Author: kmessner

It’s hard to believe that our four weeks of writing together are winding down already, but please know that even though we’re not blogging every day, this community doesn’t go away when it’s time to sharpen pencils again. Being a teacher-writer isn’t a one-time professional development goal, so we hope your writing habit lasts far beyond September. Gae has one more Friday Feedback for you today. And Gae, Jo, Jennifer, and I – and most of your guest authors – are always around on social media. We’ll keep cheering for you (and your students!) throughout the school year.

Today’s writing prompt is one that I’ve included before, but I can’t say it any better for this year’s group of brave writers, so I’m sharing it once more…

You all showed up here in early July – some of you veterans, some of you brand new to Teachers Write and even new to the idea of putting words on paper and sharing them. It’s been an amazing summer of learning and writing. You’ve written bravely and shared with joy and fear and courage and all the other emotions that go along with opening up a bit of yourself to friends and strangers who are being brave, too. You’ve made me smile and laugh and cry sometimes, too, in all the best ways, and I am so proud of you.

So here’s one last assignment…

(You are being granted special time-travel abilities for this one.)

Write a letter to yourself of 4 weeks ago.  It will be sent back through time and delivered to you on July 9th, 2017…right before you begin Teachers Write.  What advice would you give yourself?  What can you tell yourself about what the experience will be like and how it might change your writing or teaching?

Here’s the letter I wrote to my back-in-time self after our first summer of Teachers Write, back in 2012…

Dear Kate,

Today, you are going to notice some of your Twitter teacher-friends talking about their goals to write this summer, and it will occur to you that it might be fun to set up a virtual writing camp.  Go ahead and do it, even though it’s not going to go the way you’re imagining.  You’re probably picturing a dozen people, right? Maybe twenty? Multiply that by 100 and you’ll be a little closer. It’ll freak you out at first when you see all those people signing up, but don’t worry — they are amazing people who will be happy to be here and patient with your summer schedule. Besides, tons of generous and talented authors are going to show up to pitch in. This probably doesn’t surprise you, does it? The children’s and YA writer community is amazing like that.

What will surprise you is just how much you are moved when you sit down to read the comments every day. These teachers and librarians will be so smart, so brave. They will try new things. Some will be afraid at first, but they will be so good to one another, so supportive, that new voices will emerge every week.  And these voices will be full of passion and beauty, humor and joy and poignancy.  They will be amazing, and they will make you cry sometimes, in the best possible way.

So go on… Write that introductory blog post, even though you’re biting off way more than you know. It will be worth every second, and when August comes, you will not be ready to let go. Not even close.

Warmly,   Kate

Your turn now…  Put today’s date on the paper, and then write your message to be sent to yourself, back through time. We’d love it if you’d all share this one in the comments.

I hope you all enjoy the rest of your summer and have an amazing school year with your student writers. Be sure to tell them about your writing this summer. They’ll be so proud of you.

xo

~Kate

Ready for your final Thursday Quick-Write of the summer? Our guest author today is the brilliant Alicia Williams, whose debut novel comes out in the fall. Alicia is a graduate of Hamline University’s MFAC program. Her debut middle grade novel will be GENESIS RISING, with Atheneum/S&S. She started her storytelling as a folk storyteller and captivates audiences young and old with the Breh Rabbit and Breh Fox tales. She also writes and performs one-woman historical plays, featuring the likes of Sojourner Truth, Margaret Garner (slave that Toni Morrison based BELOVED on), Mamie Till (Emmit Till’s mother), to name a few. Alicia is also a Master Teaching Artist, combining her love of storytelling and acting, to teach writing based on an arts-integration pedagogy.

Today is our final Q&A Wednesday for Teachers Write 2017 – one more chance to ask our guest authors all of your questions about writing craft. Today’s guest authors are J. Anderson Coats, Dana Alison Levy, and Karen Romano Young.

As always, if you have questions, post in the comments, and our guest authors will be checking in throughout the day to respond. Ask away!

Good morning! Our guest for today’s Tuesday Quick-Write is brilliant debut author Leah Henderson. Leah has always loved getting lost in stories. When she is not scribbling down her characters’ adventures, she is off on her own, exploring new spaces and places around the world. She received her MFA at Spalding University and currently calls Washington D.C. home, but you can always find her on Twitter @LeahsMark or at her website: leahhendersonbooks.com.

Tuesday Quick-Write

Setting the Scene: Do more than just see it

First: Choose either a listed prompt and complete it, one of the images provided or a moment from your own work.

A gleaming _______________

An antique _______________

A secret __________________

A pale ____________________

A magical ________________

A suspicious _____________

An abandoned ___________

A broken _________________

A wondrous ______________

A forgotten _______________

A new _____________________

A hidden __________________

Then, once you have a snapshot in your mind, describe it using at least two or three of your senses other than sight. Hear it, taste it, touch it, or smell the scene to bring it to life.

Happy writing!

Good morning! Are you ready for one more week of writing together? Head over to Jo’s blog for your Monday Morning Warm-Up, and then come on back for today’s post!

Our guest author today is the amazing Kat Yeh. Kat is the award-winning author of middle grade novels, THE TRUTH ABOUT TWINKIE PIE (an NPR Best Book of 2015) and THE WAY TO BEA (coming Sept, 2017) from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, as well as picture book, THE FRIEND SHIP, from Disney-Hyperion. Kat and her family live in one of those crooked little nooks along the north shore of Long Island where they like to spend time exploring all the secret beaches and hidden paths. Learn more about Kat at katyeh.com.
P.S. You pronounce her last name YAY!

THE THING ABOUT THINGS

As writers and storytellers, we want our characters to be interesting and complex and unique. We want them to feel like people in the real world. And the thing about interesting, complex, unique people in the real world is that they usually have very specific interests or obsessions. They usually have Things.

In my first middle grade novel, THE TRUTH ABOUT TWINKIE PIE, my main character GiGi’s Thing was recipes from her dead Mama’s cookbook. When GiGi discovers that a girl from school has revealed an unexpected side of herself that GiGi thinks threatens her close friendship with new best friend, Trip, she reflects on a recipe from her Mama’s cookbook:

All I could think about was this salad DiDi used to make for potluck dinner. It’s covered with this blanket of mayonnaise on top, so you assume it’s all bland and mayo through and through. What you don’t see is that right under that blanket of bland, there’s all this stuff just hiding there. Waiting. Waiting for someone to realize that there’s more to it than just mayo. I used to feel sorry for that salad whenever I saw it sitting there on the table with no one digging in. But now I think it was lying in wait. All mayo and innocence on the outside, not letting us know what it really was on the inside.

This passage is followed by a recipe for Secret Layered Salad. By including recipes in key scenes, I could further the emotions of those scenes and the themes of the story, while also reinforcing this part of GiGi’s world and personality.

In my new middle grade novel, THE WAY TO BEA (Little, Brown Sept 2017), my main character, 12 year old Beatrix, is an exuberant artist and poet whose world turns upside down when she loses her friend group, upon entering 7^th grade. By including her poetry throughout the novel, I am able to show how the ways Bea expresses herself change and reflect her emotions. She goes from fanciful free verse painted on her walls to strict haiku secretly scribbled in invisible ink as her world begins to feel unsafe and her actions more guarded. She struggles when she realizes that sometimes what she wants to express might not fit into the rules of haiku.

But just because you act a certain way, that doesn’t mean it becomes true or real.

Does it?

I mean, what if I just started acting differently? What if…I acted that way I wish I were?

if I act the way

I wish I were

am I still acting…or becoming?

Five, four, nine.

Start over.

I watch the lemon juice and water shine and then fade. It doesn’t fit in the haiku structure. But I like it. And I don’t know how else to explain how I feel.

Having a Thing is a great device to show your character’s personality and emotions, but Things are even stronger when they are also tied into the driving force of your plot. Think about Ali Benjamin’s THE THING ABOUT JELLYFISH and her character, Suzy’s obsession with – well, jellyfish and how this obsession plays throughout the storyline. Rebecca Stead’s WHEN YOU REACH ME with Miranda’s reading and rereading of A WRINKLE IN TIME. It may seem like a young girl’s quirky habit at first, but reveals itself to be much, much more.

That’s the thing about Things.

When your character has a deep seeded love, fascination, or interest, their story can unfold and be told in varied and dynamically different and wonderful ways. Which gives our readers all the more ways to connect and invest emotionally in our characters and stories. And isn’t that why we tell stories to begin with?

Your Assignment: Try giving your main character a Thing or a few Things. See what fits. What works. What would help drive your storyline. Write or revisit a passage in which they deal with conflict or deep emotion or sudden joy. Express it through their Thing. Experiment! You might learn something new about your character. And they might surprise you with a hidden layer that you never knew they had.

Good morning! It’s Friday, which means there’s an opportunity to get (and give!) feedback over on Gae’s blog.

And here, we have guest author Madelyn Rosenberg! Madelyn is is the author of nine books for kids of all ages, including the Nanny X books and the How to Behave books. She wrote her newest book, THIS IS JUST TEST, with longtime friend Wendy Wan-Long Shang. You can find Madelyn online at www.madelynrosenberg.com or @madrosenberg on Twitter. Today, she’s joining us to talk about collaboration.

I sit and write in the world’s messiest office, where my only companions are often an exercise bicycle bedazzled with my most recent laundry and the braver of my two cats. Many writers I know spend their days (or nights) in similar situations, dependent, of course, on cat allergies, cleanliness habits, and whether or not they have invested in a standing desk. We take community where we can find it: In critique groups, at guild meetings, during an occasional Thursday write-a-thon at the Rock n’ Joe.

In a world that’s filled with rejection, even for published writers, it’s essential to have community support. I always find it’s easier to write knowing that someone’s out there waiting for Chapter 2. Over the past few years, I reached out to my writing community in a different way, by collaborating with a writing partner – with Mary Crockett for Dream Boy and most recently with Wendy Wan-Long Shang for This is Just a Test.

For me, collaboration was a real gift. It can be a gift for students as well. Sure, there might be frustrations if a partner takes you down a path you don’t want to follow or imbues a character with a trait you are certain she doesn’t have. But collaborative writing also gives you an editor, even as you write those first paragraphs. It helps you beat writer’s block. It gives you encouragement: you can do this, partner. With students, it also serves as an ice breaker and motivator, and increases both self confidence and self esteem (really: Google it.) I know it did for me.

All of this is a long way of getting to today’s writing prompt, which requires you to find a partner, if just for one day. You can try this with someone in Teacher’s Write, with your kid, your Uncle Buck, your mail carrier – anyone who’s willing. Two choices follow.

Your Assignment:

Option one: An exquisite corpse. You may have done this with pictures when you were a kid: someone draws the head, marks where the neck begins, folds the paper over, and hands it to the next person who draws the body without ever seeing the head. Here you’re doing the same thing, only with words. Have someone begin a story with just a paragraph or so, and pass it to the next person, who writes the middle. It goes back to player one for the beginning of the ending and back to player two for the final lines. You may take turns either virtually or on real paper. Provide your partner with the last three words from the last sentence of each section as a hook, an inspiration or a tease. The results show you how just a few words can generate thoughts, dialogue and plot.

If you want to your collaborative writing experiment to be more, well, collaborative, try option two: Do the same assignment, swapping paragraphs back and forth, only don’t hide anything. Discuss your character and plot. Give each partner a chance to tweak and edit and add lines to the parts he or she didn’t generate. If you want this one to be a little longer, that’s fine, but try to keep it to five or six paragraphs, max. (It’s a quick write, after all.)

If you have time and a willing partner, feel free to try both options.

In the comments, let us know which option you tried and how it worked for you. Were you funnier or more dramatic because you knew someone else would be seeing your words right away? More self conscious? Less self conscious? Were you surprised at the turn your story took? More confident in the final results?

I do this prompt with my family (the no-peeking version) when we’re on car trips or in restaurants. We especially like playing in large groups, where each person contributes a single line, with no clue as to what’s come the line before. The outcome is often more a surreal poem than a story, but we always end up laughing.

Good morning! Our Thursday Quick-Write today is courtesy of guest author Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich. Olugbemisola is the author of the novel 8th Grade Superzero, co-author of Two Naomis and the forthcoming And Two Naomis Too, with Audrey Vernick. She​ writes for Brightly and has written for Heinemann’s Digital Campus; she has contributed to The Journey Is Everything: Teaching Essays That Students Want To Write for People Who Want To Read Them, Imagine it Better: Visions of What Schools Might Be, Open Mic: Riffs on Life Between Cultures in Ten Voices, and Break These Rules: 35 YA Authors on Speaking Up, Standing Out, and Being Yourself. She is a Brown Bookshelf and We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) team member and teaches writing online and in living colour. Olugbemisola lives with her family in NYC where she writes, makes things, and needs to get more sleep. Find her online at olugbemisolabooks.com.​

One of my favourite writing prompts is also one of the simplest, but I find it extremely powerful, especially when I’m trying to tease out a fledgling idea, brainstorming, or just writing to write without an end “product” in mind.

I think it works best at the end of the day, or first thing in the morning. But I am not one for hard and fast rules when it comes to writing, so work it out the way it works best for you.

Your Assignment: Spend at least fifteen minutes writing down the last 24 hours, just listing what you
a) did, and
b) noticed.

That’s it! Usually, after a while, I begin to see patterns, and what Don Murray called my “writing territories,” the things that I know and care about a lot. ​You might see many different variations on a theme, or realize that there is this one thing that your whole self is crying out to write. Almost every time, I’m surprised, and it leads me in new and beautiful and strange and well-loved and tedious and ​slightly scary directions. Which is how writing often is, all at once, yeah?

As always, feel free to share a reflection in the comments!

Good morning! Got questions? Our guest authors have answers! Today on Q&A Wednesday, we have Anne Ursu, Sarah Darer Littman, and Anne Nesbet as our mentor authors.

As always, if you have questions for the group, or for a specific author, just post in the comments. They’ll be checking in throughout the day to respond.

Good morning! It’s time for your Teachers Write Tuesday Quick-Write, and our guest today is the brilliant Martha Brockenbrough. Martha is the author of The Game of Love and Death, a Kirkus Prize finalist, as well as the forthcoming Alexander Hamilton: Revolutionary, and Love, Santa. She teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, founded National Grammar Day, and likes dogs and cats equally well. Martha continues our focus on research today with some more great resources!

Getting started is often one of the hardest parts of writing—or anything, really.

Because I write fiction and nonfiction for a variety of ages, I’ve faced a lot of blank pages. One of the best ways I’ve found to get started is to have a little bit of help. Writing prompts in general can be useful. And I find all sorts of them in research, whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction.

Here are some of my favorite places to dig up research-based nuggets:

The New York Public Library Digital Collection: This is a huge archive full of images, newspaper clippings, and other documents. This link is to the last letter Alexander Hamilton wrote his wife before he was shot to death. It’s fascinating all by itself. But it also makes a writing prompt: Consider writing your character’s last letter to someone he or she loves. That someone can be a child. An exceptionally gifted pet. A criminal who needs to receive on a secret message. Or it can be something your main character receives.

Internet Archive: This site has a variety of digitized media, including old newsreels and audio reels. When I was researching The Game of Love and Death, a historical novel set in 1937, I used video of the Hindenburg tragedy as the basis for a scene.

I’d listened to the audio recording of it in a chemistry class when I was 12, and remembered it always because it was so vivid (which is why it’s not for every student. Still, it’s interesting.)

One of the first things I did when I decided to set the book in 1937 was look at a list of things that happened that year.

As your story prompt, search on a year (or use the one your story takes place in, or the year a character was born). Find a great vintage photo like this one, and write about someone in it receiving the best news of their life—which they are unable to enjoy.  https://archive.org/details/1937KSUcollage

Moon phase calendar 

One of my pet peeves is the preponderance of full moons in movies. With The Game of Love and Death, I took care to make every moon phase accurate. It became a good creative constraint. What did my characters think when they looked up to the sky and found it empty of moon?

Your assignment: Look up the moon phase on your character’s birthday, or some other significant date in your story. (If you don’t have a work in progress, choose a date like your own birthday!) Write a scene about a character doing something in the light of that moon. And as always, feel free to share a snippet of what you wrote in the comments!