Authors: Lessons Learned from Young Writers – Part 3 of 4

After two full school years and at least 100 hours of outside editing by each person involved, the lessons learned became clearer.

To the teachers, clarity included accepting the fact that most students in elective courses, even those with a single, specific goal, need strict deadlines and FREQUENT checks for understanding of expectations and due dates.

I’ll let the students speak for themselves. They will do so anonymously. When you read a name, it’s not the real name of the person being referred to.

What follows are comments from two sources. One source is a series of “opinion” questions I asked them to complete. The other source is the speeches the authors gave at the school-wide assembly celebrating the book’s official release. I’m putting up their comments and holding my commentary until Part 4.

From the speeches

Grace

I’ve been part of the Creative Writing class at our school for the last two years, and I am so beyond ecstatic to be here, in our moment of triumph, that I won’t go into how excited I am. It would take too long!

What I will go into is what it took to get here. Writing is a process—long, and arduous process. We started out with an idea and the pull to make something out of it. But as good as that is, you need more. We had to plot out our ideas, see if they would work on paper as well as they did in our heads. We had to develop our characters, decide if they were sarcastic, sincere, sweet, or just plain rude! Were they popular, social, introverted, or awkward? Did their names have some deep meaning, or did they simply sound nice? And then, when we wrote, we had to take all those tiny details and show the reader what they meant. Not just what they meant to us, or to our character, but to the real person who would be holding those pages. After that…one word: EDITING. And that is an enormous task in and of itself!

Writing is a process. But it’s something more than that, too. It’s the feeling you get when you finally think of the perfect word. It’s how you can spend hours trying to fix one bit of dialogue, and how sometimes it comes as naturally as breathing. It’s the way your fingers cramp when you write too fast, and the frustration you feel when you’ve typed the same word wrong six times. It’s the way words can mix and shift and flow together until they fit perfectly. How simple letters can fall into place in a puzzle one by one until the puzzle is revealed to be a work of art. It’s the smell of pages which hold countless stories, whether they are freshly-printed, or well-loved. It’s when you look at something you’ve made and feel a kind of joy I’m not sure how to describe.

It’s the feeling I think all of us have right now.

So here we are, two years and hundreds of writing hours later. But everything has to begin at the beginning, and that’s just how it started for us.

Hope

Now, I know a lot of you in this room, and a lot of you know me too. A lot of you probably know that I always get my work done, and also know that I am a GREAT procrastinator. I can wait until the day of the assignment that’s due, the class before, and sometimes up until the minute before class starts.

When I embarked on this project, our original deadline for our story was by the end of January 2016. You can probably guess what I was doing at the end of January. I didn’t even have half of my story done, but with the helpful reminders from my classmates, my teacher Mrs. Ray, and author, Mr. Downing, I somehow managed to get my story finished the night it was due.

We came back, and we were told that we were in the editing process and planning to publish in May of 2017. I continued the process of waiting until the last minute to get my assignments done for this book until our final draft for the proof was due in March of 2017.

I thought “I have until March, why would I need to edit now when I have months?”

Months became weeks, weeks became days, and then I realized Wait, I have to get this done tonight!

I rushed through, and “edited” my story. The next day, I found out that I had a major problem with the narrative part of my story and I had to redo almost my entire chapter, in two days. I had a deadline of 2 days. I thought there is no way, and it would have to be late.

My hero, Grace helped me edit for 6 hours on the phone, day and night to get it done. Somehow, we got it done, but it was passed the deadline. I had to have a placeholder in our proof book when they were ordered. Not until that moment did I ever think “So that’s what a deadline is! I didn’t get my story in in time, so it's dead!”

Ok, I grabbed a grip and worked hard to edit my story, and I got in in a day early. When we got the proofs, we had to edit each other’s stories. Mrs. Ray told us that we have until next Thursday to turn in the proofs. OK, no big deal, I thought, I have a week.

Guess who was working on it on the car ride to school?

I walked into class ready with my apology ready as I told Mrs. Ray how sorry I was that I didn’t finish editing my classmate’s stories. I only had 5 more pages to edit!

And she said, “You have until next Thursday.”

I was in shock and couldn't help but say “You told me today” and after deep thought, I asked, “Is that because you knew I wouldn’t get it done it time?”

And with a smile, she said, “We know each other so well.”

I finished editing their stories and mine as soon as possible because a deadline, means death if you don't get it done! I learned a deadline means you have to get something done or it won't turn out the way you want it to.

I had to write this speech and turn it in last Thursday since that was the deadline. Anyone want to guess what I was doing on the car ride to class???

At least I now know a deadline means that you have to do whatever it takes and put in as much effort as possible to get it done.

Charity

So, revising, revising, and revising some more.

That is exactly what an author does. It takes months of revising before a product can be finished. In our case, it took twenty-four months. At the end of the first year of creative writing, we thought our stories were ready to be published. We were wrong. At the beginning of this year, we read through the stories that we had written and were appalled and so thankful that Mrs. Ray and Mr. Downing had told us that we weren’t going to be published that first year. There was a multitude of grammar mistakes and holes in our plotlines that we hadn’t even noticed.

This year of creative writing was spent on revising so that we could publish by the end of the year. Grace had to change her story a few times, Wanda had to get her story from 30 or so pages down into the twenties, I had to rewrite my entire story as a narrative before I could add in dialogue, Hope spent hours on the phone with Grace trying to get her story finished and revised in time, and Lily, being an eighth grader, wasn’t in our class most of the time, so none of us knew what her story was about and when we read it, we all had lots of notes that she had to sift through.

But here we are. The stories are finished and published.

Throughout this year, we learned many things, some different than others. But one thing we all learned is that revising is a necessary annoyance. Editors are very helpful, but at the same time annoying because once you have written the ending of your story and you put your pencil down or shut down the computer, you want to be done. You don’t want to have to deal with the story anymore, but thank goodness you do.

It’s easier to see what mistakes you’ve made when people go through and critique your story. It forces you to look from another perspective and think, “If I was a reader who didn’t know what was going on, would this make sense?” And oftentimes, it doesn’t!

That’s okay though. It’s all part of the process known as editing, and while that same process is annoying, it’s also the best thing that could happen to your story.

So despite spending hours on end revising and being completely frustrated with our stories, we finally got to a product that we can be proud of and we couldn’t be happier to share it with you guys.

Two community newspapers covered the story. Both did excellent jobs. The idea that "media" was involved was motivational, too!

Below is the article that included photos of the students. The other is included in Part 4 of this series.

Student names have been redacted and their faces digitally distorted in these photographs.

From the opinion questions

 These are the questions the writers were asked to respond to. It was not a formal assignment.

Please answer each of these questions. Use as much space as you’d like. Just start typing in the line below the question you are answering.

 I’m continuing my blog series on “Lessons Learned from Young Writers” and will include some of the quoted text to help make points. The name on the top is for my tracking only. No student names will be used in the blog; neither will the name of the school.

 Thank you for doing this.

 Dr. D.

  

Wanda	Charity
What was your expectation in September 2015?
In September 2015v I thought that we would have a great book ready to be published by the end of the school year.	I expected that we would have our book published by the end of the year.
What is the biggest disappointment for you during this process? Explain.
The biggest disappointment for me was that not everyone in the class published their stories. Probably also that it took us two years to finish this project.	My biggest disappointment during this process was having to continuously edit what I thought was a completely finished story. I thought that my story was completely finished by the end of the first semester, but when I was told differently, I didn’t want to/couldn’t believe that it was true.
If you were to do this over, what would you do differently? What would you do the same way?
I would edit more near the start of the process and probably try to finish my story faster to leave more time for edits.	If I were to do this over I would definitely not procrastinate as much as I did, but I would definitely take the same amount of time editing because it really helped me grow as a writer.
What is the most important lesson you learned from this process? Why?
Edit ‘til your eyes bleed, then edit some more.	The most important lesson I learned is that editors are not trying to make your life miserable, they are trying to help get your writing to the best it can be.
What three pieces of advice do you have for aspiring authors?
·      Don’t give up on your story, the editing process is hard but once you finally get to the end it is so worth it. ·      Don’t procrastinate; whatever you do always meet the deadlines. Have fun! ·      Always keep the imagination stream flowing and don’t be afraid to change your story.	·      Definitely, choose to write something that you’re passionate about, it will make it much easier. ·      Don’t be hard on yourself when people give you lots of changes to make in your story, take them as an opportunity to make yourself better and think of it as if they are giving you a second chance to do it better than before. ·      think about what lessons you and your readers can learn from your writing. Sure stories are nice, but if you can’t learn anything from them, what’s the point?
Optional. Add any thoughts or comments you want to add.
If you have a good teacher like I did take advantage of their knowledge. They have a ton of experiences and if you ask they are always willing to help you out.	If you really enjoy writing, then write. Don’t let anyone stop you. Even if you’re a bad writer, you can get better. That’s the point of the editing process. To make you and your writing the best it can be. If you have good ideas, you can write.

If you’ve been paying attention, you

     ·      know that five students completed the class and had stories in the book.

     ·      noticed only four student contributors to today’s blog content.

     ·      saw that the same students are not included in both areas of reflection.

In the cases of these reflective pieces, we took what we could get. You need to know that the two speeches not included because we didn’t get digital copies from the speakers provided insight and pathos, as did those you read.

“Grace” excelled in many ways during this project. Her story was excellent. She met every deadline. She could have finished her second story for inclusion, but she chose to help the other authors who were struggling. I don’t know how many hours she spent on the phone or in person with colleagues correcting, complimenting, and cajoling them into better products.

With her permission, I’m printing her “opinion” answers in total in Part 4 of this series. You will be amazed at the depth of understanding and maturity from this high school sophomore.

Next Authors blog: Lessons Learned from Young Writers - Conclusion

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