Letters between friends

There’s a special feeling that you get when you hold the new book of an author whose work you've loved in the past. 

It’s a little like when you meet an old friend on the street and she shares good news with you, or maybe like when you return to a favorite spot and find it’s the same but different, still special but with a newness that wasn’t there before. 

That’s how I felt when I held my copy of Joyce Sidman’’s Dear Acorn (Love, Oak): Letter Poems to Friends by Joyce Sidman (Illustrated by Melissa Sweet). 

What a remarkable collection of letters in the form of poems that friends send to each other. 

The “friends,” however, are different than you might expect. 

Imagine an oak tree sending a letter to an acorn, or an acorn responding with a letter of its own. 

And what if a bubble could write a letter to sky?

Dear Sky,

Hello! It’s me, Bubble!

I’m here!

Someone breathed me

awake!

Or what if baby sea turtles could share a poem with the ocean, and the ocean could respond with a poem of its own to all the creatures who live in its water?

Not only is Dear Acorn a collection of love letters between friends, it’s a book where each poem and illustration connect us more deeply to each other and to the world around us, and encourage us to use our imaginations to envision the world in a way that makes it clear how all of life is interconnected. 

Melissa Sweet’s illustrations are perfect compliments to the poems and equally wonderful, bringing to life Sidman’s words and offering readers a world in these pages as colorful and enthralling as the world itself.

Here’s Oak writing to Acorn:

Dear Acorn,

I feel you there,

a tickle at my twig tips,

a plump promise

against my rough bark.

Your whole life ahead of you

and weeks till you fall.

Take a good look around, Acorn.

Drink in the view.

The next stop is earth.

Then years upon years

until you see this sky

this high

again.

I’ll be waiting,

Oak

And here’s Acorn’s response:

Dear Oak,

I am round and ready. Bursting

with hope, crammed with possibilities.

I know I must drop and sleep andrtificate

sprout and grow. So slow! But then,

Oak, I’ll stretch up my arms,

strong and true. I’ll be your

friend, the one who rises

up beside you.

Love,

Acorn

For budding poets (young and old), Sidman includes a handful of suggestions for how to write your own letter poems, such as how to choose a subject, what to think about, and how to begin writing a poem. 

I hope you’ll get the chance to pick up your own copy of Dear Acorn (Love, Oak): Letter Poems to Friends from a bookstore or library near you and enjoy Sidman’s poems and Sweet’s illustrations. 

It’s a marvelous collection that helps both adults and children see the world anew. 

Still More on Point of View

How do you teach young writers about point of view?

In one of last year's workshop sessions that I led at our local library, I explained to a handful of young writers that point of view is simply the way each of us sees the world... and that each of us has a view of the world unlike anyone else's.

To explore this idea, I asked the children to sit in a circle.

"What do you see?" I asked.

Then we spun around so our backs faced into the circle, and I asked once again what they saw.

After each young writer described a part of the room that only he or she could see, I asked them to lay down on the floor (in a circle, heads toward the center) and gaze up at the ceiling and describe what they saw.

And then, after we got up, I asked them to find a place in the room where they felt they could get the best view.

Some crawled under the tables, a few hid behind a cabinet, a boy stood on a chair.

They loved it!

"I can't believe this is a writing class!" said one girl.

It was a great way to introduce these young writers to the idea of point of view, and it led to an interesting discussion about how writers select different points of view as ways of drawing readers into the story.

Best of all, I think the exercise revealed how each point of view is limited in its ability to tell only part of a story.

The writing exercises came next.

I handed out copies of two stories that I'd cut out of the newspaper. Both stories were about dogs... one about a dog who had wandered from Tampa to Chicago after a hurricane, the other about two Yorkshire puppies stolen from a pet store.

We read the stories together, and then I asked the children to identify the various points of view from which the stories might be told, encouraging them to imagine a point of view that might not have been mentioned.

One girl imagined the story told from the point of view of a flea on the dog wandering from Tampa to Chicago.

Another imagined the story from the point of view of the dog's water dish... missing the dog.

And then I asked them to write their own version of the story... using the point of view that they liked best.

What about you? Do you have a favorite point of view? How do you select a point of view for your story? And once you've selected a point of view, how do you go deeper into it?

Let us know when you get the chance.

For more point of view exercises, visit:
http://writingfiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/creative_writing_exercises
http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/Virtualit/fiction/elements.asp?e=4_ex
http://www.anitraweb.org/kalliope/pov.html
http://ezinearticles.com/?Practicing-Point-of-View-Writing-Exercise&id=1359516
http://aww.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=72930

On Teaching Children to Write

Writing stories--and how one learns to do it--is so elusive.

Can anyone explain the actual process of learning to write... or fully understand how a child--how anyone, really--finds words and manages to put them down on paper?

If you followed the postings at Wordswimmer over the summer, you know that I spent part of July and August at the local library teaching children (ages 7 to 12) how to write stories while seeking answers to these questions.

And last month I returned to the library to offer another workshop, hoping to help young writers step into the water so they can swim into their own stories.

These workshops with the children have taught me that the success of most workshops depends largely on whether a teacher is able to create a safe space, a place where writers, whether children or adults, feel safe to explore their imaginations and make mistakes.

This method of teaching takes great patience and sensitivity to each student's passions and interests. And it requires a willingness to let each student follow his or her heart wherever it wants to go... rather than insist that the student follow the teacher's plan for the day.

This kind of teaching also demands a willingness (on the part of the teacher and student) to suspend critical assessments, to simply let words flow onto paper. Suspending critical judgment means not worrying about proper punctuation or strict rules of grammar or spelling or paragraphing... at least in the beginning... so that nothing gets in the way of the imagination. Such a non-critical approach, I've found, enables writers--young and old--to dive unrestrained into the sea of their imagination and freely reproduce the scenes that they discover there.

As I spent time with the children during our summer workshops, I noticed how each child brought his or her own set of experiences to the exercises. By this I mean each child lived a different life, with different expectations and different experiences, and each child held onto the memories of his or her experiences in different ways...not just holding on to pictures or scenes stored in memory but to emotions--and a full panoply of senses (taste, smell, sight, hearing, touch)--that enriched the child's memory and understanding about life and what it felt like to be human.

Learning to write stories means, on the deepest level, I think, learning how to empathize with one's fellow human beings. To do this, writers must learn how to sort through their own memories, emotions, senses, and experiences, and then learn how to translate their emotions into the emotions and experiences of their characters.

But it also means learning that his or her view of the world is slightly slanted. That is, writers need to understand that they see the world in their own unique way, differently from anyone else's way of looking at the world. It's each writer's unique viewpoint, after all--the way he or she understands the world--that will draw a reader into his or her stories.

Without such a slant, without the perspective of the author reflected in the narrative voice and in the details that voice selects to put on the page, there is no story... because there is no narrator with whom the reader can relate.

In our sessions this past summer, some children wrote in their journals with ease and had no trouble finding words or putting them down on paper; their imaginations seemed to overflow, and they wrote quickly, as fast as ideas popped into their heads. Others wrote extremely slowly, not necessarily because their imaginations were less full, but, perhaps, because they found it more difficult to translate the pictures in their minds into words.

I had to remind myself that speed wasn't an accurate indicator of skill or talent. It was only an indicator of how fast a child could put words down on paper. No matter how fast or slow a child would write a story, I couldn't predict when or how skill or talent might be revealed in each child's work. Often, the two elements appeared in different amounts at different times during the process. In the end, I was less interested in skill or talent anyway and more interested in whether the children were enjoying the chance to explore and discover new worlds inside themselves and the stories that they uncovered there.

When I started these workshops, I hadn't expected that teaching children to write might be as mysterious as writing itself. Just as a writer can't predict how a story will end, I couldn't predict which child would find a story and which child wouldn't, who might put words in a compelling order, who might be left staring at a blank page. The process itself was, for the most part, out of my hands and in the hands of the children.

What I learned as a result of the workshops--and what I hope I can remember in the coming months--was that many factors contribute to a child's success as a writer: desire; unwillingness to give up; love of words; devotion to stories, and, most of all, that unfathomable quality--a writer's spirit--or the inner force that propels writers through the world toward whatever goals they may set for themselves.

Maybe what some people mean when they say you can't teach writing is: you can't teach spirit; you can only hope to kindle and nurture it.

By the end of the sessions, I came away with a much deeper respect for the difficulty each of us --beginning writers and more experienced writers alike--goes through to get words on paper. No one who embarks on this journey in search of words and stories is spared the struggle of trying to get the words down.

But teaching children about the process of writing also taught me to trust the process more fully. And it taught me to have greater faith in the invisible source of all stories, the source out of which our stories emerge.... and where we'll find more stories waiting for us, if only we--like the children--can summon the courage to dive in.

To read earlier posts about my experience teaching children to write, visit:

http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2007/08/walking-across-sand.html
http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2007/08/swimming-with-maps.html
http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2007/07/rarely-swimming-in-straight-line.html
http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2007/06/teaching-young-swimmers.html

Walking Across the Sand

During the last two sessions of the Young Writers Workshop that I taught at our local library, I introduced a simple exercise to help the children distinguish between an idea and a story.

I wanted the children to understand on a deep level--way down in their guts, not just in their minds--how a story evolves from idea to story.

So, we spent a few minutes after introductions talking about where I find ideas for my stories, and then I asked the children to share where they find ideas for stories.

Even young writers, it seems, are aware that ideas for stories are hiding everywhere.

If you look closely enough at your life, you can find them in dreams, at school, in books and movies, while playing games with friends or listening to family stories, on and on...

After they shared a handful of ideas, I asked them to stand up and join me in the middle of the room.

"Pretend the floor in front of us is covered with sand," I said, arranging them in a line behind me. "Now let's walk across the sand."

We walked across the imaginary sand, the children marching behind me giggling and wondering what was going on, but willing to take a hike--even if it was an imaginary hike--because, after all, it gave them a chance to stand up and move around the room, if nothing else.

As soon as everyone made it across the sand, I turned to the children and asked, "Ok, what happened? Was that a story?"

Some of the children shouted, "Yes!"

And some of them shouted, "No!"

And, of course, I had to ask: why yes... or why no.

"Nothing happened!"

"There was no setting!"

"No characters!"

"No conflict!"

Exactly. It wasn't a story... because the hike across the sand lacked these crucial elements.

Was I pleased with their responses? You bet.

Then, I asked, "Where can you find sand?"

"A desert," some of the children cried.

"A sandbox," others called.

"A beach," others said.

"Fine," I said. "Let's pretend the sand is hot... and let's walk across it again. This time think about where you're walking: a desert, a beach, or a sandbox."

So we set off again, walking in a line across the sand until we reached the other side of the room, the children giggling as much as the first time, still wondering where the exercise was leading.

When everyone had safely crossed the sand, I asked, "Who walked across a desert?"

A few hands went up.

"Who walked across the beach?"

More hands.

"And who walked across the sandbox?"

Only two hands.

"Everyone who walked across the beach... over here," I said, dividing the children into groups.

Next, I said, "Talk to each other and figure out who is on the beach (or desert or sandbox) with you, and why? What do you want? And what's keeping you from getting it?"

I gave them five minutes. In that time they had to come up with a story--a character or characters, what the characters hoped to find by walking across the sand, and what prevented them from reaching their goal.

While they talked, brainstorming different ideas, I went from group to group asking questions, urging them to think of situations and characters and problems, and then left them alone to work out the problems on their own.

And, oh, the stories they came up with.

Shipwrecked pirates on a beach searching for food.

Cats lost in a sandbox wanting to go home.

A plane crash in the desert, the survivors searching for treasure buried long ago in
Pharaoh's tomb.

The children spun stories out of ideas with the same skill a spider might weave an intricate web.

No matter how many questions I asked each group, I received answer after answer, their imaginations a rich source of inspiration for stories.

After the exercise, I asked the children to return to their seats and to think about an idea that they had discovered during our discussion about ideas.

"Now it's time to develop your ideas," I said, "into stories...."

And the children spent the remaining ten minutes of class spinning their stories.

There wasn't enough time in the one-hour sessions for the children to finish their stories, so I never found out how the stories ended... or if the children spent more time working on them after leaving class.

But, really, it didn't matter if they finished their stories.

What mattered was that now they understood the difference between an idea and a story.

Each child had started on the journey that a writer embarks on when setting off to explore his or her imagination.

Swimming With Maps

A small crowd of children is gathered in a semi-circle on the floor around me as we begin the second session of the Young Writers Workshop at our local library.

After brief introductions, I talk about how a writer always notices details about where he or she lives and ask the children to share some of their observations about living in Florida.

Sometimes if you look closely enough, I tell them, you can find ideas for stories hidden in details: clouds like castles floating across the sky; a thick line of ants crawling up a wall; strange-looking birds that might have flown out of the pages of a Dr. Seuss picture book.

Who might live in a floating castle, I ask, and why might ants crawl up a wall? What if birds actually flew out of books? Could you spin a story out of these questions?

Another way to uncover the stories in your life, I suggest, is to draw a map of your house or favorite playground or neighborhood.

It doesn't have to be a serious map with accurate distances measured between houses or street names or anything like that.

Rather, the map is meant as a way to help writers recall interesting details about their lives or incidents that may have happened recently... or long ago.

My hope for the exercise is that it will engage the children in a hands-on activity, encouraging them to think about interesting details in their lives, even stories, without the pressure of having to find words to describe the stories.

And the process of drawing a map of familiar surroundings--a neighborhood, a house, a favorite playground--may trigger memories of events that can be developed into stories.

The credit for the map-making exercise goes to Jack Gantos, the author of Joey Pigza Swallowed The Key, Rotten Ralph, and a host of other books. He shared the exercise during one of his lectures that I was lucky to have attended years ago.

Gantos, who uses map-making to mine his own experiences for stories, had drawn a series of incidents on his map in bright magic-marker colors, the kind of wacky events that can only happen in a Gantos story. It was his map that inspired me to draw a map of my neighborhood and which led to the discovery of some of my own stories.

As the children crowd around me, I share my map, showing them the pond where one of my friends almost drowned; the dead tree in our backyard filled with ghosts and bats that flew into the air squealing at dusk every night; the hole my best friend's brother had cut in his backyard fence which my friends and I climbed through to go sledding on the golf course.

Not stories, exactly, but threads that might lead to stories.

In order to make a story, I explain, you need more than an idea. You need to construct scenes that show your character struggling to get what he or she wants.

And after reading a few scenes from some of my favorite books, I ask the children to develop their own scenes as building blocks for their stories. Ten minutes later, after working silently on their own, the children share some of the scenes that they've imagined.

All too soon the class comes to an end, and, as the children gather up their journals and pens, I encourage them to keep writing. It's hard to watch them leave, not knowing if they'll ever finish the stories that they started.

But the next day I learn from the librarian, who has spoken to some of the parents, that many of the kids are still writing, sustaining themselves with the power of their own imaginations.

How amazing is that?

Even though hearing her comments helps me feel as if the class is a success, I still harbor doubts about the lesson. I can't help worrying.

Did I give the children enough useful information about writing stories? How might I improve the lesson?

I think about these questions for a day or so and come up with this crazy notion: what if we try writing a story together?

Wouldn't that be amazing?

Will it work?

I have no idea, but stay tuned and I'll let you know what happens.

If you'd like to learn more about how Jack Gantos uses maps as inspiration for his stories, visit:
http://www.fsgkidsbooks.com/teachersguides/jackgantos.htm#booklinksarticle

Rarely Swimming in a Straight Line

On my first night teaching a young writers' workshop at our local library, I stand in front of a roomful of twenty children and try to describe my writing process.

Writing, I tell the children after a brief discussion about where writers find ideas, can often feel as frustrating as trying to untangle a mass of knotted string.

You take a thread--an idea, perhaps, or an image, or a feeling, or anything, really--and you begin to pull it, teasing it out into the open, to see where it will lead you.

If you're lucky, I continue, that thread will lead to another idea or image. And, eventually, if you pull the thread long enough and refuse to let go, it may lead to a story.

I share some of the threads that have led to my stories... and explain how I came to write these stories... and read a few excerpts, hoping the children might begin to see how to shape their threads into stories of their own.

And then, after reading the excerpts, I explain how these threads--the very ones that they may spend so much time teasing and pulling--may often lead to nothing.

After lots of work, a writer might end up empty-handed, only to find himself or herself searching for yet another thread, another way into a story.

My aim in this discussion isn't to discourage the children but to illuminate the process of making stories.

I want these young writers to understand that the process is often messy: rarely does it follow a straight line but rather an unpredictable, often confusing, path.

Most of all, I want them to learn that only by taking risks and making a mess (mess = lots of false starts, dead ends, blind alleys, etc.) can a writer discover and begin to explore his or her story.

We spend a few minutes speaking about plot and characterization, of course, but not for very long because the children seem to know that a story needs a plot and characters to inhabit it.

Before the end of the hour, we open our journals and start writing... a two minute free-write that stretches to four, then five minutes.

After we finish, I give the children a chance to spend the rest of the session on their own stories or to continue exploring whatever subjects they may have found during the free-writes.

By the end of our time together, a few children come forward to share stories that they've started during the session.

Seeing their notebooks open to pages filled with freshly scribbled words lets me know that a certain kind of magic has taken place in the room. The children have tapped into their imaginations and started to write.

That's all that I'd hoped for, really, when I designed the session... that the children would be able to make a start, a beginning...

But even though the workshop seems to have gone well, the moment I leave the library I begin to worry that the idea of process is too abstract, too squishy, for children to grasp. And I think about how I might explore different aspects of writing stories in the next workshop.

On my way home I ask myself how I might talk about stories in a more concrete way and what I might do differently. I wonder if I should talk more about stories... about how to tell the difference between an idea and a story... and what makes a story work as a story.

Can I explain the basic building blocks of stories: scenes... and can I show the children how a scene works... and how it leads to the next scene... and the next... from the beginning of the story to the end?

And can I show how each scene reveals a change in the character, a progression that brings him or her closer to an ultimate goal?

Better yet, can I show each step a writer takes to create a story... from the initial idea to the burst of words to the messy trial-and-error required to find the shape of the story?

I'm not entirely sure that I can pull it off. But sometimes teaching, like writing, doesn't follow a straight line. The process requires that you take risks.

So, when I arrive home, I prepare a new lesson.

Will the plan work?

Check back next week. I'll let you know.

Teaching Young Swimmers

Over the next five weeks I'll be teaching a writing workshop at the local library to help young swimmers find their way into the water.

The plan is for us to meet each week in the children's room and talk for an hour about writing and stories in the hope that the children--more than 100 have registered for the free summer program--will eventually embark on their own story-writing adventures.

But with less than twenty-four hours to go before the start of the first session, I'm getting a little anxious about what I'm going to say.

I mean, how much can anyone teach children (or adults, for that matter) in sixty minutes about writing a story?

What I've decided is that I am going to focus the sessions on the process of writing rather than on how to develop a plot or construct a character, mainly because I don't think it's helpful (or truthful) to make writing stories seem like a simple fill-in-the-blank exercise.

It's not that the children won't need to learn the elements of plot and character development eventually. (And for that it is sometimes helpful to fill in the blanks to questions such as "What does your character want?" and "What's keeping him or her from getting it?")

But as the children enter the water and begin writing their own stories, I think it's more important for them at this stage to learn about the pleasures that can come from playing with words.

My hope is that they'll explore their own imaginations without a goal in mind, simply for the sake of exploring their imaginary worlds and discovering things that they may never have seen before.

Whether or not their words lead to stories isn't the point, really. What's important is that they begin to hear (and enjoy) the sound of their own voices coming to them from the page for the first time.

So, here are a few of my thoughts on writing that I hope the children will take away from our sessions together:

1) Writing is a process... and it's very, very messy. Even with a story map or outline, plans can go awry; you can hit detours, dead-ends, and find, in the end, that your story--without any warning or explanation--has dried up. You can also discover a story that takes your breath away, the images flowing so fast that your hand has trouble keeping up with the words as they pour onto the page.

2) This messy process involves making (lots of) mistakes, but, amazingly, it's only by making mistakes--back-tracking, revising, revising yet again--that you begin to understand what it is that you want to write. The very process that seems so frustrating, in the end, leads you to what you needed to know all along.

3) Ideas for stories can come from anywhere... from memories and experiences, from the news reports on TV or in the paper, from details that you notice on your way to school or work, from overheard conversations, from old photographs, from paintings in museums, from incidents in school or at camp, from dreams or day-dreaming... from anywhere.

4) If you listen closely to your inner voice, you can find out what you really want to write about. This is important since, unless you're excited about an idea for a story, the words will most likely appear flat and uninteresting on paper, and you'll lose interest over the course of revision, and your enthusiasm--as well as the words--will evaporate into thin air.

5) The process of writing involves finding an idea, then searching for the right words to give form to the idea... and then finding a shape for the story... with a beginning, middle, and end... and a plot, which is all just another way of saying that you need to find a character who wants something but who faces a series of harder and harder obstacles that will keep him or her from getting it.

6) There is no reason to hurry or force the process. What's the rush, really? So, take pleasure in the time that you need to discover and write the story.

When I was growing up, I never heard anyone speak like this about writing stories.

Libraries offered books... and a quiet place to read... and a few kind-hearted adult librarians sometimes suggested books to read.

But never during my childhood or young adult years did I meet an author or hear one describe his or her writing process.

Nor did writers visit schools to read and sign their books.

Writers were like ghosts, invisible, and their books emerged (as I imagined the process) straight from an author's imagination onto the shelves of the library and into my hands.

And teachers didn't sit down with us and talk about where stories came from or how they got written or who might write them.

But in fourth grade I was lucky to have a teacher who told a story every day after lunch.

Once everyone settled down, Mrs. Hunt opened Sheila Burnford's The Incredible Journey and began to read aloud in her deep voice. And, with our heads cradled on our desks, we listened as another chapter in the story unfolded.

Hearing Mrs. Hunt's voice every afternoon as she read aloud to us was all the encouragement that I needed to fall in love with words and stories.

So, maybe years from now a child will look back on this summer and remember the voice of an unknown writer whose name she will have long forgotten.

Maybe she'll remember him reading a story at the local library.

And maybe she'll recall that moment as the time when her own love-affair with words and stories began.

You never know the mysterious way this process works, right? (Sometimes I think teaching is even more mysterious than writing.)

Wish me luck. I'll let you know how it goes after the sessions end next month.