Use one or more of these in a story. They can be dialogue, as I have it, or woven into the narration. They can be a beginning or an end or show up in the middle. You may not finish your story in the time you have. Just write as much as you can.

Keep in mind as you write that everything in fiction is connected. Dialogue reveals character; character produces dialogue (or even silence).  

“Do you think these fangs are just for show?”

“You’re staring at me.”

“You’re not me. I’m me!”

“Please help me climb down.”

“I always wanted to kick someone through a portal.”

“Hmm. Um. Er.”

You can continue what you started during the workshop or do one of the options below. Email me no more than five double-spaced pages in 12-point type as a Word or Google document. If it’s a Google document, please remember to give me permission to edit it.

Make one of these adages the title of your story and write how the precept works out for your characters—which can be disastrously or perfectly. (You can change the title later if you come up with something you like better.)

• Better safe than sorry

• What you don’t know can’t hurt you

• Two wrongs don’t make a right

• Look before you leap

• Two heads are better than one

• If at first you fail, try, try, try again

There are my notes to myself for the first writing workshop of the summer last year. The workshop this year will run from 7/14 to 7/31, Mondays and Thursdays from 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm:

Things (for me) to bring:

1. Writing Magic and Writer to Writer

1. this page!

1. Pad

1. WELCOME!

• My phone #, email address. Don’t share. Website, can share. Take a screen shot.

• My name & pronouns. Intro Jen and Debbie

Go around & say pronoun, what grades they’re going into. What do they hope to get out of summer? Say if it’s more than writing better, if there’s something partic you want. Poetry possible. Tell everyone: If you could time travel to the past or future, when in the past or how far in the future would you visit? Why?

• How c we make it better? You can say it out loud or email me.
• Ask if any will miss ½ summer.  If they don’t like it, not forced to stay. How much will they miss?

1. How many like to write poems?  Read poems? How many prefer story-writing to poetry?  How many vice-versa?  How many equal?

• Keep what you’ve written, and keep in mind that we want a collection by the end of the summer. I’ll expect you to email in something after the fifth week for copying for the sixth week.

• about homework. Don’t have to do it, but if they do, will get benefit of my editing. They can do the week’s assignment or keep going with something they started in the workshop. Don’t submit something you wrote for school, and no AI. I’ll get it back to you but maybe not instantly. Email to me as Word or Google doc. If it’s a google doc, give me permission to edit. Due by Wednesday at noon.
• email me if you want to set up a time for an individual meeting.

• can drink something, but no food. No lying in bed, unless you’re sick.

• How vocab works. Do not look up! Type in chat meaning and part of speech. What does part of speech mean? lycanthropy

PRONUNCIATION:

(ly-KAN-thruh-pee)

MEANING:

noun:
1. A delusion that one has transformed into a wolf.
2. The process of or ability to transform into a wolf.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Greek lykos (wolf) + -anthropy (human). Earliest documented use: 1584.

•  

Prompts. Discuss

Homework. Discuss. Remind them when it’s due.

These will help you delight your readers.

• In prose—including fiction, reports, essays, papers, newspaper articles—clarity is more important than anything else. Readers won’t enjoy our exciting plots and fascinating characters if they don’t understand what we’re saying.

• The most powerful parts of speech in English are nouns (people, places, and things) and verbs (action words). We sometimes need adjectives (modifying nouns) and adverbs (modifying verbs and adjectives), but they’re weaker. If you start to put one in, read your sentence with it and without it to see which way is better.

• Look for word repetition and substitute synonyms if you notice that you’re using a particular word too much.

• Vary our paragraph beginnings. We don’t want to start more than two paragraphs in a row with the same word.

• Vary our sentence structures. We don’t want to repeat two parts of a sentence connected by and or but over and over or to have all our sentences be very short. We want to mix it up. For but, we can use though, although, or however; for and we can use what’s more or plus or also.

• Long paragraph blocks make readers tired and worried that they’re not up to the job of reading through them. We can break our long paragraphs up wherever there’s an opportunity—a change in focus, in character, in what’s happening. Bits of white space on the page are relaxing to the eyes.

You can use these as starter sentences or as the idea for your story:

• When it rains toothpicks, you-know-who is coming.

• Ms. Chenchy said, “Copy down the homework,” and began to write on the blackboard in letters that weren’t familiar to Pat and didn’t even seem to be letters. Everyone else was writing as if nothing was wrong.

• When I finished washing my face, I looked up and saw an unfamiliar face in the mirror—on top of my neck, above my tee-shirt.

• The leader of the world’s smallest nation loved snakes.

• A raven landed on my head, and the people of the realm declared me their ruler.

Write toward one of these endings. You may not get there, but head your story in its direction:

• They parted friends.

• The stain never came out.

• That was the moral: finders really are keepers.

• The dog stopped barking.

• The castle was closed for repairs.

• Your main character is the friend everyone goes to when they’re unhappy. Your main character is keeping more secrets than they have fingers and toes combined. But two secrets don’t add up. Someone is lying, and someone is going to get hurt. Have them delve into the thoughts and feelings of her friends to find out what’s really going on.

• Take a minor bad characteristic, maybe something that drives you crazy when someone does it. For example, could be tickling people whether they want to be tickled or not. Make it bigger and write a scene or a whole story about someone who learns to stop or who becomes a villain and does it even more.

• Your main character, who’s been captured by the enemy, is held in a stone fortress. (You decide what the war is about.) They have a candle and a lady’s fan, determination, resourcefulness, and a bad habit of becoming distracted and losing focus. Have them escape or fail to escape.

• Write “Little Red Riding Hood” from the point of view of the wolf. Make him the hero. Grandma or Little Red is the villain. 

• Your main character is the friend everyone goes to when they’re unhappy. Your main character is keeping more secrets than they have fingers and toes combined. But two secrets don’t add up. Someone is lying, and someone is going to get hurt. Have them delve into the thoughts and feelings of her friends to find out what’s really going on.

• Take a minor bad characteristic, maybe something that drives you crazy when someone does it. For example, could be tickling people whether they want to be tickled or not. Make it bigger and write a scene or a whole story about someone who learns to stop or who becomes a villain and does it even more.

• Your main character, who’s been captured by the enemy, is held in a stone fortress. (You decide what the war is about.) They have a candle and a lady’s fan, determination, resourcefulness, and a bad habit of becoming distracted and losing focus. Have them escape or fail to escape.

• Write “Little Red Riding Hood” from the point of view of the wolf. Make him the hero. Grandma or Little Red is the villain. 

• This prompt combines science and Greek mythology. Scientists have recently discovered that carpenter ants can perform successful leg amputations on injured ants in their own colonies. In Greek mythology, almost all the inhabitants of an island have been killed by a plague. To repopulate the island, Zeus turns the ants that live there into people. In your story, this transformation to human form happens during an amputation. Your main characters are the injured ant, the ant who’s doing the amputation, and however many as you like of the injured ant’s family and friends. Write the story. Be sure to include details about what it’s like to turn from an ant into a person.

• Your main character is off to meet a friend who is in danger—you decide what the peril is. On the way, by whatever means of transportation you choose, their sensations go haywire: intensify, fade, play tricks. One moment everything is too loud and the next they can hardly hear at all. Same with sight, smell, taste, and touch. Despite what’s happening to them, they need to reach their destination. Write the scene.

• While still awake, before being pricked by the spinning wheel, Sleeping Beauty or Sleeping Handsome is determined to throw off all the fairy gifts they got at birth and discover their true self. They don’t want to be magically goodlooking or angelically virtuous or graceful or a marvelous dancer or singer or musician—or have to sleep for a hundred years. Write the quest to discover their true self—and if you get to it, how they end up being.

• You, the main character, are taster for King Jebel, who has many enemies. You stand at the king’s side at meals and taste everything as soon as it’s served. If you live, the king eats. You do not want to die! Seven tasters have already died this year, and it’s only May. You’re just in your first week. The annual royal banquet is beginning. Attending are the king’s family, the nobility of the realm, the king’s ministers, and visiting ambassadors. You take your place next to the king. You have to examine each dish extremely carefully. You need to notice who passes a dish to you for the king. Every sense has to be alert but, to make matters worse, you’re sleepy because you couldn’t sleep last night. You’re also very hungry.

• In 1277, in England, there were no banks and no paper money, only silver pennies, which were worth more than pennies are today. For example, two dozen eggs would cost a penny; a fashionable gown, sixty-three pennies; a horse to pull a plow or a wagon, 240 pennies. An unskilled laborer would earn two pennies a day, and a master carpenter, four. People kept their money at home, in wooden chests in the “counting room.” These chests were locked, but locks weren’t very good back then.  Front doors had no locks, but they were guarded at night. During the day, visitors knocked, and, if the family was even a little rich, a servant would let them in. In the spring, a wealthy widow is robbed. The coroner is called (as he would be). As the law requires, he appoints twelve jurors (who would be free men of the community—not serfs) whose job is to investigate the crime, identify a suspect or suspects, and charge them. There are no detectives and no lawyers. Possible suspects are a blacksmith, a soldier, a shoemaker, a butcher’s wife, and an innkeeper. A roofer and a shepherd are possible accomplices. Write the story or as far as you can get.

• In medieval England, forests were dangerous, and much of the kingdom was forested. There was no Robin Hood, but there were brigands who robbed and sometimes even killed travelers. Everyone believed in magic, and forests were thought to be full of enchanted creatures. English kings regarded the forests as their private hunting grounds. People were allowed to travel through them but not to hunt. When people had to travel, they did so in groups for at least partial safety-in-numbers. Your main character has to travel through a forest to Oxford to live with their cousins. They’re traveling with a group of wool merchants heading to London and pilgrims hoping for a miracle cure in Canterbury. Write what happens on the way, or as far as you get.

• This comes from my family, history-not-to-be-proud-of. The New York City subway fare until 1948 was a nickel. Some turnstiles were full height, as some still are today. Here’s an image of a historical one: https://www.deviantart.com/rlkitterman/art/NYC-MTA-Iron-Maiden-Turnstile-659112427. During the Depression (in the 1930s, before I was born), my very plump grandmother and my very plump great-aunt put a nickel into a full-height turnstile, squeezed in together, started to move through, and got stuck. Write a story about what happened next. How did they get out? Did they have to be rescued?

• Write a story that’s based on your family’s history. (Don’t hurt the feelings of anyone who’s still alive.)