I have learned so much about the craft of writing during this last year. I’m no expert, but I thought it would be fun to share some tips and tricks that have been the most helpful to me for improving my skills. Hopefully some of you will find this helpful.
One of the first things I learned about when I joined SCBWI was the concept of mentor texts. A mentor text is a published book that you study and use as a reference while writing your own book. It could be a book that has a similar topic or theme to the one you are writing. Or it could be written in a similar voice or point of view that you are trying to use. Obviously the goal is not to copy another book, but it can be helpful to see a finished product when you are still working with pen and paper or a blank computer screen.
My most recent manuscript is about what it’s like being a pastor’s kid. For my mentor texts, I looked at several other pictures books that were about church so I could see how people wrote about attending church. These mentor texts helped me be aware of some trends with picture books for the Christian market. A lot of these books were rhyming. My book is not. I noodled around with making my book a rhyming story, but ultimately I decided against it. But now I know that I might be competing with books that rhyme and that might be a preference for publishers and agents. If I decide to retool at any point, I know that rhyming might be the way to go.
I also looked at a few books that featured kids talking about their parent’s job. I wanted to see examples of writing from a kids point of view about working parents. This helped me figure out how much I wanted to center the child’s experience.
There was one mentor text that didn’t fit into any of these categories, but in the end it was the book I looked to the most in this process. It is a lovely book called IN MY MOSQUE by M. O. Yuksel and Hatem Aly. In the book, a child takes readers through their day at the mosque. The writing is very lyrical, but not rhyming, and it engages all five senses in its descriptions of the community, rituals and activities in the mosque.
This book really showed me how to make my writing less didactic and more sensory. Yuksel made the experience of the mosque come alive to me as someone who has never been to a mosque. I wanted to bring that approach to my story about a specific childhood experience that many people have never had for themselves. And the book really stays faithful to showing a kid’s point of view which is what I want to do in my book.
One trick I learned with mentor texts is to type them out. This is relatively easy to do with picture books. With IN MY MOSQUE, I sat down and typed up the whole text of the book. I made paragraphs to represent page turns to get a sense of how the book was structured and how ideas were grouped in the book. This way I was able to see how text looked on a typed page versus in an illustrated book. I then used that as a reference to help me see where my page breaks could be and how to give my story a sense of flow and structure with the not-yet existing illustrations in mind.
It might seem a little ironic that for my book about a pastor’s kid, the most helpful mentor text was a book about a kid going to the mosque. But other showing different faiths, IN MY MOSQUE was the perfect book to study for POV, structure, use of language, and its approach to depicting religious practices and communities.
It’s fun to discover new books and understand them in a deeper way, and mentor texts really allow you to do that while improving your writing.
Judy Campbell-Smith 