Monday, 9 March 2015

Getting down to the nitty gritty

Last week, we split apart my group of three writing mentees so that they had a one-on-one mentor-mentee relationship.  Kevin and Andy went off with other mentors and Aarohi and I continued to work together on her short story.

At the end of my last post, I talked about how the chronological outline seemed to be working for Aarohi and I was hoping she would have it done by our next meeting.  Not so much.  Aarohi has a busy schedule.  Rather than moving ahead on her story last week, we continued to work together on the Ideas trait by finishing off her outline.

I find that writers in this age group have a difficult time maintaining focus on their storyline and tend to go off in several different directions with no end in sight.  I found that my most important role in this exercise was to keep her on the main path, focussed on the reader (what will the reader need to know and want to know?), and continually asking “does this make sense for your character?” and “does this drive the story forward?”.  At the end of our time together last week, Aarohi had completed her chronological outline.  I tasked her with finishing her story for me by this week (“just the bones of it,” I said) so that we could work on word choice, sentence fluency, etc.

I found that the chrono outline was just what she needed as a starting point to hone in on her main ideas and characters.  Too often student writers sit down to start their story, take off with writing and have no clear idea about where their story is going or even what it is about.  They run into trouble from the start, not surprisingly.  When I sit down to write an essay, a blog post, a paper, or a story, I almost always have a mental outline of what I’m going to write.  With an essay, I always have an outline written down on paper. It is the only way I can stay organized and keep focussed on my main arguments. When I wrote my Masters Thesis, I was surrounded by sticky notes, cue cards and research sheets and yes, paper outlines – many, many, many of them. The same kind of approach is necessary for fiction writing as well.  As an example, take a look at J.K. Rowling’s outline for Order of the Phoenix:

rowling_spreadsheet-565x404_6

Like any good writer, she needed to set out the plot points, timelines, and story arc before she sat down to write.  This is such an important lesson in writing.  Ideas are the first step, but organization has to come right on the heels of ideas.  I’m very pleased that Aarohi has had the chance to discover how important this step is.

And I also discovered how important it is to give a student a break when needed… but we didn’t stop writing during our break! Instead, we wrote haikus.  And we laughed and laughed.  Here is a sample of Aarohi’s haikus from last week:

Aarohi loves cheese
She is a cool unicorn
That is the end. Bye.

Clifford the red dog
He looks like a big red log
He is so scary.

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