I once had an “aha” moment while giving my nephew a ride on a beautiful summer day. He was in that early stage of adolescence: old enough to sit in the front seat, but young enough that riding shotgun was exciting. But during this ride, he was giving off strange signals. He twitched. He wiggled. He squirmed.… more
Sometimes, despite cramming plenty of action and conflict into my writing, it still falls flat. I want the words to leap off the page and grab readers by the throat, and instead they flop around gasping for breath.
Fortunately, there’s a straightforward revision trick that can rejuvenate such writing: a verb check.
I start by going through the piece and underlining or highlighting every verb.… more
I love book spine poetry, and it’s a great way to get young writers to engage with both books and poetry-writing. Check out your own shelves and see what stories emerge.
Here are some of my own efforts to show you how easy it can be.
Where She Went
Looking for Alaska
Chasing Vermeer
Tracking daddy down
Looking for Alibrandi
In search of Mockingbird
Where the kissing never stops
Reality check
Reality check:
Don’t you know there’s a war on?
You Split
You
Split
Just like that
As easy as falling off the face of the Earth
Down the rabbit hole
Absolutely, positively not
Okay for now
The Sky is Everywhere
The sky is everywhere
I’ll be there
Forever
Check out this post by Travis Jonker for more information about book spine poems.… more
In my town, parallel parking was known as the “skill most likely to rattle” new driving candidates and ultimately cause them to flunk their on-road driving test.
Luckily for me, I was assigned a gigantic pickup truck the day we practiced parallel parking in the student lot for Driver’s Ed class. By the time class was over, I could have wedged the Titanic between icebergs and come out safely on the other side (as long as the icebergs had highly visible orange safety cones sticking up out of the water).… more
Names are one-word poems. I often do tons of research to figure out which name is the best match for the individual I’m inventing; it matters that I get it right.
Some students jump into wild creativity without hearing a single warning rattle. Others stop to look both ways so often that they never successfully make it across the writing street.
Writing well is hard. If you’re not challenging yourself as a writer, you can turn into writing road kill. Besides: angels need a reason to show up.
There’s a quote about sculpting, attributed to Michelangelo, that I often paraphrase for students when I’m talking about the art of revising:
In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.
A first draft is often written in a kind of overdrive, with words spinning across the paper without thought to whether they all belong.… more
