Writing Instruction Resources for Sale Online...

You can find some ready-to-use, skills-focused writing exercises, whether you're a teacher or a student, on my new online "storefront," sponsored by TeachersPayTeachers.com. Go to: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Susan-Lipson

And please let me know if you or your students use my handouts to write something worth sharing here, on my blog! I'll be happy to consider posting your work if I inspired and guided it with one of my online resources.

RECIPE FOR WELL-BAKED WRITING!

Ingredients:

5 cups of fully visualized CHARACTERS--avoid the pre-packaged “Trite” types

1 generous pinch of CONFLICT baking powder, to enable ingredients to blend and stick together

2 cups of PLOT broth, the more fluid, the better, for the smoothest batter (add ¾ cup of SUBPLOT broth to enrich flavor)

4 cups of SETTING, or settings, depending on quantity of Good Writing desired--use the “Multi-sensory” brand

1 cup of sifted THEME yeast, to make story rise to a higher level--mix in gradually

8 heaping Tablespoons of VIVID VERBS--the “Active” brand (Avoid using fatty “Passive” products of the “to be” variety,including: am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been, has, have, do, does, did, go, goes, went

8 heaping Tablespoons of COLORFUL ADJECTIVES--the “Showing” brand--never use adjectives manufactured by “Opinions, Inc.” or
the “Vague Co.”

10 Tablespoons of DIALOGUE--fresh, not frozen or stale--and you may substitute for nonfiction recipes 6 teaspoons of QUOTATIONS, depending on taste

10 teaspoons of SMOOTH TRANSITIONS (connective words and phrases--without any lumps or excessive and’s or then’s

20 teaspoons of PROPER PUNCTUATION--to improve flow and texture

3 cups of mixed FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE spices, according to taste, of the following varieties: similes, metaphors, irony,
hyperbole, personification

2 cups of “Proofreader’s” icing
_____________________________________________


Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix first 5 ingredients ahead of time--the order of mixing is your preference--and allow to marinate before adding other ingredients.

Add to the pre-mixed batter the remaining ingredients, sifting out any of the non-recommended brands before blending. The batter may be difficult to stir at first, even after removal of undesirable ingredients, but earnest strokes, additions and deletions, will achieve the best consistency. Taste the batter, and ask a person with good taste buds to taste the batter, before you bake. Stir further, as needed or recommended by respectable taster.

Bake fully (no half-baked literary loafs, please!) until golden, at 375 degrees. Once cooled, spread onto loaf the “Proofreader’s” brand of icing, then have an assistant spread a second coat of “Proofreader’s” to achieve maximum glossiness.

SHARE AND ENJOY!

Recorded Raindrops Drumming in a Gutter: A Poetry Prompt that My Students Loved

After a downpour of rain during a group lesson, I walked my students out the door and noticed sounds emanating from our rain gutter--the sounds of a raindrop percussion section. I'm not exaggerating; the beats sounded like a jazz drummer playing in a nearby studio. I ran and got my phone so that I could record the rain's "gutteral" music. The recording awed my musician son who thought I must have doctored the recording to make it sound so much like a drummer. I decided that the recording would make a great writing prompt for my students (ages 10-13), who would listen to the music and write metaphorical poems about it.

Once they had listened twice to the recording, I provided metaphorical models to help them get started. I read them my own poem about fluffy clouds as "mashed potatoes on blue gravy,/ stirred by wind"("Cumulus Potatoes"), as well as a poem by Frederick Morgan, "The Busses," in which yellow school buses stopping from house to house on a rainy street become "a stream/ dark and serene in China,/ down which sleek goldfish dart and gleam." Then I told them to start writing. Here are some of the amazing results I got today (so proud of my students!):

The Gods' Party
by A.Y., age 11

The gods must have had a party with tap-dancers that whirled about in the heavens,
A drummer stood nearby pounding out a fierce beat,
The sweat of the dancers and the drummer poured down onto the Earth,
Tapping out a beat just like the beat of the dancers and drummers,
As night fell, the gods partied harder and harder and harder,
The dancers danced faster and faster and faster as the gods partied,
The sweat of the dancers poured down faster and faster,
The sweat pounded harder and faster,
Creating a fantastic beat on the metal tube.




Man of Raindrops
By D.S., age 10

Walking home,
a rainy night,
running from awning to awning
Then
I hear distant drums,
somebody
out here
tapping out a rhythm
No one is here,
but still
somewhere
a drum beats on
I run
to another dry spot
here
the sound is louder,
beckoning,
beckoning for me to come closer
metallic ringing notes
I turn
and see
in the sheets of rain
a shimmering drummer
He walks to me,
then disappears into
the gutter.
I realize that
he, a raindrop, is the one
speaking to me
through his music.




Dancing in the Gutter
By K.G., age 11
(This poem is supposed to be indented to form a raindrop, but Blogger wouldn't allow me to paste it that way!)

My
tap dance shoes
On the cold, metal tube
Tappity-tap-tap, tappity-tap
Tap tap tappity-tap, my watery feet
Coming down to the ground, to create
A beautiful rhythm, tappity-tap-tap
Tappity-tap, the last beat comes out
loud and quick, as I strike my
finishing pose, TAP



Nature’s Drummer
by B.C., age 13

Nature’s drummer
Plays with a steady beat
Ts
ts tss
ts tss
His drumsticks rain down
On his hi-hats
With perfect rhythm
And they start to get faster
Ts ts ts
Ts ts ts
Ts ts ts
But suddenly
The sound starts to mumble
Plob plob plob
The gutter is now full.

Former mountains

Sand as crumbled mountains...a cyclical perspective...
See the blog post below, titled "Aim To Change the Way Your Reader Sees the World."

Aim To Change the Way Your Reader Sees the World

Do you want a goal for laboring over word choices, to justify the time it takes to come up with that perfect description? How about aiming to change the way your reader sees the world in some small way? Now that may sound like a lofty goal, maybe even overdramatic to you; however, I achieved that goal during a private lesson the other day, according to my 8th-grade student, B.

I opened my lesson by explaining to B that "literal language says just what it means, nothing more; whereas figurative language means more than what it says." She smiled and replied, "Huh...I never thought of it that way, but you're right."

Then I presented some examples of figurative imagery. First I asked her to read this sentence aloud:


The sand is like crumbled mountains, dissolved by lapping waves.


I asked, "If you read that sentence without the simile, you have a literal description of sand being lapped by waves, right?" She read it softly to herself and nodded. "And if you substitute the simile 'like coarse brown sugar' for the crumbled mountains simile, how would the sentence change?"

She wrinkled her brow. "Hmm. Well, it would describe what the sand looked like. But it's not as good as the first simile."

"Why not? It's a sweeter image, right?"

She chuckled. "Yes. But it's not as descriptive as 'crumbled mountains.' It only says what the sand looks like, but not what it's...what it's LIKE."

I prompted her further: "Okay, elaborate on that. What else, besides how the sand looks, does the image of crumbled mountains suggest to you?"

Her eyes lit up. "Time passing! It takes a long time for mountains to crumble." I was still nodding happily as she added, "Erosion!"

"Yes, yes! So it makes you think of sand a-a-as..." I led her with my rising tone.

"As pieces of mountains, not just...sand."

"Yes!" I then gave her a short metaphorical poem I wrote as an expansion of the same image. "Here. Now read this poem, please. 'The Sands of Time.'"

She read it aloud:


SANDS OF TIME

Former mountain fortresses,
eroded by the sea:
the children now rebuild your grains
into tiny castles,
still threatened by the tides of change.


"Ooh, I like that," she murmured.

"From fortresses to tiny castles, eh?" I asked, smiling.

"Yeah. I never would have thought of that. That's really cool."

I was beaming, I'm sure. "Thank you. I'm glad you like it. Okay, so how does figurative language affect a reader's perception of a scene?"

She explained, "It makes me see a new perspective, something I might not see it on my own." She paused. "Like, I'll never look at the sand at the beach the same way after reading your poem."

"You've just summed up the very reason I write, B! So that I can change the way people see the world, even in a small way!"

Now she was beaming, too.

Handing her a selection of gorgeous landscape photos torn out of an old calendar, I asked her to write her own unique perspective on one of the scenes, focusing not on how it looks, but on what it looks LIKE. "Write your own metaphorical poem." She selected a photo of rolling green hills and wrote a first draft about Mother Nature covered by her thick green blanket, slowly shifting under the grassy fabric over time--a peaceful napping earth. I will remember her metaphor when I go hiking over the green hills near my home tomorrow morning!

Facebook Inspired a Lesson!

Let it never be said that Facebook is a waste of time! It all depends whose pages you follow. I follow Rabbi David Wolpe's inspiring posts every day. Today not only his post inspired me, but also one of the comments posted below it, a quotation by another great rabbinical sage: Abraham Joshua Heschel. So I created a lesson for a new book I'm planning, featuring writing lessons to evoke introspection. Let me know what you think of this:


Writing Lesson To Evoke Introspection:
Comparing Words by Heschel and Wolpe


“Sometimes in the quiet of the night you listen and realize that the chords struck in your soul differ from the music of those around you. The trick of life is to hear those same internal chords amid the clamor and insistent noise of the day. Hold fast to your harmonies.” --David Wolpe


“There are alleys in the soul where a man walks alone, ways that do not lead to society, a world of privacy that shrinks from the public eye. Life comprises not only arable, productive land, but also mountains of dreams, an underground of sorrow, towers of yearning....” --Abraham Joshua Heschel


QUESTIONS TO PONDER (please write your answers):

What does each passage mean, in your own words?

How do these two passages differ in tone?

Which one resonates more for you, and why?


CREATIVE WRITING EXERCISE:

Write a short story or poem titled “Holding on to Harmony” to illustrate Wolpe’s message.

Or, write a short story or poem titled “Lonely Landscape of the Soul,” featuring the borrowed images, from Heschel, of “mountains of dreams,” “an underground of sorrow,” or “towers of yearning.”

Be sure to credit the author with a parenthetical citation, as follows: (based on words by _______).

Teaching About Writing Style via Emulation and Reflection

An awareness of writing styles is the first step in developing one's own literary style. I teach students not only to comprehend what's going on in a story, but to analyze the specific word choices in terms of how they mold the entire reading experience. One of my favorite ways to evoke critical thinking regarding the style of a literary work is to assign exercises in emulation of that work.

Using opening pages from two YA novels--Fade, by Robert Cormier, and Gone, by Michael Grant--I asked middle-school students to compare the writing styles for clues about the following: the genre and time period of each book, how recently each was published, the mood established by the openings, the points-of-view, and the pacing of the narrative. A discussion led students to determine that Cormier's first-person opening, with its "retrospective narration" (new vocabulary for them), suggested that the genre was either historical mystery/fantasy, while Grant's third-person omniscient narration seemed classifiable as contemporary suspense (or possibly sci-fi/fantasy). The narrative styles--Cormier's narrator's recollections versus Grant's "real-time" narration--made some students label Cormier's book as "more telling than showing, even though it's descriptive," and others label Grant's as "more like a movie, based on dialogue, but not requiring as much thinking from the reader." (I gave them another new term for their vocabulary lists, "cinematic," after that last comment.) They guessed, correctly, that Cormier's book was published long before Grant's (20 years before), and that the mood both authors had set was one of mystery, with added suspense in Grant's. Cormier's first-person point-of-view allowed these young readers to be pulled into the narrator's world through his thoughts and actions, in that order, while Grant's third-person omniscient point-of-view compelled readers via the actions of the protagonist as much, or more than, his thoughts. Regarding the pace of storytelling, one student argued that Cormier's slower pace "pulls me in gradually, the way I like to get pulled into a story," while another student declared that Grant's faster pace "immediately puts me in the scene with the main character and makes me HAVE TO READ MORE."

With all of those observations recorded in their notebooks, I then posed a question for my students to ponder: "Which kind of writing comes more naturally to YOU?" But I didn't want them to guess the answer to that question. I wanted them to DISCOVER the answer, via emulating each style.

So, I asked them to participate in an experiment: to write two of their own story openings, with each one borrowing the first lines from Fade or Gone and altering those borrowed lines with their own substituted words. For example: Cormier's opening words, "At first glance, the picture looked like any other...," changed to "At first glance, the ____ looked like any other...." Students plugged in their own nouns, which would evoke very different kinds of stories. The opening of Grant's novel is "One minute the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next minute he was gone." I told my students to delete "about the Civil War" and find substitutions for "teacher"and "talking." Hence, their borrowed fill-in-the-blank line from Gone would read: "One minute ____ was ___ing.... And the next minute he/she was gone."

The next part of their experiment to determine their most natural fiction writing style began with my instruction: "Take each adapted story opener and now write a compelling first page of your own novel, in the style of the original work it is derived from: either in a first-person, retrospective, literary style, or in a third-person, omniscient, cinematic style. Maintain the same verb tenses, the same kind of pacing, and the same genre."

The lesson required two 90-minute sessions for the initial comparative discussion of the opening pages, followed by the writing, sharing, and revising of their opening pages. Finally, I asked them to compose a reflective short essay with this suggested topic sentence: "Writing fiction in a style that is ______,____, and ____ poses challenges that writing in a style that is _____,______, and _____ does not." Using quoted examples from both of their own new pieces, they then illustrated and analyzed why they prefer one style of writing fiction over another.

Thus, they learned by emulating stylistic techniques, not just writing theoretically about their preferences. In the end, I pointed out that this exercise illustrated yet another application of my constant advice to "show, don't tell" with memorable words.