![build your wild self writing build your wild self writing](https://alltogether.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/samwildself.jpeg)
My old friend and editor gave me her notes and I got back to writing. Luckily, the wonderful Alvina Ling was on my side.
BUILD YOUR WILD SELF WRITING HOW TO
But Little, Brown & Company liked it enough to sign it up and in July of 2014 it became official: my robot nature story would be published! There was just one problem…I didn’t know how to finish it. I spent over a year cobbling together my first draft of The Wild Robot. It’s great for organizing notes and research and chapters. I used a program called Scrivener to write the story. But I tried not to self-edit and I let the words flow. Up close, I realized just how hard it is to find the right words. I was no longer looking at the story with binoculars, but with a microscope. With my writing rules and my story maps and my research and my notes and my sketches in tow, I drove out to a cabin in the woods, brewed a pot of coffee, and opened my laptop. Understand the motivation behind each of Roz’s actions.Give the narrator a conversational voice, especially during slow scenes.Write with symmetry and repetition, to mirror robots and nature.Keep Roz mysterious by writing in the 3 rd person.You’re not a poet, just tell the story plainly.So I procrastinated by making myself some writing rules: There was so much to consider! How might a robot become wild? Do robots have anything in common with wildlife? What kinds of lessons could Roz learn from a tree, or a storm, or an opossum? And why is Roz on an island in the first place?Īfter I’d mapped and plotted absolutely everything it was finally time to write.
![build your wild self writing build your wild self writing](https://shanellecassir.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/build-your-wild-self.jpg)
![build your wild self writing build your wild self writing](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/85/8e/0a/858e0a132cea2cee8cf59767381388e1.png)
I spent a year mapping all the possible directions for the story. I’d always enjoyed reading science fiction, but now I was studying science fiction.
BUILD YOUR WILD SELF WRITING FREE
In my free time I scribbled notes about a robot in the wild. I had to get back to work on The Curious Garden, but that question never left my mind. I was really intrigued by the image of a robot in a tree, and a question suddenly popped into my mind: What would an intelligent robot do in the wilderness? And that got me thinking about scenes of unnatural things living in surprising places, and I made a few sketches like this. I loved imagining scenes of nature living in surprising places. If you have a few minutes I’d like to tell you about it.īack in 2008, while working on a picture book called The Curious Garden, I spent a lot of time making sketches like this. It wasn’t a graceful process, but I survived the stress and the solitude and the crippling self-doubt, and now my novel has entered the world.