Tag: Anna Staniszewski (Page 1 of 2)

Diving Into Research with Anna Staniszewski Author of ONCE UPON A CRUISE

September 28, 2016 / Katie L. Carroll

Prolific author and one of my writing buddies Anna Staniszewski is here today to talk about researching ONCE UPON A CRUISE, the first book in her latest tween series. It’s always fun and informative to have Anna on the blog!

Diving Into Book Research

by Anna Staniszewski

Before I embark on a post about the process of researching my newest tween novel, ONCE UPON A CRUISE, I have a confession to make: I’ve never been a big fan of the research process. For many authors I know, research is one of the most fun parts of the process, but for me, it can be paralyzing.

When I start researching something, I often feel overwhelmed by the amount of information I don’t know, and I start to panic that I’m going to get everything wrong. That’s why, when I can, I write stories that require minimal research (e.g. ones that take place in completely made-up worlds) or ones that require the most enjoyable type of research (e.g. creating the perfect brownie). But when my editor at Scholastic approached me with the idea for a story about a girl who spends her summer working with her mom on a wannabe Disney cruise, I was instantly on board, even though it meant knowing a lot more information about cruise ships than was currently in my brain.

Now, in an ideal world, researching cruise ships would also be the enjoyable kind of research. You just go on a cruise and write it off as a business expense, right? Sadly, not in my case. When I started working on the book, I was hugely pregnant and too bogged down with deadlines to be able to dash out of town. That meant I had to remain firmly on land and explore other research avenues.

First, I started with what I knew. I had been on a couple of cruises in the past, so I wrote down as many details as I could remember about the experience—the seas of sunbathers who were starting to resemble leather suitcases and the extremely enthusiastic people spraying hand disinfectant at every turn. But those details weren’t enough for the book, especially since my character wasn’t a passenger on a cruise—she was an employee. I had to dig deeper.

I set out to read as much as I could on what it’s like to work on a cruise ship, including the crazy hours, the cramped living quarters, and the personal dramas. This gave me a better idea of what my protagonist’s room might look like and what her schedule might be, but I was missing one very important detail. This wasn’t any cruise. It was a knockoff Disney cruise, and Disney cruises are their own special kind of nautical adventure.

With that in mind, I started looking into life on a Disney cruise, which led to watching training videos and even a documentary on how Disney cruise ships are built and operated. Once I had this info, I went about twisting it to make it fit my “knockoff cruise,” which often meant making things goofier and a lot less organized than they would be on a Disney vessel. Thankfully when it came to the fairy tale details of the story, I could use a lot of the info that I’d gathered for my UnFairy Tale series.

Finally, after all of that research and writing and revising, I was pretty happy with the result. But, being the paranoid researcher that I am, I still wasn’t sure the details were right. So I put out a call on social media, asking if anyone happened to have experience working on a cruise ship, and the Internet did not disappoint!

Thanks to the magic of Twitter, I was able to find someone who’d not only worked on a Disney cruise but had actually done the same job as my main character! I couldn’t believe my luck. Not only was this woman willing to answer my questions, but she agreed to read through my manuscript and flag any errors. She pointed out a few small mistakes and had a couple of suggestions that helped make the details more authentic. When she wrote, “I can tell you did your research!” in her comments, I had to admit that I was so relieved. If I’d passed her scrutiny, I was a lot more confident that I’d pass young readers’ as well!

So did my experience with ONCE UPON A CRUISE change my approach to research? Yes and no. I still find the process a bit daunting, but because the amount of research I did for this book was much more in-depth than for my other projects, I now have more confidence in my ability to do even more research for future books. And hey, maybe next time, I’ll even get a tropical vacation out of the deal. 😉

ONCE UPON A CRUISE blurb:

Ainsley never wanted to spend her summer on a fairy tale cruise–especially since, instead of lounging by the pool, she’s running around the ship doing favor after favor for her cruise director mom.

Things aren’t all bad–it’s good to see her mom acting confident again after the divorce, and she’s learning a lot about obscure German fairy tales and how to fold towels into entertaining shapes for little kids (um, yay?). There’s also a guy who’s super cute, even in a dorky dwarf costume–if only Ainsley could get Prince Handsome to stop babbling about himself long enough for her to say more than ‘hi’ to the cute dwarf!

But once the cruise starts, things start to go wrong: the laundry turns pink, the kitchen runs out of food, the guy playing the Pig King is always in Ainsley’s hair, and her mom expects her to be in a hundred places all at once. Is this fairy tale cruise under a wicked curse? Or can Ainsley stand up for herself and make the cruise end happily ever after?

About the Author:

Anna Staniszewski is the author of the My Very UnFairy Tale Life series, the Dirt Diary series, and the Switched at First Kiss series–-all published by Sourcebooks–-as well as the picture book POWER DOWN, LITTLE ROBOT. Her latest tween novel, ONCE UPON A CRUISE, will be released by Scholastic on September 27th. Anna was a Writer-in-Residence at the Boston Public Library and a recipient of the PEN New England Discovery Award, and she currently teach in the MFA Writing for Children Program at Simmons College in Boston. You can find out more about Anna and her books at www.annastan.com.

Dealing With Gossip from Anna Staniszewski Author of THE GOSSIP FILE

January 15, 2015 / Katie L. Carroll

Returning guest poster Anna Staniszewski always has such great posts. Today she stops by with her latest release, the humorous MG story THE GOSSIP FILE (see my 5-star Goodreads review here), and a little bit of her own gossip…with advice for kids and teens on how to deal with gossip! Make sure to check out the giveaway at the end. Welcome, Anna!

Dealing With Gossip

by Anna Staniszewski

My mom used to say that you should never say anything about someone that you wouldn’t want said about you. While I think these are wise words, they’re not always easy to stick to. After all, sometimes gossiping about other people can be really fun, which is probably why we do it. But when I think back to my middle school years, when it seemed like everyone was doing nothing but gossiping, I have to admit that most of the things people were saying were hurtful, whether they were meant to be or not.

This is something my main character, Rachel, struggles with in The Gossip File. When the older girls she’s working with hand her a book and ask her to add bits of juicy gossip to it, at first she’s stumped. What makes gossip “juicy,” anyway? But when she starts writing down things that she knows would be hurtful if someone else read them, that’s when she realizes that she’s crossed the line. Before she can get rid of those bits of gossip, they’re discovered, thus creating a mess that she frantically tries to clean up.

So here’s my first piece of advice: if you’re going to gossip, definitely don’t write the gossip down! If you put it in a book or online, it’s only going to cause more damage. Secondly, consider if it’s really your secret to tell, and if you’d be upset if someone said it about you. No matter how juicy a piece of gossip is, it’s probably not worth ruining a friendship over. And hey, if you’re really desperate for some good dirt, you can always make some up about your pets! (By the way, don’t tell anyone, but I’m pretty sure my dog has a secret cat boyfriend…)

THE GOSSIP FILE blurb:

The Gossip File:

Chandra lets little kids pee in the pool.
Melody stole $ from the café register.
Ava isn’t who she says she is…

Ava is cool. Ava is confident. Ava is really Rachel Lee who is lying her butt off.

Rachel is visiting her dad at a resort in sunny Florida and is ready for two weeks of relaxing poolside, trips to Disney World – and NOT scrubbing toilets. Until her dad’s new girlfriend, Ellie, begs Rachel to help out at her short-staffed café. That’s when Rachel kinda sorta adopts a new identity to impress the cool, older girls who work there. Ava is everything Rachel wishes she could be. But when the girls ask “Ava” to help add juicy resort gossip to their file, Rachel’s not sure what to do…especially when one of the entries is a secret about Ellie.

Buy Links:

About the Author:

Born in Poland and raised in the United States, Anna Staniszewski grew up loving stories in both Polish and English. When she’s not writing, Anna spends her time teaching, reading, and eating far too much chocolate. She is the author of the My Very UnFairy Tale Life series, the Dirt Diary series, and the forthcoming Switched at First Kiss series, all published by Sourcebooks. Visit her at www.annastan.com.

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Middle Grade vs. Young Adult with Anna Staniszewski Author of The Prank List

June 30, 2014 / Katie L. Carroll

Anna Staniszewski is one of my favorite guest bloggers because she always brings such insightful topics and discussions. Today, as she celebrates the upcoming release of her newest book The Prank List (The Dirt Diary #2), Anna is talking the difference between middle grade and young adult fiction. Welcome, Anna!

What Separates Middle Grade from Young Adult Fiction?

by Anna Staniszewski

I get this question a lot, so I thought I’d tackle it here. Let’s start with a couple of definitions.

“Middle grade” is generally for ages 7-12, though it can skew a bit younger or older depending on the project (short chapter books vs. longer novels). Middle grade usually features protagonists in elementary or middle school, and if it deals with topics such as sex or violence, those tend to happen off-screen.The ending, while not necessarily happy, should be hopeful.

“Young adult” generally features teen protagonists (14-19) and is often a coming-of-age story for readers 12 and up. (The actual readership of YA varies quite a bit. You might have fifth-graders reading it, but you also have adults who read nothing else.) Issues such as sex and violence can be shown on-screen and can even be of a graphic nature, though you often won’t get as much detail as you would in adult books. Endings, while often hopeful, can sometimes be bleak.

Now that we have that out of the way, we can see that content isn’t necessarily the dividing line between MG and YA. The bigger distinction is how the content is handled, whether it’s off-screen and implied or on-screen and shown.

The protagonist’s age is often a factor, as well, although there is some wiggle room here, too. My main character in The Dirt Diary is 14, for example, but she’s in 8th grade. That puts her right smack in between the two genres, which is why I often refer to the book as “tween,” although it’s generally considered MG.

For me, the biggest difference between MG and YA is the character’s emotional journey. I’ve heard more than one person say that in MG, the character goes through lots of life-changing experiences but can still remain a child at the end. In YA, the character goes through lots of life-changing experiences that force him/her to become an adult. This might be too simplistic of an answer, but I think it goes a long way to explain the difference between the two.

In MG, you have characters exploring their worlds and experiencing what things outside of their own lives are like. In YA, you have characters exploring their own identities and figuring out where they belong in the world. The role of family is different in both; in MG, the family tends to be part of the story, both a support system and a source of conflict, whereas in YA, the family is often secondary or more a source of conflict than anything else. Again, this goes back to the idea of staying a child vs. becoming an adult. At some point, you need to find independence from your family (as many YA protagonists do) and strike out on your own.

Over the past decade or two, the MG and YA markets have changed quite a bit. It used to be that a book with a 14-year-old girl would automatically be labelled as YA, but now that you have more adults reading YA, the genre has started to focus on older and more mature protagonists. That means that MG has expanded too, including a wider range of books, sometimes those that feature younger teens.

Because the market is always shifting, I try not to drive myself too crazy with definitions, but I do try to keep in mind the general attitude in MG vs. YA. That, I think, hasn’t changed too much. In MG, we often still see characters branching out into the world, whereas in YA we see characters who want to find their places in it.

The Prank List blurb:

Rachel Lee never thought she’d fight for the right to clean toilets. But when a rival cleaning business starts stealing her mom’s clients, Rachel will do whatever it takes to save herself the horror of moving to Connecticut—which would mean giving up her almost, sort of boyfriend, her fantastic new pastry classes, and her best friend Marisol.

Operation Save Mom’s Cleaning Business is a go!

But when the series of pranks Rachel and her BFF cook up to take down the competition totally backfires, Rachel worries that her recipe for success is a dud. You know what they say—if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen…

About the Author:

Born in Poland and raised in the United States, Anna Staniszewski grew up loving stories in both Polish and English. Currently, she lives outside Boston with her husband and their crazy dog. When she’s not writing, Anna spends her time reading, daydreaming, and challenging unicorns to games of hopscotch. She is the author of the My Very UnFairy Tale Life series and the Dirt Diary series. Her newest book, The Prank List, releases on July 1st from Sourcebooks. You can visit Anna at www.annastan.com.

The Dirt Diary Author Anna Staniszewski on Creating Diverse Characters

December 11, 2013 / Katie L. Carroll

Let’s give a big welcome to returning guest blogger Anna Staniszewski, author of the upcoming tween book The Dirt Diary, as she discusses creating a diverse main character. I was very pleased to receive an ARC of this fabulous book and shared my thoughts on it in my 5-star Goodreads review. Welcome, Anna!

When I first began writing The Dirt Diary a few years ago, I knew early on that the main character, Rachel, had a white mom and a Korean-American dad. Perhaps this character detail emerged because the story took place in middle school, a time in my own life that I associate with one of my closest friends (then and now) who is Korean. Or perhaps Rachel appeared in my head that way just because that’s who she is.

For several drafts of the novel, however, I struggled with how overt I should make Rachel’s ethnicity. It didn’t play a large part in the story, but it was part of her character. Also, did I, a Polish-born, American-raised author have a right to write about a character who wasn’t like me?

As I mulled this over, I came to two realizations. First, why couldn’t Rachel’s race be part of her character without it affecting the plot? Rachel being biracial was just as much a part of her as being a girl or an only child. It didn’t guide the story; it just felt like a natural part of her character. And second, I realized that none of the other characters I had written were “like me.” If I stuck to the “like me” criteria then I could only write about characters who had lived in Poland until they were five and then moved to New England. How boring would that be?

So I set out to write Rachel not as a biracial character but as a real character, one whose desires and emotions I could tap into and understand. I realized that my personal experiences did play a part in shaping her character. Not only do I know a thing or two about teen mortification, but having been raised bicultural made it easier for me to imagine how Rachel might feel about being biracial.

Have I made any missteps in depicting a biracial character? Perhaps. And it’s precisely that fear that kept me from acknowledging her ethnicity in early drafts of the book. Ultimately, though, I felt like it would be worse to ignore her true identity than to not try writing it at all.

The Dirt Diary blurb:

Cleaning up after the in-crowd gets Rachel all the best dirt.

Rachel can’t believe she has to give up her Saturdays to scrubbing other people’s toilets. So. Gross. But she kinda, sorta stole $287.22 from her college fund that she’s got to pay back ASAP or her mom will ground her for life. Which is even worse than working for her mother’s new cleaning business. Maybe. After all, becoming a maid is definitely not going to help her already loserish reputation.

But Rachel picks up more than smell socks on the job. As maid to some of the most popular kids in school, Rachel suddenly has all the dirt on the 8th grade in-crowd. Her formerly boring diary is now filled with juicy secrets. And when her crush offers to pay her to spy on his girlfriend, Rachel has to decide if she’s willing to get her hands dirty…

About the Author:

Born in Poland and raised in the United States, Anna Staniszewski grew up loving stories in both Polish and English. She was named the 2006-2007 Writer-in-Residence at the Boston Public Library and a winner of the 2009 PEN New England Susan P. Bloom Discovery Award. When she’s not writing, Anna spends her time teaching, reading, and challenging unicorns to games of hopscotch. She is the author of My Very UnFairy Tale Life series, published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky. Look for the first book in Anna’s next tween series, The Dirt Diary, in January 2014, and visit her at www.annastan.com.

Writing Middle Grade with Anna Staniszewski

October 11, 2013 / Katie L. Carroll

Anna Staniszewski, author of the hilarious My Very UnFairy Tale Life series, the most recent of which, called My Sort of Fairy Tale Ending, releases next month, discusses writing middle grade fiction. A topic she is well-versed in. Welcome, Anna!

How to Write Middle Grade Fiction in Two Simple Steps

What’s the hardest thing about writing middle grade fiction? Being an adult. Really. Your adult self likes to get in the way when you’re writing for 8-12 year olds. Your adult self is judgmental and bossy. It thinks it knows best. Sometimes it won’t shut up.

Here’s my advice when you’re writing middle grade fiction: Try to quiet the adult part of your brain as much as you can and consider these two questions.

1. How can I be the child protagonist?

2. How can I let the child protagonist be him/herself?

Let’s tackle the first question. How can I be the child protagonist? You can’t, right? Because you’re an adult. Well, I’m not sure that’s true. For one, I think many of us have inner children that we can tap into. (And some of us never quite mature beyond the age of thirteen, anyway.)

I’ve found that middle grade books that don’t quite work feel like they were written by an adult instead of told by a child character. To avoid this trap, try to tap into those feelings of what it was like to be the age you’re writing about. Do some journaling as your younger self, if that helps.

Also, do your research. Try to find a (non-creepy) way to spend time with kids and listen to what they talk about, care about, etc. Trust me. This will help. And remember that you’re not writing about all children; you’re writing about one particular character who happens to be in elementary school or—even worse—middle school.

And now on to the second question. How can you let the child protagonist be herself? For one, you need to spend a lot of time working out this specific character, what she wants, what she needs, etc. But also, try to quiet that adult voice that might be tempted to judge your character’s actions or to medicate her or to call her mother.

Because here’s the thing: Your young character might be smart and resourceful, but chances are she has less world experience than you do. She’s going to make mistakes. Maybe big mistakes. Let her. And don’t worry about what kind of example she’s going to set for other kids. If you try to make an example of her, she’ll feel fake. Let her mess up and learn and BE HUMAN. Then she’ll feel real.

So that’s it. How to write middle grade fiction in two simple steps. Easy, right? Not exactly. But when it all comes together, it really is worth it. Trust me. I’m an adult.

My Sort of Fairy Tale Ending blurb:

Happily ever after? Yeah, right. Jenny’s search for her parents leads her to Fairy Land, a rundown amusement park filled with creepily happy fairies and disgruntled leprechauns. Despite the fairies’ kindness, she knows they are keeping her parents from her. If only they would stop being so happy all the time-it’s starting to weird her out! With the help of a fairy-boy and some rebellious leprechauns, Jenny finds a way to rescue her parents, but at the expense of putting all magical worlds in danger. Now Jenny must decide how far she is willing to go to put her family back together.

About the Author:

When she’s not writing, Anna spends her time teaching, reading, and challenging unicorns to games of hopscotch. She is the author of My Very UnFairy Tale Life and its sequels, My Epic Fairy Tale Fail and My Sort Of Fairy Tale Ending, all published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky. Look for the first book in Anna’s next tween series, The Dirt Diary, in January 2014, and visit her at www.annastan.com.