Teenage Lexicon

Ah, the bane of every writer’s existence: naming your characters. An extensive plot and coinciding subplots, subtle symbolism, and quirky dialogue may come extremely easy to you, but picking a name for your character is a completely different ballpark—in fact, it’s more like an ice rink. Your OCs are like your children, after all, and you want only the best for your children (unless, of course, you kill them off). In actuality, however, naming a character is simple if you don’t overthink it. But if the perfect name doesn’t come to you in your sleep like some sort of lucid dream, then here are some things you might want to try. 1. Keep an ongoing name list, even before you’re planning on a new character.   Every time you hear a name you like, you should jot it down somewhere. Maybe you’ve just met a Sadie in your chemistry class and you love her name. Or you’re watching the news and an anchor named Holden catches your attention. Just having a list in a journal or on you...

The worst thing about being a writer still in school is that you have to balance interesting things (i.e. writing) with terrible, awful, tedious things (i.e. homework). As summer draws to a close and I prepare to enter my senior year, it would seem I'm inundated by summer work.  Yes, all of it seems pointless. And to most students, it is. But to a writer, it's all inspiration, technique, and extreme amounts of getting out of your writing box. You get the opportunity to turn all of it from a waste of time into a progression of your skills. Here are some things to consider: 1. It makes you pick up a pencil every once in awhile. With the exception of essays, a lot of my work has to be done by hand. I actually kind of love it. All my artwork for my studio classes is so much better when handmade. My vocabulary flashcards for English look so much prettier than any computer could do. Math looks kind of cool when you do it all out. I’m not saying you should write y...

All of my posts used to be on Teen Author's Journal, but that has since shut down. So I've found this thing again, and I'm going to actually try to use it as a good outlet. I'll ACTUALLY post things (if I remember to). I have some summer left, so maybe I can make a few worthwhile posts. THE KNOWERS is on Amazon now, if anyone's interested. It's kind of interesting.  You can get it here.

This is my first year doing NaNoWriMo, and it's been quite the adventure for these past two days. I really want to get somewhere substantial on the Eminence, so I joined. I gave myself a goal of 30,000 words. I'm in my school's musical and have three-to-five-hour rehearsals every day until opening on the ninth, and I'm in three AP classes and two honors classes. I'm editor of my school's literary magazine, and submissions open this month, so that's going to be hectic. Obviously, I'm hoping to surpass my goal, but this is a good start. So let's see what happens this month.

There are two reasons I didn't post this week. 1. I went on vacation with my cousins. It was amazing. 2. I sent some stuff to an agent. My heart is still pounding. I'm going to post this week's Book of the Week and Dialogue Diaries within the next few days. Everyone, wish me luck.

One of the things in writing that I'm actually good at is dialogue. Through lots of practice, discussion, and hair-pulling-outing, I've come up with lots of tips and methods for writing dialogue.  Something that happens a lot in books—especially YA and upper-middle grade—is inaccuracy or unrealism. Sometimes characters will say things to each other that people just don’t say to each other in real life.  Like, how many times in real life do you hear people say things like, “Come on, everyone, we have to put the sword back in the cave by midnight or else the world will explode!” Dialogue has to feel real to readers, or else it’s ineffective.  Here’s an example from a very, very early draft of my book, The Knowers : “Can you stop skipping already? It’s annoying.” “Oh. Sorry.” I try to make my walking more methodical, but the day is just so beautiful. We’re no longer at the mercy of the bus. Our little brothers are ahead of us, racing each other. They...

Hi, everyone (though I doubt anyone's gonna read this)! I'm Nina. I'm a writer. This is off to a great start, isn't it? One day, I'm going to be a famous author and people are going to stalk my blog and come back and find this post and think, "Maybe she's not that great, anyway." Anyway, I wrote a book called The Knowers. It's actually not that bad. I'm hoping that it'll be published one day. As of now, I've sent countless queries (not countless, more like twenty-two). I haven't gotten any offers yet, but I've gotten some amazing advice from some very sweet people. The Knowers is about these super smart kids. Really, I could try to explain it, but it would sound so marginalizing. Basically, a group of super smart people live underground and try to solve the world's problems, but they actually end up creating a lot of them. The story follows Skylar, a new Knower, who has absolutely no idea what's going on. I...