I ran out on stage. All I could think about was dancing Illustrator Rachel Hellwig, 13, for her story Nutcracker Dreams. Published November/December 2002. A note from William Rubel Last Sunday I went to see the ballet The Sleeping Beauty with my daughter, Stella. I had never watched many ballets until Stella was eighteen months old. One morning, in a café, I thought, well, I have a daughter, what about looking up “ballet prince” in YouTube? What I found was the Prince Variation in the wedding scene in Sleeping Beauty’s last act. The Prince is dancing (showing off) for his now-betrothed, Princess Aurora. In this variation, the Prince dances in a circle with lots of leaps and twirls. It is an athletic tour-de-force and seemed to keep my then very young daughter reasonably engaged. So, I bought the DVD of The Sleeping Beauty and that was a real success—at least the scene in which the evil witch gives Sleep Beauty the spindle that will send her into her long sleep. Stella watched that scene over and over and over and over again. And then, she watched it again. I vividly recall her saying “again” and my re-playing the DVD. Over the years we have watched different version of The Sleeping Beauty which means in ballet terms that we have watched the same story with the same music interpreted with dance moves that are slightly different from each other. Seeing the San Francisco Ballet performance with yet another choreography brought to mind the many different ways that choreographers have handled the spindle scene my daughter loved so much as a young child. To remind you what happens in the story. At the very beginning, the King and Queen’s secretary makes a mistake and fails to invite the fairy Carabosse to their infant daughter’s christening. The secretary invites all of the other important fairies, but not Carabosse. When Carabosse shows up anyway, uninvited, she is in a foul mood. She arrives, dressed in black, with demon assistants. She is angry. Very. In ballet sign language she tells the King and Queen that she has come to give their daughter a present. The present is that on her 16th birthday she will prick herself with a spindle, and die. She will die! What a present to bring to a christening! In the ballet story there were twelve fairies invited to the party, and all but one of them had already given her gift before Carabosse gave hers. The one who hadn’t was the very powerful Lilac fairy. So, the Lilac fairy comes forward and tells the King and Queen that while she cannot completely undo the evil witch’s gift of death, she could change death to sleeping until a prince finds her and kisses her, at which point Aurora will wake up. Nolween Daniel as Carabosse with the Paris Opera Ballet. Jacques Demarthon/AFP/Getty Image. Well, you know what happens. However hard her parents tried to shield her from spindles, on her 16th birthday, at a grand dance, the evil witch appears, hands Aurora a spindle, she pricks herself, and collapses. She manages to rise again, but she is in a bad way. She continues dancing, but this time, her dance steps are erratic. In one of the most beautiful and moving scenes in all the ballet repertoire Aurora dances backwards with great speed, but as the poison spreads her backward movement becomes uneven, jerky, and then she collapses unconscious.The way most choreographers handle this scene is to have Aurora dancing erratically and the rest of the court looking on as passive observers. But there is one version in particular, the Sleeping Beauty that is danced by the Paris Opera Ballet, that is different. In their version, when Aurora is dancing strangely, all the people who are watching the dance sway back and forth in sympathy with her staggering back and forth. It is as if the whole world feels for her. I would urge you to watch this video of that particular dance. This weekend’s writing project Reflecting on Princess Aurora, here is this Saturday’s project. I want you to tell a story in which something bad happens to a main character. The character can be a person, a fairy, a sportsperson, a member of royalty, a farmer, a pet, even an object that you might care about—like a stuffed animal. I want you to decide whether the world at large feels your character’s pain, or not. Some years ago I had a friend, who died. He was a kind, brilliant, creative man: a musician, an artist, a poet, and a mathematician. His name was Gene Lewis. The night he died there was a terrific storm. On that night, I was driving back to Santa Cruz from San Francisco. The last twenty miles of that drive is over a winding mountain road. When I got to the base of the mountain, the storm was so bad that rather than drive over the mountains in the storm, I stayed at a motel waiting for the morning. It was during the height of this storm, when the earth went wild, that my friend died. If this were a story about a fictional character who was brilliant and beloved by all his or her friends, then writing the death scene with the world itself howling in protest—the world flailing its arms in the form of thrashing tree branches, and crying in the form of a deluge, you would be reinforcing the emotional sense of your character’s death. On the other hand, the turbulence might all be internal. You could describe a calm world: the cars still driving on the freeways, the night calm, apparently no different from so many other nights. Your character dies. The world doesn’t seem to blink. As always, if you really like what you’ve done, then please send it Emma via the Stone Soup Submissions page. Until Next WeekWilliam Thank you! I just want, briefly, to thank the 215 of you who subscribed to Stone Soup in January. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I like to keep
creative writing
Writing Process: Sounding the Key Word Outline
Years ago, when I was doing contract negotiations for a small advertising agency, the CFO gave me some good advice at the start. Always know what you’re talking about, she said. If you do, you’ll do fine. I’d never negotiated contracts before but nevertheless, was placed to work for their biggest client, JCPenney. I renewed our client’s media contracts with small circulars, monthly or weekly newspapers all over the U.S. I had to do a lot of talking. I had to know what I was talking about.Now, I teach my son to read and understand what he’s reading. It is a skill, to comprehend what is unfamiliar. More still, it takes a good grasp of this unfamiliar material to be able to speak about it with others, to share it with confidence. My son, like me, is starting to hone that instruction I was given on the job. Sounds like tired advice, but really, it is something we tend to overlook. In my previous post, I wrote about how young writers can use the reconstruction method into their writing process repertoire. I mentioned how in the homeschool, I give my son source material to create a keyword outline. This outline is what he uses to orally introduce his subject. He reads from the outline, summoning familiar information and details cued up from the outline. It is a rudimentary exercise, for my fifth grader, since he will produce a written work only after he can listen to himself present it in public speaking. When we write, we cannot hear the words, until they are vocalized. And this is when we are able to catch nuance, extraneous information that may not fit our written purpose. It develops over time, to know the material well enough to the point where an outline is only a guide, and not a script. He is getting closer and closer to learning this well. Aren’t we told as writers of the long form to read aloud our work anyway? The principle is the same and reveals much of may be left out or vice versa. One way to train the young writer to exercise confidence in their writing with the outline as a guide to speaking the material is to have your writer observe public speaking. My husband teaches Bible study at our church and my son will observe similarities between his father and his own practice at home. We are happy that the language arts curriculum my son uses has encouraged him to bolster his outlining performance, and I throw in the public speaking factor for good measure! After he’s confident about how the acquired knowledge of the material he’s learned sounds (whether he is writing about Peyton Manning, or writing a story based off three pictures in a series), then he can proceed to draft it, and dress it up with because and who/which clauses, adverbial clauses, strong verbs, quality adjectives, prepositions, and all other manner of mechanics, devoid of banned words. The benefits of sounding the key word outline as a precursor to writing a draft go transcend to other skills that will eventually grow writing, public speaking and reading comprehension.
Writing Activity: Stories about trust, truth and lying
The Mother’s Day Gift by Mathew Thompson, age 11, Dallas, Oregon
The Clay Pot by Naomi Wendland, age 12, Lusaka, Zambia
These two stories deal with the same problem: the tempation to lie to hide a mistake. The temptation to lie to cover up a mistake is a common one, and most people, at some point in their lives, give in to the temptation to pretend they haven’t done something that, in fact, they have.
