On December 8th, 2018 SCBWI-Hawaii hosted author Mina Witteman for a half-day workshop in Honolulu called: Aristotle’s Cat! A Revision Intensive.
Mina shared her kidlit-focused version of Blake Snyder’s screenplay writing concept called Save the Cat!. She outlined plot theory and plot structure in an easy to use graph and table and had us descontruct The Cat in the Hat & Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in group exercises to identify the key plot points. We then repeated the exercise in small teams using other picture books, including Where the Wild Things are, before reviewing our own stories. Two important resources recommend by Mina during the Q and A were: Scrivener, her writing application of choice and the book, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel is a comprehensive summary that describes story structure for writers.
Mina Witteman Mina writes in English and Dutch, and has seven middle grade adventure novels out in the Netherlands, over 40 short stories, and a Little Golden Book. She is currently working on an English novel for Young Adults and an English middle grade novel.
She is an accredited teacher of Creative Writing, trained at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. She is the International Published Authors’ Coordinator of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. She is member and jury of the EU Planning Committee of the Undiscovered Voices Anthology of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators British Isles. Mina serves as a longtime jury member for the Young Authors Fiction Festival of the American Library in Paris.
She lives in Berkeley, California and teaches creative writing to kids and adults and mentors aspiring and published writers. Find out more about her work at: www.minawitteman.com