Coaching KidLit Episode 36: Line-Level Language with Guest Sara Gentry
In this episode of Coaching KidLit, Author Accelerator Certified Book Coach Sara Gentry interviews Sharon about line-level language and writing and revising KidLit.
They focus on creating engaging language for picture books, establishing authentic middle-grade voices, and developing complex stories in young adult literature. The conversation highlights the importance of sensory details, precise word choices, and character perspectives to make stories resonate with young readers.
Sharon emphasizes the significance of revision for line-level writing, using mentor texts, and understanding the unique sensory experiences of characters to enhance storytelling.
Key Topics Covered:
- Importance of language and read-aloud factor in Picture Books.
- Language in middle grade books: Voice and vocabulary.
- Writing Young Adult (YA): Voice, complexity, and slang.
- The balance of descriptive prose in KidLit.
- The importance of character lens.
- Using mentor texts to improve writing skills.
- The role of sensory detail.
Books and Resources Mentioned:
An Immense World by Ed Yong
Sharon’s Downloadable Sensory Detail Resource.
Listen:
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Sharon Skinner: Welcome to Coaching KidLit, a podcast about writing and publishing good KidLit.
[00:00:06] Christy Yaros: 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.
[00:00:19] Sharon Skinner: 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] Christy Yaros: And I’m Christy Yaros, author accelerator certified book coach and story editor, focusing on KidLit, including middle grade and young adult.
[00:00:40] Sharon Skinner: Hey listeners this month, Christy and I wanted to share with you an interview that I did earlier this year as a part of KidLit summer camp. With our friend and fellow coach, Sarah Gentry. Sarah. And I totally nerded out about the power of language at the line level and the importance of sensory detail through character lens.
Sarah is a math PhD turned author accelerator certified book coach. She’s the host of KidLit Summer Camp and Novel Kickoff. You can connect with her on her website solutionsforwriters.com and on Instagram threads and X at @writewithSarah.
[00:01:16] Sara Gentry: Hello, writers! I am so happy to be having a conversation today with Sharon Skinner. Welcome, Sharon.
[00:01:24] Sharon Skinner: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:26] Sara Gentry: Sharon holds a BA in English, an MA in Creative Writing, and is a certified book coach and freelance editor, and she helps writers weave their words into stories that shine.
She mainly writes fantasy, science fiction, paranormal, and the occasional steampunk for audiences of all ages. Sharon is an active member of the SCBWI, and she serves as the regional advisor in Arizona. She also served aboard the USS Jason, the first U. S. Navy vessel to take women to sea, which makes Sharon totally awesome in many ways.
And we will talk more here about where we can find Sharon, but you can find her at sharonskinner. com to find more of her books, and bookcoachingbysharon. com, which is where she does all of her book coaching and editing stuff. So welcome again, Sharon, and Writers, we’re gonna talk here a bit about making our words shine.
As you heard, Sharon helps writers weave their words into stories that shine, and Sharon just has a lot of great experience with line level writing, which is why I asked her to come and have this conversation with me. So, shall we hop right into it?
[00:02:37] Sharon Skinner: Let’s do it. I’m excited to talk about this.
This is one of my favorite things.
[00:02:41] Sara Gentry: Yes, yes, absolutely. So, Sharon does write for Young children all the way up through adult, but today we’re going to focus the conversation on writing in the KidLit space. And so we’re going to maybe start with the youngest readers. Well, maybe not the super youngest readers, because that would be board books.
But, we’re going to start with picture books. And Sharon herself has written a picture book. So she is a picture book author. But, You know, that picture book space language is just such an important component of those books. Can you tell us why exactly it’s so important to make sure that the language is just And I think that’s top notch at the picture book level.
[00:03:19] Sharon Skinner: Yeah.
So there are a couple of reasons. One is that you want, as always, to engage the reader, right? You really want to engage the reader, have them interested and excited to hear the story, but also because parents end up doing a lot of the reading in picture books and that becomes very repetitive. So you want the language to be something that they enjoy.
The story should be something that they can enjoy. Reading over and over and over as well.
[00:03:48] Sara Gentry: Yeah, it would be terrible if, I had to read to my kids, Jane went to the store, Jane picked up bananas, Jane walked from the store.
Like, that’s kind of more the language we might expect in some early readers or things that are Teaching children how to read, but in a picture book, as you mentioned, we really want to draw the audience in. Can you speak maybe a little bit to the read aloud factor of picture books?
[00:04:13] Sharon Skinner: Well, again, parents are reading these books aloud to kids.
And so you don’t want them to stumble. You want to make it so it’s a smooth read. It’s an enjoyable read. There’s rhythm to it. There’s movement in the words and that’s not just because of the parents reading it aloud, but because the way the story needs to flow.
Again, that rhythm and that movement and the sounds that you use in a picture book, your word choices are really critical. Word choices are what drive The way that the story feels, it’s the voice of the story. So you’ll see with most bedtime books, like lullaby books, you’ll see softer word choices and sibilance and smoother sounding rhythm and it’s a slower pace.
You want the pace to be consistent with a book that will help lull a child to sleep. You don’t really want a book that gets them climbing the walls, bouncing all over, jumping. up and down because they’re so excited. Ooh, what’s happening to the story at bedtime. So again, the type of picture book matters in what kinds of word choices that you’re using and the pacing and the rhythm and the sound of it.
[00:05:25] Sara Gentry: Yeah, that’s really well said. I mean, I suppose we could even talk about the length of a picture book when you only have a few hundred words to work with. Everyone carries that much more weight, right, for the entire story. You can’t just throw away extra words like you might be able to in something that’s longer.
[00:05:43] Sharon Skinner: Yeah, it’s true. So now 500 words or less, 400 words or less. Lots and lots of practically or completely wordless picture books are out there now. Which is fascinating to me.
But, if you’re looking for a resource for the auditory experience or the voice and word choices, Darcy Pattison used to do a blog called Voice Friday. You could still pull it up if you go look . And Word Sounds is one of those Voice Friday posts that she did. She also did one a long time ago.
That I wasn’t able to pull up and find that was specific to getting deeper into what types of words and where to use them with the lullaby being the softer and with your, when you’re trying to excite someone, you’re using more hard consonants and shorter, snappier words and getting that pacing up and, getting that excitement in there because the pacing matters. Everything matters. Everything matters in all your writing. But a picture book, because it’s so concise and so contained, it matters more it’s like taking, something and squishing it down to the point where there’s that extra pressure on it.
[00:06:54] Sara Gentry: Yeah. I like that. visualization on that. So, let’s, let’s maybe move up a little bit now. So, we move on. We’re gonna skip over the early reader chapter book, markets just because those do tend to be more for developing a child’s reading skills and those are important and language is important in an entirely different way than what we’re talking about.
But let’s let’s bump up here to middle grade. And in middle grade, I know that at least according to the agents and editors who seem to be talking about it a lot, that that middle grade voice can really be a challenge. And that is one of the things that is most frequently discussed as a barrier to writing middle grade as adult writers kind of have trouble tapping into that.into that voice, without sounding too young or too old. so, can you speak to us a bit about how writers can, work within that middle grade space at a language level?
[00:07:52] Sharon Skinner: Well, like you said, , it’s a hard thing to do if you’re not able to get inside your character, but if you can get inside your character and, Revisit who you were at that age, makes it a lot easier.
Or if you never grew up like me, it makes it super easy, right? So to fall back into that space and to really get that character in your brain. But one of the things I always want to be cognizant of when I talk about this is don’t say, Talk down to your readers at whatever age, whatever age you don’t want to talk down to your readers.
Now that doesn’t mean that you can put every large word in your vocabulary in a middle grade book. You can put some in there, but it’s important in the language of the book to make sure that You’re using it in a context that makes it clear what you mean if you’re using a word that may not be grade level specific to that grade.
Now you can go out on the web and you can look up words that they’re studying at certain grade levels and that can be very helpful. You can go to your CORE standards and things like that, but if you know a word, may not be familiar to your readership. You want to use it in a way that explains it.
Even if you just have dialogue where that means blah, blah, blah. I mean, that’s fine, but you don’t want to do that over and over and over. Right?
[00:09:12] Sara Gentry: Right.
[00:09:12] Sharon Skinner: Because readers will start to realize, oh, you’re telling me that you don’t think I know that word. And some of your readers will know those words, right?
So you want to be careful about the word choices that you use and how you use them in middle grade. And the language that you use should be. specific to what you’re talking about. Again, for me, it’s a little hard for me to think of another way to do it, except for to get inside that character, get that character in your brain, get to know them.
I have a course that’s all about Knowing your characters, And I think that you really need to know your characters to know how they talk and how they think, because voice in middle grade is super important. It’s important in anything, but in middle grade, especially because kids want to hear kids their age hanging out.
They want to hang out with characters who are, their age are a little older and that they could relate to. You want it to be relatable.
[00:10:06] Sara Gentry: Yeah, and there’s nothing worse, at least I think there’s nothing worse, than reading a book written for children that you can tell An adult thought children needed to hear this book or to read this book.
[00:10:16] Sharon Skinner: Oh yeah, especially the didacticism. Yeah. Yeah. This is a lesson book, but I’m gonna tell a story around it. So you think it’s not a lesson book. Yeah. You know, there was a time and a place when children’s books were all things like mismanners and etiquette and how to behave and things like that.
Those days are long gone. Kids want to read and see themselves reflected in books. They want characters they can hang out with. It goes back to my whole analogy about if you’re going on a road trip, who do you want to get in the car with and hang out with?
[00:10:46] Sara Gentry: Yeah.
[00:10:47] Sharon Skinner: And so if you are not familiar with Kids Voices, find a way to volunteer or get around kids that age, not just don’t go and hang out in the park.
That’s creepy, but you know, maybe volunteer at a school and kind of start to hear what the kids are saying or an afterschool program is a great place to hang out with kids. And in fact, if you’re a writer, you can probably find a local place to volunteer to either teach. writing and or reading to kids.
And that is a great opportunity to interact and to hear them interact with one another and get that voice in your head if you don’t have the ability to just drop into that character. But again, knowing your characters is primary. It’s key.
[00:11:34] Sara Gentry: Yeah, yeah. All right, so then we go from our tweens, we’ll call them the tweens, in our middle grade, and then we start shifting into YA, and now our stories are getting more complex, and certainly the vocabulary and comprehension of the reader has grown, so we can be, More complex and perhaps more creative, even in how, well, it’s a different kind of creativity.
I think it’s almost more creative sometimes to boil things down, simply, but we can add more complexity to our stories. So YA has its own distinct voice. So we got a very distinct middle grade voice, and then we have a very distinct YA voice, and I would say if you’re not sure of what those are, just read a few of them and It will become clear.
But how might a writer improve their writing once they are, going into this older teenage market?
[00:12:25] Sharon Skinner: Well, again, you’re looking for a very specific voice through a specific character lens, and that’s key. But also, to what you said, adding that complexity and layering in additional things. So when you’re in a picture book, you usually have one thematic topic that you’re talking about.
When you’re in a middle grade, you can add a couple of other nuances to that. You can add maybe a subplot to compare or contrast with. When you get into your YA, You can add multiple layers and your reader’s brain can follow all of those various tracks. There are a lot of ways that you get to change up the game, right?
[00:13:04] Sara Gentry: Yeah.
[00:13:04] Sharon Skinner: To engage your young adult readers. For me, again, it’s about channeling the voice of the character and using the kind of language that they would use. Now, a caveat to that is that you don’t want to use, slang That is current in a book that may not be published for three to five years because that slang is going to change.
What is skibbity toilet? I don’t even know. I had to look it up, that’s a middle grade thing, not a YA thing, go look it up. It’s weird. And, but the thing is, is that that’s a big thing right now. And you hear that from kids. But that’s the thing that’s going to go away.
That’s a trendy thing. So language has trends, that it follows and you want to be careful that you don’t make your voice or your character speak too much in current slang because. Five years from now, 10 years from now, hopefully your book is still out there. Young people are still reading it and they’re gonna be like, what?
[00:14:00] Sara Gentry: Yeah. You know. Well, to counter that, since most of us writing in this space now would be adults and some of us may have been a teenager decades ago at this point you also want to be careful not to use the slang that you would have used as a teenager unless you were writing historical fiction, which is a sad reality.
Most of us now, if we are writing about our teenage years, would be considered historical fiction, but you know, I don’t want to say, well, gee, she’s groovy because It’s like dated in another way.
[00:14:32] Sharon Skinner: Unless you have a character who, whose parents are, those people and never came out of that era and they grew up in that, then maybe you have a character who talks like that.
But you need to point it out and what that means and your other characters need to be like, oh that’s right, Frank is, maybe you can call the character flower, talks funny, right? But yeah, you want to be careful of how you apply those sorts of things that change.
And even the word cool or the word sick
[00:15:02] Sara Gentry: yeah, I know they all get different connotations to them now.
[00:15:05] Sharon Skinner: They morph over time so you want to be careful how you use your language. But you don’t have to do all that. You can just use basic language, but give your characters a different voice.
So one character may speak in full sentences and another character may speak in single word sentences like be very non communicative or you might have a character who only speaks in partial phrases and things like that or even thinks that way. And that’s another thing the interiority is very different for YA.
You’re giving us a lot more access usually into the interiority of the character not that middle graders aren’t thinking about where they fit in the world, but I think when you’re a teenager, you start to get super inside yourself and super concerned about what’s going on.
How do I fit in this new world? How do I become who I need to be? And they’re worried about so many things these days. And not that, We all weren’t, because that’s when the brain rewires. So when you become a teenager is when your brain is doing all sorts of really interesting rewiring and stuff, and it’s very, very active, and your synapses are firing in very odd and different ways, and they get very involved in themselves, a lot of teenagers.
So you can give them a lot more interiority and a lot more more of those kinds of concerns.
[00:16:24] Sara Gentry: Yeah. So, I think that, a lot of writers, when we think about beautiful writing, no matter what age group we’re talking about here, I think a lot of writers probably have this perception of, well, we would call it the purple prose, but, you know, I, I have to have these gushing sentences about the sunsets and about the cuisine I’m eating and like, you know, really over the top.
In terms of descriptions and all of this, and I’m not sure that that flies in the KidLit Market. But, do you have any advice for some writers who, maybe want to add a little pretty, pretty prose, I’ll call it pretty prose, to their writing without going over the top? Because I think we can both agree that if I have paragraph upon paragraph of description, a young reader is just Checking out.
So, might you offer some suggestions here for writers? Want to add a little, but not too much.
[00:17:17] Sharon Skinner: Yeah, so be specific about the tonality and the mood and the feel of the words that you use. So you don’t have to have three sentences to beautify. The setting or the scene, one sentence will do.
And one adjective will do if it’s the right adjective and the right sentence, you can still be fairly concise and still have beautiful writing. And you know that my background is in poetry. And so it comes from a poetic background to be very concise and yet use imagery that really resonates and sets the scene and gives you a certain mood and tonality.
You can do the same thing in your prose. It’s all about finding just the right nuanced word. So I say when you’re drafting, He can walk into a room, he can look out the window, he can see the bright sun, your character can do all the things, but when you’re revising, your character should stride into the room, or slouch into the room, or creep into the room, there are so many choices for even your, your verbs, your action words, there’s so much glorious stuff out there in the language that you can use and really by that one word change the whole mood or tone or set the whole mood or tone.
I talk about this a lot when we talk about character lens with my clients. I talk about seeing the world through the lens of your character, through the eyes of your character. Focus on one or two things that they would see in the setting and then filter that through their emotion at the moment.
What are they feeling? Is the sunshine mocking them or is it making them super happy because they’re already in a happy mood? Like, are they in a bad mood and oh, you know, it’s all bright out there. It’s too bright, what is their emotional feeling right at that time. So what are the one or two things that they would be looking at that they might notice in their environment and then pick the most perfect nuanced word for that.
That’s all done in revision, though. I mean, once you start learning it and once you start doing it in revision, a lot of that will become organic as you draft. So the next book you write, your draft will have more of that in it already, and the next book after that, and the next book after that.
But don’t worry about it when you’re first drafting. You can use your basic placeholder words. But remember that words like walk or walked are all placeholder words. Cliches, you can put all the cliches you want in your first draft, but once you Go in to revise, find those cliches and then rewrite them through your character lens.
Give it something new, instead of they tied a bow around it, they put sequins and glitter on it, if that’s who your character is, it’s all done through character lens and that nuance the English language is huge.
Yeah.
Use your words.
[00:20:09] Sara Gentry: Well, and to your point with the comments about how it’s being filtered through the character, we don’t have to mention everything. I don’t have to describe everything. I only need to describe what’s important to reflect in my character in the story at that time.
[00:20:25] Sharon Skinner: Yeah, and the pacing matters too.
So I go back to my car analogy all the time. I go back to the road trip analogy. If you’re speeding by in a car, what one or two things are you going to see out the window? Right? So when the pacing is up, what things are you going to see? Right? If you’re cruising slowly down the road, you might see more things.
You might actually. Give us three things instead of one. Because you’re slowing the pacing down, the character is moving more slowly through the world. So that will help us also with pacing. Language and at the line level, I love doing revision at the line level especially because I work with, speculative fiction writers.
And the world building just, offers so much opportunity for making fresh cliches and fresh ways of saying things. And it’s just so much fun to me. When I wrote my middle grade Lostuns Found. I had so much fun making up curses that the characters used like rusty cogs I just had fun with it because it was part of the world and it was part of who they were. It’s how they spoke in that world. So for those of you who are writing fantasy, speculative fiction, science fiction, use your words and use them based on the world that you’re in. And it will go so much farther in building your world without you having to describe the whole setting all the time to us.
Just giving them language that’s specific to their world is going to help build that world.
[00:21:52] Sara Gentry: Yeah, well you’ve talked about how writers can build this muscle just by the sheer fact of writing more. More practice, whether it’s through revision or drafting, you and I are both big fans of reading for the sake of learning, from books as mentor texts.
How might people, use their reading to help develop their line level writing
skills
[00:22:14] Sharon Skinner: That’s a really great question. I believe two thing about mentor texts. One, every book is a mentor text, even if it’s its a mentor text of what not to do
[00:22:25] Sara Gentry: Okay, fair enough.
[00:22:27] Sharon Skinner: And two, don’t be afraid to read broadly and read widely and read outside of your genre and get the flavors of all the things and how people do that. Read a mystery and find out how they’re using their word choices and the nuanced choices that they make for the mood and tonality of that.
Read a humorous book to see how they pull off a joke inside a book by using language and the setup and all of that. Read across genres, read broadly, read across ages, and find out how other writers are doing it. This goes back to the analogy that I like to use about if you were learning to paint, you would study the masters and you would study their brush strokes and their use of color and their use of light and the way they set things up on the canvas, what they choose to illustrate and what they don’t, that’s what you want to do when you’re using a mentor text. So if you are reading a book and you’re like, Oh, this is terrible. Don’t do that. If you don’t like the way a writer wrote something, then that’s a mentor text for you for how not to write.
But if you’re reading a book, and even if you’re reading for pleasure and you find yourself just sinking into it, and all of a sudden you’re in backstory and you go, how did they do that? I didn’t realize we jumped. And I was right there and it was smooth and I, and it didn’t bother me, right? How did they do that?
Go back and reread those passages. Same thing with word choices. Look at the word choices that they’re using to set the tone, the setting, the mood, the emotion, what dialogue words are they using? And yes, always read in your age level. If you’re writing middle grade, yes, you should read many more middle grade books than you are other things, but don’t be afraid to go out and use what’s out there where people have written all these glorious books and learn from them and take and apply what they’re doing into your book, even though it might be for a different age group.
[00:24:22] Sara Gentry: Yeah, and I also like to, if I come across something that’s particularly well written, Just like a sentence or two. I don’t do this at like a chapter level, but if there’s something particularly well written, I’ll like to write it In a notebook or something just to kind of keep it.
For later and kind of come back and look to it.
[00:24:40] Sharon Skinner: I collect those too. And as a matter of fact, I have a weekly update that goes out to specific clients to keep them writing and to keep them encouraged. And every single one of those has one of those quotes that I have recently found. They’re my cheer letters, and then how did you apply this in your world? Or did you find anything that did this in your world based on the quote that I’m pulling? I love pull quotes.
Sometimes I’ll use that as a jumping off place to write a blog because something hits me I just wrote a blog post about, If I were a dog, what kind of dog would I be? Because Seth Godin had that question in his newsletter and I was like, huh, it really made me think about it.
Right. So you never know where you’re going to find the inspiration and the quotes that you can keep around you to help you write beautiful language. And don’t be afraid to read good poetry.
[00:25:26] Sara Gentry: Right. I think people get intimidated by the idea of reading poetry, but we need not be.
[00:25:31] Sharon Skinner: There’s so much glorious imagery in poetry.
[00:25:35] Sara Gentry: Yeah, absolutely. So I do want to make sure to let everyone know that you have a really great resource on sensory detail, which obviously is very helpful for line level writing. Would you like to talk about that a little bit?
[00:25:50] Sharon Skinner: Yes. So, I’m actually updating that resource right now because that one doesn’t have the, there are two things that have been something I felt but didn’t know how to articulate until I was doing my residency this last year.
And that is proprioception and interoception. And those are sensory components that are about where we are in space. That’s proprioception, knowing where you are in space. Like dancers have to know exactly where they are, where their body is, where they are in space. And interception is, that those weird feelings that you get and all of the gurgling and all of the things that are happening inside you
and another concept that I want to incorporate into that is something I learned this last year called umwelt. Umwelt is the specific environment of an organism, and every organism has a specific environment. And how we sense our environment is different than, say, a dog senses their environment, or a jellyfish senses their environment, or an electric eel senses their environment.
I learned this from a book called, An Immense World by Ed Yong. The idea being that if you’re an earthworm. So this is why it comes back to sensory. If you’re an earthworm, if you don’t have a perception of how you affect the environment versus how the environment affects you then you would never be able to dig a hole because every time you pushed against the you would feel like the dirt was pushing against you and you would back up,. So that perception of your environment and how you’re affecting the environment and how it’s affecting you is really important okay I am nerding out I am totally nerding out and I know it but this whole idea of how we affect our environment versus how the environment affects us, I think is just fabulous. And I’m looking at ways to articulate that for writers to be able to add that to their toolbox.
[00:27:44] Sara Gentry: Yeah, I love it.
And I’m always happy to nerd out. I mean, you know that you won’t find a much more nerdy person than I am. So it’s. Totally cool. But I do want to thank you for your time and for digging into this stuff with me, the line level. I’m glad that you talked about it being more of a revision thing.
I think sometimes writers get worried that their first draft sounds terrible And that they’re not a real writer because they can’t write pretty sentences, but we know that a lot of that happens later in the process. So I hope that this conversation has helped to encourage people in that way.
Thank you.
[00:28:24] Sharon Skinner: Yeah. Last night I worked on my work in progress and, all those words. Sounded pretty terrible, but it moved the story along and I can go back and revise them later. So I’m good with that. .
[00:28:34] Sara Gentry: She’s like, I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s all good. It’s all good. So thank you so much Sharon, and thank you writers and we will catch you next time.
[00:28:43] Sharon Skinner: Bye for now.
[00:28:45] Christy Yaros: We hope you enjoyed this episode of Coaching KidLit, a writing and book coaching podcast for writers who want to level up their KidLit writing game.
[00:28:52] Sharon Skinner: For more about us and to discover what a book coach can do for you, check out coachingkidlit. com and follow us on social media.
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For more information about Sharon Skinner, visit bookcoachingbysharon.com or follow her on Instagram @sharon_skinner_author_bookcoach and Twitter @SharonSkinner56.
For more information about Christy Yaros, visit christyyaros.com or follow her on Instagram and Twitter @ChristyYaros.
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