I had the privilege and pleasure of interviewing middle grade and YA author Maryrose Wood last night for our Wednesday night Writers Speak series at Stony Brook Southampton. Maryrose is everything you might wish the author of a delightfully satirical and superbly written series called The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place to be… smart, witty, quick, fun and completely original. She is also an accomplished writing teacher, with a keen eye for what constitutes good writing, and she offered a number of insights during the interview and at dinner afterwards that made me wish I’d brought my notebook. At one moment, she described her own editing process as “like looking at every single word with a jewelers loupe” to assess its value.
We had a fine time, chatting over our vegetarian pasta about the dangers of passive language, redundancies, cheesy modifiers and other writing mistakes – and I am so looking forward to welcoming Maryrose back to the campus this summer,when she will teach a middle grade workshop as part of the Southampton Children’s Literature Conference and Fellows program.
In the meantime, I wanted to share a blogpost of hers that I dug up in preparation for last night’s interview, one that I think is so full of good writing and editing advice, it’s like a mini-workshop in and of itself. Talk about looking at each word with a jeweler’s loupe… I loved it so much that I printed it out for myself to file for future reference. You can see it here:
Maryrose Wood’s Lesson in Revision
Enjoy!
