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motivation 1

Ten Ways to Motivate Reluctant Writers (Part One)

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If you have more than one student or more than one child in the household, you are familiar with motivation—or the lack of it. Some kids are self-starters and perfectionists who can drive you crazy. Others are barely motivated enough to crawl out of bed in the morning and drive you crazy in a different way.

When even posters fail . . .

And when it comes to that, there are different kinds of motivation—like that between a kid who balks at reading comprehension but can read every clue and meet every logistical challenge of Madden NFL.

Reluctant writers may be in a class by themselves and, to be perfectly honest, some kids always hated to write and always will. But unlike reluctant geometers or science experimenters, they still have to learn to write, and write well enough to be understood when written communication is necessary. These Ten Ways to Motivate won’t motivate permanently I’m afraid, but they may provide an avenue interesting enough to pursue to the end, and get a little writing practice in while they’re at it.

  • Family Newsletter. Not gonna lie—a monthly newsletter requires some commitment on the part of the editor (usually mom) to assign, compile and format the material. Back in 1984 we started with a handwritten two-page paper with a hand-drawn masthead. Eventually we moved to a two-column word-processor format printed on a dot-matrix printer (does anybody even remember those?). For many a month, when the printing date came in view, I inwardly groaned, “Is it that time again?” But, unlike some of my other homeschool ambitions, I kept up with this one for almost every month of the school year, right through to 1996. I won’t say it was always motivating to the kids, but I remember one time telling my son to revise a report that was going into the school paper. He sighed and said, “Well, okay. If it’s for the paper . . .” The circulation wasn’t wide—mostly grandmas—but the grandmas appreciated our monthly updates, and the grownup kids appreciate having a complete collection of their homeschool years.
  • Fan Letter. Has she read a book she just loves? Does he have a football or soccer idol? Encourage them to write a letter of appreciation, with certain guidelines. “You’re the greatest!” is not enough; the letter should include a little information about themselves specifics about what what’s so great about the recipient. (Wordsmith Craftsman, p. 16-17, provides guidelines and examples of fan letters anyone would love to receive.)
  • Dreaming on Paper. Assign a brief essay, 2-6 paragraphs depending on grade level, describing My Dream House, Dream Career, Dream Place to Live, or Dream Vacation. Provide guidelines about what sort of specifics they should include. And don’t call it an essay.
  • Get a pen pal. True, this won’t motivate everybody, and pen pals are not created equal in terms of frequency and interest, but a student who’s interested in other places and people may find this attractive. Google “International Pen Pals” for more information. Closer to home, a caring student may find it rewarding to exchange letters with quarantined seniors or nursing home residents; search “Pen Pals for Seniors.”
  • Letter to the Editor. If there’s an issue your student is concerned about, encourage a letter on the subject. Even though print newspapers have declined in influence and size, they all have an opinion section and most editors love to get letters from engaged young citizens. Here’s simple 3-paragraph format: 1) introduction with first name, age, and why you’re interested in this topic; 2) a clear statement of the problem; 3) suggested solution (even if it’s only to raise awareness). Chances are much better than average the letter will be printed, and won’t that be a thrill!

That’s only five, not ten. But it’s enough for one post. Watch for the remaining five next week!

fearless writer

Writing Fearlessly

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Two obstacles face a beginning writer: 1) what to say and 2) how to say it.

Every kid has at least 14 hours every day of everyday experience to write about; she just hasn’t learned to find the material in it. To be fair, even grownups haven’t learned that. Most of us charge through our days like navy cruisers, carving a path in waters that close behind us as if we’d never passed. We should be more like farmers, mindfully plowing furrows to be planted with memories, goals, and plans.

Or, to drop the metaphors, everybody has plenty of material in their own experience; we just need to teach ourselves to notice and cultivate it.

As for the other great obstacle, think about it: from kindergarten, or maybe even earlier, the typical language arts program bombards kids with rules about periods, commas, capital/lower case letters, parts of speech, subject/predicate, spelling words. Rules, rules rules! Some little rebels could care less (rules are for breaking). But others, perhaps most, start out wanting to please their parents and authority figures. Front-loading their language-arts study with a bunch of rules that may seem arbitrary and abstract may only serve to frustrate them.

Discarding the rules is not the answer. They need those punctuation flags and proper syntax to communicate effectively. But they have plenty of time to learn it. There’s no need to attack every mistake on every paper with your red pencil.

In Wordsmith, I encourage students to not worry about spelling or punctuating everything correctly, but to give it their best guess and focus on content. To that end, messy drafts should be encouraged. For example

  • Offer five minutes of extra screen time, up to 30 minutes, for each mistake they find and correct in a first draft. Granted, this can be tricky as they’ll make mistakes on purpose. But your eagle eye should be able to detect those purposeful ones (and besides, they have to know it’s a mistake in order to make it, so obviously they know something). To balance it out, take points off for each mistake they didn’t correct.
  • If you’re teaching students of similar age, give them each a red pencil and let them correct each other’s papers. Offer some reward (M&Ms or fruit snacks or quarters) for each legitimate mistake they find in the other guy’s paper. This refers to mechanical errors, like spelling and punctuation, not content.
  • For an art project, ask the student to design and make a poster with a letter-sized blank space in it. Under the caption, Nobody writes it right the first time, feature a “messy draft of the month” in the blank space.

These are ideas off the top of my head. A perceptive student may not need gimmicks to be persuaded, just your reassurance that mistakes are okay, and far preferable to sitting frozen over a blank page.

As for what kind of mistakes to look for, and how to go about fixing them—Wordsmith and the Teacher’s Guide to Wordsmith include extensive material on that subject, including handy checklists and examples of messy drafts..

possibility (2)

5 Answers to “What Should I Write About?”

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There she is, staring at the endless whiteness of a blank piece of paper (or the soulless stare of a blank screen). The blankness is to be filled with words and the words have to be relevant to a particular subject and make sense together. If this were a matter of re-statement, of putting in her own words the properties of noble gases or the causes of the Civil War, the task might be easier to tackle. But the assignment is some sort of personal essay and the subject is herself.

“I don’t have anything to write about!”

A World of possibilities out there!

Nonsense. Even a 12-year-old has plenty to write about, and what’s more, it’s interesting. That’s because 12-year-olds are people, and people are inherently interesting—once they learn to focus and relate. I have a lot more to say about that in Wordsmith, but for now, a prompt or two might get the content machine pumping. So here are five possible answers to the title question:

  • Write about the last argument you had with your brother or sister. Include direct quotes (with quotation marks) and facial expressions.
  • Write about how you felt going up that first long incline on the roller coaster (second by second!).
  • Write about the household chore you dislike most (or, the one you don’t mind so much).
  • Go outside and lie down in the grass for five minutes (assuming there’s grass to lie down on). Write about what you see, feel, hear, and smell.
  • Write about packing for your last family vacation.

Five possible answers. As you might gather, the possibilities are practically endless!

 

bad writing2

Adventures in Bad Writing #1: Limp-Wristed Description

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Wait a minute—where do I get off, wagging a finger at “bad writing”? Doesn’t everyone have a right to express herself however she sees fit? Isn’t that creativity?

In a word, no. But creativity is a wider subject than a single blogpost can take on. Examples of bad writing, on the other hand, are narrow and specific. They doesn’t necessarily imply a bad writer, much less a bad person. I plead guilty to plenty of bad writing, and not just in my earliest attempts. (I could show you plenty of examples from my first unpublished novel except that I trashed it years ago out of embarrassment.) Self-expression is one purpose of writing, but if your work doesn’t communicate to readers, you’ve only expressed yourself to yourself.

If you want to communicate to readers, there are better and worse ways to do it. One effective means of learning those better ways is to analyze bad writing and consider how to fix it.

So here’s an example of descriptive writing from a self-published novel:

It had hat shelves and coat racks along both sides. There were double doors leading into the sanctuary, which was plain but neat. There was a carpeted main aisle that ran from the doors to the altar. There were neat rows of oak pews on both sides of the aisle. Secondary aisles ran along both sides of the church between the pews and the windows. On the raised platform in front, there was an altar, a lectern, and behind that were two rows of chairs for the choir. There was a fairly new piano on the left side of the platform . . .

And so on. Do you find this description tedious, or even tiresome? Could it move a little faster? Do we need so much of it? Unless something significant is going to happen within those aisles or between those pews (and soon!), the picture could be sketched out much more efficiently with careful attention to word choice and sentence structure.

This writer would have benefitted from a short course in Wordsmith! I’m not bragging—Part Two tackles head-on the “it has” and “there was” trap, and suggests a helpful formula for avoiding such lazy sentence openers. Without going into the formula (read the book!) let’s energize the two very weak sentences at the beginning:

It had hat shelves and coat racks along both sides.

“It has” makes grammatical sense, but does not pull a reader into the scene. The two words just lie there at the beginning of the paragraph (You can come in. If you want to. Or stay outside. Whatevs.). Also, “It had hat . . .” presents us with two very similar words that sound almost alike when read out loud. A listener would be confused and a reader has to work at visualizing a hat shelf instead of a typo. To make this sentence stand up and briskly beckon us into the scene, let’s do some reshuffling:

Hat shelves and coat racks lined the walls of the vestibule.

Not necessarily exciting, but swift and positive. This brief sentence ushers the reader not just into a four-walled space, but a particular kind of space: a vestibule, or, for an especially churchy feel, a narthex. Moving on:

There were double doors leading into the sanctuary, which was plain but neat.

(Yawn.) Come on, description! A really easy fix is staring you right in the face, so hop to it.

Double doors led into the sanctuary . . .

“Plain but neat” is okay; I kinda get the picture, but could we be a little more specific? From the beginning:

Hat shelves and coat racks lined the walls of the vestibule. Double doors led into the sanctuary, where light streaming from the unadorned windows fell upon orderly rows of oak pews.

And just like that, we’re in. Skip the secondary aisles, go straight to the pulpit, dwell on other details—which are common to most churches—only as they pertain to the plot. A single sentence will encompass everything else that matters, for example:

The red-carpeted center aisle ended in three steps rising to the marble-topped altar, framed by a gleaming grand piano on the right, a lectern on the left, and a choir loft behind.

I might work on that a little more: is the sentence too long? Do I want two hyphenated adjectives so close together? But at least I have something to work with, rather than a pale recital of a picture that most churchgoers already know.

And the adventure continues . . . .

Star Cage

True Originals

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As a teenager I used to frequent the Dallas Art Museum. One particular exhibit was a by the sculptor David Smith whose name I had long forgotten until I looked it up a few weeks ago. I was able to look it up because I remember the title of the work that made the greatest impression on me: “Star Cage.”  Welded steel rods captured small metal clusters representing the constellations of the night sky. The sculpture balanced on a pedestal resembling a traffic cone (which is probably what it was supposed to represent, given the sculptor’s engineering background).  “I could have done that,” was my first thought. Immediately followed by, “Yes, but could you have thought of it?”

“Star Cage” by David Smith – Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota

All the arts begin with thinking. Dorothy Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker, calls this the Idea: that germ of an impression or image that darts into your mind. Often it darts right out again, but sometimes it sticks and gathers possibility dust until you think, I could do something with that. This is the artistic imagination: to “do something” with the found objects in your world. But you don’t have to be a capital-A Artist to think this way. I trained myself to think this way while becoming a writer, because writers always need material. Fortunately, material is lying all around you—much more than you can use, once you’ve taught yourself to notice it.

(Pssst—that’s what Wordsmith, Part Three, is all about.)

Beginning writers, animators, cartoonists, songwriters, etc. typically exhibit two weaknesses that turn out to be the same. One, their art is derivative. Two, they try to be original.

The derivative part is not illegitimate, since all art is imitation (didn’t Aristotle say that?). We all tend to copy each other, and if we didn’t our work might be so far out there it couldn’t find an audience. But trying to be original usually results in ignoring what’s right under your nose in order to construct some sort of new reality . . . which ends up becoming a copy of somebody else’s new reality, like . . .

  • A boy with a mysterious mark and profound destiny.
  • A girl with warrior instincts competing in a contest to the death.
  • A mortal and a supernatural being who fall in love.

High-concept plots that require intense world-building are beyond the reach of most of us, and by striving for a new world you will most like fall into the patterns of those who Did It First. The path to true originality is learning taking notice of yourself and what’s around you. Because, even though all humans share a tremendous amount of common experiences and emotions—otherwise we wouldn’t be able to communicate at all—each of us also possesses a unique perspective that’s at a slightly different angle from anyone else.

Don’t start from the perspective of your favorite author or film director. Start from you.

What makes the poetry of Nadim Shamma-Sourgen so striking is not that he’s one of the youngest writers, at four years old, to ever sign a book deal. It’s that because he’s four years old he has no other perspective than his own from which to notice things. And he notices—that’s pretty unusual, even for a 40-year-old. Life seems to pour past us and through us too quickly for us to pause and observe. Details, both small and significant, make so many demands on our time there’s none left for paying attention. You have to make the time: for example, deliberately set aside half an hour to write an observation in your journal or tuck a notebook in your pocket for quick takes.

Nadim can’t write yet. When he has a thought, or a poem sprouts in his head, he dictates it to his mother. She probably helps him to shape his poetry, but he’s the one with eyes to see and a rapidly-developing brain to make connections in his little world. We all have our little worlds and our peculiar connections that, in the rush of daily events, don’t seem all that special. But somewhere in their worlds David Smith conceived of trapping stars in a steel-rod cage,* and Nadim Shamma-Sourgen saw home as a place where you don’t have to be brave.

What do you see in your world?

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*Here’s more about Star Cage from the collection catalog.

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