Coaching KidLit Episode 47: Writing Across Genres with Guest Jessica Vitalis

[00:00:00] Sharon Skinner: Welcome to coachingkidlit.com, a podcast about writing and publishing. Good KidLit. We dig into various aspects of writing craft through a KidLit lens and provide inspiration and clear actionable items to help writers like you move forward on their KidLit writing journeys. I’m Sharon Skinner, author accelerator, certified book coach and author of Speculative Fiction and KidLit, including picture books, middle grade and young adult.

[00:00:30] Hello listeners. It’s Sharon again, and today I have another special guest for you.

[00:00:35] Jessica Vitalis is an award-winning Columbia MBA wielding middle grade author with Green Willow Harper Collins. Her books have been translated into three languages, received multiple starred reviews, junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selections and a 2025 NCTE. Notable verse novel designation. In addition to appearing on best book lists for Kirkus and CCBC, Jessica has also won the Reading The West Book Award, the www 2024 Willa Literary Award and the High Plains Book Award. An American Canadian.

[00:01:11] Jessica currently lives and writes in Ontario, but speaks at schools, conferences, and festivals all over North America. She also works as a developmental editor, helping middle grade authors find the stories they’re truly meant to tell.

[00:01:24] Welcome Jessica. It is so good to have you here.

[00:01:28] Jessica Vitalis: Thanks so much Sharon. I’m excited to be here chatting KidLit with you.

[00:01:31] Sharon Skinner: you’ve had quite an amazing, journey with your writing. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about your journey into writing middle grade.

[00:01:38] Jessica Vitalis: Sure. It’s been actually a very, very long journey. I started out thinking I was going to write picture books and I started taking picture book manuscript. To a critique group that I joined and every single time I showed up with a new picture book, they would tell me, this is fantastic. It sounds like the first chapter in a middle grade novel.

[00:01:55] And I had never read a middle grade novel, you know, literally since I was in middle school. So I remember going to the library and checking out a couple of middle grade novels, trying to figure out what the heck they were talking about, and I checked out a book called Kit’s Wilderness by David Almond, and I was just.

[00:02:11] Immediately hooked. It was like this dark, creepy, sort of magical story, and I just knew immediately that was where I was meant to be and I haven’t looked back. So that’s sort of the short answer to how I came to writing middle grade. In terms of my actual publishing journey, it was much, much longer than that.

[00:02:27] I think I wrote three novels over the course of about seven years before I got my first agent. And then I spent six or seven years with that agent writing another three novels, and so it wasn’t 13 years. Before I finally realized that even though I loved my agent, we had a really good relationship, it just wasn’t happening.

[00:02:45] And so I parted ways with her, and I had started mentoring something called Pitch Wars at that time, which is a mentoring program that’s no longer in existence. But at that time I was a mentor and Erin Entrada Kelly was also a mentor, and this is a Newberry winning author. Medalist and honor winning author, and she had posted something behind the scenes saying, Hey, I’m teaching a class.

[00:03:06] I’d love to share five pages with my class. If somebody’s writing, I’ll give you all my class’s feedback and my feedback. And I was just getting ready to query for a new agent. And so I said, absolutely, that would be amazing. Sent it to her, not really expecting much to come of it other than maybe getting a few pieces of feedback.

[00:03:22] And so fast forward a couple months later, she texted me late on a Saturday night and said, I’m teaching my class. And I just wanna let you know I’m obsessed with these pages. And I said, well that really is just so amazing to hear. ’cause I just left my agent and I’m querying. And she said, send me the whole manuscript.

[00:03:38] I’ll share it with my agent. and so I did that knowing, and it was a tremendous opportunity, but also having been in the business for, by that point, 13 years. Knowing not to get my hopes up. So that all took place on a Saturday and Monday morning I got an email from Erin saying, my agent loves your novel.

[00:03:53] She’d like to set up a call. And so in less than 48 hours. I signed with that agent and we went on sub almost immediately and my book sold two weeks later. So I have kind of a Cinderella story, but also I put in the hard work and lots and lots of years leading up to that.

[00:04:10] Sharon Skinner: I think we all feel like Cinderella. When somebody finally picks us, you know, we work hard and we work long hours and we, query and we pitch and we do all the things. And you had an agent for, six years you said?

[00:04:22] Jessica Vitalis: Yeah, it was six or seven years. Mm-hmm.

[00:04:23] Sharon Skinner: but I think when we finally get chosen, I think we all feel like it’s a Cinderella story, but it’s really not because you’ve done all the work and for you to connect with Erin took you putting yourself out there into community and doing the pitch wars and mentoring other writers

[00:04:40] that is pretty cool that you were ready. You’d written all these books, but nothing was published yet, and yet you felt like, I’m gonna contribute. I’m going to step up and mentor someone else in the meantime. Tell me a little bit about that decision making.

[00:04:55] Jessica Vitalis: Yeah, I, you know, I guess I’ve always felt like my people are book people and I had spent so many years by that point writing and I felt like I had all of this knowledge and I could see that every book was getting better and better and better. And so even though, as you said, I hadn’t been picked yet, so to speak, by an editor, I knew I still had a lot to give back to the community.

[00:05:14] And I knew that I loved middle grade writing folk, and I just thought, you know, if there are people out there who can use some of this knowledge that I’ve spent 13 years accumulating, if I can make their journey just. A little bit shorter then, that’s something I wanna do. And the other thing that I had figured out by that point from working with so many different critique partners and beta readers, is that the more you give feedback to people, the better your own writing gets.

[00:05:37] And so I never see that as like, I’m just giving something away. I’m also getting something in return. It’s improving my craft every single time I read a story and have to figure out what are the particular elements of that story that still need work that improves my writing.

[00:05:50] Sharon Skinner: I agree. I, tell people all the time that whenever I teach, I’m reminded of something I should be doing in my own writing or I see it in a different light, or I understand that’s what’s wrong with this manuscript. That’s what I’m not doing that I know to do because I can teach it, but. Yet we can forget, or we can, I don’t know, forest for the trees, if you will.

[00:06:13] You know, you get very absorbed into the work that you’re doing, and sometimes those craft elements can fall, by the way. And then you have to regroup and come back. And that’s, why the editorial process is so important. But having a mentor and it’s unfortunate that they no longer are doing the mentorship in that way.

[00:06:30] But I know it, it became very. Cumbersome in a lot of work for the, people who were organizing it. And at some point, your passion can fade for the thing that you’re doing when it’s that much work. But I’ve talked to other authors who that’s how they got their books published. I’ve even interviewed them for the podcast that they participated in that, and that’s how they met their agent, or that’s how they, found an editor or the publisher,

[00:06:56] Jessica Vitalis: it was a tremendous community. I still am sad. for all the reasons, it, you know, it was time for that to wrap up, but it did do an awful lot of good while it lasted.

[00:07:04] Sharon Skinner: Yeah, it helped put a lot of good books out into the world.

[00:07:07] Jessica Vitalis: Sure did.

[00:07:07] Sharon Skinner: So, the whole idea of it feeling like the Cinderella, you know, the shoe finally fits. I think that’s really important for people to understand because it’s not necessarily the one time you go to the ball, it’s going back and back and back and back and back, and that’s pitching, that’s conferences, that’s being engaged with your community, that’s participating, connecting with people.

[00:07:31] If you hadn’t connected with Erin, you wouldn’t have connected with Erin’s. Agent right.

[00:07:37] Jessica Vitalis: Right, and you know, the most important thing, I think is just never giving up because you can’t control when that Cinderella moment is going to happen. The only thing you can control is that you keep going and that you keep improving. I had so many times along the way, I mean dozens and dozens and dozens, probably hundreds.

[00:07:54] Of rejections and it’s just choosing to say, no, I’m getting better, and as long as I keep going and my craft keeps improving and I’m making progress and this is something that is bringing me joy, then it’s something worth pursuing. I will tell you one story I had very early on. My very first book that I tried to write was a memoir and I sent it out.

[00:08:12] I queried and I didn’t know at that time that it was very hard to get an agent’s attention, so I got a very high response rate. I’m talking like 75% of the agents I queried wanted to read the story. So I thought I was in, and all of them passed on the book for all sorts of really good reasons. I had no idea what I was doing at that time.

[00:08:29] But one agent actually wrote me back and quite literally said, you have no idea what you’re doing. You don’t know how to write a book, you don’t know how to write a scene. You don’t know how to write. You didn’t really very good sentences, like really that direct to me. and that was a moment where I had a professional, somebody I respected, telling me that I was really.

[00:08:45] Bad at what I was trying to do. and that was a moment where I had to really decide like, this is a dream of mine. Am I gonna listen to the expert or am I gonna step back and go, you know. Maybe that was a little bit harsh, but there was also some truth to it. We wouldn’t go out and we wouldn’t try to do open heart surgery without studying medicine, but I was trying to publish a book without studying the craft of writing and how stories are structured and narrative arc and all of the different things that make books really work.

[00:09:10] So I decided to put on my, learning cap and just start the process, the very, very long process of learning how to do all of that. And so you have to be willing to just stick with it and keep improving.

[00:09:20] Sharon Skinner: Yeah. Most published authors will tell you that the people who are not published are the ones who give up.

[00:09:25] Jessica Vitalis: That’s right.

[00:09:26] Sharon Skinner: So we’ve, covered how you came to writing middle grade and how you’ve worked at it and worked at it. And you said you’d written several novels. What shifted you from novels to novels in verse.

[00:09:37] Jessica Vitalis: Well, that’s an interesting journey. So I actually have sort of cycled through all of the genres. I’ve done all the things. So the memoir in the beginning, one of the major reasons it didn’t work. When we’re talking specifically about middle grade memoirs, I think there’s a reason we don’t see a lot of them, the market.

[00:09:54] And that’s because anytime you have A novel, your character needs to go on an emotional journey. They need to have an emotional arc, and a lot of times when we’re dealing with real life, we don’t have that sort of character arc as a child. A lot of time that arc happens when we’re older, when we’re adults, and so that makes memoirs very, very hard to write for the middle grade market.

[00:10:13] So that was one of the main reasons why that story didn’t work. Once I realized that that story wasn’t gonna work, I set it aside, started working on fiction. My next several stories were all just contemporary, realistic fiction, and I think my next five stories. And so when it came time to that sixth story, the one that finally sold, I thought, well, maybe it’s time for me to try to do something new.

[00:10:34] So I decided to write a fantasy story and I knew almost immediately that the story was gonna work. It was just one of those. I’ve heard somewhere that authors get this once in a lifetime where it’s just kind of a magical experience where the voice came to me and I just had so much fun writing it. And the story just came out.

[00:10:51] It was a very sort of easy book to write to the extent that books can ever be easy to write. And so that book ended up being my debut, the Wolf’s Curse, and my editor actually bought a second book, so I ended up writing two fantasy books and at that time. My first book came out in 2021, which was when we were still very much in COVID.

[00:11:11] And my first book, the Wolf’s Curse, was a death story. Death was the narrator is a grim reaper, and it turns out that people didn’t really want to be reading stories about grim reapers during COVID. So I feel like. My first two books kind of just had this quiet launch and didn’t really take off in the way that I wanted them to.

[00:11:32] So I decided to switch gears, and I wrote a contemporary story, thinking of it as a little bit of a reset with just a twist of magic. Now interestingly, this third book, coyote Queen, was a retelling of my memoir. So I had realized by that point that that memoir was never gonna work, but I wasn’t ready to give up on that story.

[00:11:53] And so I gave myself a fictional character arc for middle grade that worked with the story, added a little bit of magic to the story because it was really pretty gritty, and I thought that would make it a little bit more palatable to readers. And so that was my third book. And then. I had another idea based on my childhood again, and I had always sort of loved verse novels, but I remember telling a critique partner, I could never write when I’m not a poet.

[00:12:21] I don’t have that skillset. There’s some magic trick to it, but I don’t understand. And when I sat down to write my fourth book inspired by my childhood, it started as a short story for an anthology. And that short story came out in verse, and I think that felt really safe to me, right? Like I could try it.

[00:12:37] It’s only a short story. If it doesn’t work, I can quick rewrite it in prose. And they loved it and my agent loved it. And the editors didn’t bite on that anthology, but my editor read it and she said, we don’t do anthologies. But I love that short story. If you wanna write me a novel in verse, I’d love to take a peek at it.

[00:12:54] And so I became a verse writer.

[00:12:57] Sharon Skinner: Nice. So let’s talk a. Little bit about that because I do think that people think there’s a secret to it . It’s really not poetry in the sense of rhyming, and you have to know all these things, and yet it is a poetic form. and it does need to have that feel and poetic constructs. So when you tried it, had you dug into the nature of it before that or did you just go for it?

[00:13:23] Jessica Vitalis: The first thing that I did was read, I would say about at least 20 verse novels. Like I read all the verse novels I could get my hands on. ’cause I just wanted to get a sense for all of the different possibilities. So I, didn’t do a deep dive in terms of like studying every single one of those in detail, but I definitely immersed myself in the form.

[00:13:42] And then One of the tricks for me was that I had written so many novels by that point that I sort of have this internalized sense of character arc and story structure, which are things that absolutely have to exist even in a novel in verse. And so for me, it wasn’t so much reinventing the wheel, it was just saying, okay, well I’m going to develop my story structure and I’m gonna.

[00:14:02] My character arc the same way I would for any book. But when it comes to what actually shows up on the page, on the line level, then it’s really sitting down and figuring out what is it that needs to show up here? What is it that needs to show up in this poem to move the story forward? And what is the emotion that I need to evoke?

[00:14:20] And so those were the two questions that I would ask myself with each poem. And how do I evoke that with the fewest possible words? And so I think that was the main difference for me writing verse versus just a regular novel in prose.

[00:14:34] Sharon Skinner: Let’s dig into that a little bit. Getting that emotion on the page in verse versus getting that emotion on the page in straight up prose. How does that feel different for you when you’re crafting?

[00:14:46] Jessica Vitalis: For me, it’s not too terribly, terribly difficult because one of the things that I’m the most concerned about for middle grade readers is readability, and I didn’t ever want them to have an experience where they are feeling really frustrated and there’s all this ambiguity on the page like. Sometimes we can feel with poetry where it’s very open-ended, there’s a lot of different metaphors happening and we can’t quite figure it out, or it takes a lot of energy.

[00:15:11] I really focused on how do I tell this story in the simplest possible way, and then I relied on things like line breaks and metaphors and. Especially objective correlatives. So when I felt like I really needed to evoke emotion, I would look at what are the big image systems in my book? So an example of that would be the two giant objective correlatives I had in my story was the Titanic and birds.

[00:15:35] And so I had a list of bird facts that I would just keep next to my desk. And when I needed to evoke some emotion in a poem, I would say, well, here’s an interesting bird fact. Is there some way I can. Link this bird fact to somehow bring out the emotion that I want my readers to be feeling in the character.

[00:15:51] And then I did the same thing with the Titanic, which is of course very easy because you have all of the obvious things like sinking and not drowning and saving yourself. And those are all things that lend themself to emotional, discussions anyway. So I think finding the right image system for whatever theme you’re trying to explore in your novel is really the trick.

[00:16:10] Sharon Skinner: So talk a little bit about Unsinkable Cayenne, and. Tell us a little bit about the journey. I know you don’t wanna do spoilers, but tell us a little bit about the journey, because you touched on the fact that this is based on something out of your childhood and we know that we as writers, we put autobiographical information into pretty much everything that we do.

[00:16:34] So talk a little bit about that for us.

[00:16:37] Jessica Vitalis: It was an interesting experience because my third novel Coyote Queen was almost entirely autobiographical. I wrote a first draft of Unsinkable Cayenne, and one of my critique partners said, this really feels a lot like Coyote Queen. Are you sure you don’t wanna do something a little bit different? So I kept the, essence of my childhood in terms of I have a very, very transient family.

[00:16:59] They were a very. Weird sort of hippie family that I found very embarrassing. We moved more than 24 times before I even reached middle school, and so I kept that and I just gave the main character, Cayenne, a different family to live That experience with that experienced different things than what, you know, my character in Coyote Queen had experienced.

[00:17:21] So that is a story about a girl who lives with these weird hippie parents traveling in the country in this very embarrassing sticker covered van. She just wants to live a normal life. She wants the chance to settle down, go to school, and make friends for the first time, and she gets that chance when her family welcomes twins and they realize they can’t continue to travel the country in a van.

[00:17:40] They settle down in a house for the first time and she very quickly realizes that number one, there’s nothing normal about this house. It doesn’t have any doors on it. Her mom still raises chickens in the front yard. Her family is still very weird. She doesn’t have the right clothes, she doesn’t have the right makeup, and so it’s very much a story about fitting in what it means to be normal, whether that’s something that’s really even worth striving for.

[00:18:02] Sharon Skinner: Jessica. Is there something about, novel in verse that you’re drawn to now? Do you think you’ll go back to writing straight up prose, or do you think that this is kind of where you’re gonna land now?

[00:18:14] Jessica Vitalis: I have both in progress, so I definitely fell in love with verse, but I also think particular stories lend themselves to verse. If you’re really trying to dig into some deep emotional meaning, that can be sometimes easier to do with a novel in verse. I don’t think Unsinkable Cayenne would’ve worked in prose because I do all sorts of things with the Titanic, for example, where I talk about the number of people who died in the tragedy and how that was divided out by class.

[00:18:43] And most of the first class passengers survived and most of the third class passengers died. And that sort of mirrors Cayenne’s emotional journey of how first class people in life get treated differently than. People that are considered to be third class, and that would’ve come across as very, very didactic, I think very preachy if I had written it all out in prose.

[00:19:02] So I don’t think that novel could have ever been written in prose. It had to be written in poetry. So I think it really just depends on sort of what you’re trying to do with a story. You probably wouldn’t write a very humorous book in poetry.

[00:19:15] So I think you just have to do what’s right for the story. And again, it comes down to image systems. Do you have a story that lends itself to really powerful image systems that will evoke really strong emotions with very few words?

[00:19:26] Sharon Skinner: That’s a great point. So are there specific examples of novels in verse that you found inspiring on your journey?

[00:19:36] Jessica Vitalis: I will say Alone by Megan E. Freeman is a really great example of a verse novel because it’s readable. So again, readability for the middle grade market is really, really important. It is very, very compelling. It has a very compelling action plot in the sense that it’s a girl who is. Left alone and has to figure out how to survive for several years.

[00:20:00] So survival stories are evergreen. But also the author, Megan does a really beautiful job of bringing that emotion home on the page in a really tangible, beautiful way. So that was definitely a mentor text for me. Like I said, I didn’t really dig too deeply into it. Anyone. It was just immersing myself in general and trying to figure out what the possibilities were.

[00:20:23] Another novel in verse that I really, really love is Anything by Lisa Fipps. So her verse novel Starfish. I think that’s a really great example of how to be really voicey. You can be writing in verse and still have a really strong character with a really strong voice.

[00:20:38] Sharon Skinner: Those are great examples. I love that you said that you immersed yourself. It’s sort of like immersing yourself in another language to learn that language. This style of writing when you’re trying to learn it. I think that’s the same thing with picture books. If you’re trying to write picture books, you should be reading lots and lots and lots of good picture books.

[00:20:58] So if you’re trying to write novels in verse, you should be reading lots and lots and lots of novels in verse. You really need to immerse yourself in the sort of thing that you are trying to accomplish.

[00:21:09] Jessica Vitalis: I would totally agree with that. In fact, way back when I started working on middle grade novels and I realized that was gonna be my sort of happy place. I was overwhelmed by the number of middle grade novels out there. And so I went and dug up a list of the Newberry winners for the last 20 years, and I read every single winner and every single honor book because I figured.

[00:21:28] Not that there aren’t lots of other really great books out there, but those for sure already had reached a certain level of mastery. So it’s not that I wanted to write those exact books, but it gave me a sense for what is being published, what is considered a really good book, what can you get away with, what kind of voice do middle grade novels have?

[00:21:43] And so I think that’s just really good advice. Always, I hear people say sometimes, oh, I’m scared to read too much. Maybe it will influence me. No, that’s how you would develop ideas. The more you read, the more creative you become, the more ideas come to you. Like, I cannot stress that enough. The importance of immersing yourself in whatever genre you’re working on.

[00:22:00] Sharon Skinner: Jessica, I wanna go back to your bio. It’s full of awards I mean, it’s a long list. How has winning all those awards affected your journey? Has it had a positive lift for sales? Is it just really good for you? Share a little bit about that with us.

[00:22:17] Jessica Vitalis: Sure. You know, I don’t track my sales super closely because, I have an agent and I find that. Worrying about sales sort of stifles my creative process. I wouldn’t say that I have any evidence that would lead me to believe that winning awards leads to an immediate or massive bump in sales. I think the caveat to that is obviously if you were to win a Newberry or a Caldecott or a National Book Award, like one of the really, really top tier levels, of course that’s going to lead to a bump in sales.

[00:22:46] The other awards, I think the value in. Having them is that it’s sort of another touch point for readers because we know that readers need to see your book over and over and over. Like research shows something like seven times before they’ll purchase a copy. And so each time you win an award, your name is out there, the book is out there.

[00:23:04] That’s just one more time that the readers go, oh hey, that book looks interesting. And maybe that will be the tipping point where they decide to buy the book. The other benefit of winning awards is it just gives you more credibility, certainly in my work as a developmental editor, but also for things like.

[00:23:18] Podcasts and teaching classes and all of the things that we want to do in terms of conferences and festivals. The more sort of accolades you have, the more legitimate you seem. Whether that’s true or not. So I think there are a lot of good reasons to pursue awards, even if they don’t necessarily result in an immediate sales bump.

[00:23:36] Sharon Skinner: Let me ask you a little bit about how that process works. Now, you’re traditionally published, so did your publishers submit your book for all those awards, or do you submit for some of those awards?

[00:23:48] Jessica Vitalis: So that’s a really interesting question. Your listeners probably have heard you talk a little bit about how traditional publishing doesn’t always look exactly like we think it’s going to look in terms of marketing, and I certainly found that to be true. I’m with Green Willow, who is a very small imprint.

[00:24:04] Beautiful, beautiful books. Love my editorial team. So what happens is we work on a book together. When it’s finished, when it’s ready to go to press, that book gets sent over to the larger Harper Collins marketing machine. And I actually have published four books with Green Willow Harper Collins. I have never spoken to a single person in the marketing team.

[00:24:23] Once it gets turned over, it’s sort of out of your hands and they do with the book what they’re going to do and. I always remind myself that the marketing team has hundreds of books they’re working on. They literally put out hundreds of books a quarter. It’s not realistic to think that they are going to be sending every single book out for every word that’s out there.

[00:24:43] So I kind of knew that early on from having talked to friends who had been published. The approach that I took was that I made a dream marketing plan for myself that included awards that I thought would be a good fit for my book. So anytime I saw an award, I would write it down on a list. I keep an Excel spreadsheet with tabs in one of the tabs as awards, and I would do some research on.

[00:25:02] What are the requirements for that award? Does my book meet those requirements? What are the kind of books winning that award? Does my book feel similar? Could it be a possibility? And so when it came time for each of my books to come out, I would send a list of things to my publisher saying, this is my dream marketing list.

[00:25:19] Which one of these things are you doing? They would usually send me back their marketing plan, and then I would have a conversation with my agent and say. Here’s some things that I think that I could do on my own. Here’s the resources I have to do it. And then we would ask our editor, who would go to the marketing team and say, will you do these things?

[00:25:35] So all of that to say the awards are one of the things that I would always go back and ask. If they didn’t have award submission on my marketing plan, I would say, are you submitting me for the Newberry? Are you submitting me for the High Plains Book award? Are you submitting me for NCTE? Sometimes the answer was yes.

[00:25:50] A lot of time the answer was no. And so then it would become a decision for me. Am I going to try to submit myself a lot of times for the big awards again, the Caldecott, the Newberry, the National Book Award, I think. Writers cannot submit themselves. That has to come from the publisher, and there’s a fee for that.

[00:26:07] So some of those were just out of my reach. If my publisher said no, some of them there would be fees for, and you would have to submit several books, like multiple copies. So then it would be an issue of, well, if this is really important to me, do I think my book is a perfect fit for this award? Do I have the financial resources to pay that 75 or a hundred dollars fee?

[00:26:26] And then I would go back to my editor and say, if I pay this fee, will you mail out the 10 copies? And almost all of the time, that was one place where I could get an easy yes from my editor where they would be able to support me. ’cause that’s just a really simple, low cost way for them to support their authors.

[00:26:41] I know that not every author has. The ability to do that. Like I spent definitely a couple hundred dollars on each book for awards. But again, for me, I was trying to look at the long game, trying to think, well, I could take some of my, initial advance and have a small budget to do some of these things that I know.

[00:26:58] Is not gonna get done otherwise. So that was my approach. I think it’s paid off pretty well. Like I said, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a huge bump from any one award, but it is sort of establishing my expertise, I think, as a literary writer that is again, helping my developmental edit business and is hopefully making my editor more interested in buying future books.

[00:27:19] So that’s been my approach.

[00:27:20] Sharon Skinner: I appreciate you sharing that with our listeners because I know that awards are something that people get very excited about and there are good reasons to pursue having those awards and asking to be submitted for those awards. But Again, one of the things that I say to my writers, my clients all the time is why?

[00:27:41] go back to your why. Why is this important to you? Why do you want it? For like you, you knew what you wanted and why you wanted it. And it made the decision process of, is it worth it? So much easier.

[00:27:54] Jessica Vitalis: Exactly, and I don’t think that any writer out there should feel like, oh, my book didn’t get submitted for that award, or, I don’t have the money for this award. At the end of the day, that is not. At what’s going to determine your writing journey in almost every case. Like I said, there are a few exceptions with the really big awards, but those are out of your hands anyway, so don’t sweat the stuff that you can’t control.

[00:28:13] Sharon Skinner: Absolutely. is there anything else that we haven’t touched on that you would like to share with our audience before we get to our action items?

[00:28:20] Jessica Vitalis: Oh gosh. I think we’ve done a pretty good job touching on it all. Just the importance of beta readers and critique partners. I think I mentioned that earlier. They’ve been really instrumental to my journey. I think we all have ideas what is in our head, and we all think that we’ve translated that to the page and most of the time.

[00:28:36] That is not the case. So my advice to your listeners is always to find trusted readers to give you feedback, not just cheerleaders. We do need cheerleaders of course, but it’s much more valuable to have people say, this is what I love, and this isn’t what’s working so well, so that you know where to go with your story and how to take it to the next level.

[00:28:54] Sharon Skinner: Great. Alright. Well Jessica, now it’s time for us to give our listeners some kind of an actionable item to take away.

[00:29:04] Jessica Vitalis: Okay. I would love to share with your listeners my very favorite writing exercise. This is the exercise that I did that I think has had the most profound impact. On my writing career. So what I would challenge your listeners to do is to find a book that they view as a mentor text or a comp to whatever story they’re writing, and I would challenge them to type out or photocopy the first couple of pages to a chapter, highly preferable that they type out the first chapter.

[00:29:36] The reason for that is because as you are typing somebody else’s words, you are. Asking yourself, why did they phrase the sentence that way? I would’ve phrased the sentence this way. And you learn so much by looking at how a published author has. Handled their craft that you don’t necessarily get if you’re just reading as a reader.

[00:29:54] There’s something about the act of typing it that engages your brain as a writer. So that’s the first step. The second step is after you have either typed out some pages or photocopied some pages, I would challenge your listeners to highlight the text, and I would like them to use four different colors of highlighter.

[00:30:13] I don’t care what four colors, but what I want them to highlight is setting in one color. Emotion and interiority in another color action. In a third color and then dialogue in a fourth color. And again, going through this process of really examining a story that’s already complete, that’s been through the editorial process, will reveal so much about your own writing process, about how stories go together, how to integrate and fold all of that in seamlessly.

[00:30:40] I just think it’s absolutely an invaluable exercise that I still do when I find stories that I really, really love and wanna understand how an author pulled it off.

[00:30:48] Sharon Skinner: That’s a really nice way to pull it apart and to analyze a text without having to go through the whole book, but to just analyze maybe one chapter and dig. In and see how it’s working, how all the parts are put together, and how they’re all chugging along and making that particular section work.

[00:31:07] If you’re an artist, they say, study the masters. And so we talk here on this podcast a lot about mentor texts and about going out and looking for those books that help you to understand how the genre works and how the craft works. But I think this particular exercise that you’re suggesting is a nice way to really dig in and get a deeper look at a portion of that book. So thank you for that. my action item for our listeners is going to go back to something you said early on, and it’s the fact that you were willing to put yourself out there. You’d learned a lot about your craft. You had written a number of books, you weren’t published yet.

[00:31:49] You were working on it, but you put yourself out there and made connections and. Connected with the community, and this is one of the ways that you were able to finally accomplish your goal and get your book published. So I recommend that our listeners go out and find ways to connect with their writing community.

[00:32:10] We can get really into the solo act of writing and hanging out and maybe doing some online webinars or what have you, but. Getting that connection into community is really important. I’ve been a long time member of S-C-B-W-I, which is the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and for our listeners here, that’s probably the primary organization.

[00:32:33] But we’ve had people on here talk about Romance Writers of America who also write Young Adult Sweet Romance, and we have had people on here who. Are involved in other groups. I happen to be involved in a number of different writing groups that I stay connected to, and I think it’s really important to find those connections in your community.

[00:32:55] Even if, like me, you’re more an introvert. It’s important to go out there and make those connections. Go to your local library, see if they’ve got a writing program, . Find those connections and you can find them online. There are people out there who are doing writing sprints online and meetups online and things like that.

[00:33:11] So if you really don’t wanna go out into the world, but I do recommend that you do. There are book festivals. You can go to a. Small book event and talk to other authors who are there, find out how they’re connected in the community. But I highly recommend that you go out and start making those connections and making them early and, getting involved in your community and finding ways to contribute.

[00:33:34] Jessica Vitalis: I love that. And I just wanna say for the people who like us are introverts, that can be a scary thing. It helps if you don’t think about it as I’m doing this to further my career, but do. It because you want to meet other like-minded people. My very best friends now are the people that I have met in KidLit and in the middle grade market because I’ve put myself out there, and that made it worth it, regardless of what happened with my career.

[00:33:58] So this is a way to just meet people who have the same values, who have the same interests, who you’re really gonna connect with. You’re gonna find your people by putting yourself out there like that.

[00:34:07] Sharon Skinner: And you never know, you might find a glass slipper along the way.

[00:34:10] Jessica Vitalis: That’s right.

[00:34:11] Sharon Skinner: So Jessica, where else can we find you out in the world?

[00:34:15] Jessica Vitalis: The very best place to find me is on my website at jessicavitalis.com. I am on Instagram sometimes and dabble on Blue Sky sometimes.

[00:34:26] Sharon Skinner: Well, it’s been great having you here. Thank you so much for taking the time and sharing your journey and your knowledge with our listeners.

[00:34:34] Jessica Vitalis: Thanks so much for having me.

[00:34:36] Sharon Skinner: Bye for now.

[00:34:37] We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Coaching KidLit, a writing and book coaching podcast for writers who want to level up their KidLit game. For more episodes, visit coaching KidLit dot com and to find out more about what a book coach could do for you, visit my website, bookcoachingbysharon.com.