Happy summer, friends! And welcome to Teachers Write, our free online summer writing camp especially for teachers & librarians. Whether you’re a new writer or you’ve been with us from the very beginning, I’m so glad you’re here. A few housekeeping things before we get started…
Teachers Write is meant to be a fun, low-stress way to stretch your writing muscles over the summer. That means there’s no pressure to complete every writing prompt or revision task on any given day. Take things at your own pace and if you have to take a week or two off, don’t feel like you need to step back. Just join us again whenever you’d like!
Weekly Check-ins
Teachers Write co-founder Jen Vincent helps keep us motivated through the summer with her weekly check-ins each Friday at her new space, storyexploratory.substack.com. This is an opportunity to reflect on your writing practice, share the ups and downs of the week, and most importantly, really celebrate yourself.
Zoom workshop on July 31st
We’ll also have a special revision Zoom workshop on July 31st, hosted by authors and writing teachers Jo Knowles and Rob Costello of Revise and Shine, a community of writers who offer critiques, retreats, and other services for passionate writers. Mark your calendars now, and we’ll send out a link later this month.
Books for your Library or Classroom
Teachers Write has always been and will always be free. But it does take many hours of work from me and our mentor authors, so if you can, we’d ask that you say thanks by buying our books this summer. I have three new titles coming out in August!
HISTORY SMASHERS: SALEM WITCH TRIALS comes out August 13th. It’s the ninth book in our popular graphic nonfiction series that smashes historical myths with primary sources, along with lots of photographs, illustrations, and comics. Shoutout to Dylan Meconis (cover art) and Falynn Koch (interior art) for their amazing illustrations!
OVER AND UNDER THE WETLAND, illustrated by Christopher Silas Neal, also comes out August 13th! This is the seventh book in our series of nature picture books that have become read-aloud and StoryWalk® favorites, and it explores the wonderful, watery ecosystem of the Florida Everglades.
THE NEXT SCIENTIST: THE UNEXPECTED BEGINNINGS AND UNWRITTEN FUTURE OF THE WORLD’S GREAT SCIENTISTS, illustrated by Julia Kuo, comes out August 27th and takes a look at how the childhood passions of great scientists have fueled their future endeavors. This is a follow-up to our 2020 picture book THE NEXT PRESIDENT, illustrated by Adam Rex, which looks at what America’s presidents were doing before they led the nation and how they grew into the job. It’s a great one to share in an election year!
All three books are available for pre-order now, and I’d love it if you’d order from my local indie The Bookstore Plus in Lake Placid so I can sign a copy especially for you and your readers. When you order, please leave a comment to let them know how you’d like your books signed, and that you’re part of Teachers Write so that I can tuck a special thank you into your package!
Now, let’s talk revision!
I do school visits and staff development sessions all over the world, and I’ve noticed that no matter what continent I’m on, when I first bring up the subject of revision, kids often groan. They finally finished that piece of writing and they don’t want to keep working on it. But I’ve also noticed that when I break down the revision process into small, manageable steps, they’re suddenly a lot more interested in getting back to work. It’s that nebulous, undefined “REVISION” that feels overwhelming.
Simply asking writers to revise doesn’t offer them the specific tools and strategies they need in order to do the job. But when we break that job down into specific steps that can be done in a sitting or two, it changes everything. That’s why we’re going to dig deep into the revision process this summer, with a look behind the scenes at how published books were revised (again and again!) and a smorgasbord of specific revision strategies from some of your favorite authors. You’ll be able to try these out with your own writing and share them with students when you go back to school in the fall.
The Evolution of Over and Under the Wetland
Before I draft an Over and Under picture book, I spent several months doing research – reading books, visiting museums, interviewing biologists, and most of all, spending time in the ecosystem featured in the book. Being there allows me to soak in the world of the story, listening to the sounds, feeling the sun or wind or cold, and of course, observing the animals. I’ve found that there’s just no substitute for having my boots on the ground, or my kayak in the water, depending on the setting.
Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Southwest Florida
Once I’ve organized my notes, I tend to make a Post-It Note outline for these books, pairing the living organisms in the story with the moments that my human characters might experience in that ecosystem. This allows me to move things around, play with different pairings, and work to strengthen connections.
From there, I write a very rough first draft. My first revision pass might happen right away with a read-aloud. When you read aloud, you get a first chance to hear what works and what doesn’t. This is an essential step for every kind of writing I do, perhaps picture books most of all because they’re meant to be shared aloud. From there, I’ll make additional revision passes, focusing on different elements of the text.
For a long-standing series like this one, structure is less of a question mark, since it’s already been established, and that consistency is part of the appeal for readers. So my revisions for books in this series tend to focus most on word choice – especially verbs, sensory words, and onomatopoetic language, all of which help a young reader to feel more immersed in the world of the book.
I’ll do this work in several passes; having a single focus keeps me from getting distracted and makes the work of revision feel less overwhelming. “We don’t have to revise the whole thing!” I’ll tell myself. “We just need to look at these verbs today.” I’ve been known to go through the text with a highlighter to mark verbs, which forces me to consider whether each is the very best word for the action happening at that time. Is that turtle diving into the pond or splooshing? Is that alligator chewing, chomping, or snapping?
Once I was happy with the text for Over and Under the Wetland, I sent it along to my editor Melissa Manlove, who read it and shared notes. Again, because this is part of an already beloved series, those notes focused less on already-established elements like structure and more on the finer details – including connections and tension as well as word choice. I used Melissa’s notes to mark up my draft, adding more of my own notes, too.
After we’ve gone back and forth a few times, the manuscript will make its way to copy edits and fact checking, and I continue to revise. Sometimes a copy editor’s suggestion regarding a grammatical word choice doesn’t work for the music of the story and I end up finding a way to rephrase a whole section of text in a way that works better, all around. Sometimes when I run the almost-final text past an expert, they’ll point out an inconsistency that I missed or share a tiny, lovely detail that’s too perfect to leave out, and there are more changes. The edits grow smaller and smaller until the book’s final pass pages are laid out with all of the edited text and art in place.
Over and Under the Wetland is ready for readers now and comes out August 13th! Feel free to bookmark this post about the book’s revision process to share with your students when you read the book aloud – it’s one of the very best ways to model revision for young writers!
Teachers Write Guest Author Sarah Albee on Revising for Humor
The Over & Under nature series is poetic and informational, so for these titles, my revision strategies focus on those elements. But what if you want to revise with an eye on humor? Guest author Sarah Albee joins us this week with some tips on that:
I love writing history with a humorous voice. That presents challenges right off the bat, because as we all know, there’s plenty of history that isn’t funny. So it’s important to start with a topic that lends itself to humor, or at least, to a lively voice.
The final revision stage is my favorite part of the process, because that’s when I can add the fun stuff. By the time I get to that late-stage revision, I have already toiled over the hard parts: I’ve confirmed the facts (to the best of my ability). I’ve boiled down what are often complex, nuanced historical events and explained them with precision and clarity (to the best of my ability). After that’s done, I can focus on the voice. Here are some of the questions I ask myself:
- Can I use a stronger verb here?
- Can I jolt my reader with a kid-friendly, funny, unexpected metaphor?
- Can I insert other rhetorical devices such as alliteration, synecdoche, direct address, onomatopoeia?
- Have I read it out loud for rhythm and prosody?
But the fun doesn’t stop there! Next I go through and check these things one by one:
- I assess line length (it should vary) and word order (the punchline should go at the end of a sentence!).
- I add “jokes” that employ that time-tested comic trope known as rule-of-three (or misdirection and reversal).
- And finally, I try hard to fun-up my subtitles, sidebars, and special features.
Humorous writing has to look easy, but for the writer, it can require laborious, painstaking, and time-consuming revision. And yet, when kids tell me they’ve loved a book or laughed at something I’ve written, there’s nothing more gratifying.
Check out Sarah’s newest picture book, The Painter and the President: Gilbert Stuart’s Brush with George Washington, out in August!
Now…let’s talk about your writing!
I’d like you to spend this first week of Teachers Write camp coming up with a few pieces that you’d like to work on revising as we work our way through this next month. These can be narratives, poems, short stories, nonfiction, picture books, or longer works of fiction or nonfiction.
If you don’t have anything to work on right now, that’s okay! Take this afternoon to write a very rough draft of something that you can play around with this week. Need a prompt? Write a personal narrative about a journey you made that was incredibly lovely, eye-opening, or hard.
Whether you’re working with an older piece or something you just wrote, take some time this week to choose a few small revision jobs. Ask yourself what the piece is asking for. With my Over and Under books, action and sensory language are always important. Maybe you’ll decide that’s a good first focus for your piece, too. Or maybe you’d like to start by adding more humor or crafting sharper dialogue.
Make a list of small jobs. This week, choose just one of those jobs to focus on in earnest, and let me know how it goes!