Can a boy dancer be cool? Yes he can! And yet Alex, the main character in “Standing Alone,” is teased mercilessly by his classmates because he likes to dance. They call him “ballerina,” even though he actually does contemporary dance, not ballet. They make his life miserable every chance they get. Nobody likes to be made fun of. Nobody likes to be bullied. Everybody wants to be liked and appreciated. In our modern world, we think of ourselves as open-minded. Boys and girls can follow their dreams, no matter what they are. But some stereotypes persist from the past, like the one that says it’s unmanly for a boy to be interested in dance. It’s important to look at those stereotypes and see how wrong they are, how much they hurt people. Then maybe we can get rid of them and become better people. Eleven-year-old author Erin Trefny helps us do just that in “Standing Alone,” the featured story from our May/June 2014 issue. She shows us the world through Alex’s eyes – his love of dance, the cruelty of his classmates, how he deals with his problem. Some of the best stories we receive are stories in which the author is writing about his or her own experiences. In Erin’s case, though, she is a girl writing from the viewpoint of a boy. How does she do it? Maybe she knows a boy like Alex, or maybe she is really good at using her imagination and observations to put herself in someone else’s shoes (or bare feet, in Alex’s case!). Whatever her secret, Erin has created a believable character. She has placed him in a story that holds our interest from start to finish. The story teaches us an important lesson, not by telling but by showing. Read Erin’s story twice, then read it again. Each time you will notice more little details and bits of dialogue that make the people and places come to life. Most of all, notice how Erin shows us, through her well-crafted story, that it is wrong to tease, wrong to bully, and wrong to stereotype.
creative writing
Everybody Is Different: Varied Characters Make For Believable Characters
No two people are alike. For that matter, no two animals are alike either! One mark of a great story is believable characters, each with his or her own distinct personality and habits. Author Kaley Birchfield is only eleven years old. Her story, “A Home for Barney” (the featured story from our March/April 2014 issue), is only six pages long. Somehow, in those six short pages, Kaley manages to bring to life a whole host of human and animal characters. How does she do it? There’s the narrator, Christy, a young woman who works at a goat farm. From the first sentence, we see that Christy loves nature. As the story goes on, we learn that she is emotional, loving, and a bit of a worrier. Christy’s co-worker, Marla, seems kind of slow at first. Little by little, we see that, while Marla may not say much, she is wise, and she feels things deeply. Their boss, Jenny, is a take charge kind of person, full of confidence. But she has a soft side and feels sad, like Christy does, when Barney the goat has to leave. Then there’s Barney and another goat, Mocha. They couldn’t be more different from each other. Barney is gentle, calm, and affectionate. Mocha is unfriendly and moody. Even the family that arrives at the end of the story has well-drawn characters, especially the bubbly, impulsive youngest sister, Autumn. It would be boring if Kaley simply listed each character’s distinguishing qualities. Instead, she shows us what each character is like through their words, actions, gestures, and speech. Marla seems unemotional, but the goodbye hug she gives Christy speaks volumes. Christy’s emotions are up and down as she and Barney are separated and reunited more than once. At different times Christy’s shoulders sag, she can’t sleep, she has a lump in her throat. She is overjoyed when Barney runs up to her after their separations. When Autumn realizes how sad Christy is to lose Barney, she blurts out her family’s address and tells Christy to come visit. Why do we write stories? Why do we read them? You can probably think of many answers to these questions. Maybe we like to leave our own lives for a little while and lose ourselves in the lives of others. Maybe we have feelings of sadness that we can’t express, and a sad story helps us tap into our own feelings and get them out. And no matter how young or how old we are, we can always learn. We can learn how to be better people, more loving toward each other and our pets, more understanding, better able to cope with loss and change. But before we can get all these benefits from a story, we must believe in it. We must believe that the characters are real.
Talent Is Overrated: Teaching the Three Rs of Great Writers
When we think of writers who have left their names etched in history, such as Robert Frost or J.K. Rowling, two words that come to mind are talented, unique, and we lift them up on a pedestal of literary greatness. We set them apart as endowed with a gift for fashioning one-of-a-kind creations. But this idea is a myth, one that has ruined students of writing for years, including me. In reality good writers have no greater knack than the average person. What they do have is the wherewithal to work hard. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn this lesson until late in life, and since I was never labeled as talented, I always criticized my work as lacking that mysterious gift of distinction. This hindered my writing or made me avoid it altogether. But when I started homeschooling my children, I didn’t want the talent myth to hurt their relationship with writing as it did me. It is a relationship after all, whether you like it, love it, deal with it, fear it, or avoid it. Of course, I wanted my kids to have a positive interaction with writing, so I knew I needed the right approach. That tactic is to teach them what all good writers do: revise, read, and reap from others. It’s believed that Hemingway revised the final chapter of A Farewell to Arms 39 times. Now I’m not suggesting I had my eight year old revise her snowman story even close to that amount. I’m not Mommy Dearest. The fact remains, however, that proficient writers don’t quit after their first drafts. They revise, revise, and revise again, so I knew I had to teach my children this habit right at the beginning. For their very first writing projects of the year, I focused on revising. The first thing I had them do with their initial drafts, though, was tuck them away in their folders, not to look at them again (at least for a few days). In the meantime, we read a few stories and articles done by professional and child authors, especially children within a few years of their ages. Many homeschool writing curriculums include step-by-step samples of children’s writings along with the revised versions, so I used a few of these along with a sample from one of their favorite authors. We looked at the before and after versions, discussing what we liked and didn’t like about the samples, what we might have done differently and why. I topped this all off with a cute video of two elementary school kids teaching about revising. The video was a hit, and in the end, they were anxious to get back to work on their own pieces, frequently asking to do so. I firmly believe that stepping away from their drafts for a while was an important aspect. It not only gave them a break but it allowed them to return to their work with fresh eyes, so they could better see where improvements could be made. We now always take at least a few days, no more than a week, hiatus between first drafts and revising for each writing project. Showing my kids the powerful effects of revising has had a positive influence on them. I agree with Stephen King, who writes, “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” Good writers read for entertainment, yes, but they also read to reap skills from other writers. After all, authors use most of the same techniques; they just use them in different ways to make their ideas meaningful and to suit their purposes. I try to teach these same skills to my children through what I call focused reading. During this time, which is often our hiatus from a writing project, we read passages that model a particular skill that I’ve pre-chosen. For example, one time they wrote a description of something that was special to them (a toy, friend, family member). I also wrote my own description. Then we read a paragraph from The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, which provides wonderful physical depictions using similes. We talked briefly about what made them interesting, and using my example first, worked together replacing one of my descriptions with a simile. They then practiced the technique with their own descriptions. Again, we usually read from a variety of sources including works done by other children. It’s only a matter of finding a piece that is representative of the skill I want to teach—a topic more deeply discussed in a future post. I would be careless if I didn’t mention that I keep focused reading separate from reading for pleasure. If every time they read turns into a lesson, they will find it burdensome and may become reluctant to read. Needless to say, I provide plenty of opportunities for free reading as well. I have no doubt they are still learning then, too. In helping my kids practice the three Rs, they will not only become proficient writers, they will also learn that their favorite authors are not much different from them, that there’s no special gift of writing bestowed on a few, no mystery to it. There are only techniques and tools they can use to create whatever inspires them.
