACING 101 You hear the word all the time from teachers, critiquers, and editors. "Nice brisk pace." "Kind of slow, pick up the pace". "I li...
VOICE You may feel like you are struggling to find it. The first step in succeeding is realizing that it isn't as far away as you might thin...
GETTING DOWN AND DIRTY WITH PLOT Today we're continuing our conversation around plot. Our IFW blogger Jamie K. Schmidt contributed to a grea...
INTERVIEW WITH WANDA BRUNSTETTER Wanda Brunstetter is an award-winning romance novelist who has led millions of readers to lose their heart...
INTERVIEW WITH EMMA DRYDEN Over the course of her twenty-five year career (including as Vice President and Publisher of imprints at Simon &...
SETTING AS A CHARACTER Today's episode comes from Jamie K. Schmidt, a regular blogger for us on the IFW Blog focusing on writing for adults....
200th EPISODE When you're about to begin revising a piece of writing, it can seem so daunting you may be tempted to bury the darn thing at t...
INTERVIEW WITH CHARLIE N. HOLMBERG Charlie N. Holmberg is the author of the Numina series and the Wall Street Journal bestselling Paper Magi...
ELEMENTS OF SETTING If you're going to build a whole new world in your story, you have got to get the setting right. Today's episode explore...
POETRY FOR THE VERY YOUNG Poetry for very young children has a lot in common with poetry for older readers. It's built word by word, as poet...
POETRY-BASED REVISIONS Today we bring you a special episode from our favorite lyrical wordsmith Renee LaTulippe. If you write for kids, you...
HOW NOT TO GET REJECTED Perhaps the most common question from new picture book authors is, "Why do agents and editors say they hate rhyme wh...