When I donated a month’s worth of writing coach sessions to a silent auction benefiting a local non-profit organization, I didn’t expect my new writing coach client to be 11.
“Does he want to do this?” I asked his father who had actually bid on my services.
“He’ll do what he’s told.”
That didn’t bode well, but I had trained to be a teacher in college and worked as a teaching assistant right after. So I figured I could find a way to win over my young writing coach client.
I mulled through ideas about how to get kids excited about writing, and remembered one particularly successful writing exercise I had done with my students. Before Halloween, we had read Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” while simultaneously listening to a recording of the story. Before the kids started writing, we talked about what made the story so scary. After they had written their stories, I met one-on-one with each student to go over his or her work. We briefly discussed any mistakes. Then we focused on how the story could be made scarier. The kids were so excited about their rewrites, they couldn’t wait for my reaction. I had to confess that I’d gotten too “creeped out” the night before and couldn’t finish reading all of them. They were ecstatic.
I figured I would use a variation of that “how to get kids excited about writing” technique with my new young writing coach client. The night before our first session, the boy’s father emailed over a journal entry his son had written as a school assignment. I started reading immediately.
They don’t know me, they don’t know the truth of where I come from, of what I can do. They don’t know and they never will. I act normal, like I was born here on Earth, but I wasn’t.
The remainder of the short journal entry explained that the narrator was from a planet called Maldovar, that he was 24 years old on his planet but only 12 on earth, and that he had been transported here during an emergency evacuation.
When my 11-year-old client arrived, I told him how much I had liked his journal entry. “You could turn this into a big story if you wanted,” I said. “It could even be a book.” Switching gears, I added, “Come here. I want to show you something.” That’s when I took him upstairs to my office, where I have my on demand printing operation which I call The Beast. “Once you’ve done the writing, we could print it up and you’d have real bound books to give to your family and friends,” I said.
“That’d be cool!” he exclaimed.
Yup. I had him hooked. We returned downstairs and talked briefly about two main writing points:
1) Every sentence has just one thought. A new thought requires a new sentence.
2) Opt to show the story instead of telling the story. That means using dialog (including internal dialog and thoughts), action and scene setting.
After giving him a hard copy of my Story Telling vs. Story Showing blog post, we started to brainstorm plot possibilities. By the end of our session, we had come up with an outline for a 12-chapter novel.
“You’re going to have to be disciplined and really do this,” his father warned when he returned to pick up his son.
“I know,” said the boy without a second’s hesitation. “I’m going to start writing tonight.”
That made me pretty darn happy. One newly-minted writer signed, sealed and delivered. I’m not sure which of us is more excited about the next phase.
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