chapter-a-month challenge

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chapter-a-month challenge: february

March 10, 2010 in chapter-a-month challenge, learning, writing | No comments

I’m a little late, but here’s how I’m doing with my project.

It always feels a little funny sharing a work-in-progress. I read a post from ysolda on her fabulous knitting blog, about her qualms with sharing her designs-in-progress. She does share, saying, “Personally I think it’s pretty interesting to see a project build and gain some insight into the development process.” (And doesn’t the sweater she’s working on look gorgeous? Check out the post with the wrist detail. I want to knit that!)

I’m always fascinated with the creative processes of others. I’m hoping that some of you out there feel the same. If nothing else, if you don’t write yourself, what I share here might help you see what a messy process writing can be. It might help you understand your kids’ frustrations when they write.

Anyway, I don’t have a chapter this month. But I have an awful lot of stuff.

I kept starting new parts, but nothing came together. It was like trying to gather up a ball of bread dough that didn’t have enough moisture. I finally realized what was holding me back.

I had this idea–which I still like–that I wanted to write very short chapters for this book. Break down my ideas into small bits, followed with practical suggestions, so parents could pick up the book and consider one small idea at a time–or they could read several.

But here’s what I realized: I don’t write short. Gee, I’ll bet you’re thinking, no duh. Have you ever seen a short post on this blog? What I’ve always loved about the essay form is that it imitates the thought process. It takes off in unexpected directions, incorporating story, analysis, argument and wonder. It’s a little unwieldy. That’s my style, and I think I need to go with it.

That realization opened up the possibilities for me. Instead of not knowing what to do with those chunks in which I’d written about each of my kids, it occurred to me that each of those sections was part of a bigger idea. With each kid I learned something new about writing with homeschoolers:

  • With H, I learned that the traditional school model of having kids take on their own writing at age six doesn’t work very well.
  • With Lulu, I learned that what’s most important is to find ways to help kids want to write, and to develop their voices as writers.
  • With Mr. T, I learned that homeschoolers can put the previous notions into practice differently. We can use an entirely different model.

Suddenly, I realized that I could write a chapter on each of those ideas, incorporating the sections I’d written about my kids with the newer sections I’d been working on. I could try to carry my readers along my own evolution of thoughts about kids and writing–assuming that many readers might follow a similar evolution–leading them right into the practical ideas that will form most of the book.

And I knew what I needed to do next. It was time for a cut-and-paste session.

cutting and pasting in the back of the car

Cutting up and rearranging my work in the back of the car, while Mr. T was at his wilderness program.

This is one of my favorite techniques for when writing isn’t working. Take what you have, cut it up and play with the order. It’s fun, and it almost always leads to new ideas. If nothing else, it gets you up from your writing chair and moving, which is always helpful.

I helped a homeschooled friend on her college essays this fall. She’d written a nice essay on her love of cycling, but it wasn’t quite capturing her passion. It wasn’t lively enough. I remembered a beautiful poem she’d written in our writer’s workshop, a very sensory, tangible poem about one particular ride. I suggested that she might want to cut up her essay and her poem, and see if she could work them into one. 

Her resulting essay was unique and vivid and wonderful. I hope it helps get her where she wants to go.

At any rate, my own cutting and pasting session was just what I needed. Suddenly all my ideas are coming together, and I have a big, shaggy ball of dough to knead. It needs work, but it’s working.

This month I hope to write a good draft of the chapter on H and the traditional school model of writing (and why it doesn’t work). I’ll let you know how how it goes.

chapter-a-month challenge: january

February 9, 2010 in chapter-a-month challenge, homeschooling, writing | 16 comments

It’s time for me to report back to you on whether I deserve a pat on the head or a kick in the butt on my book project.

writing at night

Finding interesting photos for this project is sure to be a challenge in itself.

My goal is to write a draft of a chapter each month. I gave myself an easy start for January, since I had just the last part of a sort of triptych of three shorter chapters to finish up.

I felt compelled to start with a brief history of how my views on kids and writing have evolved over time, with each of my own kids. (Brief history sounds troublesome already, don’t you think?) So I wrote a short chapter on each kid, following the shifts in my thinking.

With H, I was still pretty locked into the school model, and felt that kids at six should begin doing all their own writing.

“On a bookshelf in our family room is a tiny yellow book, hand-stitched with dental floss by H. at six, and titled–with a backwards J–My Journal. Only a few pages are filled, with lines like I oent to a rastrant. I had pancacs.  (I went to a restaurant. I had pancakes.) My articulate boy couldn’t manage more, didn’t want to manage more. Now, flipping through the empty pages that followed, I wonder: why didn’t I transcribe what he really wanted to say? Why didn’t I write for him more often? I know the reason, and there was just one: it wasn’t how schools did it.”

I go on to tell how at seven, H. slammed his pencil to the table and hollered, “I hate writing!”

Lulu’s chapter is all about cheating as a homeschooling parent:

     “Any parent of more than one child knows what happens with the second. You learn to cheat. You learn to slacken the rules that meant so much with your first. You permit pacifiers past first birthdays, you let bedtimes creep late, you let broccoli be snubbed and allow ice cream anyway. You know it’s cheating, but you try not to care. Anything to bypass a tantrum, to speed up a grocery trip, to let you sit at the table until you’re ready to deal with the dishes.”

With Lulu I knew that, more than anything, I didn’t want her to hate writing. So instead of forcing her to write, I cheated: I often took dictation from her. Still, I saw my transcribing as a temporary fix, just a little help until she could write on her own without difficulty.

Mr. T came six years after Lulu, and almost ten after H. That’s how long it took me to realize that all the times I’d thought I’d “cheated” with homeschooling had really been homeschooling at its finest: me, offering my kids just what they needed at the time. I took dictation from Mr. T as I’d done with Lulu, but this time around I began noticing what he seemed to be learning from the process.

     “T. narrated his tale, his head whirling with ideas, and I took notes, my head whirling with my own.

     I compiled quite a Post-It list at the kitchen table that morning. Slowly, I began to realize that T. had intuited an awful lot about writing from our dictation sessions. Not merely rules of grammar, but also the writerly choices that authors make, like using strong verbs such as tore to describe a character eating his food quickly, or ending a chapter with a cliffhanger.”

That was when I first began to see that taking dictation has real potential as a writing tool for homeschooling families.

So now I have three chapters–but I’m not sure I’ll use any of them. Part of me thinks telling my stories as the start of a book is too self-indulgent; part of me thinks readers love stories, and long to see how others trip up and figure things out. And that my history is a necessary lead-in to what I’ve come to believe about kids and writing.

I don’t know. This may not be my beginning. I may take stuff from these chapters and insert it elsewhere. I may not use it at all. I think I just need to keep writing and see where the pages settle, see what form the book wants to take.

One thing I’ve learned with writing, that I tell the kids in my writer’s workshops, is that the beginning you start with may not be your ultimate beginning. So often we feel compelled to start with something that drums at our minds, but that may just be a warm-up, a way into our true beginning. Our first efforts may simply be what I call making clay. Unlike the sculptor who begins work by taking out a block of clay and shaping it, the writer has nothing to work with, no clay at all, until he or she writes a draft and makes some. Only then can the shaping start.

the plan for february:

I’m forging ahead and starting a chapter on voice. To me, the most important part of a writing education should be nurturing a child’s written voice. If you’re baffled by the term as I once was, if you’re befuddled at how an auditory word like voice can have anything to do with writing on a page, stick around. I’ll try to explain.

thoughts on a year-long project (or, boring my readers for one last time)

January 25, 2010 in books, chapter-a-month challenge, learning, my year of essayists, writing | 16 comments

my excellent essayists

On New Year’s morning, I woke to find a message in my inbox telling me that Scott Russell Sanders had left a comment on my blog. Sanders was my essayist for October, and reading his message was such a thrill, and a closing more satisfying than I ever could have imagined for my year-long project. 

This wasn’t the first time a writer had left a comment on my blog, but it was the first of my beloved essayists to stop and say hello. I’m not sure I would have ever had the gall to put these thoughts out in public if I’d ever dreamed that the writers themselves might show up to read what I’d written. And I’m not sure I would have ever started this project if I’d realized what a time-consuming creature it would become.

Oh, it was time-consuming. There was at least one book to read each month. (And not a lick of fiction all year–not a lick!) After reading, I had to go back over my highlights and select favorites. Type them in and explain what I admired about them. And then write a little nutshell overview of what I thought about the writer. Those posts took me hours to write–usually over several days. Somehow they got longer and longer as the months went on, yet they consistently received far fewer comments than any of my regular posts. What was I thinking? What kept me doing it, month after month, like that dutiful teachers’ pet in the front row that makes everyone cross their eyes? 

I’m not entirely sure. There was something about declaring the project in public that fueled me. Who wants to fail on the stage of the World Wide Web? But more than that, I think, it became clear in the early months that I was learning an awful lot from the project. Here’s what I wrote when I first started out:

“The idea of studying essayists came to me in late December, when I was reading some writer’s list of favorite writers. And I realized, with plenty of despair and loathing, that although I’ve been reading and writing essays for thirteen years now, I would have a hard time coming up with a list of favorite essayists. I could give you a couple names, but a couple is a set, mere salt and pepper shakers. Not a list.”

And now? After twelve months of being a good student, sitting as I am in the front row, I can rattle off a long list of favorites. I can even tell what I’ve learned from each one. (Not that I can apply what I’ve learned. But I’m trying.)

Annie Dillard showed me how to observe, how to make every word in every sentence count; Michel de Montaigne  showed that in an essay, it’s more important to raise questions than to answer them. From Sue Hubbell I learned how to approach instructive writing using the essayist’s toolbox, and from Joan Didion how to work the telling detail, and the rhythm of a paragraph. I will always love Anne Lamott for her humor, her heart, and her wacky, spot-on metaphors. I’ll always appreciate Molly Wizenberg for showing me how to leap from the blogging world to the literary one. E.B. White showed me how an essayist can be witty and intelligent yet still downright charming, while Pico Iyer taught me how to pay attention to the details in the world around me, whether I’m in Iceland or my own kitchen. M.F.K. Fisher showed how insight into people is as important as details about things–and how to be sassy. Scott Russell Sanders taught me how to craft beautiful lines about pain as well as joy, and Michael Chabon showed me how to craft beautiful lines, somehow, from the most mundane bits from our culture and our days. And Adam Gopnik, well, Adam Gopnik will always be the Scarecrow to my Dorothy, my first favorite essayist.

This project has been so satisfying. I’m thinking of slurping all the posts into a Blurb book, so I can revisit all those fabulous lines until they burn themselves into my brain and fingers and make me a better writer.

Recognizing the power that a public year-long project seems to have on me, as the year wound down I began considering a new project for the new year. As good as it would be for me to read another dozen essayists, to finally get around to studying Virginia Woolf, I’m not doing it. It just took too much time. I thought about doing something completely different, something with photography, because I want to take better pictures.

But eventually I realized that the natural follow-up to this project would be to take what I’ve learned this year and to try to apply it to my own writing. And to make some progress on my book idea, since it’s the project that matters most to me right now. So I’ve come up with something I’m calling my Chapter-A-Month Challenge. I’m going to try to get a draft of a new book chapter completed each month.

I have no idea if I can pull this off. I write s-l-o-w-l-y. I write about as fast as Mr. T brushes his teeth, because he spends most of his brushing time making faces in the mirror. But at least I can try to write slowly more often, right? Once a month I’ll report here on how it’s going. Maybe I’ll share a few lines; maybe I’ll just whine about how hard it is to wake up at 5:00 am on Tuesdays to write. I’m not sure.

I’m putting the challenge on my blog for the kick-in-the-pants effect I hope it will have on my writing, not because I think you, dear readers, will find it interesting. I hope you don’t mind indulging me once a month.

The week I finished off my essayist project, I read one more essay. This one was by Alexander Chee, from Mentors, Muses and Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives. It’s an essay about the time Chee spent in the classroom of Annie Dillard, my January essayist from last year. By the time you get to the part where Dillard tells her students that whenever they’re in a bookstore, they should put their finger in the place on the shelf where their own book would be, you are guaranteed to have goosebumps if you’re an aspiring writer yourself.

“If I’ve done my job, she said in the last class, you won’t be happy with anything you write for the next ten years. It’s not because you won’t be writing well, but because I’ve raised your standards for yourself. Don’t compare yourselves with each other. Compare yourselves to Colette, or Henry James, or Edith Wharton. Compare yourselves to the classics. Shoot there.”

After nearly twenty years of trying to teach myself to write, I’m sure I won’t be satisfied after another ten. But after twelve months of reading some pretty excellent essayists, twelve months of sampling them and savoring them, now, when it comes to my own writing, at least I know what I’m shooting for.