Here's the third book in the Children of Jubilee trilogy. Check out the author interview below then enter to win the whole young adult trilogy. You have through 12/27 to enter. Good luck.
Welcome to the Children of Jubilee Blog Tour!
To celebrate the release of The Children of Jubilee (Children of Exile #3) on December 4th, blogs across the web are featuring exclusive content from author Margaret Peterson Haddix and 10 chances to win the complete trilogy!
Endings
by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Occasionally when I do writing workshops with kids, I’ll run into one who finds it easy to write endings.
When that happens, our roles instantly reverse. I stop being the experienced writer handing out advice and become the supplicant begging for pearls of wisdom: “How do you do that? What’s your secret? Can you help me? Please?”
It makes the other kids in the workshop laugh, but I’m (mostly) just being sincere: I think endings are hard, and I am eager to hear how other writers do them, even if those writers are decades younger than me. They really might be that much wiser than me; they really might have the answer I seek.
In more than twenty years of being a professional writer—and after writing more than forty books—I can only think of two or three times when my initial reaction to finishing writing a book wasn’t “Yay! It’s done!” immediately followed by “But every single word of this ending will need to be rewritten, because it’s terrible.”
After those two decades and more than forty books, I at least have a good grip on what my problems are with endings. It’s typically one of three different issues: