Monday's Tips-From an Author!

Hey everyone! I am so excited for this post. So the other day I was brainstorming,thinking of things I could do that would make things a little more interesting.What better way to make things interesting than get tips from a published author!-I thought.I also got the idea from Shelby's 100th post.So I was going around,thinking of books I had just recently read,books I thought were amazing.I came across two of my absolute favorite!!!! I found their contact info,and I was so excited to open up my email  Saturday morning and find one of them had replied! Her name is M.E.Breen and she wrote "Darkwood".Here are her tips-

How did you get started writing?

The first piece of creative writing I remember doing was in third grade, when I wrote a poem about a spider getting eaten by a bird. It was pretty dark and dreary as poems go. After that there was a long break until after I graduated from college, when I started working on Darkwood. I've always lived in cities, and I was staying in the country one night and I was walking along a road back to my cabin. There was no moon and I could not believe how dark it was. It seemed like anything was possible in that darkness -- scary things, but magical things, too. I started thinking about what people would be like if they lived with that darkness all the time. Would they be cowardly or brave? Imaginative or close-minded? I'd been looking at pictures of wolves earlier, and I missed my old dog Annie and my two cats, and, well, you can see how the story grew from there. I never knew where it was going from one day to the next. I just followed wherever it led.
Any books you would recommend?

This is great question, because I'm about to teach a class on writing novels for teenagers and kids. We're reading five books for the course, all of which I would recommend for different reasons:
The Hunger Games, for incredible suspense and a marvelously detailed picture of a truly terrifying governmentMarcelo and the Real World, for its minute exploration of a unique heart and mind and for having a pretty curious mystery
What I Saw and How I Lied, for looking at the world of adult problems through the eyes of someone just starting to feel adult, and also for being full of interesting history and being beautifully writtenFrom the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler, for being perfectly written and funny and really really understanding kids
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, for being completely, totally awesome and making me cry every time.
Any tips you would like to give to young writers?

Yes! One is boring because everybody says it, but it bears repeating: Revise, revise, revise! I wrote the first draft of Darkwood in one year and then spent SEVEN more years revising and making it better. You don't have to take that long, but you should always plan on doing a lot of rethinking and rewriting.

The other piece of advice is more fun. Start a writing group. Writing is a lonely task, and it helps immensely to have people you trust and like reading your work and giving you feedback. Critiquing their work will also teach you a lot about your own writing. It looks like you've made an excellent start on this with your friend Shelby and your online followers.

So,what do you think? If this goes over well(with comments!) we may start doing this every Monday(if we can find an author) along with the contest.I'm going to start that back up today!

  In under 900 words,write a short story,poem,etc. about any topic whatsoever. 

 Okay,I think that's it! Well,have a nice day! Also,I'm back! Yay!