AU SABLE FORKS — Children’s book author Brian Heinz divides his time between his home near the Long Island Sound and Wilmington.
Today at 10 a.m., he will be at the AuSable Forks Free Library to lead a “Writing Workshop: The Opening Page,” for ages grade 4 to adult.
With visual aids, chart board examples, readings, discussion, and brief exercises, attendees learn to artfully reveal the critical elements of “story.”
Heinz is the critically acclaimed author of 20 books for children. His books include fiction and nonfiction, in verse and in prose, from true-to-life to humorous, in multiple genres. Many titles reflect the majesty of the natural world and were researched on location.
He is a former elementary and middle school educator of Language Arts and Science and has taught Writing for Children at the prestigious Hofstra University Summer Writers Conference for 10 years.
He presents 80 days of programs annually at schools and professional conferences, both regionally and nationally. His books have garnered multiple starred reviews and awards. Publishers include Doubleday, Creative Editions, Dial, Millbrook, Chronicle, North Country Books, 4RV Publishing, and others.
“So basically, I’m still an educator, even though I have retired from my classroom,” Heinz said.
“I’m in dozens upon dozens of other classrooms.”
READER TO WRITER
Heinz’s mother taught him to read at an early age, and he remains an avid reader. During his classroom career, he decided to take a writing workshop with a prominent French children’s book author, Bijou LeTord.
“I spent a couple of days with her,” he said.
“She felt I had a lot of talent. I left that workshop and went home and crafted my first children’s book, ‘The Alley Cat,’ which was published by Doubleday. I dedicated it to her cat, Marcellou. We were actually out on her deck during that workshop, and her cat leaped up onto the deck chasing butterflies and moths around the flowers. I was watching those gyrations, and I wondered, gee, what if I took a cat, not in a beautiful Long Island home, but I dropped him into a gritty, New York City alley. What would his life be like?”
Heinz had been writing articles for educational trade magazines like Science and Children, Teacher Magazine, and a couple of nonfiction art and crafts activity books.
“It started with nonfiction writing articles and just blossomed from there,” he said.
Heinz published five titles before his retirement, and he has three new ones under contract.
“Hopefully, I will not be slowing down any time soon,” he said.
OPENING PAGE
Heinz will share with workshop attendees tips about the opening page, revision and editing techniques.
“Anybody can write, but writing for a professional publication and just writing is kind of the difference between being in a Sunday beer softball league and being in the Major Leagues,” he said.
“The first page is super critical, so there are six attributes that I stress that people should be involved with on the first page. Those components have to be there, especially if it’s a story. Some books are not stories. Some books are concept pieces or mood pieces. But if it’s a true story with a character going through a plot, then those elements have to be there.”
Heinz’s talk will include employing poetic devices — simile, metaphor hyperbole, onomatopoeia, alliteration.
“Those techniques are just as appropriate in nonfiction as they are in fiction,” he said.
“But that first page has to grab an editor’s attention. I’ve seen editors stop and put down a manuscript after reading an opening paragraph. That’s how critical they are. They can assess somebody’s use of language in a handful of sentences because they see thousands of manuscripts a year.”
Heinz will talk about critical targets of revision, the places where younger writers and new writers fall short.
“That includes sensory detail, repetition and redundancy, non precision nouns and verbs, unnecessary qualifiers,” he said.
“Things like adverbs. My teen-thriller novel, ‘Peabody Pond,’ is 50,000 words. There are eight adverbs in that entire book. We talk about how to cull those out and how to use precision language in both nouns and verbs. Precision is the key.”
