Help Me Teach Teen Writers!

I'm doing a presentation in a few weeks about getting published, hoping to cover everything from queries to contracts (and something in between!) Do you, fellow teen writers and adult writing experts, have any suggestions? If you came to the workshop, what would you want to hear? What are you interested in? What are you not coming to hear?

The Writing Workshop: Anecdotes

Do you know what an anecdote is?

According to the Gabrielle dictionar, an anecdote is a personal story used for a purpose. These are used in articles and essays nonstop 24/7 all the time but since this is the Incredible Writing Workshop we're talking about fiction and poetry.

1.

Anecdotes are awesome when you write a novel,

because if you're completely stuck and have no idea which direction forward is, you can employ the Storyteller-Like Character and have him/her tell an anecdote. Old Uncle Joe or Little Cousin Tashika can serve this purpose well.

I love when authors use anecdote-telling with irony, like when the weird old woman starts talking about her dead boyfriend and the Protagonist doesn't pay attention... only to discover that the Antagonist is the dead boyfriend's great-grandson!

2.

Anecdotes have obvious humor purposes in

fiction, because what happens to us in life is often funny. Think Mark Twain. Show the tension of a short story when the Sibling launches into a raucous tale of the Protagonist as the Prot. stares helplessly at his Dearly Beloved. It's funny, gives background and moves the story ahead all at the same time.

3.

In poetry, anecdotes can help us remember the feelings

that moved us. Are you writing a poem about embarrassment? Write down the full story of your Most Embarrassing Moment (then burn it. I've never told my MEM to anybody. It's too humiliating.) Underline the phrases that give color to the story or express the events succinctly. Look for odd noun/adjective combinations, and begin to shape your poem.

Writing Workshop

Welcome to The Incredible Writing Workshop, where we look at actual pieces of writing and see where we can go from there. Look for both critique and publishing advice, specific and readable and downright fun. This week we're looking at "A Manifesto," the previous post on Innovative.

By now I think most of you have read the previous post "A Manifesto." Today we're going to look at (geez, I feel like a talk show host) how to turn a brainstorm, diary-style piece of writing like that into something publishable! Seatbelts and other protective garments prepared, let's go.

Nonfiction

You had a horrible day, you let it out on paper and kazaam! You get something like my post previous. But now your ambition takes over and you want to write an essay about this Horrible No-Good Day. How would you structure it?

Categorize examples. Make a list of all the things that went wrong: "rejection from team," "no phone calls," "bad job," "frustration," etc. You can use these as points in your essay.

Connect to an outside theme. Essays or op-ed pieces work best when you connect a personal experience (a bad day) to a universal or outside theme. This could be an international event (the tragedies in China or Myanmar) or a culture trend (depression medication) or a historical person (Sylvia Plath.)

Work on tone. You want the entire essay to feel like those two paragraphs of brainstorm did, without being in that form. As you write the essay, try to recapture the same emotion that prompted you to write in the first place.

Fiction

You've had a horrible day, wrote something like my post previous, and bazoom! it's a short story, right?

Create the situation. What you have is an emotion, what you need is a setting and a cast of characters. The "easiest" thing is to make it like your own sitch: a teenager with a bad day, staring out the window at a rainy future, etc. The "harder" thing would be to take these emotions and attribute them to a person most unlike yourself: a grandmother fearing Alzheimer's, a quadriplegic watching the Olympics on T.V., an insurance salesman who's just been laid off.

Translate to dialogue. Internal monologue (when the protagonist talks to himself, or to the audience) is not always as readable as dialogue. All those awesome phrases and examples of depression can be turned into a dialogue between two feisty/depressed characters. Your message will still come across, but it will be more interesting.

Poetry

You had a terrible day and abacadabra! you're writing a Pulitzer poem. But how does it happen?

Take exact phrases. Poetry is the jewelry-making part of writing. Poets are delicate and precise with words, so in this case you would take the exact phrases from the piece and style it into a poem form of your choice. I'd recommend free or blank verse for this kind of thing.

Translate paragraphs into stanzas. The last part of the post previous was in paragraph form. To make it into poetry, take the most important ideas from your diary-style writing and form them into lines.

You eat chocolate
Conquer the world one day
One miserable day
One beautiful day
At a time
With chocolate
[ etc.]

I don't think this is how Maya Angelou wrote it, but take a look at her poem "Still I Rise." You can see how potentially she could have worked from paragraph/diary-style form into a poem with a fantastic rhythm and powerful message.