Instructor Stories: Carter Higgins
Introduction
After the success of Writing Voice with Carter Higgins earlier this year, we’re excited to have Carter back to teach a brand new 9-week course this coming term. She’ll be teaching Picture Book Wordsmith live this term, and then the recorded lessons will be available with live workshops next year. You can view the schedule of upcoming classes here.
Carter has a blog called Design of the Picture Book, where she talks about picture books and graphic design. You can also listen to Carter and Matthew Winner in his Episode 332: All the Wonders podcast.
Carter has spent over a decade as an elementary school librarian, reading thousands of books to children. Her experience has made Carter a picture book wordsmith and helped her forge connections with professionals all over the industry. One of Carter’s picture books inspired the following Emily Arrow song.
Carter’s Books
Carter Higgins is the author of the middle grade, A Rambler Steals Home (HMH), and three picture books from Chronicle Books: This is Not a Valentine (Lucy Ruth Cummins), Everything You Need For a Treehouse (Emily Hughes), and Bikes for Sale (Zachariah Ohora).
And just this week, she shared an announcement for a new book that will be illustrated by Daniel Miyares.
Writing Voice with Carter Higgins
In this 78-minute intensive, you’ll learn how to craft just the right voice for the story you want to tell.
You may have been told that a great writing voice is something you either have, or you don’t have. But while your writing will carry signature characteristics that are uniquely yours, you can learn to use that as a strength and make more informed choices.
Voice is really all about the choices that you and your characters make. You can make those choices on autopilot. Or you can learn to make deliberate choices that support the kind of story you want to tell. You can choose how a story feels.
That’s better than writing on autopilot, right?
In this 9-week course, you’ll learn how to write picture books with voice, rhythm, and flow. You’ll master poetic devices, such as alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, musicality, and cadence. This class will help you create amazing read aloud stories.
If you’re one of the students who took Carter’s intensive on voice and asked for a longer class that went into more depth . . . well, we listened.
With the entirely live nature of the class this term, we’re only offering the class to Makers Pro members (who will automatically have access at the beginning of term) and those who purchase the class with workshops. If you’re interested, you can follow this link to a webinar. Registration for this first class will be limited and closes soon. Her first class will be on Saturday, October 12.
But if you can’t take Picture Book Wordsmith right now, don’t worry. The class will be available with or without workshops next year, just like all of our other classes.
Book Giveaway Details
For the book giveaway, which IS open to international readers, the winner can choose one book—any book—of Carter’s from this post. 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 October 11. 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.