The Writing Days of Summer

On August 22, 2011, Melissa wrote, ….I still want to know what you’re doing at your summer workshop. Or if you could tell me some of the homework you gave the kids. Hopefully I can find your answer this time.
Thirty to thirty-five children sign up and usually about twenty or so are there each week. The age range is ten years to eighteen. Debby, a fifth grade teacher volunteer helps me. (I’m also a volunteer. The local library hosts us.) I hold six sessions, each an hour-and-a-half long. We always start with a vocabulary word, often a word that’s new to me that I got online from Wordsmith at http://wordsmith.org/words/today.html. I’m looking for interesting words, interesting meaning. My favorite word last summer was poetaster.

The kids know what to do as soon as I write the word on the eraser board. They make up a definition and guess what part of speech the word is and write both on a scrap of paper, which I collect. I pick four or five to read aloud and slip in the real definition, written in a kid vernacular. Then they vote for the one they think is the true meaning. My hope is that they won’t pick mine so there’s a surprise. When the real definition is revealed we applaud the person who came up with the most persuasive wrong definition. Kids return to the workshop year after year and get better and better at inventing the fakes. They also start thinking about roots of words and etymology. My goal is to help them fall in love with English. Most are at least halfway there already.

Next, I read a poem I like and suspect will appeal to them. I’m not always right.

During the first class I ask the kids what they hope to get out of the summer. Last year several wanted to work on conflict. Great choice!

So I looked online for help and found an article that listed four kinds of conflict (interpersonal, internal, situational, societal). For the second class of the season I introduced the four and we started on one, interpersonal conflict. I’ve discovered over the years that some prep helps before the writing commences. Here are my notes to myself for leading the introductory discussion on conflict:

Why does a story need suffering, humorous suffering or serious suffering?

Why do readers seek out entertainment in which terrible things happen, villains behave monstrously, people die? I’m not sure, but maybe because we’re preparing for the worst that life can throw at us. When we make Sammy suffer we’re helping our readers, which should stiffen us to do it. We may hurt him, but we’re helping them.

Conflict doesn’t have to be huge, though. Worry about a report card and a parent’s reaction, worry about something foolish a character said.

How do you convey that a character feels bad?

Thoughts.
Perception, like stomach clench.
Dialogue.
Action (like leaving, or being wounded literally).
Possibly even setting.
After the discussion, when I think everyone is ready, I give out the writing exercise. You’ll see that I offer two choices. The age range in the class is huge – we’re like a one-room writing schoolhouse – and I want to appeal to them all. Here’s the in-class choice of exercises. You can use either or both as a blog-post prompt:

Carl or Carlie, who doesn’t like to share, has something that’s very precious to him or her, may have magical properties. His or her best friend Tom or Tomasina wants it. Write what happens. Make each one do or say something he or she doesn’t mean. Make them both feel bad. (I emphasized that we weren’t going for a happy ending here; we were working on conflict, which means distress.)

A new bicycle
Book by author they both love
Ten dollars

Or Carl or Carlie says to Tom or Tomasina, “I hate when you do that.” Write their argument. Make each one do or say something he or she doesn’t mean. Make them both feel bad.
I can’t find the handout I gave the kids or I would have shown it to you here, but I usually give them something to look at while they work.

Then they write. I ask them to let me or Debby know if they need help. We also watch for kids who’ve stopped working and seem stuck.

After about twenty to twenty-five minutes I stop them and break them into groups for sharing and critique. Often I arrange the groups by age, and Debby and I join groups of the younger kids, because the older ones generally need no assistance. Part of the first class is devoted to a discussion of critiquing protocol.

Then I give out the homework. Below is what I handed out for the internal conflict class. It’s one of my favorites ever, and it can be another prompt for you. I don’t think I used it on the blog, but often my blog prompts are the source of class exercises and vice versa. Here is is:

A car is a great place for conflict. Who picks the radio station? Or CD player or iPod. Who prefers news or a recorded book? Open window? Closed window? How high to crank the heat or the air-conditioner? Who sits in front? Anybody gets carsick? Are the grownups arguing about driving style? Are the kids pushing, pinching, teasing? In doing this exercise you can draw on your own miserable car experiences.

Perry is invited to vacation with his best friend Letty Pewer and her parents. They are traveling from Brewster to Florida for a winter week in the sun. Write a scene or a story about their trip. Below are some possibilities to fool around with. Pick as many as you like or make up your own or do a combo of mine and yours.

•    Letty’s father is peculiar. You decide how.

•    Letty’s mom is a dangerous driver. You decide how.

•    Letty’s younger brother and older sister are coming along. They don’t get along with Letty and dislike Perry.

•    The car is older than Perry. The radio doesn’t work. There is no iPod, no CD player.

•    The Pewers are economizing and haven’t bought a GPS. Good old maps are good enough for them. They plan to camp out and save on motel costs as soon as they reach warm enough weather.

•    The car is bewitched – not in a good way.

•    This is the snowiest winter in the history of New York and surrounding states.

•    The scenic route will take the family and Perry through an old mining town in Pennsylvania. Unbeknownst to the authorities, one of the abandoned mines is now occupied by squatters who may be dangerous.
The children aren’t required to do the homework; this is summer and the workshop isn’t a school, but usually they do. I don’t grade their work but I do comment and return it. The emphasis in my comments is on story not on spelling and grammar.

For those of you who are teachers, I think you’ll understand this: I always show up with a longer lesson plan than I think I’ll need. Sometimes what I think is going to take half an hour gets done in five minutes. There is nothing (well, hardly anything) worse than running out of material.

Then we go home.

Two sessions are devoted to writing poetry. Since I’m still a newbie poet I just do my best and hope I don’t make too many mistakes. (I still shudder at the crazy advice I gave the kids about how to write a sestina.) I’ve found that structured poetry works best. Last summer we did poems that use anaphora and we did rhymed poetry. For the poetry sessions we follow the same structure as for fiction writing: discussion, in-class exercise, homework.

For the session on rhyme, the vocabulary word was apocope, a word I hadn’t known before, which I found in my preparation and which connected to the class topic. These are my notes for what I wanted to say about rhyme before giving out the exercise:

Rhyme:

the good – satisfying, pleasing, when clever surprising

the bad – too often not surprising, forced with word inversion, using not the best word

we’re waiting for the rhyme, may miss the meaning, like limericks

read from Poet’s Companion, define kinds of rhyme, make sure they know what accented vs. unaccented syllables are.

internal rhyme

rhyme scheme, aa bb, abab,

hand out Molly’s poems, go over rhymes

bouts-rimes – give example of rhymes in Handbook of Poetic Forms, put examples of these in your words, but not my examples

The exercise was a bouts-rimes, which is a kind of poem challenge. I think I had them do it in pairs. Each pair wrote a list of rhyming words then passed them off to the pair to their left. The next step was to write a poem using the rhymes. Fun. So another prompt would be to try this with a friend or a few friends.

Near the end of class I handed out Edward Lear’s poem, “Alphabet” and gave this homework assignment:

Write your own alphabet poem. In the example I gave you, some of the rhymes are forced. Avoid forced rhymes in your own poem. You can start with these first two lines or make up your own, but make the subject something lost:

A lost her Amulet, though she ransacked the Attic for it.
B said: Might it have been taken by a Bandit?

You can use any kind of rhyme:

∙    Masculine perfect rhyme, as in book with look

∙    Feminine perfect rhyme, as in riding with gliding

∙    Slant rhyme, as in blade with head

∙    Apocopated rhyme, as in beak with speaker

∙    Assonance or vowel rhyme, as in why with pride

∙    Identical rhyme, as in book with book (you can’t do this constantly)

∙    Eye rhyme, as in though with cough

For extra credit, after Z, end the poem with two or three lines (serious or not) about lost things.
Some of the poems I got back were amazing. You can look up the Lear poem and try it yourself.

The other thing I do each summer, although with decreasing enthusiasm, is a group novel. I keep offering it as a possibility because the kids like the idea, but then I think it disappoints them. I suggest a theme, and the first child writes a first chapter during the week and brings two copies of it in the next week. Debby keeps a master copy and passes the other on to someone to write the next chapter. By the end there’s a story in five chapters and everyone in the workshop gets a copy. Since there are more than five participants, there are several novels in the works, the number depending on the level of interest. Those who don’t participate in the novel can submit a piece they worked on during the summer for distribution.

And that’s the summer workshop in a very long post. For prompts, try the exercise I gave the kids. Have fun, and save what you write!

27 Responses on “The Writing Days of Summer”

  1. Melissa says:

    Gail- Thankyou sooo much! I sound pretty clueless in my question that you blogged on don't I? =Þ I had just joined your blog and had no idea how to navigate it. Ah well. I obiously did find your answer. Anyways….guess what! My uncle lives in New York and I might be able to stay with him during that part of the summer so I can come to your workshop!!!! I begged to for Christmas. I'm dying to come. It sounds so fun!I've got my fingers crossed.

  3. Alex says:

    So I have a question about cliches. I know some of them are inevitable, but I want to stay away from them as much as possible.

    In my book, I guess you could say the romantic plot starts off as cliche (he's the new boy in town). But it ends in a way that I don't think is cliche at all – it's complicated, but it ends sadly. My question is this – how should I make it so that the beginning, even if it is cliched, keeps readers hooked and not groaning at yet another cliched book? Or is there a way to introduce a male character as someone the MC has never known before in a non-cliched way?

  5. Erin Edwards says:

    It sounds like a really great workshop! Melissa, I hope you get to go. My daughters will be envious. 🙂

    Why we are drawn to conflict as entertainment must have been a very interesting discussion in the workshop. There are so many aspects that may come into play. Is it that it gives us courage, does it help us plan for the unexpected, or does it make us feel lucky that we are not "them," that our lot in life is better than we sometimes think? Maybe the explanation is tied to our obsession with celebrities and our obvious glee when something goes wrong in their lives? Why is it that the juiciest gossip has always been about something bad?

    @ Megan – If you are still looking for Princess books for your younger sister, my younger just read Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George and loved it!

  6. welliewalks says:

    I really love this! Thank you, Mrs. Levine!! This gives me a summer job idea. Maybe I could lead a writing camp/day at my local library? I dont know, something to think about :).
    Alex- hmmm, I see what you mean. Maybe don't start it off as a romance- I mean the reader doesnn't have to know it's a romance from page one. And if you want to do that, which is totally fine, make something ELSE really interesting, something that really hooks the reader as well by adding a side plot or a funky characteristic, etc. Hope this helps! 🙂

  9. Alex says:

    @welliewalks: Thanks for your suggestions. 🙂 The thing is, it doesn't start off as a romance, not really. The romance starts around 27k in. And the romance is just a subplot. I'm just worried that people will think it's like all the other Insta-love YA romances there are today, when it's not.

  10. writeforfun says:

    That sounds like it would be so much fun! I wish I could go to one of your workshops! Unfortunately, I live in Indiana, and I don't have an uncle in New York (although I hope it works out for you, Melissa!), but at least now I can try some of those exercises!

    Alex – first off, don't worry too much just yet if you're still in the first draft (as hard as that is); you can worry about that later. If your in your second draft, then I would say, (1) let some other people read it and tell you if and where it turns them off, and (2) If it's not a romance at first, then just work on hooking them onto your character and his his immediate problems or struggles. If you can get them to like him before the "cliche" part comes in, then I don't think readers will be turned off.

  11. April says:

    This was an excellent post. I enjoyed learning your process for leading a class. 🙂

    I'm curious for more peeks into your life. Perhaps you could divulge a little more in another post? For example, I read the linked post today about writers' various quirks. What are some of yours? How do your husband, family, and friends react to your quirks, or to your writerly profession in general (both in the past and presently)?

    http://www.rachellegardner.com/2012/01/writers-quirks/

  12. Brianna says:

    @Gail… sounds like a board game called Balderdash. Our family loves it.
    Here's a word that I learned from some Wordnik books and also saw it in a 39 Clues novel… Brouhaha! Isn't that the, like, funnest word ever?!
    @Alex… You could do the totally cliched love-hate. They absolutely loathe each other but then learn to like each other. Then you could prolong the non-cliched part of the book. 😉 A great book that's NOT "happily-ever-after" is Princess Ben by Catherine Gilbert Murdock (another fantastic princess book for ages 12+)… there's sort of an "after chapter", after they get married and after the "happily-ever-after". The book has some great word-pictures too… I love it and highly recommend it too!
    Gail, I wish I lived close enough that I could attend one of your workshops! They sound like a lot of fun.

  16. Agnes says:

    I have a question but it needs an introduction, I live in New York state so back in October we had a lot of snow. Come Thanksgiving we are still talking about it so when I'm sitting at the dinner table, I try to make a conversation…"The early snow was very unexpected,wasn't it? I said not thinking it would sound funny, but my grandmother and my cousin laughed and said I sounded like I had come out of an 18th century novel.

    Now here is my question how can you make your characters have interesting habits (like using long words) without it coming across as comic?

  17. writeforfun says:

    Carpelibris – oops, sorry – I can't believe I forgot to mention that! The characters in those books are anthropomorphic animals (like Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse), so he would be very person-like dog, if I can put it that way. Please let me know if my question makes any sense now, or if I'm still forgetting something (maybe this is why I've never asked!). Basically, I just want to know how to include a blind character without accidentally offending any blind people.

  18. carpelibris says:

    Too bad your character doesn't have Cerebral Palsy. I could tell you lots about that. 😉

    Well, the first thing to remember is that blind people (or people with CP, or deaf people, or whatever), are just like anybody else, except that they have to find ways to adapt to their limitations. So if you try to "write about a blind person," you could end up with a stereotype, but if you get to know the person as deeply as any other character, and they happen to be blind, you're on the right track.

    As for the nuts + bolts of adapting, if you don't know any actual blind people you could contact someplace like the Commission For The Blind and Visually Handicapped or Lighthouse, and see if they can send you any educational material. (Or look them up online.) I don't know where you are, but in Albany, NY, we have the Northeastern Association of The Blind, which teaches people adaptive living skills and things like Braille and community mobility, and helps people find jobs. Someone from a place like that could tell you a lot.
    Hope this helps!

  19. writeforfun says:

    Carelibris – thank you soooo much!!! I never would have guessed that there were organizations like that! I already looked up one of them on the internet and it's fantastic! I guess all I really needed were some resources. And your advice is really helpful, too. I'm copying it all over to my computer so that I can always come back to it. Thanks!

    P.S. I wouldn't mind info on CP, either – I'm sure I'd end up using it in SOME book!

  20. writeforfun says:

    Agnes – well, I think it depends. If everyone in your book is speaking like that, then the reader won't think it odd. If only one person speaks like that, you'd have to give them the kind of personality that fits the language i.e. an English nerd, dramatic actress, ect. Then the reader would be used to it and they would not find it funny – they'd find it characteristic. If you're talking about average, ordinary characters using big long words, well…you might want to be careful. I just used the word "anthropomorphic" to describe talking animals, but if my little brother used that in everyday conversation, along with the words "inaudible" and "existential," that definitely wouldn't be right – it would sound funny. There's a very helpful chapter on this subject in Writing Magic. If you haven't read it, you should – Gail explains it very well. Hope that helps!

  21. carpelibris says:

    You're welcome. Anything specific you want to know? I don't want to take over Gail's blog with medical stuff and whatnot, so if you have a lot of questions you can e-mail me ay JayneknoxATyahooDotcom. (Convert the "AT" and "DOT"- I did that to thwart spammers.
    Where I'm coming from: I have CP, was in a school for disabled kids up to 5th grade, went to a summer camp for disabled kids, and was my school district's first mainstreamed student. So if you need to know anything about that stuff from a firsthand viewpoint, I can help. (Mind you, this was a few decades ago! ;))

  22. gailcarsonlevine says:

    From the website:

    Hello Ms. Levine! This is a somewhat random question, but when you're writing, do you prefer to write in past or present tense? I have somewhat struggled with finding out what tense to use. I like to write in present tense because of the advantages it has: "I look over at Joshua. Why is he looking at me?" It has its advantages, I see…as in, it's kind of an insight into their brain. But the past has advantages too. "I looked over at Joshua. I wondered why he was looking at me." It seems more personal when it's present, but I was just wondering your opinion on the different tenses. THANKS! 🙂
    MKMCK 01/09/2012

  24. carpelibris says:

    Of course, no problem. I didn't know how old you were, and I didn't want to assume. You don't have to delete your question if you don't want to. I don't mind it, and my having CP is no secret.
    Hm. Not an easy question. Off the top of my head, I'd say that I wouldn't want to lose the experiences I've had from being who I am, but there sure are times when it would be handy to be able to, for example, get into buildings that have "Just one little step."
    Of course, other people I've known would have very different answers.

    (I just had a thought. You might be able to leave me questions on the Carpe Libris page by clicking on my name. We haven't used "Ask Dragon" in a while, but I think it still works.)

  25. Alex says:

    writeforfun: I'm still in the first draft, but I only have about 10k left, so it's going to be something I'm going to get to soon. And okay. 🙂 Thanks for that. I'll definitely concentrate on that first.

    Brianna: Hmm, okay. Possibly…

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