Dream Dream (oil) by Sophia Zhang, 12; published in Stone Soup March 2023 A note from Emma Wood Hello, readers! I am sitting in the attic of our house with the wind blowing so hard that it is shaking the whole structure. It’s a cold, blustery day, and yet it has been raining not snowing—so not that cold. It has been a strange winter here in coastal Connecticut, in the village where we are living for the year. I can count on one hand the number of times it has snowed. And I have been experiencing some climate grief (and not for the first time). Margot, my daughter, loves snow—it dominates her imaginative play—and yet she has barely gotten to play in it. As my husband said, “She’s young!” But (I countered) she is only two this winter, and this winter, she didn’t get snow in a place where you are supposed to get snow! The image I selected for the newsletter is spring-like, however, because my thoughts have been tending that way as April, Easter, and the spring equinox approach. Soon, we will put winter, and my sadness about the lack of snow this year, behind me and enjoy warmer weather, green grass, and flowers. One of the best things about becoming a parent, for me, has been how it renews the world: seasons, holidays, simple errands—all those things that had lost their luster are once again imbued with meaning and magic. This month, I encourage you to write about an event or an activity that was once special to you, but which you now take for granted. Can you write about it in a way that makes it strange and exciting once again? As for Stone Soup business! We have a number of announcements this week. Regarding our classes: For anyone interested in getting a taste of our writing workshop in advance of our spring series, we are offering free attendance to the makeup session of the Winter 2023 Workshop, taught by Conner Bassett, on April 1st at 11:00 a.m. Pacific time/2:00 p.m. Eastern time. You can sign up here. Our spring session is also now open for enrollment. You can purchase tickets here. We decided to cap enrollment at 20 students and to increase tuition accordingly. While we would love to work with as many students as possible, our instructor has found larger class sizes limit his ability to connect to his students and offer feedback. This was the reasoning behind our registration cap. And to make the change sustainable, we needed to increase tuition. Subscribers will now pay $22 per session and non-subscribers will pay $27.50. Please write to stonesoup@stonesoup.com with any questions or concerns. Regarding our book contest: Our 2023 Book Contest has officially launched! If you haven’t already started working on your manuscript, now is the time! If you’d like some help kickstarting the project, we encourage you to sign up for the Design a Novel workshop, run by our partner, Society of Young Inklings. Till next time, Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498.
writing workshop
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #58: Polysyndeton vs. Asyndeton
An update from our fifty-eighth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, March 4, plus some of the output published below This week, the workshop focused on polysyndeton and asyndeton. Conner began his presentation by introducing three examples of sentences that use polysyndeton, which translates to “many bound together” and is the technique of using conjunctions in a sentence instead of punctuation. We looked at examples of polysyndeton in texts, such as Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. Then, workshop participants wrote their own stories using polysyndeton and then we learned about asyndeton, which is a technique that is the opposite of polysyndeton. The sentence directly before this one uses polysyndeton. This one does not. In fact, it uses asyndeton. Asyndeton is the technique of using punctuation, such as commas and periods, in one’s sentences rather than conjunctions. Next, we took the excerpt from All the Pretty Horses and removed the conjunctions, separating it into sentences to employ asyndeton. The Challenge: Write your own story using polysyndeton, then revise it using asyndeton. The Participants: Anushka, Ava, Amaya, Emma, Sarah, Lucy, Samarina, Stella, Aarush, Catherine, Arjun, Yueling, Eliza, Katelyn Two Exercises in Polysyndeton Amaya Chugani, 9 Anger The rain hit my head or the sun gleamed on me and the rain fell on me or I loved and I was safe and I was happy and I told myself this was the perfect family and I hated her and him and her and him and I hated all of them and mom and not dad and not mom and I hated him and her and him and her for every reason. Hitting My Stone I was sitting by the river and the pebbles hit my feet and I could feel the stream and the wind and the cool stones and I move the stream with a twig and I can feel the water sloshing around my feet. And I laid back and I felt guilty again and smiled and was mad and I got back up and stared at the woods and felt the sun shining down and I felt happy and I could see the fish. And they were red and white and blue and yellow and red birds flew overhead and the hints of the sun’s golden rays speckled in my eyes and I leaned down at the river and I was hitting my stone with a twig all along.
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #54: Characterization
An update from our fifty-fourth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, February 4 This week, we discussed another fundamental building block of writing: characterization. Characterization is how a character is revealed through language, or the “‘dramatic’ methods writers use to imply the qualities of characters,” Conner explained. Indirect characterization is a way of describing a character according to what he or she does, and this is where we turned our focus today. We read three examples in literature, including Cathy’s first appearance in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, in which her manner of chewing meat with her front teeth is described and no mention of her physical appearance is made. Because most people begin with physical descriptions, it is more interesting to begin with behavioral descriptions when introducing a character, Conner advised. As a mini-challenge, Conner then gave students three adjectives—creepy, arrogant, and shy—and one minute to write one sentence for each in which they used indirect characterization to reveal a character who embodied that adjective. The Challenge: Write a “meet” scene (in which one character meets another character), focusing on the details that each character notices about the other. Think about action rather than how they look! The Participants: Anushka, Amaya, Samarina, Yueling, Emma, Katelyn, Ava, Aarush, Lindsay, Genevieve, Lucy, Jacey, Catherine, Stella
