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A Writer's Dream

On a whim, I applied for a grant from Fund For Teachers to attend the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. You can imagine my surprise when my principal walked in on the morning of April 5th to announce to my class that I had received the grant! My nerves oscillated between excitement and fear, as I realized that I was going to have to put myself out there as a writer for the first time. This July I will be traveling to Iowa to participate in two Writer's Workshops: "Novel Bootcamp" and "Driving Through the Dark - Writing a Story in a Week".  My students are my inspiration for this trip. We are adopting Lucy Calkins' Writing Workshop next year and I thought the best way to understand the workshop model of teaching was to first be a student in a workshop myself. Here are excerpts from my grant proposal: Writing is a personal passion of mine. I’ve always felt that my strength lies in my ability to express myself and my creativity through written words instead of ...
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Workshop Reflections - Part 1

This morning's workshop was enlightening, inspiring, validating... and paralyzing. First off, my instructor is fabulous. She will be a wealth of knowledge this weekend and I hope that I get the chance to pick her brain. This morning was an "Info Dump" of literary terms, steps to reading and writing like a writer, and breakdowns of the elements of craft and narrative structure. I have never taken a writing course before, so it was validating to be familiar with most of her terminology. Also, her "Info Dump" mirrored a lot of what I teach to my middle school students. It is always a comforting feeling to know that you are on the right track! The hardest part for me is now utilizing this information to benefit my own writing. It is relatively easy to analyze a finished novel's plot structure. It is a much more complicated task to create structure in your own writing. My instructor's advice: Come up with your own rules for your work - or borrow others....
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Workshop Reflections - Part 2

The second half of my workshop today focused on character. Oftentimes we associate plot as the backbone of a story but it is really the characters that are in the driving seat. My instructor had us read and excerpt by Stephen Koch titled "Shaping the Story". In this, Koch described plot as a damaging fear that plagues most new novelists (this one included!). The dreaded monosyllable plot worked on them like Kryptonite; Flash it before them, and they would slump down helpless... They kept circling around some situation, or character, or image, or obsession. It suggested a story to them, but try as they might, they could not get at it... They were suffering from the tantalizing, maddening presence of a story that they could not reach or get within their grasp. They were being tortured by the nearness of narrative they couldn't yet get into words or even define except in the vaguest kind of way. - Koch This excerpt resonated with me. It echoed the worries that have bee...
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