Category: Social Justice

• The F Words: The Fear of F

  

  In an earlier blog I wrote about The Power of F. But now I want to write about a subject that strikes me as very sad: the fear of F. Back in 2020, after City of Light offered me a publishing contract for The F Words, my editor and I discussed the title. Our first…

  Barbara Gregorich

  June 1, 2023

  Books, Coming-of-Age, Literature, Marketing, Novel, Social Justice, Story, The F Words, Title, Titles, Words, YA Fiction

  Books, Censorship, Fear of Words, Fiction, Literature, Story, The F Words, Titles, Writing, YA Fiction

• The F Words: Framing Device

  

  In literature, a framing device is a story that surrounds another story. That is, a novel begins with a story, and that story is interrupted by another story, told to completion. And after the inner story ends, the novel returns to the starting story and finishes that. Some examples of frame stories are Joseph Conrad’s…

  Barbara Gregorich

  March 15, 2023

  Books, Coming-of-Age, Ending, Literature, Novel, Novel, Social Justice, Story, Structure, The F Words, Writing, Writing Decisions, YA Fiction

  Books, Frames, Framing a Story, Literature, The F Words, Writing, Writing Decisions, YA Fiction

• The F Words: The Freedom of Silence

  

  For many writers, possibly most, the second chapter of a book is a big problem. One of the main reasons for this problem is that writers spend an inordinate amount of time perfecting their first chapters, this in order to grab an editor’s attention and make a sale. After all that energy and rewriting, one…

  Barbara Gregorich

  February 15, 2023

  Books, History, Literature, Novel, Resistance, Social Justice, The F Words, Words, YA Fiction

  Books, Fiction, Flashbacks, Freedom of Speech, Right to Remain Silent, Second Chapters, The F Words, YA Fiction

• The F Words: Following the F Words

  

  It stands to reason that, before I sat down to write a YA novel titled The F Words  — in which a teen who tags his high school wall with the F word is required to write two poems a week, each about a word that starts with the letter F — I would make…

  Barbara Gregorich

  December 15, 2022

  Books, Character, Cinquain, Coming-of-Age, First Novel, Forms, Free Verse, Literature, Novel, Novel, Poetry, Social Justice, Story, The F Words, Words, Writing Decisions, YA Fiction

  Books, Character, Literature, Poetry, The F Words, Writing Decisions, YA Fiction

• The F Words: The Gift of Fire

  After the 5,000-year-old body of the Iceman (later named Otzi) was discovered preserved in a glacier in the Alps in 1991, scientists began examining  everything they could about this person — in order to better understand the past and its importance to the present. Among the many things they discovered about the Iceman was this:…

  Barbara Gregorich

  July 15, 2022

  Books, Change, Changes, History, Labor Struggles, Resistance, Social Justice, The F Words, Unions, YA Fiction

  Antiwar Movement, Labor Struggles, Leadership, Political Struggles, Protest, Social Protest, The F Words, YA

• The F Words: Bilingualism

  Not counting the US, approximately 65-75% of the world’s population is bilingual. In the US in 1980 only 10% of the population was bilingual. Today that number has risen to 20%, possibly to 25%, primarily through immigrants, largely Spanish-speaking. Many different cultures have positive proverbs about knowing more than one language. An old Persian proverb…

  Barbara Gregorich

  June 15, 2022

  Bilingualism, Books, Literature, Novel, Novel, Social Justice, The F Words, Writing Decisions, YA Fiction

  Bilingualism, Monolingualism, The F Words, YA

• The F Words: The Writing

  For well over a year now I’ve been blogging about various aspects of The F Words, but one thing I haven’t talked about is the actual steps of writing the novel. Writers and readers are often interested in how writing takes place. So, for those who might want to know, I will try to recount…

  Barbara Gregorich

  April 15, 2022

  Books, Literature, Novel, Novel, Rewriting, Social Justice, Story, The F Words, Writing, Writing Decisions, YA Fiction

  Fiction, Manuscript Drafts, Rewriting, The F Words, YA Novel

• The F Words: The Hate U Give

  I love Angie Thomas’s YA novel, The Hate U Give. I read it when it was published and felt as if I  had been living in a stuffy room and now, at last, somebody opened the windows and let the light and the fresh air in — somebody was talking about the truths of racism,…

  Barbara Gregorich

  February 1, 2022

  Books, Change, Literature, Novel, Novel, Poetry, Resistance, Social Justice, The F Words, YA Fiction

  Books, Literature, School Closings, Social Justice, The F Words, The Hate U Give, YA Fiction

• The F Words: Educator Guide

  This blog first appeared as an article in the SCBWI-Illinois journal, Prairie Wind. *     *     * During the 1980s and into  the 1990s I used to write educational materials: activity sheets, teacher guides, parent guides, flashcards, scripts for audio how-to instructions, and teacher guides and parent guides.  At one point I…

  Barbara Gregorich

  November 15, 2021

  Books, Educator Guide, Literature, Novel, Social Justice, Story, Teaching, The F Words, Writing, YA Fiction

  Educator Guide, Teacher Materials, Teaching, The F Words, YA Fiction

• The F Words: A Stranger Comes to Town

  In literature the stranger-comes-to-town motif is quite common. In films, for example, there’s In the Heat of the Night. There’s Shane. There’s The Brother from Another Planet. Stranger-comes-to-town is a type of plot, just as seeking revenge is a type, and going on a journey is a type. It’s the skeletal structure on which a…

  Barbara Gregorich

  October 15, 2021

  Books, Change, Literature, Novel, Social Justice, Story, The F Words, Writing, Writing Decisions, YA Fiction

  Catalyst, Change, Plot, Stranger Comes to Town, The F Words, YA Fiction