First of all, I have to tell you that you are amazing. I’m away at BEA in New York this week but came back to my hotel room late Monday night and read your posts and your commitments to make writing time, and I’m so, so excited. (I might have teared up a little, too. Collectively, the 700+ of you are a serious inspiration!) I’ll be commenting more later in the week, but for now, I just wanted to say to all of you….well…wow. Well done walking that walk.
So…let’s get on with Day Two, shall we? On Tuesdays & Thursdays during Teachers Write! Virtual Summer Writing Camp, I’ll be sharing quick-write prompts, designed to get you free-writing for a few minutes in response to a question or idea. These can be used as a simple free-write, brainstorming, warm-up activity OR as a way to deepen your thinking about a work-in-progress. Got your keyboard or pencil ready?
Tuesday Quick-Write:
Write for two minutes to describe a very specific place. If you’re just free-writing, it can be a place that you love, or have visited, or a place that frightens you.
This is one of my favorite places (which also happens to frighten me sometimes), the Florida Everglades.
Anyplace is fine. If you want to relate this to your work-in-progress, choose a very specific setting within the piece and imagine yourself there.
When your two minutes are up, stop writing.
Now…if your place is real and you can go there, go there now. I’ll wait….
If it’s far away, find a picture of it. If it’s not a real place, put yourself there in your mind. Now write for one minute about each of the following:
Everything you SEE – Pay attention to big things and tiny things. Search for concrete details.
Everything you HEAR – Be specific. Don’t just say “a scraping sound.” Say a “high-pitched, raspity-raspity-screeeeeaking noise.” You can make up words if you want.If you aren’t in the place, try to find a video. Or guess what you might hear.
Everything you SMELL – Especially pay attention to the smells that surprise you. If you’re not in the place, pictures can help you smell. Look carefully…what would that dumpster smell like?
Everything you FEEL – Weather, wind, things that land on you or brush against you. Again – pictures help you imagine if you’re not there, and if it’s not a real place, try imagining images and then assigning sensations from a similar place that might be real (desert, tundra, etc.)
Now, go back and rewrite that descriptive paragraph. Include your best tiny, surprising details, and work on senses other than sight. Better? More vivid? This is a fun activity to do with kids, too. Have them write about the playground or gym or cafeteria; then go there and hunt for sensory details!
Feel free to share your final paragraph in the comments if you’d like! I’m busy at BEA in New York through tonight but will check in to read from the airport if I can, and you can cheer one another on, too!
One more quick note before we start… I’m actually in New York City the first part of this week for BEA, so I’ll be checking in when I can, but it may take longer than usual for comments to be approved, etc.
Today’s topic is the very first one people asked about when we started talking about summer writing camp on Twitter.
“How do you find time to write?”
(If you are already an expert at making time or you magically have plenty of time, and you just want to get writing, you should go straight to guest author Jo Knowles’ blog and look for her weekly Monday Morning Warm-Up. She shares great writing prompts every Monday!)
If you’re still here…let’s talk about time to write. For the first five years of my writing career, I was also teaching middle school full time. I have a family, too, and lots of people asked how I managed to write books with everything else going on. The answer is easy…and not-so-easy. I made time because it was important to me.
Nobody gets more than 24 hours in a day, and while some people can get by on less sleep than others, we’re all still on a pretty level playing field when it comes to time. Notice that the title of this post isn’t “Finding Time.” It’s “Making Time.” You can’t decide that you want to write and then simply conjure up two new hours a day. Your days, like mine, are probably already pretty full from the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep.
So where does that writing time come from? It’s pretty simple. You have to not do something that you’re currently doing, and use that time to write. So take a look at how you spend a typical day, and if you really want to write, choose something else that can go. If you watch TV, maybe that means not watching TV. Or watching half an hour less. Maybe it means checking your email once in the morning and once in the afternoon instead of flittering in and out of it all day long. Maybe it means waking up half an hour earlier, or staying up half an hour later. During the school year, maybe it means having your lunch in front of your computer or notebook instead of in the faculty room. Or maybe you can write instead of chatting with the other parents while your kid is at ballet/karate/baseball/basket-weaving practice. I don’t recommend stealing time from exercise or family dinners, but there are lots of other options.
I’ve blogged about this before, talking about “Waiting for the Perfect Time to Write” and “Making Time to Write,” and you can read those posts if you need more ideas, but it comes down to this: If you really want to write, you need to do these things:
Look at how you spend your time now. What can go?
Make time. Even 15-20 minutes a day is a great start. Make it an appointment with yourself, and then keep it.
Make space. If you choose a place to write, as well as a time, you’ll be more likely to stick to your routine. It doesn’t have to be fancy – one of my friends set up a tiny desk in her closet – but it helps to have a place where you usually write.
Share your plans with the other people who live in your house, and remind them that this is important to you.
Ready for your assignment this week?
Make a writing plan for your summer and for your school year.
Then if you’d like, leave a comment to let us know:
What you found that you might be able to cut out of your schedule or cut back on to make time to write.
When you’ll be writing each day & for how long. Remember to be realistic. 15 minutes is fine to start.
Where you’ll usually write. This can be different places on different days, depending on your schedule.
Who you told about your plans. Remember, sharing your writing plans with the people in your life helps to make them real and reminds your family & friends to give you that space for writing.
Tomorrow, we’ll have our first Tuesday quick-write…to make use of some of that time you foundmade!
So… I hear some of you are kind of scared about this whole writing thing. Jen Vincent mentioned that many of the comments on her Teach Mentor Texts writing group blog post today were about anxiety over sharing your writing, or being good enough. She thought I might want to blog about that, and she was right.
This is where you’re probably expecting me to say, “Don’t be afraid” or “There’s no reason to be scared.” But I’m not going to say that.
Be scared. That’s absolutely fine.
Because you know what? I’m scared, too. I put up a blog post a few days ago expecting a dozen people to sign up for a cozy little online writing camp. And then I turned around and there were more than 600 of you. Way cool…but for sure, a little scary, too.
I’m also scared when I start a new book. When I was writing my first book, I thought this would be a temporary thing…that the second and third books would be easy and fun and fearless. But no. Turns out they’re all scary in different ways, and making art – the very process of making art – is inherently fear-producing. (There’s a whole book about this idea, by the way – ART AND FEAR by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It’s excellent.) But making art is scary in a good way.
You see… there are two kinds of fear. The first kind keeps you safe from things that might cause you real and imminent harm.
My son and I encountered this cottonmouth while we were hiking in the Everglades in April. We were scared, and we quickly identified our fear as the kind that saves you from danger. With this kind of fear, it’s good and healthy to act on your fear and run away to avoid venomous bites and other potentially fatal things.
But there’s another kind of fear – the kind that we feel when we’re about to exceed the artificial limits we’ve set for ourselves. When we’re about to step outside of our cozy little boxes and try something new. Something that’s scary because we might fail. And what will people think?
I learned a lot about this kind of fear in March, when I gave a TED talk at the organization’s annual conference in Long Beach.
Photo by James Duncan Davidson – TED
There were 1500 people in the audience, including CEOs of huge companies, inventors, producers, engineers, a former vice president, and other leaders in just about every area imaginable.
One of the other speakers was Bill Nye the Science Guy, who said something that I am going to remember for the rest of my life. He told one of the other (scared) speakers, “If you weren’t nervous, it wouldn’t be worth doing.” And he was right. I was terrified when I stepped onto that stage. Absolutely terrified. It was extremely uncomfortable. But I learned so much from the experience, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
The kind of fear I was feeling is not the kind we should avoid. It’s the kind of fear we should seek out because it gives us opportunities to be brave and to grow. In fact, nervous writing camp member Colby Sharp reminded me this morning that Mattie Breen, the main character in Linda Urban’s brilliant novel HOUND DOG TRUE says it perfectly: “You can’t have brave without scared.” It’s true.
That twist of anxiety you feel when you think about sharing your writing? Think of it as a big, huge billboard in your heart that says, “GO, YOU!! YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING AWESOME AND NEW!” And after you do the new awesome thing, you will never be quite the same. Your world will be a little bigger. And this is good.
One of my favorite things about being an author is being part of an incredible community of people who write and illustrate books for kids and young adults. Some of you interact with these authors via Skype and online, and you already know how much they rock. The rest of you are about to find out, because more than THIRTY guest authors have offered to visit us at Teachers Write! over the next ten weeks.
Jen Vincent (Jen’s more than a guest, too! She’s a teacher-writer who’ll be blogging every Sunday about her journey & inviting you to join the conversation.)
Some guest authors will be offering Monday morning mini-lessons. Some will be providing Tuesday & Thursday writing prompts, and some have signed up to answer your questions on Wednesdays and hang out to be part of our Friday Writing Happy Hour conversations. They’re doing this because they support teachers and librarians, so please support them, too, by purchasing and sharing their books whenever you can.
The list above is a work in progress. It includes folks who signed up and committed to visit on specific days. Other authors will be dropping in from time to time to answer questions and join our conversations, too, so get ready for some surprises along the way. (You never know who’s going to show up at writing camp!)
Note for authors: If you signed up for a day but you’re not on this list yet, please let me know and I’ll fix that. (With 570 more than 700 teachers/librarians signed up so far, it’s been a little crazy around here… 🙂 If you haven’t signed up to help but would like to join us as a guest author, please drop me an email (kmessner at kate messner dot com) I’m focusing on traditionally published folks for now because those are the books teachers are most likely to know & have as models in their classrooms – also because I don’t want this to get too overwhelming. Thanks!
So… Remember a couple days ago when I said, “Hey! Let’s have a virtual summer writing camp for teachers & librarians!” and posted all about it here? I figured maybe a dozen of you would sign up, and we’d have a cozy little summer writing workshop.
As of this morning, we are at 350 participants and still growing. Which is AWESOME. But it means that instead of a cozy little summer writing workshop, we are going to have a big, huge, full-of-energy-and-amazing writing community. I don’t want to close it to new members because clearly, there was a huge need for this, and I want every teacher and librarian who wants to be involved to have this opportunity. But I am going to ask for your help with a few things if you’re participating.
1. Could you please add yourself to the Google doc I created to keep track of participants? Just click the link, scroll to the bottom of the list (you may need to click “Table” and “Add Row” if they’re full). Then fill in whatever information you’re comfortable sharing. If you don’t have Twitter or a blog, that’s absolutely fine, and you can leave that blank. I started doing this but quickly realized it was going to take ten million hours. This is only a slight exaggeration. Later, you’ll all be able to use this to follow one another’s blogs & Twitter feeds, and maybe even set up some critique groups.
2. Be active participants this summer. That means replying to one another’s comments and sharing and generally making sure that the community is a healthy and supportive one whether I’m around chatting, too, or book-traveling or locked up in a room working on a writing deadline.
3. Be open-minded and patient. This project has quickly grown more enormous than I could have imagined it would be, and it’s going to be one glorious whopper of an experiment. Let’s all enjoy the ride.
Teachers Write! is an online virtual summer writing camp for teachers and librarians who understand how important it is for people teaching writing to walk the walk. If you’re a teacher or librarian who would love to work on your own writing, we’d love to have you join us.
Here’s how it all works:
Location: www.katemessner.com/blog (Post Category: TeachersWrite) New posts will be shared each weekday morning, and you can check in whenever it’s convenient.
Dates: June 4th– August 10th
Schedule:
Schedule is kind of an ugly word for summer, isn’t it? So let’s call this the plan-of-the-day instead. Feel free to participate in whatever floats your boat and skip the rest.
Mini-Lesson Mondays: Mondays will feature a mini-lesson on writing craft or logistics (how to make time has been a big question already!). I’ll share a workshop-style lesson with ideas, tips, and examples, and then there will be something to work on during the week. Or not. You can also just bookmark it for later. It’s summer, after all.
Tuesday Quick-Write: Tuesdays will feature a writing prompt that can be used to brainstorm new ideas or deepen your thinking on the project you’re working on now.
Wednesday Q and A: Ever wished you could just pick an author’s brain about how they do it? Each Wednesday, we’ll have a post where anyone can ask questions about writing . I’ll answer, along with an awesome panel of author friends who come to visit.
Thursday Quick-Write: Like Tuesdays, Thursdays will feature a writing prompt that can be used to brainstorm new ideas or deepen your thinking on the project you’re working on now.
Friday Writing Happy Hour: Fridays will feature virtual lemonade and time to share anything you’d like – progress for the week, links to projects you’re proud of, snippets of writing that you like or want feedback on. Author Gae Polisner will also be hosting a Feedback Friday on her blog, so feel free to stop by there as well to share your work & offer feedback to others.
Sunday Check-In – Weekends are for recharging, spending time with family and friends…and that includes online writing friends, too! Amazing teacher-writer Jen Vincent is having a weekend get-together on her blog, Teach Mentor Texts. Jen will be hosting an online writing group there. Each Sunday, she’ll be sharing reflections on her journey as a teacher who writes and encouraging others along the way. Think of it as a support group for writers, and head over there on Sundays to talk about goals, progress, struggles, and more.
Beyond these daily posts, you can expect the occasional surprise along the way – guest posts and some book giveaways for your classroom libraries, because teachers & librarians who write are worth celebrating.
Teachers Write! Virtual Summer Writing Camp Q and A
Who can join?
This writing camp is for teachers and librarians who work with kids of any age in any capacity. I’d ask that the Q and A and feedback requests be limited to them and the published authors who agree to help out, so the people who are working with kids get plenty of attention when it comes to mentoring and feedback. If you’re not a teacher or librarian, you’re still more than welcome to follow the posts and do the writing.
What does it cost?
It’s free. If you’re a teacher or librarian who’s found this, you’ve probably put a lot of my books in a lot of kids’ hands already, or nominated them for state award lists, or reviewed them online, or purchased copies for your library. I’m thankful for all of those things– and this seemed like a fun way to say so. The guest authors you’ll meet along the way are volunteering their time for the same reasons — because we appreciate teachers & librarians and value the work that you do.
Umm…I followed a link on Twitter and ended up here. Who are you, exactly?
What if I’m brand new at this whole writing thing?
Then the Teachers Write! Virtual Summer Writing Camp is especially for you. Welcome. You don’t need a license or a creative writing degree or permission from anyone to be a writer. All you need is the desire to write. Beginners and experienced writers are all welcome. Don’t worry… you can go at your own pace and only share what you want to share. If you’re happier lurking as a stealth writing camp member, that’s okay, too.
So will you respond to our questions and give us feedback?
Yes. But be patient with me, okay? I have two big writing deadlines and some book travel this summer and marshmallows to roast, too, so it may take me a while for me to approve and reply to all the comments sometimes. The good news is that this camp can run quite nicely even if I’m away. Daily posts will be scheduled, and all of you can cheer one another on and provide feedback. Our guest authors will be around to help with that, too.
What if I can’t start until later? And what if I’ll be on vacation the last week of July?
That’s fine. Sign up. Join us when you can. Take breaks whenever you like. We’ll keep your lemonade cold while you’re away.
How do I sign up?
Added on 6/2: I was originally having people sign up via comments…but at this point, I need to stop approving all those comments and get back to working on our camp agenda! You are welcome to sign up for camp at ANY time during the summer, though. Even if I don’t get a chance to welcome you personally, please know that I’m thrilled to have you join us.
Hey… Why do you want all that information? Are you going to stalk me?
No. Your name & role are to help me figure out who’s participating as a teacher/librarian and how to tailor the workshops. I’d love to know where (generally) you work because occasionally when I travel for conferences, I have time to sneak in a local school visit, and I’d like to be able to let you know about that if I’m in your part of the world. Items 3-4 are to make it easier for Teachers Write! Summer Writing Campers to connect and stay connected for writing support and critique groups if you so choose. I’m going to share a list of participants on the blog so you can find one another easily. If you don’t want your name/info shared here, you can email it to me instead (kmessner at kate messner dot com). I do hope you’ll consider connecting with one another, though, because there’s so much value in being part of a writing community.
Either way, I promise not to use any of this information to stalk you. And if I do, I will be wearing a big floppy hat and those glasses with the fake nose & mustache, so you’ll never know it’s me anyway.
Got Questions?
Fire away – and if you know you’d like to join us, go ahead and leave your name & info in the comments. Watch for an exciting list of Teachers Write! guest authors soon, and next week, we’ll roll up our sleeves and get writing!
Note: 1st-time commenters on this blog need to be approved, so don’t worry if your question or sign-up comment doesn’t appear right away. I promise to get to them all by the end of the day.
