Author of award-winning, adventurous realistic and historical fiction

Why we need to teach fiction

Feb 8, 2011 | ,

I’m pretty familiar with the Common Core standards, at least the English Language Arts ones, thanks to my day job. [Warning: I will now dabble in curriculum babble for approximately 4 sentences. And then I will stop.] Overall, I think it’s a good idea to standardize across the country what’s taught at certain grade levels and to make sure that really important reading and mathematics skills are covered. One thing that really bugs me about the Common Core, though, is that the standards de-emphasize reading fiction in favor of reading informational texts and nonfiction. The rationale is that reading informational texts better prepares kids for future testing and future employment. Fiction-reading skills aren’t seen as essential to compete in the academic and business world. Fiction is treated kinda like leisure reading, and nonessential. Not that there’s anything wrong with leisure reading–but fiction is so much more than that.

Julia Steiny wrote an essay for the Providence Journal about this issue and shared her thoughts on why fiction holds as many real-life benefits for students–read her essay here. She makes some great points, like the reason why her teachers all taught classical fiction in their classrooms:

[T]heir most compelling reason to hike around fictional landscapes was to build wisdom. Really smart people absorbed a lot of worldly experience from literature, well beyond what anyone could acquire in a single human life. Fiction can take us anywhere, to any time, and help us sense how it might feel to be a different sex, race or nationality. And these experiences would prepare us for the slings and arrows of our own uncertain futures. 

TRUE!

Steiny’s article made me think about what reading (not to mention writing) fiction has taught me:

Fiction made me love history.
Fiction made me a more empathetic and less judgmental person.
Fiction taught me the value of humor, and made me appreciate irony. 
Fiction educated me on how other people live in this country and around the world.
Fiction prepared me for tough circumstances I hadn’t yet experienced.
And fiction has helped me support others in their difficult times.
Fiction helped me embrace my imperfections and celebrate what made me unique as a teen.
Fiction taught me about resilience and that a dream unachieved isn’t as sad as a dream abandoned.
Fiction has helped me make choices about the kind of life I lead and the person I want to be.
Fiction fueled my imagination and made me more creative.

What has fiction taught you?

You are not like Milli Vanilli.

Nov 22, 2010 | , ,

How many of you writers have found yourself thinking any of the following:

  • I only got an agent/got published/won an award because of luck, or because I wrote the right thing at the right time.
  • So what if I wrote that book, now I have to write another. And it has to be better.
  • I can’t believe nobody has picked up on the typos in Chapter 7 or that terrible passage I didn’t cut in Chapter 19. Eventually, someone will and then they’ll all see what a hack I am.
  • I didn’t deserve to get so much praise for that book/attract the attention of some agents/get published. What I do isn’t half as good as writers X, Y, and Z. It’s not even a thimbleful as good.
  • If [insert your favorite writer here] had written what I wrote, maybe then it would be decent.
  • I’m not a *real* writer.

Persistent self-doubting thoughts might be fleeting bouts of insecurity, or they might be a sign that you’re suffering from impostor syndrome. Which is a real thing:

Do You Have the Imposter Syndrome?
Imposter Syndrome–Feeling Like a Fraud
[Note: Apparently “impostor” and “imposter” are both accepted spellings? Merriam-Webster was a little confusing on this one.]
I should know. One of the speakers at my grad-school orientation gave lecture about the dangers of the impostor syndrome in academia. Sitting in the audience, after a couple of stress-filled days in which my internal mantra was What the hell am I doing here?!?!, I had an impostor-syndrome epiphany: You mean I’m not the only person who feels this way? Who thinks that eventually everyone else in my department will figure out that I’m the village idiot who slipped through the admissions cracks? Apparently, I was not.

It’s easy to slip into impostor thought patterns as a writer. It’s easy to overlook the laudable and successful things you’ve done (no matter what stage of the publishing process you’re at) and write them off as flukes, luck, frauds. If you ever receive a compliment for your writing and your response begins with but/actually/no, I really just/or some other modifier instead of “Why, thank you. That’s so wonderful to hear”–congrats, you’re acting like someone who thinks s/he is an impostor.

Being humble is good. Being realistic is good. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is good. Being open to criticism that makes you grow and evolve and improve is good. Thinking that you are an impostor is bad. It’s not productive, just stressful.

If you write, you are a writer. If you’ve experienced success, you most likely deserved it. Ignore impostor-y thoughts and focus instead on enjoying the writing process, which always involves occasional mistakes, usually followed by growth and improvement.

Girl you know it’s true: you are not like Milli Vanilli.

Revision Trick: Wordle

Sep 20, 2010 | , , ,

Before I started inputting my hard-copy edits Saturday, I decided to make a Wordle of my MS. (Yes, I was procrastinating.) Copying my entire 70K MS to the clipboard and pasting it into the Wordle maker almost killed my computer, which was probably EXTREMELY STUPID to do, especially because I didn’t save the file or anything beforehand. But I lucked out, my geriatric MacBook regained its footing, and I got this cool Wordle out of it:

Neat, huh? Also–educational. Notice which words are the largest? Alex, like, Emma, really, and just. Two of those refer to characters, so I would expect them to be used a lot. One of them can be used as several parts of speech–like is verb, modifier, and verbal tic/filler–but still shouldn’t be that prevalent. The MS is not a courtroom drama, so I doubt just was ever used as anything but a modifier. And really–really? I guess I really need to cut down on how really often I use really. Really.
Obviously, after several rounds of revision I’ve varied my word choice and cleaned up the prose and a lot of the interesting words I’ve used aren’t going to show up in a Wordle made from 70,000 words. Even if I only use really and like every three pages, they’d still be big. That doesn’t mean, though, that I shouldn’t try to cut their use as much as possible. Making the Wordle was a giant reminder that I need to watch for repetition and be mindful of what I can cut so the story is told more eloquently and efficiently.
Ready to revise your WIP? Try just making a Wordle, and help yourself see which words you really need to snip.

My mom is my biggest . . . critic?

Aug 30, 2010 | , ,

I love getting comments from beta readers. In particular, I love getting comments from my mom as a beta.

My mom isn’t just a sweetheart reader, although she is very encouraging and supportive and tactful. She’s also a really good critic. I must have gotten my reading genes from her–she reads more than almost anyone I know. She’s also a former English and Language Arts teacher, so she’s a stickler for proper grammar and usage. Thanks to her years teaching teenagers, she is really familiar with YA and a big fan (sample conversation: What do you mean you haven’t read SPEAK yet? You really should. or Oh, I love the HUNGER GAMES.) She cares enough about me and my writing to push me and ask tough questions and be critical. Yay, Mom!

Anyway, I got some comments on my revisions from her this weekend. This page cracked me up because, well, it’s my mom’s note:

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