Teachers as Writers workshop resource pack
By Lari Don and Scottish Book Trust
Introduction
Have you ever thought about setting up your own writing group? How about a writing group just for teachers?
As both a former teacher and a writer in my spare time, there was a point where I began to wonder if the approach I was taking towards writing in my classroom was the right one. Did it really reflect the process of a writer? Was it too heavily focused on grade related criteria, leaving little room for real creativity?
With these questions in mind, in September 2012 Scottish Book Trust set up a Teachers as Writers group, inviting primary and secondary teachers to apply for a chance to meet up and share their own writing with each other. The teachers met up once a fortnight, reading and critiquing each other’s work. There was an implicit understanding that they would reflect on their classroom practice in writing, although the main focus was on themselves as writers.
This pack can help you to set up your own group, but you can use it on your own just as happily. If you are setting up a group, it’s helpful to spend some time in the first session discussing how the group will work, considering the following things:
· Will you submit writing to each other via email before each meeting? Or will you just read each other’s work at the meetings?
· Will you work as one larger group, or will you split into smaller ones? It takes time for everyone to have their say.
· How much should everyone write? Will you set a maximum word limit?
· Will you write at the meetings, or in between, or both?
However you decide to approach the pack, and whether you’re a beginner or you write regularly, we hope that you get a lot out of the experience of focusing on your own process as a writer.
Chris Leslie
Learning Resource Developer
Scottish Book Trust
A word about feeding back
Getting and giving feedback can be a tricky thing to get right. Some people may enjoy savage criticism more than others, however most people do have feelings and it’s best to take them into account! Equally, if all we do is praise each other we are not going to be able to see the bits that could be improved and won’t make much progress. Here are a few things worth thinking about.
Everyone’s opinion is valid
It can be tempting compare yourself to others in the group and either feel you have less to contribute than others, or that some people don’t understand your work and that their opinions are less valuable. It is worth remembering that all readings of a text are valid, be open to this and you may be surprised by how much you have to offer, or by the advice which you find useful.
Don’t try and write someone else’s piece for them
If someone is struggling with a piece of writing it can be tempting to come up with the answer for them. There’s nothing wrong with making suggestions, but they have to come to their own decisions.
Ask questions
It can be difficult to get stuck in to each other’s work to begin with. A good way to get started is by asking questions, this works best if you have a chance to read through the work ahead of time and ask an agreed number of questions (7 usually works quite well). The questions don’t need to be probing or critical; more general questions can also be useful.
Don’t get too bogged down with close reading
While looking at a piece of work sentence by sentence is useful, it is also helpful to think about other things like character motivation, mood, plot and structure.
Remember to point out the things you like
Even if someone says they don’t mind tough criticism you should always point out the bits you like in a piece of writing, everyone needs a bit of praise now and then.
Enjoy it
A group of people are spending their valuable time reading your work and giving you advice on making it even better, this is time spent entirely on you which probably doesn’t happen very often so enjoy it!
Caitrin Armstrong
Writer Development Manager
Scottish Book Trust
About Lari Don
The activities in this resource were kindly written by Lari Don.
Lari Don is an award-winning Scottish writer, who writes picture books, adventure novels, and novellas for reluctant readers, for Floris Books, Barefoot Books, Barrington Stoke, A&C Black and Frances Lincoln. She regularly works with children in schools to inspire their writing and to share her passion for stories. She has never tried to inspire teachers before, except as a byproduct of inspiring their classes, and would love some feedback on how this pack words for you!
More info on Lari’s books: www.laridon.co.uk
Contact Lari:
A word from Lari
This is about the experience of writing, about discovering how you write and how you feel about writing, and about experimenting and challenging yourself. So these exercises are about the process, not the end product. However if you want to develop the pieces of writing you start in these workshops and polish them into fabulous short stories or film scripts or novels, then win many awards - go for it (and please let us know!) But the main goal is simply to write, and to learn about yourself as a writer and about how you can pass that understanding of writing on to the pupils you work with.
The exercises are all just suggestions, ideally to be done in groups, but you can do them on your own as well. You are welcome to adapt and change them, and build your own exercises round them.
Try not to read the questions and discussion points until after you’ve done the writing part of the exercise, so you come to the questions fresh, and so that you aren’t worrying about them when you’re writing!
It’s up to you how long you spend on the practical exercises. You may want to do each one fully and take a couple of hours over each one. You may just want to race through them, or even just do them as thought experiments. This could take you 7 weeks, or 14, or become a regular habit for much longer, as you come up with your own exercises. This is just a tool, use it however suits you!
Lari Don
1 – Seeing the world like a writer
One of the questions I get asked most often by children (along with ‘how many books have you written?’, ‘how long does it take to make a book?’, ‘what’s your favourite book?’ and ‘how old where you when you started writing?’) is ‘where do you get your ideas from?’
It’s tempting to tell them about the Secret Ideas Shop that only writers know about, and about how I have to push past Michael Morpurgo and Julia Donaldson to grab ideas off the shelves… but I don’t. I’m always honest with children about writing. So I tell them that everyone has ideas for stories all the time. We are all surrounded by this fascinating world, and we all have unique ideas and questions about what we see.
The only thing that’s different about writers is that we notice the ideas, and we catch hold of them.
All my fiction books have been inspired by something that happened to me: by a game I was playing with my younger child (all the First Aid for Fairies series); by a question asked by my older child (Rocking Horse War); by a passing thought on a beach (The Big Bottom Hunt); by a combination of a question from my publishers and the birdlife in my local park (How to Make a Heron Happy)...I wasn’t looking for ideas, I just stumbled across them. But I recognised them as ideas, and I wrote them down.
These ideas usually start with the words: What if…?
But they can also start with: How…?
Why…?
What next…?
I wonder…?
The ideas may be prompted by a half-heard conversation or an oddly dressed person or a throwaway line in a book or something I’ve never seen before or something I’ve seen many times before but never really noticed. As soon as I recognise an idea, I write it down in a notebook I carry everywhere. I have dozens of these notebooks, and I won’t write every book that is waiting inside their pages. But I never need to worry about “what will I write” because I have thousands of ideas written down. And I didn’t get any of the ideas from the Secret Ideas Shop. I got all of them from seeing the world around me like a writer.
Practical Exercise 1:
Get a piece of paper, and quietly think back through your day. Start when you got up. Breakfast, leaving for work…all the way to how you arrived at this writing group.
Travel back through your day with your eyes, ears and imagination open, looking for anything that might prompt an idea:
Someone you saw
Something you heard
Something you wished for
A new way to describe something
Anything that prompted (then or now as you rethink) any questions at all – who, why, what, what if, I wonder… any musings or questions which you would have written down if you had a notebook! Write them down.
Don’t write neat tidy sentences: scribble notes. Don’t write paragraphs, ask questions. Just scribble enough to remind you to follow the idea up later.
Discussion
Go round the group, and everyone share one idea they’ve mined out of their memories of the day, and chat about how you might develop it as a story. (However, if you’ve had an idea which you are convinced will turn into a bestseller, don’t feel you have to share it. Keep that to yourself!)
Also consider:
Did you look at the day differently?
Did you examine the world around you differently?
Practical Exercise 2
For the next week, or longer, carry a notebook, or some other recording device (I’m old fashioned: I use a pen and paper. You could make notes on a phone, or an ipad, or dictate to a Roman slave carrying a wax tablet, whatever works for you…)
Get into the habit of noting down any ideas, however half-formed, as they occur to you. It’s much easier to do at the time than it is in retrospect, so try to keep your notebook/other scribbling method to hand all the time.
Discussion (after a week or so of noting down ideas)
Share these ideas if you want, but it’s probably more important to chat about how carrying this notebook made you feel:
Did you see the world in a different light?
Did you feel like a writer?
Did you feel any obligation (good or bad) to fill the pages?
Do you want to develop any of the ideas?
After the exercises
You don’t have to share these ideas with anyone. You don’t have to develop them into stories immediately either. I’ve let ideas sit and mature for years before writing them. But writing them down is my way of catching them and allowing them to grow.
However, the next half dozen sections will require you to start a lot of stories. I will always suggest a potential idea to use, but if you have ideas of your own to develop, you might get more from the exercises. So the more ideas you have with you, the better.
And you might just start to see the world like a writer and find that scribbling down ideas becomes a lifelong habit!
Next time – bring your ideas notebook!
2 – Finding your own writing voice
Practical exercise 3:
Write down or discuss:
What book you would recommend as your first suggestion if you joined a new book group?
What book would you say was your favourite book of the year at a dinner party?
What book would you say was your all-time favourite if you were answering quick-fire questions on a speed-dating evening?
What book would you recommend to your best friend as a good read to take on holiday?
What book would you reread if you had the flu and were in bed for a couple of days?
What book would you happily buy for all your friends for Christmas? (You do buy books as gifts, don’t you?)
Are there any authors whose new books you get excited about and want to buy in hardback?
Discussion
Did you list lots of different books/writers, or were you fairly consistent?
Is there a difference between the books you admit to reading and want people to think you read, and the books you really, really love to lose yourself in?
Are you completely honest with yourself about what you love reading the most?
When I started as a writer, I wrote literary short stories for adults. Stories with metaphors, hidden meanings, complex sentence structures, unresolved or ambiguous endings, and vocabulary I would never use in conversation. Some of my short stories were published, some even won awards. But I never felt like I was writing in my own voice, I felt like I was putting on a posh voice, pretending to be a writer rather than just telling a story. When I wrote my first children’s book, I was suddenly writing in my own voice, telling a story I cared about, for readers I really wanted to share it with. And that’s why I’m now a children’s writer!