Please complete your Borges & I essays. Print or turn these in in the dropbox with your name on the file. If you did not turn in your journal, please do so.
During the break, please finish reading The Witches.
Write a fiction piece for an elementary reader. To inspire you, consider other childhood monters (witches are just one example, how about a teenage zombie, or werewolves, or reanimated corpses, or ghosts, or magicians, or talking animals, or vampires, or creatures from the depths, or giants, or wicked chocolate makers.)
Take a look at Dahl's website and read information about his life and works. Perhaps an idea may strike you for your story. Please visit Roald Dahl's website and under Roald Dahl listen to his interview about writing. After which, please post a comment below about how you (as a young writer) may be able to use or respond to this advice. Please leave your name after your response.
In your story you can include poetry, songs, pictures, etc. If you include pictures draw them, trace them in crayons, create them with computer graphic programs, etc. Off-set poems or songs like the Witches text. Play with text on the page. Include recipes or other "found" items in your story. Play, have fun. Remember you are writing for a younger audience who needs to be interested in the plot and characters. Write about a character that is similar to your audience age-wise or culturally.
4 comments:
I learned to stop at a good point and not when I'm stuck because when I return to continue writing, it will be easy to pick up where I left off if I stop at a good point. I also learned that you are never really finished with a piece of work because you can always re-write it to make it better. It's always a good thing to include humor in writing because people enjoy what makes them laugh. It's not good having ordinary people as characters because it won't impress a reader; it's too common and readers what to be impressed, especially children. I also learned that when writing to children, you use more telling than showing when writing a bad situation because they don't want to have a horror described to them.
I learned that you can think you're done with a piece and then you go back and read it and you can end up rewriting the whole thing. And I learned that you should try and write happy thing, especially for younger kids. And that you should always make your characters unique because if they're not unique then they're not awesome and you won't have a lot of people buy your book.
Haris Heganovic
As a young writer as myself, what I thought I used from Roald Dahl's writng from the interview I listened from him was from writing stories from around your environment. I thought this was very reasonable because you should have the two main keypoints for an idea to write a well thought out story. You should look to see what's around your environment and think about it. Another piece of advice I thought was useful in writing from the interview with Roald Dahl was that you should find a nice and quiet place to write think about your ideas and write them down so you don't get disturbed. You should always be writing your story and never get stuck because you probably won't finish your piece of writing. Also, probably you'll be in trouble.
Writing isn't easy, and good ideas don't come every day. Every idea that comes to you should be treasured and embraced. From there, the long, tedious process of writing comes in. Dahl suggests to neither write for too long or too short, but to stick to a pre-determined time. This is something that I have a problem with; I either walk away after only writing for a couple minutes, or exhaust myself for writing for too long to the point of never wanting to ever write again.
Equally important is to keep momentum; as Hemingway said, "When you are going good, stop writing." As young writers we often want to write till we can't think of anything to write about anymore. This will create ruts to get stuck in. Dahl suggests to never start a new writing session with a blank page, to always approach writing with excitement and knowledge of what's going to happen next.
-Gus Cuddy
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