Blackout Poetry / Found Poetry: A fun activity!

Have you ever made extra copies? Ended up with 25 worksheets you never got to do in class? Had a random flu bug hit your class and end up with 10 copies too many? With papers printed on only one side I usually just keep a stack and use them later when I am copying something new. However when they are double sided what can you do?

There is an activity I like to give my fast finishers, though sometimes we do this as a class when working on poetry. When someone finished early I give them an old worksheet and have them make a story or a poem out of it.

If we are studying a particular grammar point I may ask them to include that, but normally I don't.

It is basically a fun and pretty way to have students write without writing.



Optional (Pre Step):
The first time you do these in class you may want to show some examples first. One famous "blackout poet" is Austin Kleon. He has a book Newspaper Blackout available as a paper book or an ebook. You can also find his poems online (he's on Twitter and Instagram). His poetry is very simple, you essentially black out the words you don't want. He uses newspapers (which is also an option!), but you can apply the same concepts to old worksheets.

Unused Worksheet

Step 1. 
Give them an old worksheet. In this case it is a TOEFL diagnostic test. My school often asks me to give these workshops, but since I never know how many students will attend I normally have extras.

Step 2. 
Have students underline (in pencil) words that they know. The great thing about this task is even if they only understand 10% of the words that's fine! They don't need to understand everything.

Step 3. 
See if they can create a poem or story with the words they know.

OPTIONS!
For punctuation practice I like to have them re-write their poems and punctuate them properly in the margin. Punctuation often adds extra meaning to their words.

As far as appearances, you have some choices:

A. Students can black out the words they won't use. (or use any color they like!)

You need fun questions.

How can rhyme help you?

When poems work well.


Pictures must use your friends in public.

You can create, copy, open, clip, web, graph.

B. Students can draw lines connecting the words and decorate the page as they like.

We applauded, clapped.

The feeling destroyed.

The feeling should last: money, time.

C. Students can create art over the words.
Essentially, she creates a blank slate by having students paint white over the words they will not use. Once dried they draw a picture that they feel connects to the story. I do not do this in my class as I don't normally have access to paints, water, etc. However, if you are in an art friendly environment, it could be something to consider.

There are tons of ways to reuse old worksheets, but this is another one to add to your list. Plus, it is fun!

What's your favorite way to reuse paper?

Ecology , Fast Finishers , Green , Poetry , Reading , Recycling , Short Story , writing

The We Need Diverse Books Campaign; Also, Writing Frustration

I want to start by boosting the signal for a series of online events about to take place in support of diversity in children and YA's literature. This is partly in response to the recent BookCon debacle you can read about here, but also stems from a lot of recent and growing online conversation about the appalling lack of diversity in the field. The online events will take place over three days, starting May 1, and more info is at the WeNeedDiverseBooks tumblr. Visit the site, make a sign, get involved, spread the word.

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So, I've mentioned I'm starting a new book. Care to know how it's going? I'LL TELL YOU. Starting this book is like someone's walked up to me and said, "Hi there. We've decided it's your job to build a zoo. Here are your materials," then buried me under a mountain of sand, let a few tigers loose, and walked away. Or something. See, this is the type of imagery I'm coming up with. I AM HAVING A TERRIBLE TIME. For example, today I have been "about to start writing" for approximately 8 hours. I haven't managed a single word. And I know it's not over, because yesterday, recognizing what was going on, I made a rule that I have to write at least one page every day. Today isn't over until I write that one page.

What happens if I don't write the one page? Nothing in particular – I don't punish myself, and I don't even generally make progress rules like this unless nothing else is working – but here's the thing. The only way for me to start to feel like I'm writing a book that means anything is to get some words on the page -- enough words that I start to sense what this thing is now that it's on the page. I know what it is when it's off the page. I feel good about my book plan. But when I try to turn the book plan into words on the page, those words don't feel like my book plan, they feel like nothing, like I've stepped into this dimension of nothing. The only way for them to start feeling like something is for me to keep choosing to step into that nothing and add more words.

If I don't write one page today, it means I've added one day to however long I'm going to feel like this. Which would be crummy. Whereas, if I write the one page, even if it's stiff and awkward and not at all what I'm aiming for (which is likely), I will experience the relief of knowing that I'm one day closer to leaving this feeling of nothingness behind.

One trick I like to employ when this happens is to wait until late in the day to start writing. At least that way, I don't waste the entire day imagining that I'm about to start writing. Once the day is getting near its end, I HAVE to write, so I do. Hypothetically. I didn't think to do this today, but it's on the agenda for tomorrow.

******

A final note, written a couple of hours later: I am relieved to report that I wrote my one page.

diversity , writing

Notes from the Writing Room

A friend, knowing my usual one-book-at-a-time writing mode and understanding that at the moment, I'm working on three books, asked me if I've adopted a new way of working. The answer is no. I'm writing books the same way I always have. I start at the beginning of a book and write it through to the end. Then that book moves into the revision stage; over the course of however-long, my editor and I pass it back and forth and I revise it several times. While a book is in the revision stage, there are extended periods of time when either it's with my editor or we are giving it some needed space. During that time, I start the next book and write it through to the end. Rinse and repeat.

The reason I have three books in the works at the moment is that I wrote the first draft of one of them – the first one – really fast, but the revisions are going really really slowly. In the meantime, I've written a second book that's now also in revisions and is probably going to overtake the first book. I just handed a revision of the second book in to my editor and she and I are agreed that it's not yet time for me to take another crack at revising the first book. (Every book needs something different. That book needs a LOT of space.) So I'm starting the next book (#3) and intend to write it through to the end. :o)

For them that like numerical breakdowns: At any given time, I'm really only working on one book. For weeks or even months, one of the books will be my primary focus while I'm merely gathering information for the other two. Things come and go in waves. Back in May, I wrote a post about what my workday looked like and what my work life looked like at the time. Back then, about 85% of my energies were going to revising the first book, 14.5% of my energies were going toward planning the third book, and 0.5% of my energies were going toward the second book, which I'd just completed a draft of and was trying not to think about. Today, this week, and this month, I would say that 97% of my energies are going toward planning and starting the third book, 2.5% of my energies are going toward collecting feedback from readers about the most recent draft of the second book, and 0.5% of my energies, also known as "as little as possible," are going toward the first book, because it needs space. This pattern will probably hold until my editor gives me feedback for the second book, at which point I will need to switch my focus to its next revision. I am usually able to bring a project to a good stopping point before switching from one to the other; I usually have a sense of what's on the horizon.

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The new book I'm starting is a book I've been planning for years. Planning is fun and exciting but as I begin to near the actual writing, I am often filled with a sense of dread. This is because I've done this enough times now that I know what's ahead. Beginnings are the hardest part of a book for me. For weeks and weeks and months, I make little progress, my characters don't feel real to me, I can't figure out who they actually are, my plot feels stupid and hopeless, and I'm constantly overwhelmed by the weight of all the pages I haven't written yet. These feelings are not due to low self-esteem or pessimism; I would bet I'm going to be very happy with the book in the end. They're merely due to the realities of writing. You spend a lot of time at the beginning struggling to get out of the primordial muck, or at least, I do. That's just the way it is, and it's helpful to understand that it's just the way it is, but it doesn't make it fun to be stuck there.

I told some friends that now that I have all my ideas together, I wish I could just wave a wand at the ideas and the book would appear; instead, I will dive into this months-long, useless-feeling muddle. One of my friends, also writing a book, responded that she didn't know what I was talking about. According to these people she follows on Twitter, it only takes them three weeks to write a novel and the novel is amazing. Snorts all around. It's true that at this point in the writing, I tend to be hopeful and perhaps a bit over-optimistic (I need to be, or else I would never begin!), but at least I'm not delusional. I know perfectly well that a year from now, I will probably still be writing the first draft, and once I'm done with the first draft, when I look upon it, I will see that while parts of it are, in fact, exactly what I hoped they would be, other parts are a big steaming pile of crap. AS THEY SHOULD BE. First drafts are exactly that: drafty, and meant to be followed by more attempts.

******

As I begin, I am collecting and consolidating all the little planny-comments I've been jotting down for years in a couple of different notebooks, on random slips of paper, and on my phone. I'm reminded that one should really be quite explicit when jotting down ideas for a book one will probably not be writing for a long time. Today I encountered the helpful note, "Remember the Bolsheviks!!!" Apparently I was very excited when I jotted this down. There were several exclamation points. Regrettably, I have since completely forgotten the Bolsheviks (nor does the book take place in Russia) so I have no idea what I meant by that. Another comment said, "Putting aside what doesn't matter, to push away what doesn't matter. Is this what I'm looking for?" Um. It's kind of hard to tell?

******

By the end of my workday today, my new book plan was hanging radiantly on the wall (mounted on my usual handmade cloth bulletin board). I took a few pictures and sent them to a few concerned parties. See for yourself: my book plan looks like a badly-played game of Tetris. This is appropriate, as it sort of feels that way, too… fun and exciting, while infused with panic and a sense of doom.

And so it begins.

Godspeed to all writers :o)

a book takes a long time , writing

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED Talk on the Danger of a Single Story

Have you seen novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED Talk yet? Called "The danger of a single story," it's beautifully composed and full of compassion. If you make 19 minutes for it, I think you'll be glad you did so.



Here's the link to the talk on the TED page, where you can access subtitles and also the transcript of the talk in many languages.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , TED talks , writing

Writing Moments

Revising, as I've mentioned, is really intense right now, so I'm making sure I take breaks whenever I need them. Today at midday, I decided I needed a walk to clear my head. However, it's 41°F (5°C) outside today, a heat wave the likes of which I've apparently forgotten how to cope with; I put on my longjohns, my wool socks, my arm warmers, my scarf, my hat liner, and spent the first few minutes dying of heat and pulling off layers. It's amazing outside! The river has been iced over for weeks, but today there's a sheen of melted water on top. The geese are walking around on the ice in the usual manner, except that it's more slippery today, so each step includes a little unsteady slide which doesn't seem to cause them the panic that sort of thing causes me. I suppose if my center of gravity were six inches off the ground and I had webbed feet bigger than my head and could fly, I wouldn't panic either.

Because of the sheen of water, each goose had a bright and perfect reflection, which is unusual for a goose walking on ice. They were drinking from the sheen of water, and it wasn't like the way a cat drinks water with quick laps of the tongue; it was more like a woodpecker somehow, or a drill. It was making a lot of percussive noise. The geese were marvelous, they were just the break I needed from writing. Then I noticed myself trying to find the right words to describe them and made myself stop, because that's not a break from writing. Then I noticed myself writing a blog post about how I went for a walk and saw some geese and tried to find the right words to describe them but made myself stop because it wasn't a break from writing, and made myself stop that, too, because that wasn't a break from writing either. Then I noticed myself adding the line to the blog post about how I just made myself stop writing the blog post… At which point I gave up trying to control my mind on my walk. I'm sure it was an excellent break from something.

:o)

perspective , rest , writing

Seabane Isn't Real

Here's a brief conversation between Katsa and Po in Graceling:

Po looked puzzled. “What’s seabane?”

“I don’t know if you have another name for it in Lienid.  It’s a small purple flower. A woman who eats its leaves will not bear a child.”

And here's a line from Bitterblue:

Bitterblue examined the item in her hand. It was a medicinal envelope with a label written clear across the front: “Seabane, for the prevention of pregnancy.”

Seabane is a fictional herb. I made it up, not unlike the way fantasy writer Tamora Pierce made up a pregnancy charm for Alanna and her other fictional women.

Way back when I was an unpublished writer writing Graceling, choosing the name of this magical contraceptive herb was fun. I knew I wanted a plant name that, to the best of my ability to ensure such a thing, was not a known plant name in the real world in any language, because I didn't want to confuse my fantasy world with the real world and I didn't want to muddle readers ("What? Oregano doesn't prevent pregnancy!"). This left me with the task of making a word up, throwing different syllables together and deciding which ones sounded right.

Turns out that a lot of times, when you try to make a word up, you come up with a word that exists! (It's amazing how many things exist.) So I had to do a lot of checking on my "made-up" words. How? Well, I'm not a botanist, but I did the best I could. I looked my words up in dictionaries and encyclopedias, and of course, I ran them through Google searches.

Gradually, I settled on the word "seabane." It had the right feel, it was serviceable and vague-sounding in meaning… and at the time, when I checked in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and online, nothing came up – in particular, nothing plant-related. Significantly, the word didn't appear at all in the extended Oxford English Dictionary. So I decided it was a safe word to use, and began using it. Then I forgot about it.

A few days ago, my lovely Norwegian translator, Carina Westberg, contacted me with a question about the word "seabane." Where had I gotten it? Had I made it up? Did it have any significance she should know about before she tried to translate it into Norwegian? She told me that she'd done a Google search and all she'd found is that it's toxic to birds.

Toxic to birds?? That was surprising and interesting. So I did a Google search myself. And, forget about the birds. What concerned me much more is that amidst a lot of other things (including many legitimate conversations about my books), I found a very few tiny online conversations to the effect of one person asking, "What is seabane?" and another person answering as if it's an actual contraceptive.

Oh, dear readers. If you are in need of a contraceptive, please talk to a medical professional rather than consulting a fantasy novel OR a conversation forum on the internet. Many of the random forums on the internet are about as reliable as a fantasy novel! If the Internet is your only safe option, try organizations with reliable information, like Planned Parenthood or even the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services.

Of course, one nice thing is that we can use the Internet to fight the Internet. Please, readers: Feel free to click on the link to this "Seabane Isn't Real" blog post repeatedly, and send it to your friends for them to click on, too, so that if ever someone does a Google search wondering if seabane is real, this blog post explicitly stating that it's not will get bumped up to the top of their results!

(I won't get into how sad it makes me that some of our young people are so under-informed and misguided about safe contraceptive means that they do look to fantasy novels and unreliable parts of the Internet for answers.)

There's also a lesson here for the writers out there (um, aside from how scarily powerful our written words can be). Because actually, it turns out that something called "purple seabane" may in fact exist (though I have to say that after a great deal of research, I'm doubtful). Remember those birds? My Norwegian translator Carina found and shared a couple of websites where "purple seabane" is listed among plants and trees that are toxic to parrots, cockatiels, and other birds (like this list here at cockatielcottage.net). Huh! Back when I was writing Graceling, my Google searches did not bring up these lists. And the weird thing is that I can't find any mention of "purple seabane" anywhere else online, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and toxic plant databases. It only exists on these duplicated bird toxicity lists. So a few days ago, I returned again to the extended OED. Still nothing there. In the volume that would contain "seabane," it goes straight from "sea-apple" to "sea-bank." In the volume that would contain "purple seabane," it goes straight from "purple-red" to "purplewort." (Many thanks to the helpful reference librarians at the Cambridge Public Library who looked those up for me!) I'm now wondering if there might be a typo in these bird lists; if once again, shockingly, someone is wrong on the Internet. Or maybe there is such a thing as purple seabane? Further googling tells me that something called "purple seasbane" (note the extra "s") is toxic to dogs, but I can find no mention of that mysterious plant anywhere else online, either. Hm. I'm not sure. And ultimately, both whether it exists and possibly even my ability to know whether it exists are, like so many things, out of my control.

So, what's the lesson? Remember when I said above that I knew I wanted a name for my fictional plant that, to the best of my ability to ensure such a thing, was not a known plant name in the real world? I now realize that the key part of that sentence is "to the best of my ability to ensure such a thing." Writers: do you absolute best, and remember that this will involve getting things wrong. We will never have perfect knowledge or perfect control.

In conclusion: contraceptive seabane isn't real. And: (in the event it exists) don't feed purple seabane to your bird! And, finally: in moments such as these, a follow-up blog post can't hurt.

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EDITED TO ADD only five minutes later: I had an inspiration the moment this post published, and tootled off to see what happened if I googled "purple fleabane." Turns out that purple fleablane, with an "f" and an "l" rather than an "s," exists, and further googling tells me that fleabane is toxic to many animals. I wonder if we have our culprit?

contraceptives , my books , research , seabane , writing

New Year's Dreaming

Bulgarian cover for Fire! Published by Emas, designed by Zlatina Zareva. Click to enbiggen! ------>

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My dear nieces (accidentally and with great affection) gave me a Christmas present of a terrible cold in which my head was like a TARDIS of snot, so I've fallen behind in some things, including blogging. (The TARDIS, for those of you who aren't Doctor Who fans, is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, such that it's capable of containing unimaginably huge quantities of stuff you would never think possible if you're standing outside it. And by the way, I'm not as obsessed with Doctor Who as it might seem given recent mentions on my blog (though I do rather love it). It's more that a character I'm writing about is often wearing Doctor Who pajamas, so it's always on my mind.)

As colds go, this one was massive, but also dreamy and contemplative, possibly because it coincided with the New Year. I should have some resolution thoughts to blog before too long. For now, I'll merely mention that my dictation software keeps insisting that I cooked a student in my crockpot this weekend, while I swear I merely cooked an (entirely legal) stew. And here are a couple pictures from my writing desk.

Local potter Tilla Rodemann, whose work I adore, made this teapot.

At the end of every workday, I write up a tiny plan for the next day. "FORGET ABOUT
TIME" -- because dwelling on how infernally long a revision is taking does me no good
whatsoever. It will take however long it takes. Journey, not destination; maybe if I write
this to myself a thousand times, someday I'll understand it on a cellular level.

being an aunt , covers , Doctor Who , home , tea , writing , writing desk