A doable 5-part plan to engage the teenage mind.
The majority of teens are not geeks, driven to learn for learning’s sake. They go to school to meet their own intrinsic needs. For most adolescents, a group that is developmentally driven to prioritize peer friendships, the need met by school is strictly social.
Enter COVID, virtual school, quarantining, and…
Twenty-nine years. Nothing has changed.
It’s not even that she was beautiful. Dark eyes and lips that were strictly that: a set of lips. Long face with a Roman nose, which doesn’t always play well on a woman. If there was body geometry you’d never know it, with the baggy…
It only took four decades.
In Connecticut, where I grew up, the advertising wasn’t subtle. It was stitched onto throw pillows, displayed in place of pride: “You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin.”
The rich part I had no say in. I was a free lunch kid. I…
Let my students tell you
I’m the most privileged young adult author on the planet. It took me ten years to write my first book, Dead Inside, but during that ten years, I taught high school English. Cha-ching! I used my work-in-progress as a textbook. Translation: my 958 beta-readers were real, live teens, I got…
…okay, but mostly work
If you build it, they will come” is the biggest crock of shit ever foisted. The second biggest is my own mental script: “If I write it, The New York Times bestseller list will come.”
*EHNT* Wrong answer.
Put readers in your skin. Let them live your life.
Right. So you’re memoir-motivated. You’ve lived through something intense, something different, and readers will find it fascinating. You’re off to a great start with that hella-interesting story, but you’ve got to keep your readers riveted with your writing style. How you gonna do that?
Well, pop quiz. Which is more…
Take their phone away? Preposterous. Do this instead.
Let’s say you’re in a dynamic where you know, you know, that everyone has banded together in dislike of you. Could be your job, your neighborhood, or wherever you’re stuck spending a ton of time. It’s clear they talk smack about you. They’re united in making fun of your looks…
The exact steps I took to write my award-winning memoirs
So you’ve got this life, and it’s an interesting one. It’s taught you a few things, and you’d like to share them with the rest of us. An itchy voice is playing on repeat in your brain: “You need to write a memoir!”
What I see on screens and what I see in real life are two different realities
Vanity is party-neutral. I don’t go to my salon to be in a safe space with my comrades. I go because I want good hair, but I don’t want to pay the “Would you like a wine spritzer?” tax.
I made that mistake when I first landed in Carolina. I…
My self-published book got me an agent and a two-book deal.
When I was in college, I had the coolest professor. She taught history and politics with early hip-hop culture, when the human beatbox and breakdance cardboard were tools of the revolution. She taught philosophy through a book — a zine, practically — called Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing. That…
Cyndy Etler
Award-winning author. Certified teen life coach. Fledgling optimist. As seen on CNN, HuffPost, NPR, CBS, ABC. www.cyndyetler.com
