Amanda Rawson Hill

I’m starting a mailing list to send out author updates, fun activity ideas, and prizes! Not through your email, through the actual, real snail mail! Postcards!

Want to get a quarterly postcard from me for yourself, your kids, your students, your guinea pig? Sign up using the form below. Also, each postcard is also a subscriber giveaway. I’ll choose one person on my mailing list each quarter to send a signed book to. (Mine or someone else’s. I get them at my favorite conference!) So sign up!

My next middle grade novel, Once Upon a Family, is publishing on August 1st! And I’m doing a few author events to celebrate! Here is what I have lined up so far. I’m working on getting something set up in California soon.

The Hope of Elephants came out last September and it has earned some great recognition!

Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

NCTE Notable Verse Novel

Cybils Award Finalist

Whitney Award Winner

Bank Street Best Books of 2022

Can’t wait to see what happens next!

I’m so excited to reveal the YOU’LL FIND ME preorder campaign.

First, a little bit about the book. YOU’LL FIND ME is a beautiful, soft picture book about feeling close to the people we love even when we are separated. Whether that separation is temporary, like a deployment or living far away from someone, or permanent, as in a death. The text and pictures encourage children and adults alike to pause and think about all the ways we are connected to our loved ones in the small everyday moments of our lives.

 

 

With that in mind, I’ve built the preorder campaign around fostering connection and these conversations around connection.

For each preorder of YOU’LL FIND ME, you will get access to all of the digital files that I will be creating for you to share with your parent, grandparents, children, etc. These files will help you share your “You’ll Find Me Moments” with your loved ones. The first digital file is a Mother’s Day card with the cover of the book on the exterior and a pretty place to write three “You’ll Find Me Moments” in the interior.

There will be a similar card for Father’s Day and Grandparent’s Day as well as one for families experiencing deployment and one specifically for families preparing to lose a loved one (or who have recently lost someone.)

 

You will also receive the supplies to make “You’ll Find Me” bracelets. These will be simple braided floss bracelets with a small charm. The idea is that your child and the person they want to feel connected to can make the bracelets together and discuss their You’ll Find Me moments and then wear the bracelets and every time they look at it, they can feel connected. This is a technique that I’ve had other parents use for separation anxiety and so I hope it helps you.

I will also be donating $1 to the International Rescue Committee for every preorder to help support their vital work in protecting families and reuniting or keeping them together.

 

To get your preorder goodies, simply email proof of purchase to youllfindmebook@gmail.com.

You will get instant access to each of the digital files as they are released each month and I will send the bracelet supplies in September, closer to the book’s release.

 

Find the book here!

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Indiebound

Can’t wait to hear from you!

I’m so pleased to show you the cover for THE THREE RULES OF EVERYDAY MAGIC! It will be published by Boyds Mills Press on September 25, 2018.

You can preorder it on Amazon, Indiebound, and Barnes and Noble!

 

I’m reflecting on what I read this year and what I’m excited about for next year over at Thinking Through our Fingers. You can read it here.

I had the privilege of guest posting over at The MG Book Village about how the three rules from my debut novel, THE THREE RULES OF EVERYDAY MAGIC, are the same rules that make the holidays magical. You can read it here!

The decision period of Pitch Wars may be over, but that doesn’t mean the revisions are! If you’re hopping back into your WIP, I’ll be continuing on with my blog series about problems I see in books after the first chapter. You can read my other posts about direction, active characters, and show vs. tell.

Today I’m going to talk to you about something I’m working with my mentees on. Motivation. In previous posts we talked about how in every scene, your MC needs a goal, an obstacle, and a reaction. And those are all the “What’s” of writing and plot. But today we’re going to talk about the “Why.”

Motivation is the “why” behind the goal. If there isn’t a good enough reason for your character to pursue the plot or scene goal, then there isn’t any tension because the reader doesn’t care whether or not they achieve their goal. Characters can’t just do things for the heck of it. They have to have a reason. We have to understand why they are the way they are. Even if you are having a character act on impulse, even if the character doesn’t know why they did something, the reader has to be able to see why…eventually at least.

There needs to be a why for everything. Having your character do something and simply say, “I don’t know why I did it. I just did.” Isn’t very satisfying for the reader (unless you’ve actually shown us why the character did that and the character just doesn’t see it in themselves.) And it isn’t just the MC that needs motivation for everything. All you characters need motivation. Every character in your story thinks they are the main character. They all need to have reasons (good reasons) for what they do. Without good motivations, you get cliché, stereotypical characters.

The bully can’t be a bully just because they like to be mean. Go deeper. Mom can’t say no just because you need an obstacle and mom’s say no. Go deeper. The villain can’t just want to take over the world because they think it would be fun. Go deeper. There’s more there for all of your characters. And until you plumb and then show those deeper motivations, your story is going to feel shallow.

But motivation is a little bit trickier than people realize. Because your story actually needs two layers of motivation. See, in every story there is an external goal and an internal goal.

In Harry Potter the EXTERNAL GOAL is to defeat Voldemort. But the INTERNAL GOAL is to gain a family and love Harry’s always been missing.

Likewise, your MC needs an external motivation and an internal motivation.

In Harry Potter the EXTERNAL MOTIVATION is essentially that Voldemort is evil and Harry is good. But the INTERNAL MOTIVATION is that Voldemort is a threat to the people Harry has gained as family. He’s already killed Harry’s original family, he’ll get rid of mudbloods like Hermione and muggle sympathizers like the Weasleys.

And this is what makes for a powerful book. The external goal and the internal, over the course of the story, become tightly woven together. The MC can not achieve their external goal without also achieving their internal goal and vice versa. (Unless you are writing a bittersweet ending, in which case by the end the MC lays aside the external goal because they’ve achieved the internal goal and realize the external goal isn’t necessary.)

In your story, the internal goal and internal motivation are there all along. They inform the way your character acts and reacts in the story. But they aren’t always revealed right away. If you are waiting to reveal the true internal motivation for your character until later in the story for dramatic effect (which I’m totally a sucker for) then you need to make the external motivation strong enough to make the reader care AND you need to give us hints that there is more to the story. Perhaps your character is motivated by guilt because of something in the past. If you want to save the reveal about what exactly happened for the climax or midpoint, that’s fine. But you need to make sure we know that your character is feeling guilty about something and pull us along. Make us want to find out why they are feeling guilty.

So let’s go through a few examples and talk about external and internal motivation and when the internal motivation is revealed in the story.

In Harry Potter, it’s pretty easy to guess what Harry’s internal motivation is from the very start. His parents are murdered, the Dursleys are terrible. Of course he wants a family! But when do we know that’s what he wants for sure? When he looks in the mirror of Erised, right? Isn’t that when we truly feel his longing? When he does there every night and watches for hours?

In Hunger Games, both the external and internal motivation is presented pretty early in the story. But the midpoint shift kind of changes the goal and motivation, (which it’s supposed to do.) The external goal is to stay alive. At the midpoint that shifts to keeping herself AND Peeta alive. The internal motivation before that point is to protect her sister, but we are also given backstory that informs the external goal that will come later. When we are shown the story of how Peeta saved her family from starvation, we get the internal motivation for the rest of the story.

IN WE WERE LIARS, which is a story with a huge twist. We don’t get the true internal motivation until almost the very end of the story. That’s part of the twist. But there are soooo many hints about the true motivation. We know something happened. We know there is guilt and sadness around it. It draws the reader in and makes us want to read more and find out what the heck happened. And the character acts and reacts throughout the entire story according to this internal motivation. But we don’t know what it is until the end.

Now as far as external motivation goes, you should have that by the 25% mark. And before the 25% mark, there should be smaller external motivators at the very least that inform your MC’s actions. Remember, your MC needs to be active and have a goal, but they also need a good reason for that goal. Both an external and internal reason. Or the reader won’t care about the goal. Around the 50% mark, you need to raise the stakes and another way to think about raising the stakes is to think of it as deepening the motivation. If the MC needs it MORE than it’s going to hurt MORE if they don’t accomplish the goal. When people talk about stakes, they are talking about motivation. The “why” of your story.

The best way to nail down motivation in your story is to nail down your characters. Really get to know them and their backstory. Go through those character questionnaires but do more than just answer the questions. With every question, make your character tell you “why” that’s their answer. If you keep doing that, you’re going to really start understanding your character’s motivation for everything, but especially your story.

Here is a really good post about pre-writing to discover your characters’ secrets and backstory. http://writerunboxed.com/2014/10/10/pre-writing-discovering-your-characters-secrets/

And here is a bit more from the same author about internal and external goals and motivation. http://www.robinlafevers.com/2012/10/28/growing-plot-from-character/

I also highly recommend K.M. Weiland’s entire series on character arc which really lays out how to set up external and internal motivation for your characters.

 

As promised, here is another blog post about what I’m noticing as I read our requests. You can find part 1 here and part 2 here.

Show don’t tell is probably the most common advice of the writing world. But it’s really hard to get it just right. That’s because showing vs. telling is more like a balancing act than a rule. More a spectrum than a dichotomy. So I’m going to try and lay out spots on that spectrum and tell you a bit about when they work and when they don’t and the risks involved. Okay? Okay.

1. Flat out telling. This is the easiest to spot. It’s when you just flat out name an emotion. I felt sad. She was happy. Except, as writers, we always try to disguise it, right? So we say, “his eyes were sad.” (Sorry, still telling.) Or, “Her hands twitched nervously.” (That’s telling too. Basically, almost all adverbs are flat out telling.) When you name the emotion, even when you try to hide it in physical reactions (My blood pulsed with anger.) It’s STILL telling.

Doing this OCCASIONALLY is okay. It’s not a deal breaker. Especially if you can do it lyrically. For example, something like, “She felt as if all the happiness in the world could shine out of her hair and her fingertips at theat very moment.” (Okay, that’s nor super lyrical, I’m flying by the seat of my pants here. But you get the picture.) It can work, very occasionally, in small doses, with the right voice. Also, a third person narrator who is almost their own character in the story can get away with a lot more telling than any other kind of narrator. You still have to watch it, of course, but they can bend the show don’t tell rule a bit more than others.

2. Info-Dump Dialogue. This is when characters spill all the beans about exactly what they are feeling and thinking just because another character asks. Unless this is the climax of your story and your MC is getting their secret shame off their chests, DON’T DO THIS EVER! How often do people ever say exactly what they mean and exactly what they are thinking and everything they are thinking. We will learn a lot more about your character by what they choose to divulge and what they choose to hold on to and not tell anyone, than by you simply having them tell everything and then follow it up with, “It was embarrassing.” Or, “I’m so pissed.”

3. Cliché physical reactions. There are good physical reactions that are showing and then there are cliché ones that are so obvious or overused that they feel almost like flat out telling. The racing heart, the sick stomach, the crossed arms, the tapping foot, the bully smashing his fist into his other hand. You get the picture. Always try to avoid the cliché physical response, if possible. If you can’t, try to find a new way to say it. In my debut, I have a scene where the MC is feeling upset and she says that her stomach feels like a whole swarm of fruitflies are buzzing in it waiting to come up and swarm on the big watermelon-colored bow her ex-best friend is wearing. Am I still talking about an upset stomach? Yes. But is it different enough that it doesn’t feel totally cliché? I hope so…

 

4. Internalization. You have to let the reader into your MC’s thoughts. You have to. But not every single one. If we hear every single thought, then that is another form of telling. Your MC can tell us just as much (if not more) about how she’s feeling about things by what she doesn’t say or doesn’t comment on. You can show that something hurts her by having her REFUSE to comment on it. You can show us she’s hiding something without having her think, “I can’t tell her that.” Perhaps instead you can show her purposely redirect the conversation.

This is where show v. tell becomes a balancing act. I am really good at telling you things by what my MC doesn’t say. My agent loves it and compliments it every time. Several editors…not so much. They felt like they couldn’t connect to the character because they didn’t know what she was feeling. And so you have to be careful with this. Like I said before, internal thoughts are VITAL. But too many, or too direct of internal thoughts, can kill tension and just feel like blah,blah, blah, and not allow the reader to put pieces together themselves. And readers love putting pieces together themselves!!! Look at all the Harry POtter discussion groups and fan theories. Readers eat that stuff up!

If you’re like me and have a hard time knowing when you need to let readers into the MC’s head more, have somebody do a special beta read for you and mark every single instance they don’t know what your character is feeling. This is now standard procedure for me. It changed my writing and took it to a whole new level.

 

5. Similes and the word ‘felt.’ I’ll be honest. I love using similes and comparisons in my writing. Instead of saying, “I felt happy.” I love saying, “I felt like a thousand balloons were lifting me up into the air.” Oh, you get so much more of an actual feeling out of that. Oh, she’s feeling THAT way. But it still is a form of a telling and if you do it too much, it starts getting telly and long winded. So save them for real emotional punch and don’t have too many too close together. And if possible, drop the word felt. Similies and comparisons are a TOOL that can be abused. So try to find the right balance. There’s no set rule for this. Different voices have different allowances for when it becomes too much. Just feel it out and get a really good CP to tell you when you’ve gone overboard.

 

6. Non-Cliché physical reaction – We’ve now come firmly over to the showing side of the spectrum. I highly recommend the emotion thesaurus for ideas on how to do this well. A physical reaction isn’t just things like upset stomachs or tingly toes or glancing eyes. It can be breaking the eraser off your pencil, biting the inside of your cheek, kicking a rock on the ground, stomping too hard on the gas pedal, leaning back against a chair, etc. I’ve found that when I’m having a hard time writing non-cliché physical reactions, it’s because I haven’t filled out the setting enough. I haven’t given my characters enough props in their surroundings to work with. Once my characters are interacting with the environment, this gets a lot easier.

But it CAN be overdone. I actually got so good at this in my first book that people read and were like, “All these physical reactions are really slowing down your dialogue and story. We  don’t need a physical reaction for EVERYTHING.” So once again, we have that terrible word BALANCE. A physical reaction can only go so far. Sometimes, you have to throw in a simile or an internal thought to really fill it out and bring it home. That beta read for knowing how your MC is feeling will help with this.

 

7. Objective Correlative. This is like pro-level showing. It’s all about communicating how your MC feels by the way they view the world around them. So, if your MC is feeling happy, how might they describe the rain? “Rain drops tinkled on my window pane like a thousand fairy bells whispering their promises of secrets, play, and magic still alive in the world.” But what if your MC is feeling hopeless? “The rain dragged down my window pane, covering the world outside in mud and slush.” Totally different vibes, right? But do you feel what the MC is feeling? Totally!

Can you simply use Objective Correlative through out your entire story and nothing else? Heck no! We still need internal thoughts and physical reactions and some similes and dialogue. OC is a tool. But it can’t be your only tool. If it’s the only thing you use, we might always be left wondering exactly what your MC is feeling and there will be some definite disconnect.

So basically, show vs tell is hard because it is a balance. Sometimes, telling is called for. Sometimes showing can go too far and actually disconnect the reader. Good CP’s will help!