Katherine Hart

Once a week, I spend an hour in my daughter’s classroom, assisting her teacher with the writing workshop. Upon finding out from my daughter that I was going back to school for writing, Mrs. M. asked me to help out weekly with the classroom writing period. In addition to an increased appreciation for Mrs. M.’s continuous patience and enthusiasm, I have also gained insight and appreciation of how to teach creative writing to children. As adult writers, we learn about “show, don’t tell,” proper dialogue tagging, interesting openings, etc., and I’ve been surprised to see how this class is learning the same elements of creative writing, just in slightly different forms.

The first month I was in the classroom, the students worked on small moment stories. They learned how details and characters make the story and how to focus on the important events (tacked to the bulletin board, a picture of a pie slice removed from the bigger pastry serves as a visual reminder of what the students want to achieve). They discussed using actions to illustrate emotions. And they incorporated thoughts and dialogue into their stories.

This week, they started a new session. Small moment stories are still preferred, but now the class is focusing on setting writing goals and on writing for the reader. How can they make a story appealing to a reader? As I walked around and helped each student, we talked about capitalization and punctuation, leaving space between words, and using the word wall and spelling lists when making word choices. Mrs. M., who also writes children’s stories and is active in a local writing group, related her own experiences as a writer, how she sets goals before she starts a piece.

Second graders are second graders. They tease their neighbors, staple their writing sheets upside down, and need frequent reminders to at least begin their story. However, I’ve been amazed and impressed by the stories they write weekly, the natural creativity they possess and the joy they experience while relating tales of trick-or-treating or finding frogs in toilets. In fourth grade, they will take a writing assessment as part of the FCAT, the statewide standardized test administered yearly from grades three through ten. Soon, they will essentially learn how to write for the test; for the moment, they enjoy the freedom and joy of creativity, and I hope that they never lose it.

Titles make me nervous. That is, titling my own pieces is difficult. I lack the creativity to come up with a succinct, clever group of words to capture the essence of my work. Hence, stories, finished or not, linger in my Google docs with names like NaNo2009 and Story 2004. I figure if I ever get close to publishing something, I will have a brilliant beta-reader who will suggest the perfect title. Right??

That said, I’ll take inspiration wherever its found, and on the drive home from the grocery store this afternoon, it hit me: Story 2005, my novel-in-progress begun in the winter of 2005, is Be With Me. No, it’s not original. In fact, it’s the title of a movie from Singapore I recently saw, a beautiful meditation on love and the need for connection (and the closest to a poem, as far as films go). But it works for this piece, for now. And it’s nice to have a working title, which somehow lends more purpose to the piece.

In 2006, when I lived in Dayton and was part of a local writers’ group, I participated in the National Novel Writing Month challenge: complete a 50K word novel in 30 days (that’s about 1667 words per day or about 7 pages double-spaced). Several of us took on the challenge, checked-in with each other both online and at our regular meeting spot (Panera Bread) and toasted each other with hot chocolates when we met the word-count goal. It was crazy, it was tiring. But the beauty of writing so many words in a limited time is that there is no time to think! You write and let the crazy plot twists and quirky characters form the novel.

I participated in NaNo in ’07, ’08, and ’09, all three times writing close to 30K words. Last year, my sister got married, and writing a novel was simply unfeasible. This year, just a few days shy of the 1 November start date, I remain undecided.

We’ve been working on different writing prompts in class, and I have a shiny new cast of characters to work with–either my zombie infestation crew or my love triangle families (although I have a feeling spending 30 days with the latter group may be a bit of a bummer). Not to mention fall term wraps up at the end of November, and there is much schoolwork to complete.

I’ll see how I feel after I raid the kids’ Halloween candy. Chocolate and sugar make the daunting seem doable…