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Mary Amato’s Tips for Teachers: How to Encourage Creative Writing

March 31, 2011 by Mary Amato Leave a Comment

Children have a lot of writing assignments in school. Often, time for creative writing is squeezed out of the curriculum. If you are a teacher who wants to introduce/encourage more creative writing, here are some ideas. Please email me at info@maryamato.com if you have ideas you’d like to share.

Keep a Writer’s Notebook. See my Tips for Keeping a Writer’s Notebook for more info.

Create a Writer’s Corner. Stock it with pencils, paper, materials for making mini-books, a mirror for looking at facial expressions (in order to be able to describe them), a phone book or baby naming book for character name ideas, and more. Encourage kids to write a poem or story during free time. Encourage kids who are upset about something to write about it.

Try a “collaborative” journal with your class. In my book, Please Write in This Book, the teacher leaves a blank book in her room asking students to please write in it.

Be open to “silly” writing. Students may be inspired to write a story that you think is ridiculous or silly. Remember, creative writing is not about creating something perfect or something necessarily profound. Be open and encourage creativity, and the child will want to keep writing.

Encourage all kinds of writing. Stories, poems, songs, plays, cartoons, comics, etc.

Allow reluctant writers to dictate to you or a volunteer/assistant. Be a scribe, not an editor. Use the child’s exact words.

Embrace and encourage mistakes. The goal is to increase creative fluency and make writing fun. Save the grammar and spelling lessons for later. The truth is that my rough drafts are riddled with mistakes. I’m pushing myself to get something down without trying to edit as I go…children should be allowed to have the same writing process.

Ask questions if the student gets stuck. What is the story or poem about? If it’s a story, who is your main character and what does your main character want?

Talk it through one sentence at a time. If the student has trouble organizing or keeping track of thoughts, ask him/her to tell the story aloud one sentence at a time. Write down one sentence at a time.

Write yourself. Model enthusiasm by writing and sharing your own creative stories and poems– especially your “mistakes” or the ones that didn’t turn out as well as you’d like or the ones that you’re having trouble finishing.

Encourage the child to use his/her own voice. Rather than trying to “be poetic,” or to cram lots of big words into a story, it’s important for a child to learn to capture his/her own voice.

Create venues for sharing writing.

Have a “literary reading” and invite friends and family
Create podcasts of work
Publish work on a website
Encourage students to submit to writing contests.
Establish a young author’s club
Hold a Young Authors celebration, publishing and sharing books

Try “dialogue journals” between students. Link students who enjoy writing by encouraging them to write to each other by passing a designated notebook back and forth.

Give the gift of the written word. Model meaningful writing. Write real, meaningful messages to your class in your own voice on special days or for special events. No hallmark cards. Say what is really in your heart. This will make a big impression.

Create special “Everybody Writes” Sessions. Help kids to get in the mood by playing an unusual piece of music, lighting a candle (if your school allows this), dimming the lights, asking everybody to sit in a different seat, etc.

Shake things Up. Ask your students to get their creative juices moving by first dancing to an awesome piece of music and getting their bodies moving. Then sit down to write…

For encouraging story writing, use my WOW story technique to get started.

What is a WOW story?

WOW is an acronym that I created to help kids remember a simple story structure.

The story has a main character who Wants something. This is the beginning of the story.
There is an Obstacle that gets in the way of the main character. This is the middle of the story.
The main character either Wins or loses. This is the end of the story.

How to make up WOW stories

Choose a main character. This can be a person, an animal, or even an object: for example, a boy, a grandmother, a soccer star, a sock, or a paintbrush!
Decide what the main character wants. What might a paintbrush want? Some paint to play with? To belong to a famous artist? Try unexpected ideas. A grandmother might want to ride a motorcycle!
Decide what will get in the way of the main character’s desire. Brainstorm lots of obstacles and decide which one is the most fun or engaging. Obstacles can be simple. A rabbit wants to eat grass on a hillside, but a tiger lives on that hillside. The tiger is the obstacle. A boy wants a new bike, but his father says no. His father is the obstacle. Obstacles can also be emotions. What if a girl wants to ice skate, but she is afraid that she’ll fall down? Fear is her obstacle.
Decide how/if the main character will “win or lose.” Does your main character get what he or she wants in the end? How?

Write or perform WOW stories

Write or dictate your story: Write your stories on paper. Or make a book by folding pages and stapling them together. If your child hasn’t learned how to write yet, ask him or her to tell you the story and write it down word for word.

Act your story out: For reluctant writers, try acting out the story first. After you have brainstormed the basics for a specific WOW story using the steps above, act out the story. Choose a narrator who will tell the story and provide cues for the actors. This can be the job of the parent or a child. The narrator should be very clear and say “The End” so that everyone knows when the story is over. After acting out stories, the child may be more interested in writing them down.

Getting Out of the Way

March 19, 2011 by Mary Amato 2 Comments

“I don’t know [expletive] about words. The reason the language comes out that way is, it’s me just trying to get out of the way.” This provocative quote from Irish playwright Enda Kenny (from a recent Washington Post article by Peter Marks) speaks to an important concept that I am continually stressing to students. Writing is about ideas; words serve the story. Too much writing instruction and critique-group feedback focus on the superficial level of the sentences. A fiction writer who is too conscious about constructing beautiful or clever sentences puts his/her mind into the inkwell of pen, instead of into the heart/mind/soul of the character, which is where it needs to reside in order to write a story.

What is the Weirdest Thing?

February 24, 2011 by Mary Amato Leave a Comment

When Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and editor-in-chief of One Story Magazine, gets bored writing, she doesn’t ask, “What happens next?” She asks herself this question: “What’s the weirdest thing that can happen right now?” At this year’s AWP conference, Tinti said that you don’t want weirdness for the sake of weirdness, but pushing yourself to think outside your own box can help move your story forward.

The Writer’s Notebook: Don’t Leave Home Without It!

October 5, 2010 by Mary Amato 6 Comments

“Inside Sedaris’s left shirt pocket, he keeps an omnipresent notebook, a little spiral-bound one, in which he writes down everything that happens that might later be of use. If he walks out of the house and realizes he’s forgotten it, he turns around and goes home. “I might see a worm attacking a centipede. I might see a bumper sticker,” he says. “I don’t know how to turn off that part of myself that exploits everyone and everything that I come into contact with.”

I love this juicy bit from Monica Hesse’s article about writer David Sedaris in The Washington Post (October 4, 2010). When I’m doing school visits, I tell kids that if they see me on the street, they should stop me and ask me if I have my writer’s notebook-that’s because I always have it with me. Wouldn’t go to the grocery store without it, which is why I like pocket-sized notebooks. Writers are essentially spies.

The Need for Obstacles

October 1, 2010 by Mary Amato Leave a Comment

One of the recurring problems I see when I’m critiquing a story is the lack of an obstacle or nemesis. William Gibson calls it “the barrier” in his excellent book about writing titled Shakespeare’s Game. Something must get in the way of the main character’s yearning or else there is no tension and ultimately no climax. Writes Gibson: “…if Hamlet at once marches off to stab the King, what have we lost? –the play.”

It seems obvious and yet many writers create stories without an obstacle or nemesis. I do it myself. I get caught up with the main character and allow him or her free reign when I should be causing problem after problem for the poor thing. Only after a hundred pages or so, when I’m wondering why the story isn’t working, does it hit me. I’m being too nice.

We spend our lives trying to avoid creating obstacles for other people, so why should it come easy when we write? It’s scary to close the door on our main character’s desire; but if we do, if we dream up a fantastic barrier, then our hero will have to work hard to get what he or she wants, and therein will be the story.

Learning from a Master

September 23, 2010 by Mary Amato 2 Comments

Let’s say you’re reading a book, and you come across a sentence that blows you away because of its poetry or cadence or economy or expansiveness. Mark it. Then at some point, come back and don’t just read it again. Write that sentence down in your writer’s notebook, word for word, comma for comma. In doing so, you will get the feeling of that sentence in your muscle memory–the clauses, the pauses, the rhythm. When it’s time for you to write, what you learned will come out to play.

Here’s one that I wrote down recently from Elizabeth Strout’s excellent book, Olive Kitteridge:

Olive, years ago, had taught math at the Crosby Junior High School, and while her emotions at times had attached themselves fiercely to particular students, Andrea Bibber had never seemed to her to be anything more than a small, dull, asseverating mouse.

Perhaps this exercise is akin to the idea of the artist who learns by copying a much-admired painting, brush stroke for brush stroke.

What did I learn?

September 15, 2010 by Mary Amato Leave a Comment

If you want to learn something, one of the best ways to do it is to be conscious of what you are learning. That may sound ridiculously obvious, but life has a way of flooding the mind with too much information and sweeping the newly-learned or almost-learned stuff out to sea.

The best way for me to be conscious of what I’m learning is to literally write what I’m learning down. After every class that I teach (or take) I force myself to sit and write down at least one thing that I learned. Sometimes it’s easy; sometimes not. Usually, the act of writing helps realizations to occur.

I put myself through a course in humor writing by watching funny movies with an agenda: each time I watched, I had to write down at least one thing I learned about why it was funny.

If you’re taking a class, create a ritual for yourself (a mini notebook? a set of 3×5 cards? a dedicated blog?) to write down what you are learning.

How to Read a Novel

September 13, 2010 by Mary Amato Leave a Comment

One of the students in my Fiction for Young Readers class asked what she should focus on when she’s reading the novels I assigned.

First of all, I read for enjoyment, of course; but I do analyze books as I read, and I do it on two basic levels. Think of a house. You’ve got the individual planks of wood (those are sentences); and then you have the entire structure (the story). When I’m reading on the sentence level, I’m looking at the quality of the writing: fresh metaphors, rhythm, sentence construction. When I’m reading on the structure level, I’m thinking about whether or not the story works and how it was constructed.

On the story level, I analyze by asking myself questions: What is the heart of the story? If you boil it down to its most basic form, what is the story about? Try to define this in just one or two sentences. Usually, the heart of the story comes from looking at what your main character is yearning for and what gets in the way of him/her. This is basic Aristotle.

Then I look closely at the climax. Stories that work have climaxes that spring forth in an organic and inevitable way from the story’s heart. Identifying and analyzing how a writer moves from heart to climax is a simple and excellent way to get STORY into your bloodstream.

Some great books that emphasize the importance of understanding basic story structure:

William Gibson’s Shakespeare’s Game (yes, plays work the same way)