It's National Novel Writing Month!

with Angela Harris

Mosaic Texas - Creative Writing Class

We thought everyone might like to know what we've been up to in Texas this fall! We have a great group of writers participating in National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). Mosaic New Jersey students will remember their novel writing adventures from 2011 -- please join me in cheering on the Texas students as they face this amazing challenge all November-long!

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September

We kicked off our first class on September 9th by defining what makes a novel and filled out our "What Makes a Novel a Novel" worksheet in preparation for our in-class "book talks." We discussed the meaning of conflict within the context of a novel, perspective, and point of view (first person vs. third person).

We discussed what a workshop partner is and how to provide constructive critique. Remember the "feedback sandwich"? (Compliment/Suggestion for Improvement/Compliment) and we started working on our characters for our novel. 

At our second class, we wrapped up our discussion of what makes a character interesting and what clues authors use to let us know which characters are the protagonist, antagonist, and supporting character(s). We want to remember these "tricks" authors use to portray them and keep them in mind as we write our own novels. 

We wrapped up our day by describing the first three elements of plot: set-up, inciting incident and rising action. We discussed that a good plot is a lot like a good roller coaster and read through a sample story that gave us good examples of these first three elements. 

I've really enjoyed getting to know all the children. On our first day together, I had them write down their answers to the question, "What does it mean to be creative?" We shared some of our answers, among which were some great insights such as, "...to be creative is to have a great imagination and energy released in any form of art." and, "...being creative means thinking outside the box, or something out of the ordinary." 

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October

By October, we started to get to know one another a little better and are now feeling more comfortable sharing our writing and creative processes.

We finished discussing our "plot outlines" and then moved on to "Setting and Mood" which proved a little tricky in the end, but also prompted a lot of great discussion and examples of moods that we might convey through our novels. The difficulty comes in communicating these moods through a description of a setting. 

By our last October class I could really sense the excitement and confidence building!

We practiced using setting to re-inforce characters. Everyone selected a character or characters to describe using setting details, and I think did a wonderful job overall! We talked about things we did right and things we could have done a little differently to make our writing more effective.  

We then moved on to define dialogue and talked about what makes dialogue interesting vs. boring. The kids stretched their acting muscles and enjoyed reading a few scenes which demonstrated the three functions of dialogue.  

Lastly, everyone set their word count goals, signed their writing contracts, and we filled out our in-class poster which will keep track of our progress in November.

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Monday, November 4

This week we began class by updating our in-class progress chart. 

NaNoWriMo has just begun, but students already have a great start! Two students were at the 10% completion mark and all others were close behind. All writers should be at approximately the 50% mark when next we meet on November 18. You can validate your word count now and then on the Young Writers Program web-site. You can do this under the Edit Novel Info tab and also check out your NaNo Stats under My NaNoWriMo to make sure you're on track to reach your word count goal! You can also update your word count by simply entering the number of words you've written in the Word Count box at the top of the NaNoWriMo web-page.

Thank you to those students who turned in dialogue scenes for critique, I will have feedback to you on those at our next class.

We spent the rest of class covering many topics, such as, different beginnings for novels (ask your student what it means to begin a novel "in medias res"!) and using our five senses to describe different random objects.

We then tried to describe our classroom using all five senses and quickly discovered that some students like to be very literal, while others can describe things more abstractly. Both are good skills, and I encouraged the literal thinkers to take some risks and try to "think outside the box."

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If we can get in touch with our senses while writing our novels they will be more interesting to read, AND the added detail will BOOST OUR WORD COUNTS!

We also briefly defined similes and metaphors and spent some time trying to create sensory detail for rather abstract ideas using both. For instance, how do you describe how Happiness "tastes" using a simile or a metaphor? These exercises proved very difficult, but I thought we still got some great ideas on paper. Next class, the students would like to play a game to get more practice identifying similes vs. metaphors, so we'll spend a bit more time on this.

We closed class by reading aloud the lovely short story, "Thank you, M'am," by Langston Hughes. Next time, we will break into two teams and engage in a hands-on project using this short story that will allow us to experiment with sequence and structure.

The only homework is to write, write, write!

Please come to next class with your copy of "Thank you, M'am", your binders, something to write with AND your word count through November 17, so we can up-date our chart. See you then!