take five minutes and try this

I gave my Nurturing Young Writers workshop to a small group of homeschoolers the other night. Part of the workshop is a quick exercise, which, judging from the reaction it gets, is effective. The following is a snippet from a book chapter I’m working on, explaining what I ask them to do.

      Participants in my workshop this summer. I must have taken this photo during the second part of the exercise: I only see one lefty.

     When I give workshops to homeschooling parents on nurturing their children’s writing, I often start with a writing exercise.  I allay their anxieties right off, explaining that they won’t have to share what they write. And I entice them with an assignment both simple and intriguing: write a description of the room we’re sitting in. “Focus on whatever interests you: the people, the room itself, the chairs, the walls. Use your senses and describe what you hear out the open door, what you smell, the feel of the desk beneath your fingers. Take two minutes, and try not to think too much. Just write.”

       And then, as they’re cracking their notebooks and picking up pens, I lay it on them: “Oh, but wait! I have a few constraints for you.”

       Whereupon I ask them to place their pens or pencils in their non-dominant hands: lefties will write with their right hands, righties with their left. Also, they should write from right to left, rather than the traditional (in English anyway) left-to-right. Each letter should be a mirror image of its usual form.  “And when it comes to vowels, I want you to think in alphabetical order: A-E-I-O-U. Each time you need to write a vowel, rather than writing the vowel you intend to, write the next vowel in A-E-I-O-U order: a’s become e’s; e’s become i’s, and when you need a u, write an a instead.”

       They look at me baffled, as if I’ve just asked them to remove their tongues, and I pick up my timer and smile. “Ready?”

       It’s a fun two minutes. As they work, some giggle at their own ineptitude. Some groan. Others gasp in dismay.

       When the timer goes off, they exhale with drama. They drop heads to desks. I ask how much they got down. Most finish a single sentence; a few manage part of a second. Without discussing much more, I reset the timer and ask them to repeat the assignment once more, but this time they can write as they usually do. “A description of the room. Focus on what you want to. Don’t think too much. Two minutes. Go!”

        ”How much did you get down this time?” I ask the participants, as the timer goes off a second time.

        Most say they wrote at least five sentences. “I could have written more,” one woman points out, “but the sentences were more complex this time.”

        ”When you wrote the first time, what were you thinking as you wrote? Did you have a sense of where you were going, what you would write next?”

       “I just focused on one word at a time,” says another woman. “I couldn’t keep track of what I was trying to say.” She shakes her head back and forth slowly, like a sad farmer appraising the damage after a storm. “Now I know how my five-year-old feels when she writes.”

       Exactly. I want parents to remember how formidable it is to be a beginning writer.

Confusing as interchanging vowels might seem, it’s not nearly as difficult as spelling words is for a beginning writer, although the vowel-shuffling is my attempt to replicate that struggle somewhat. 

Regardless, the task is challenging. I encourage you, especially if you have a young child at home, to take five minutes to try it yourself. Just reading about it won’t give you the tangible experience of doing it. Try both parts of the exercise–first describing whatever room you’re in with the above-mentioned constraints, and then without–to experience the difference between the two. The difference between being a fledgling writer and a fluent one. 

Then maybe you’ll have a better sense of why I think taking dictation from young writers is so important.