On writing fantasy...

I need to do a semester analysis as we wrap things up, and I've also been doing some great reading as I apply to M.Ed programs and school districts, working my way towards a unified concept of why and how I teach. So look for some thoughts on that soon, maybe next weekend as the Powers That Be don't let me teach on the Saturday before Memorial Day.  :4)  It's alright; my fantastic students are all drowning in standardized tests and end-of-year projects and certainly deserve the break.

However, if it's not too sappy and self-indulgent to do so, I wanted to post a link to the blog of my boyfriend, an aspiring fantasy writer.  I thought he had some thoughts on why one writes in fantasy/science fiction, and especially as most of my students seem to read and write in that genre, they might enjoy this:

Errors, Wrong Turns, & Exciting Opportunities

The generalized thoughts on fantasy start about halfway down the post.

Relatedly:  I wrote fantasy/science fiction above.  I could have written "speculative fiction," this being the term I've seen thrown about occasionally.  On the one hand, it seems to come from the same market-driven, oh-heavens-let-it-seem-anything-but-GENRE repackaging that lead to the frankly sexist rebranding of the Sci-Fi channel as "SyFy".  On the other hand, like so many meaningless-brand phrases, it becomes more interesting if you actually unpack it. Speculating! Both in the sense of imagining/contemplating/theorizing, and perhaps even in the sense of gambling.  Hmm.  Or maybe I'm just language-geeking a bit too much.

Shiny Syllabus! And a snazzy link!

First of all, allow me to geek out pedagogically a little bit and say that this is an absolutely fantastic example of an English teacher's website. I wish more of my college professors had been half so organized.

Secondly, my spring syllabus, behold!  More details will be forthcoming, but I'm super-excited about all of it and hope my students will be as well.  Spring 2011

DRAMA.

 No, that does not describe my life.  Well, not more so than usual. 

Fall semester of Northwest Chinese School ended on Saturday.  As usual, I ended the semester by pulling an all-nighter to get the grades in and, DESPITE the sleep deprivation, floated out of the last class deeply grateful for all of my students, excited about the next semester and feeling the usual giddy terror that if anyone knew how much I have fun teaching no one would ever agree to pay me for it. 

The Saturday class, untrammelled by school administrations and required texts, is a very open-ended one that gives me the opportunity to teach some of the projects whose long-term value is incalculable but whose short-term results might be hard to work into a standard classroom (though if and when I do have my own classroom, I'm dedicated to a yearly NaNoWriMo unit, because the results have regularly outstripped my wildest expectations.)  Just to make sure I don't teach a class that would only be interesting to thirty-five middle-school versions of me, however, I try to base most of my teaching decisions on two things.  One, the state standards for reading, writing and public speaking; this keeps me at an appropriate grade level and leads to some occasional neat connections being made between what they're doing with me and what they're doing in their weekday Language Arts classes. 

Second, I base the spring semester on their answers to the class evaluation in the fall, including the question "What would you like to cover next semester?" 

I got quite a few useful gems out of this semester's evaluations.  Less in-class work time; I was hesitant to assign too much homework, but it sounds as though the in-class working, as with our novels, was often more boring.  No love whatsoever for the "Vocabulary From Classical Roots" work; I may start designing my own worksheets based off their units rather than relying on the workbook.  If I'm going to do public speaking stuff, it needs to be scaffolded, supported and clearly laid out; that caused a lot of anxiety, and one eval said simply "In the spring: No presentations.  Seriously. I *hate* presentations." 

However, the one thing that got the most interest and the most votes was drama and acting.  Which is, of course, the area of English education where I'm the least comfortable teaching.  

I ran to my old college roommate, a talented and rigorous director, and got these basic theatrical "most important things" to add to the language arts goals I'd be focusing on.

moi: .

  Okay.

  What would YOU say were the four most important things about acting and playwriting?

18:32             Roomie:  four each? or four all together?

18:33               ....you should read David Ball's Backwards and Forwards...it would help with                         something like this...

but...
     

 
 

Acting:  

1) Motivation

  2) Obstacle

18:34 3) Creativity

18:35 ....4)....

  I'm not going to state this very well...

18:36 but the idea that...the person in the script is does not exist...that they are what you make them...when you see it as a shell, or a skeleton, you can better see what needs to be filled in.

18:37 or how to build into your portrayal what is needed to make the character a real person

  

  Ok...

  Playwrighting:

  (you should ask Jenn...she took the class :))

  but...

  1)

18:39 oh gah...I'm so not a playwright...

18:41 1) Write, knowing all the time that it will be read out loud.

18:42 2) Good exposition

18:43 addendum to 1)....write, knowing it will be seen, as well

  I don't know what 2 means...

18:44 I mean, I do...but I mean that you need to be able to apprise the audience of the situation of the play without saying "so, this is the situation of the play"

18:47 3) Conflict

12 minutes

19:00           Roomie : I don't have a 4th...

  ...I was trying to think of one...but I have given up...

  Or rather, I was trying to think of how to state it, but I gave up.

So now begins the brainstorming, the planning, and the search for a good middle school sample text as far as plays and scenes go.  The go-tos for teaching theatre, once you get beyond "This Play Was Only Written To Be Anthologized For Eighth Graders," appear to be "Romeo & Juliet" and "The Crucible."  Both are awesome shows deserving of a far more character-based and subtle treatment than they usually get.  But I think both plays can get offered to middle schoolers a little condescendingly: "Look! Juliet/Abigail Williams is under eighteen, too! Don't you feel catered to? Isn't it (air quotes) 'relevant'?"

Though perhaps I say this just because I like both of those plays, and I'm not interested in only spending a single day or two at most on them. 

Despite my anxiety, I've got to say: theatre! Drama! Acting!  This is going to be fun.  And with any luck, my talentless enthusiasm will be infectious, and the students will feel less self-conscious.  :0) 

Any thoughts on theatrical possibilities? 

Finishing up the semester at NWCS!

Today was our third to last class at Northwest Chinese School, so I'm doing the end-of-semester clean-up of missing assignments, so here I'm reposting a few papers:

Dialogue Gloss or Character Paragraphs

Prewriting Exercises

Today we did a revision exercise working through five main skills:
1. Pronoun Usage
2.  Sentence Fragments & Run-Ons
3. Weak or Passive Sentences
4. Simple, Complex & Compound Sentences
5. Paragraph Organization

The details and explanations of the activity are here.

Finishing NaNoWriMo!

My lesson plan and materials for my class's last day of NaNoWriMo.  Feel free to take!

Lesson Plan: Week 10

Novel Reflection Assignment: Midterm         

Novel Mad Libs: New Year's Resolutions, The Odyssey & Make Me A Video Game

Novel Character Game: 12-Character Meme 

Verdict from the Jury

Students' responses to the questions:

What did you like about the novel project?	What did you not like about the novel project?
It is interesting I like the old times in Europe, I put them in my story.	It takes days to finish it.
It made me feel more confident about my writing. Helped me shorten my time in ESL class in my school.	Going too fast. It is hard for me.
Practicing writing Know how hard it is to write a novel.
I liked how it was really fun we had dare machines to make our stories funny and goofy. I liked how our story could be as random as we wanted to.	I didn’t like how i had way too much homework from school to make my novel better. I didn’t like how I didn’t use my time wisely si could improve my story and I couldn’t make it as long as I could.
How it was really sad but good and how my characters came out to be.
I could use my imagination to create a story. I learned that a story can come with many lessons if it’s not meant to be	It took a lot of my time.. sometimes I got stuck on wha to write.
It was fun writing a story. I liked using the dare machine.	There was a lot to write. I don’t have a 2nd one.
One is the gut and another one is the theme.	Too long, no special stuff.
Writing the story.  It was very fun and interesting.	You had to write a novel in a certain time. It was a bit tiring, because sometimes I would stay up late writing it.
I liked doing the preplanning, and actually typing it down.	I didn’t like figuring out what my characters should say, and I didn’t like figuring out the enxt scene.
I liked it when we can create our own things, also getting tickets.	I didn’t like it when we had to write, and I didn’t like to write paragraphs.
I liked it because it was fun and a good experience.	I didn’t like it because I didn’t have much time to do other things.
I liked creating my characters and my world. I liked making my characters do what they did.	I didn’t like it when I got stumped.  Also, I hated not knowing how to spell a word when needed.
I always had something to do when I was bored. I had fun making up stuff.	Too much typing. Hard to think sometimes.
the two things I liked about the novel project is you get to experience writing your own story without having to follow rules also it lets you create your own story.	There was a time limit which made it o hard to manage writing the entire novel while writing other things.
I liked getting to create and write my own story without my mom yelling at me to do my homework. I also liked the prizes.	I really wish we had more time to finish and the pace was tiring.
Well, you had an extra challenge in doing wriitng.	Writer’s block and staying on topic.

Fanfiction...

This takes much more thought than I've got the time to give it right this instant, but I wanted to share this NaNoWriMo pep talk from Mercedes Lackey on the benefits of writing fanfiction.  It's usually a knee-jerk rejected thing, but it's always been interesting to me as a writer (good place to experiment with character and dialogue and prose without getting bogged down in world-building), as an academic (communal writing, the-author-is-dead, textual ownership), and as a teacher. Four of my students did fan novel this year or last.  One has now written something like 200 pages of "Magical Starsign," a DS game, and the character development she's adding to this game and the description she's pouring into it are impressive, and I've definitely seen her confidence in her own writing grow, or so it seems.  She's putting out great work for any new writer, let alone a twelve-year-old writing in her second or third language, and is that really diminished because her jumping-off point was a video game?

NaNoWriMo Pep Talk

At the end of the month...

My word count: 51,788

My Bellevue class's total word count (23 students): 102,557

My Seattle class's total word count (8 students): 29,102 

Total Northwest-Chinese School Related Noveling In November of 2010: 183,447 words of novel rough drafts. 

WHEE!!!

Three NaNoWriMey tricks...

I've been so bad about posting!  Mostly because I've been terribly behind on my own wordcount, heh, and now I'm down with the flu to boot. However, after a marathon session during a very quiet night shift (almost 8000 words in seven hours), I'm all caught up.

I have two lesson plans to share that I'll get up tomorrow after I've reflected on them a bit.  But I wanted to share three tricks that have been immensely helpful to me over the last few days as I've struggled to catch up to my story.

1) Read a good book.
   I know, I know.  Thoroughly counter-intuitive.  This is Novel WRITING Month, not Reading.  Sure, most of us are dedicated fans of some form of literature or another, and especially those who do NaNoWriMo, and/or teach it, must be pretty dedicated to Story with a capital S or they wouldn't be intrigued by this little adventure in creative masochism.  But I'm a big believer in the idea that your output is only ever going to be as good as your input.  Over the last two days, as I've surged back from a big hole in my wordcount and gotten the story to a place where I feel much more confident about my ability to write all the way to the end, I've also been doing more reading.  Not a lot, not the curl-under-the-covers-for-three-hours kind of reading.  But I have Robin Mckinley's Dragonhaven and Connie Willis' Passage, both books I love that have significant narrative and thematic connections to my story, sitting next to my computer.  And every thousand words, if I want to, I'll take a fifteen minute break and just read a little.  I'm always more energized and more full of words when I come back.

2) Write the good stuff first.
   I want to stress that this works FOR ME.  For many people, almost all NaNoWriMoers, it doesn't.  The idea of NaNoWriMo is that, as the King says in Alice In Wonderland, "Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end, then stop." And in previous years I've done that, with mixed results.  It's too early to say what my results are now, but I've already written the last 200 or so words of the book, as well as a few choice bits of dialogue from an important scene near the end and I've written the actual moment of the climax (as in, the moment the Ring falls into Mount Doom kind of thing, nothing before or after.) I have these in white text so I don't see them, but they're there, at the end of my document, adding to my wordcount and giving me something very clear to shoot for.  This also means that when I'm -- inevitably -- scrambling to get to the end at 11:00 on my last day, I'll hopefully feel a little less tragic about how I can't remember what exactly my protagonist was going to say or what that brilliant metaphor was that I know I had, because that text is already there, written in the (relative) calm of late Week 3, just waiting for me to highlight it and turn it visible again.  Which brings me to the third thing that's been working for me...

3) Hide your text.
I'm a pretty decent touch-typer, and so if you're the hunt-and-peck type, this might not work for you, although nothing says you can't keep your eyes on the keyboard.  I was trying to get some words in last weekend during a long bus ride back from Bellevue, and, terribly paranoid about someone reading my poor deformed first draft of a novel over my shoulder, I pulled up a new document and changed the text color to ivory.  It showed up just enough on the page for me to know where to put my cursor; then I turned my eyes out the window, and proceeded to write about 1500 words that I could not see. This was GREAT for me. It was like Write Or Die (http://writeordie.drwicked.com) without the annoying sounds and panic.   My eyes, my mind, all of it were on the scene of the story unfolding inside my imagination, and my fingers were just doing the necessary transcription work.  No spellchecking, no grammar fretting, no rereading, no going back to add a better adjective or vary dialogue tags. At the end of my bus ride, I highlighted the whole thing, changed the text to black, and scrupulously saved. Day's wordcount all but done in forty minutes, and I felt good about it too.  Of course it was riddled with typos and little red lines and it still wasn't the flawless recreation of the scene in my head I wanted -- but it's NaNoWriMo.  And the text was THERE.

Now me and my flu -- and my novel -- are going back to bed.  And to end on a joyous note, emails have been pouring in from my weekend students as they finish their novels.  You guys unquestionably and definitively rock. Soon I'll have so much to read!

On Books That Are Short

Two weeks ago, working my way through a gift certificate to a used bookstore on University Way (Twice Sold Tales), I picked up all five of Lloyd Alexander's "Prydain Chronicles":  The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, & The High King.


I read these in the third or fourth grade and remember adoring them, though I didn't get, at the time, any of the references to Welsh legends (many characters are covert homages or open imports from Welsh mythology) or many of the archetypes at work in general.  This was the first fantasy epic I remember reading, even though "epic" might seem a strong word for a series with no installment over 300 pages, especially in the age of Harry Potter.  Before rereading them this past week, my strongest memories of this series were the completely awesome bard with the polygraphic harp (it breaks every time he exaggerates, and he exaggerates, as one would expect of a storyteller, all the time) and the fact that one of the chapters in the first installment ends with the bonechilling line "Before Taran could reach for his sword, the animal sprang."  Because I'm a loving older sister, I stopped the book THERE for the night when I was reading it to my six year old brother.  I'm pretty sure I also hissed "The animal sprang!" at him periodically throughout the next two or three days before finally relenting and reading him the next bit in the story.  Miraculously, we're still talking to each other as adults.

Going over them this time, I appreciated an element that I missed entirely the first time around.  These are books filled with archetypes, not to say stereotypes: the callow farm boy with dreams of shining armor and gallant charges, the slightly airheaded rebellious princess whom he hates on sight and who's clearly destined for him, the strong, silent warrior, doubtless older than he looks, who lingers on the sidelines of his quests to mentor, reprimand and generally save his rear end when required.  There's even a sort-of-animal sidekick in Gurgi, whose catchphrase "Crunching and munchings?", as delivered by my fifth grade teacher, could send us all into stitches.

The story is more predictable and the language simpler than a lot of what's exploded into Young Adult Lit over the past ten years, especially in the fantasy department.  But I was still giggling at snarky exchanges and weeping at the finale, and it's because there's an economy of expression in these books that's been almost abolished from modern literature.  I'm much more of a Les Miserables than a The Old Man and the Sea reader myself; I appreciate those big sprawling stories that you can lose yourself in for days, make into four-hour-long movies, and, in a pinch, use as a footstool to reach the top shelf.  By thirty pages into The Book of Three, the first installment, we've already introduced our hero, established his main predicament, removed him from his comfortable, if boring, home and plunged him headlong into danger accompanied by a heroic mentor whose own mission lies parallel to the hero's and will be compromised if he turns aside to help.  Just for comparison's sake, this takes Tolkien about a sixth of The Lord of the Rings.

(For the record, this is comparing apples and oranges. I have actually written papers arguing that the entire structure of Tolkien's epic falls apart if you don't pay attention to those interminable first chapters that introduce the Shire, establish the Hobbit friendships and take our four diminutive heroes through a sort of Basic Training.  But Alexander certainly gets the job done faster.)

The thing is, while moving the plot at such a rapid pace, Alexander isn't sacrificing character development or world-building; he's just doing it in clear, broad strokes, letting the reader's imagination do a lot.  He's not using ten words where two will do.  And he's taking advantage of the fact that his audience, children and young teenagers, are storytellers at their core and will create the story's world with only minimal input from him. The language is spare and the emotions of the characters are put out bluntly, but the story unfolded in my mind as vividly as any other.  Maybe even more so!

There's a number of shorter young adult series and trilogies that I read in my childhood which I'd like to see enjoy some of the benefits of the explosion of the genre:  Ursula K. Leguin's Earthsea trilogy, for one, and John Christopher's The White Mountains and its sequels.   Some of the tomes my students have read last year and this year didn't actually seem to have enough story to justify their great weight of words.  And especially this month, with my students (and me!) frantically throwing pages at our wordcount goals, I'm thinking about the importance of a good story at the core.

Lloyd Alexander's shorter books not be much more than 50,000 words.  But every word is a crucial part of the story he's telling.  Just something to think about.

And now, back to my own word count -- far behind where I should be today! Time for Write Or Die!

My favorite dare

I've been signing into and off of the Young Writers' Program website the last few days as only a expert procrastinator can do (and this despite the fact that I have the kind of schedule this week that, for example, just now I got out of bed and will not have an opportunity to get back INTO bed or indeed enter my house at all until 33 hours from now), and so every time I see the welcome page the Dare Machine challenges me to new heights of absurdity.

Many of the dares are random and relatively silly, though definitely a good trick to get you jumpstarted if you're stuck.  One of them, however, has come up a few times and I really like it:

"We dare you to devote a chapter to your villain's morning routine."

Unless you're writing a first-person narration where this kind of information would be EXTREMELY tricky to wedge in, I think this is an awesome idea. (And even in a first-person narration, I imagine you could have someone give them the information for some plausible reason.)   I've been doing it for my villain as a prewriting exercise.  If you're writing a modern-day story with an antagonist in the form of a sibling, classmate or mean adult, this exercise will help you keep them human in your mind's eye.  How much can you REALLY hate someone who's still using Winnie the Pooh toothpaste, after all?

And if you're writing a sweeping fantasy epic, the morning routine can be either a great chance for lightness and humor (Xokor, Lord of a Thousand Hells, squinted into the obsidian mirror and frowned.  There was no doubt about it.  His hairline was definitely receding.  He'd need to order AT LEAST four executions before he'd feel better about this.)  or a chance to infuse more horror and terror into the situation by showing that the villain is even more powerful, evil, or heartless than your heroes thought.  Maybe his morning routine involves killing the servant who brought him his breakfast, just because.  Maybe his morning routine involves looking in his crystal ball -- where he can see and hear EXACTLY what the heroes are up to.  

Happy writing!

Just to say...

....so many of my students have great friend groups in their stories with tight relationships and sudden betrayals, at least according to their plot outlines.   This makes me happy for two reasons:

1. It confirms my sense that young adult literature in general is becoming more and more peer-group focused, or perhaps this is something that's always been great about YA lit, come to think of it, as things like 'The Book of Three" and "The White Mountains" and even "Redwall," come to mind. I haven't read "The Hunger Games" yet, but the summary of that one as given me by one of my tutees was that, while there's a principal romance at work in the stories, the book itself is at least as concerned with the main character and her friends, not just the boy she loves.  And since I think solid friend groups and "fellowships" are both more interesting to read and harder to write well than straight romance, I like this trend.

2. *I* get to read all these stories! And I LOVE friendships, fellowships and and gasp-oh-no-what-now?! betrayals!  Whee!

On Variety

One of my classes is already noveling.  The next class starts next weekend.  The rest of the insane noveling world starts in two weeks, on November 1st. I'm doing my own novel in pace with my second class, which means my 50,000 words need to happen between Saturday, October 23rd and Saturday, November 20th. (Not even a full month!)  And, just like (I hope) my students, I am filled with equal parts excitement and terror.  This is my third year doing NaNoWriMo, and while I've always "won" by hitting my required word count, I've never come CLOSE to the end of the story.  This year, with a tighter plot than usual and a modern-day setting so I won't need to spend so much time world-building, I'm hoping it actually happens.

In what is perhaps slightly inimical to the  spirit of NaNoWriMo, I'm doing some prewriting today, as my students did last week. I appreciate the thrill of setting forth on November 1st, or whenever you start, without so much as a chart, a compass, or even a back-up keg of drinking water on your metaphorical novelling boat. But for me, at least, it's never worked.  I posted a list of prewriting exercises in the previous post on NaNoWriMo lesson plans, and I'm sitting and grading my way now through a big pile of them.  And it's absolutely thrilling, the fantasies and the mysteries and the slice-of-life novels and the romances and all the rest of it that my students are hopefully writing right now.

The really interesting thing is the combination of similarity and variety.  I've come across three or four "young teenager goes to a fantasy world and has a quest" plots, for example.  Hey, it's a tried-and-true formula for everyone from C.S. Lewis to Neil Gaiman.  And yet, even just in utero, I can see differences in character, in tone, and certainly in events that are going to make each of these novels completely its own.  Last NaNo, one of my close friends and I retold the same fairy tale.  We've known each other over ten years, lived together for four years before her marriage, read, watch and listen to much of the same media, and even got our English degrees at the same college, so it'd be hard to find two people more likely to write similar stories.  There is NOTHING beyond the bare bones of the story similar between her book and mine. (Hers is closer to finished, for one thing.)

It's such a cliche, but everyone really does have their own story to write, and that book will never exist if they don't write it.

And now I'm off to finish grading and then do MY homework -- namely, my plot rollercoaster and my annotated NaNo playlist!

Let's start at the very beginning...

Or, you know, not.  However you want to start your novel.

A few handouts on ways to begin a novel, courtesy of Orson Scott Card's "How To Write Fantasy & Science Fiction" and the NaNoWriMo middle school workbook: Available here.



Also, first class started their  novels today, hooray!  I started grading some of their prewriting exercises on the way home on the bus.  Lots of great characters and exciting plots.  If you're reading this, think good thoughts for them!

Getting things started

I teach two sections of English Enrichment, grades 6-8, at the Northwest Chinese School. (nwchinese.org). This is a great independent enrichment school that offers kids the opportunity to learn Mandarin (both speaking and writing) as well as pursuing other extracurriculars, from math and writing enrichment classes to Chinese culture courses, SAT prep and traditional music.


I'm beginning this blog just a few days before my first weekend class (a week ahead of the other one) begins their National Novel Writing Month. Because of the difficulties of school-scheduled midterms and Thanksgiving break, I'm shifting our calendar forward a bit from the official month of November. It takes something away from the excitement of it to not begin with a new month, but I think the importance of having a class-wide kickoff and a class-wide ending are worth the sacrifice of a calendar page.


My plan for this blog is pretty straightforward: I want to exercise my own mind as a teacher and a student, remaining constantly reflective about what I'm teaching, how I'm teaching, and why. Since it's only a few times a week that I get a chance to truly teach, I need to keep my skills sharp and my analysis of those skills accurate.


I also want to post my own lesson plans and a brief take on how they worked out. I've been both helped and disappointed by what's available in the way of inspiration, instruction and even grammar worksheets on the Internet, especially for free. If you're a teacher and you see something you like, please – take, use, and tell me how it worked with your students!


On the sidebar you'll see a list of the resources I use most commonly. Some of them I highly recommend having your students buy, if you've got the resources, or keeping on the reference shelf if you're lucky enough to have your own classroom. Others, like “Playwriting” and “Fantasy & Science Fiction,” are just useful as comprehensible, user-friendly manuals on elements of fiction and creative writing.




Of all the stuff I've taught on NaNoWriMo, this is the lesson plan that's worked the best, and it also happens to be the one I taught last week. So check it out, and feel free to take it!