Workshop: Discovering Your Inner Child
Perfecting the Young Adult or Middle-Grade Voice
With Sarah Everett
Acclaimed author Sarah Everett will lead a workshop on perfecting the young adult or middle-grade voice.
At the end of the workshop, you will be able to
– Describe the differences between middle-grade, YA and adult novels
– Discern when/if your novel is for young people
– Experiment with different approaches or tools for capturing a young person’s voice
– Evaluate whether you nailed a child/YA voice or need to go back to the drawing board
$50 ($45 in a bundle)
Suitable for:
Adult writers looking to write, or experiment with writing for young people
What to prepare:
Participants should prepare a short paragraph (no more than 250 words) from a middle-grade or young adult’s point of view. Sarah may share and discuss different participants’ work, but only if you are comfortable with it.
If you are comfortable with sharing your work, please send your sample in advance of the workshop, preferably by Friday September 1. This is not a mandatory requirement but Sarah would love to use some of your writing as examples in the class!
Sarah Everett is the author of The Probability of Everything, No One Here is Lonely and Everyone We’ve Been. She remembers growing up in enchanted forests, on desert islands, and inside a magical wardrobe. She would only ever erase her memory of past karaoke performances and certain fashion choices. She lives in Alberta, Canada.
The Probability of Everything
By Sarah Everett
Published by Clarion Books (HarperCollins Canada)
A heart-wrenching middle grade debut about Kemi, an aspiring scientist who loves statistics and facts, as she navigates grief and loss at a moment when life as she knows it changes forever.
Eleven-year-old Kemi Carter loves scientific facts, specifically probability. It’s how she understands the world and her place in it. Kemi knows her odds of being born were 1 in 5.5 trillion, and that the odds of her having the best family ever were even lower. Yet somehow, Kemi lucked out.
But everything Kemi thought she knew changes when she sees an asteroid hover in the sky, casting a purple haze over her world. Amplus-68 has an 84.7% chance of colliding with earth in four days, and with that collision, Kemi’s life as she knows it will end.
But over the course of the four days, even facts don’t feel true to Kemi anymore. The new town she moved to that was supposed to be “better for her family” isn’t very welcoming. And Amplus-68 is taking over her life, but others are still going to school and eating at their favorite diner like nothing has changed. Is Kemi the only one who feels like the world is ending?
With the days numbered, Kemi decides to put together a time capsule that will capture her family’s truth: how creative her mother is, how inquisitive her little sister can be, and how much Kemi’s whole world revolves around her father. But no time capsule can change the truth behind all of it, that Kemi must face the most inevitable and hardest part of life: saying goodbye.