Instructor Stories: Marcie Colleen
Introduction
We're so happy to have the wonderful, award-winning Marcie Colleen teaching our Crafting a Strong Beginning intensive this month. Marcie has a background in teaching and the theatre. She is a frequent presenter at conferences for the SCBWI, as well as a faculty member for The Writing Barn, San Diego Writer's Ink, and the University of California San Diego Extension. In addition to her picture books and chapter books, her educational work in children’s literature has been recognized by School Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, and the Children’s Book Council.
Susan Hawk at Upstart Crow Literary represents Marcie's picture books and chapter books.
I'll be giving away one of Marcie's books at the end of this post. One randomly selected winner will get to choose from any of her eleven children's books.
Marcie's Books
Marcie writes picture books and chapter books for multiple publishers.
Her Super Happy Party Bears chapter book series follows the delightfully funny situations that some upbeat bears get into in the “Grumpy Woods” where they live.
Love, Triangle was named a Bank Street College of Education’s Best Children's Book of 2018.
And Penguinaut! was voted One Book Colorado for 2019! Over 75,000 copies were distributed to every four-year-old in the state.
The Bear's Garden, illustrated by Alison Oliver (Macmillan), was called “a well-illustrated, beautifully written tale of encouragement” by Kirkus and given a starred review. It releases next month!
Crafting a Strong Beginning with Marcie Colleen
In this bite-sized, 25-minute intensive, you'll learn how to craft the best beginning for your picture book. Marcie Colleen will share the four essential elements that every beginning should have, a step-by-step exercise to help you connect with your characters, and examples from picture books with great beginnings. Each of the three lessons has an assignment to help you get the most out of what you're learning, and we've included two handouts for easy reference.
It's so easy to see progress with this intensive that I've already had some “Aha!” moments for one of my own picture book beginnings (and then the overall story). Marcie gets to the heart of the matter quickly and gives assignments that will help you see results.
I also loved how helpful the examples she shared were. The following example shows how she resolved the promise she made in the beginning of the story at the end.
Book Giveaway Details
For the book giveaway, which IS open to international readers, the winner can choose one book—any book—of Marcie’s. To enter, you must tell me which book you’d choose in the comments of this post. For additional entries, you can share the post on social media and post a link to where you’ve shared in the comments (preferably as a comment to your original comment so that all of your entries are grouped together).
You can go ahead and ask questions in the comments and interact with each other, but I won’t count those as entries.
I’ll close the contest at midnight PST on February 21. You don't need to be a Storyteller Academy student or purchase anything to enter. Thanks for reading and sharing!
Blog Contributors
Myrna Foster writes and edits content for Storyteller Academy and the WriteRiders Newsletter for SCBWI Nevada. She has spent a lot of time teaching and coaching children, including five years as a preschool teacher. She's also worked as a journalist, and Highlights High Five has published six of her poems.
Arree Chung is an author/illustrator and the founder of Storyteller Academy. Arree’s Ninja! series has received starred reviews from Kirkus and School Library Journal. Kirkus also gave a starred review to Mixed, which recently won the FCGB award.
Today Arree lives a creative life, making stories for children. Arree spends most of his time making picture books, writing middle grade novels, and sharing his love for art, design, and storytelling with kids and dreamers everywhere.