Teachers Write 8/6/13 Tuesday Quick Write with Laurel Snyder

Happy Tuesday!  Guest author Laurel Snyder joins us with today’s quick-write.

Laurel is the author of many books for kids, including novels like Bigger than a Bread Box and Any Which Wall, and picture books like Baxter, the Pig Who Wanted To Be Kosher.  Her next novel, Seven Stories Up, will be out in January. Laurel lives in Atlanta, GA and online at http://laurelsnyder.com, and she spends way way way too much time on Twitter:  @laurelsnyder

 

One of my very favorite writing prompts is something I learned a long time ago, from my poetry teacher in college.

Essentially, the goal is to stretch yourself beyond your comfort zone. To include things in your work you might not otherwise include.

For poets (especially young poets), this is a critical skill.  Because they often have a very formatted sense of what a poem should be about.

A young poet (or the young poet I was, at any rate) typically thinks poems are about the natural world. They love birds, the sky, rivers, mountains, lakes, seasons times of day or night, etc.  They also love to write about FEELINGS. Darkness. Sadness. Blah blah blah.  Not to mention old places in Europe and broken American landscapes and junk like that.

Of course, poems can be about ANYTHING.  But “anything” doesn’t always feel natural to a young poet.  So the assignment is this:

Make a list of things you’re unlikely to include in a poem. Categories of things!

Like mine might be…

Electrical appliances
Scientists
Brand names for cereals
Dead presidents
Types of cars
Diseases
Mass murderers
Comic book characters
Something in quotes
Cuss words
Religions not your own
Car part
State capitals
Words with more than 4 syllables
Board games
Video games
Things you can find at IKEA
Names of bad hair bands
Scientific names of mushrooms
Sports teams
Reference to WWI

Now, when you’re using this for poetry, the goal is to get a certain number of the categories into the poem.  Maybe you’d require yourself to use 5 or 10 of these things in a poem.

Of course, when you revise, you can always do what you like.  But even if you take the details out later, you will have pushed the writing into a new place.  So let’s say you set out to write a very typical poem like,

As the
sparrow
 falls
through
the gray
sky
above
the river
I can’t help
But think
of you.
Remember?
That night
we walked
The streets
Till dawn.
I closed
My eyes.
To keep
Myself
From
Morning.

Now, that poem has been written a jillion times by a jillion college students, pretty much.  But let’s add some of the details from my list, and see what happens.

As the sparrow
Falls through the gray Albany
Sky above me, I can’t help
But think of leprosy.
 
Why is that?
I guess they both remind me
of you, honey. 
 
Remember that night
We drove your sister’s Corolla
too fast, and the
tailpipe fell off?
 
I do. The Yankees
Were on the radio. They had just won.
No surprise there.
 
But you said you were leaving me.
“Why?” I asked.
“You look too much
Like Charles Manson,” you told me.
 
I closed my eyes. And tried
to remember If we were out of
Captain Crunch.  Or not.

**

Now, this is NO GREAT POEM. But do you see what the items from the list did to the work? They demanded specificity.  They demanded that I make a more real relationship for these two characters.  They required me to make sense of how incongruous the details themselves were.

If I asked someone else to put Albany, Leprosy, Dodge Dart, Yankees, Tailpipe, Captain Crunch, and Charles Manson in a poem they’d have to make sense too, but they’d make a different sense.

This exercise  a lot of fun to try, and especially good as a trick to get yourself out of feeling stuck. If you’re bored with something you’re writing, or you feel blocked.  And it doesn’t just work with poetry, obviously. You can do this with a chapter, or you can do this with an outline. Challenge yourself to work details or moments you wouldn’t typically write into an outline, and see what that does to the shape of the work.  You can keep a running list on your desk or cork board.  Call it “Things I’m not likely to put in a book.”

For picture books, it’s a wonderful way to alter the tone of your work.  And it can be a neat way to add vocabulary you don’t always find in picture books.  New words for kids to learn.

Anyone feel like trying to write a paragraph using three or more of my examples? Anyone have details to add to our list?

Feel free to share all those thoughts, ideas, and (of course!) poems in the comments!

 

Teachers Write 8/5/13 Mini-Lesson Monday with Lynda Mullaly Hunt

Good morning, everyone! We’re down to the last two weeks of Teachers Write, and I know we’ve lost some folks to school already. But I hope those of you who are still here will hang in there and keep sharing your amazing work.

LyndaMullalyHuntLow-resOur guest author today is Lynda Mullaly Hunt, the author of middle-grade novel, ONE FOR THE MURPHYS (Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin), winner of The Tassy Walden Award: New Voices in Children’s Literature, an ABA New Voices Pick, and an Editor’s Choice Book with Scholastic Book Clubs. Lynda has also directed the SCBWI-NE Whispering Pines Retreat for eight years and is a former teacher and Scenario Writing coach. Her second novel, ALPHABET SOUP, will be released in spring, 2015. Lynda lives with her husband, two kids, impetuous beagle and beagle-loathing cat. Today, Lynda’s discussing…

The Courage to Model Courage

As a writer, I learn things about myself that I didn’t know as I create stories. Something will leak from my fingers onto the keyboard and I’ll pause and think, I know where that comes from. These connections can create a myriad of emotions.

As writers, we are vulnerable. We have to be. Like the way a swimmer must get wet. But, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we only mine from the saddest facets of ourselves. It may mean that we are trying to be funny while wondering if our readers will laugh or scrunch their eyebrows up in confusion. It may mean that we are writing a mystery and working to get authentic red herrings in place. It may mean that we struggle for word choice, trying to drill into a universal human experience so that our readers feel emotion.

The thing is, no matter what the challenge, it’s often hard to be judged and writing for others is an open invitation to just that.

I’ve recently asked a few teacher friends if they’d share their own writing with students and most looked at me like I’d stuck them with a pin. But, I understand. It’s scary.

So, as teachers and writers and humans, how do we get past this? How do we help ourselves—and our students—move past the fear of asking the world, “What do you think?” and being ready for the answer.

As a third grade teacher prepping kids for the writing sample of The Fourth Grade Mastery Test, we did a lot of writing. A lot.

And I saw this fear and worry around writing every year. Here are some things I did to try to help my students learn to let go and write without worry. Without fear. Because this is when a writer often discovers her own voice.

  • I told my students that something “set in paper” is not “set in stone.” Not everything you write will be great – and that’s okay. Even as a published author, I will often write pages of stuff I know I won’t keep in order to get that one sentence that ends up being the seed for a chapter of its own. So, just write! Push through the times you feel your writing is not quite what you’d hope for. Believe in your ability to shock and surprise yourself.
  • During writing times, I’d sit at a student desk (I had an extra for this purpose) and write with the kids. I never forced anyone to share but I always did and they looked forward to it. Do you know why? Because I was NOT a good writer at that time. Seriously. I really wasn’t. But do you know what kids admire even more than good writing?

Honesty and bravery.

  • I’d buy notebooks and/or journals (dollar store has them) and give them to the kids with a message: “These are for you. They are for fun to just write whatever you like. I will never correct them. I will never grade them. If you turn them in to share your writing with me, I will only tell you about the things I love about it.”

The kids wrote  in these during that getting ready morning time (I’d have a suggested topic on the board each morning but the kids could write about anything they chose). They were also free to write in them when their work was done. Sometimes, I would converse with kids through them; a lot of great things came out of these journals besides just writing. Removing the fear of negative judgment really opened the kids up, so the amount of writing in them steadily grew throughout the year. And why not? How many of us would like a deal like this?

  • I would often go home at night and write terrible stories. Deadly boring. Off topic. Illogically ordered. If it wasn’t truly bad, I’d start again. I’d make a point to make the same kinds of mistakes that I knew the class needed to recognize in their own writing. Then I’d give out copies to my students along with red pens and say, “Fail me if you’d like, but you better explain why.” Even I was shocked at how deep these kids dug to fail the teacher – a lot of kids dream of this, don’t they?

It got to a point I would show up, warm copies in hand, and tell them, “Okay. This is it. Today I’ve got it. This is going to be the one that convinces you that I’m a fantastic writer.” Of course it was terrible – because it was meant to be. And they would let me know with arms flailing, faces on desks, and sympathetic shakes of their heads. We all had good laughs over it. They learned a lot about critiquing on these writing adventures but no doubt that they learned that feedback on writing is not personal. Not something to be afraid of. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough.

  • Finally, my message for them—and my message for you—is that you should not compare your writing to anyone else’s. You can’t write what they write and they can’t write what you write. A voice is like a fingerprint and unique to each person. As teachers, we must teach the hows of writing. The nuts and bolts. This way, our kids have the tools to tackle the task. But the actual writing? That is about having something to say. It’s about the being human part.

And the being human part – well, I’ve always felt like that’s the very best part of teaching as well.

Today’s assignment: Reflect on Lynda’s thoughts as they relate to your teaching life, and/or head on over to Jo’s blog to participate in the Monday Morning Warm-Up!  Share your thoughts in the comments if you’d like – let us know you’re still here!

Teachers Write 8/1/13 Thursday Quick-Write with Dayna Lorentz

Good morning! Ready to think like a dog for today’s quick write?

Our guest author is Dayna Lorentz, the author of the Dogs of the Drowned City series (Scholastic) and the No Safety in Numbers trilogy (Dial/Kathy Dawson Books). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Bennington College. A former attorney, Dayna is now a full-time writer and lives with her husband, two kids, and dogs in Vermont. If you ask nicely, she will show you the proper way to eat a cupcake. Visit her at www.daynalorentz.com. Check out the thrilling book trailer for No Safety at NoSafetyinNumbersBooks.com.

Writing from a Dog’s-Eye-View of the World

 My first series, Dogs of the Drowned City (Scholastic 2012), is an animal fantasy adventure series for middle grade readers, and is told from the point of view of Shep, a German shepherd dog. The biggest challenge I faced in writing this series was trying to capture how Shep—as opposed to a human (a/k/a me)—perceives the world. I wanted to create for readers the world of the story as Shep and my other dog characters experienced it. To do this, I focused on three things.

First, I tried to describe everything using a dog’s primary senses: smell and sound, then sight. This is really hard for a sight-dependent human like me! It means talking about what the grass smells like and how it whispers as it moves in the wind before talking about the fact that it’s green.

Second, I had to think about the human world from a dog’s point of view. This meant figuring out what would most interest a dog in the human world. I guessed smelly things like socks and leftovers. I also had to think about how a dog might describe human things that are totally alien to them, like vacuum cleaners. (During school visits, I ask kids to come up with their own descriptions for a vacuum cleaner. Shep calls them “floor suckers.”)

Finally, I changed the language I used in the book to reflect how I thought a dog would talk. I made up dog idioms and sayings, and tried to put a doggy spin on my descriptions, such as describing daybreak as “the tails of dawn wagging in the sky.”

These steps forced me to get out of my own, limited point of view and put myself into the limited point of view of another person/dog, an exercise that can be helpful even if you’re not writing from the viewpoint of a different species. I found that I had to do similar, though perhaps not as extreme, exercises when writing my YA trilogy, No Safety in Numbers (Dial 2012): How would this particular character describe the smell of the food court at the mall? What things would she notice that maybe I wouldn’t?

So, getting to the writing prompt: I’m going to give you two! If you’d like to take a break from your work-in-progress and think like a dog for a little while, try this out:

Screen Shot 2013-07-21 at 10.13.57 PM

The first Dogs of the Drowned City book, The Storm, is about a pack of pets trying to survive a super storm that wipes out Miami. A lot of my research, therefore, focused on Hurricane Katrina and the thousands of pets left stranded in the city when people were evacuated and told they could not bring their furry family members with them. This picture is one of the many I found of those Katrina Dogs.

Write a scene from the point of view of one of the dogs pictured above. Focus on making the scene as doggy as possible. Try employing these tricks:

  • Describe things smell first, then sight
  • Though a dog’s eyesight is far better than a human’s, a dog sees in a limited palate of colors, mostly yellow or blue, so these dogs would not, for example, talk about the bright red sedan submerged across the street from them.
  • As a dog, you have four paws — use them!
  • Dogs can communicate in many different ways. They bark and growl, but also use their ears, tails, and stance to signal how they’re feeling.

If you’re deeply submerged in your work-in-progress and don’t want to surface, try taking a scene, maybe the scene you’re working on, and list all the ways in which you would describe and talk about your surroundings. Then make a separate list for how your character would describe and talk about those same things. How are they the same? Should they be the same, or have you missed an opportunity to move the story further from yourself and into the space of your character? Think about the metaphors you’re using—are they yours or the character’s? One of my characters in No Safety is VERY different from me. With him, I wrote his chapters, then went back and edited all the sentences to make them less complex, and took out all the metaphorical language because that just wasn’t him—it was me talking about him and his situation, but not really being him in that situation.

Happy writing!  As always, feel free to share a few lines of today’s writing in the comments if you’d like!