murder.booklocker.com

Today’s Spotlight is on Chicago Writers Association member Diana Zwinak.

How 18 people came to write more than 70,000 words in November
and lived to tell about it
By Diana Zwinak

I believe that teenage writers have a wealth of creativity inside them that should not be ignored and that our schools’ curriculums, focused as they are on standardized tests, push many students away from acquiring the very skills that teachers want adamantly to drill into their heads. For this reason, and as a response to the needs of several of my students, I created a non-profit corporation (Teen Writers and Artists Project) that tries to help supply these teenagers with the outlet that they so desperately crave. This is beginning to take up a serious amount of time, but when I am not tending to my corporation, or writing my own work, I am teaching at a rural high school in Illinois. Our entire student body is less than 500 students. However, last year 17 of them started the journey to became first time novelists, at least by NaNoWriMo standards. It all started on a pretty typical day in November. . .

Students in my high school English classes never know what to expect. In the course of a typical day I may get overtaken by inspiration several times and spontaneously start bouncing up and down in front of the classroom, a signal that I am about to send the whole class, or a select few adventurous souls, off on a project that takes us places we never even thought of before. That is what happened to us that day in the middle of the first week of last November.

I had just started my first attempt at participating in NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month. I was brimming with the exhilaration of just writing without a direction, just letting words flow for once. I hadn’t written in this way since high school or early college when I seemed to be a pipeline of words that poured forth and shaped themselves into their own amazing projects destined after a little tweaking from the internal editor to become pretty solid creations. I had honestly forgotten how good that felt.

So I was telling my students about it. They thought I was nuts. Most of them have never attempted to write anything beyond the papers demanded of them by the school system, and once they get to high school in our district, these papers become dry and unimaginative. Wrapped up in the MLA style manual and a formula that makes them easy to grade, they are boring to write. Students soon lose interest in writing at all, much less writing well. However, these papers are also designed in such a way that the department believes their are sure to learn various skills mandated by the state, so I can see why they exist in the format they do.

But that day I was filled with the joy and the lightening that true creative freedom can bring, and I challenged them to try to take part in the project with me. The NaNoWriMo Young Writer’s program allows students to make an agreement with a teacher and set a word goal for themselves. Students are not restricted to the 50,000 words that adult novelists are given. I offered my students 25 extra credit points if they set a word limit and succeeded. If they got half-way to their goal, they got 50 percent of the points. A quarter of the way got them 25 percent and so on.

Seventeen of my students took me up on the offer. Surprisingly, many of them were not from actual classes I taught but from my creative writing club at the high school. These people weren’t currently taking classes with me so they could not earn extra credit for their work. Some worked individually, some worked in pairs. Six of my students met their word goals and several NaNoWriMo novels came into existence. Everything from love stories to teen angst and horror stories poured through their fingers and into their computers. Periodically, students would turn their novels in to me electronically so that I could upload their novels into the NaNoWriMo counter.

My students who wrote the greatest amount of words 17,220 out of a contracted goal of 12,500 wrote a semi-Gothic exchange of letters between two twins battling for survival against their emotionally abusive father. One twin was sweetness and optimism; the other was eerie and weird. Overall the novel flowed well and descriptively for a piece that was not given a chance for a rewrite. They were proud of the work they had done and were presented with blank books to serve as journals to honor their achievement.

As a whole the student body of Indian Creek High School in Shabbona, Illinois had set a goal of 50,000 words. They wrote 70,430. Not too shabby for first timers.

Most importantly of all these students were given a chance to attempt a feat their peers would not. They came away having felt the joy of unbridled creation, and the confidence of accomplishment. One memory that sticks out in my mind was the day one of my freshmen came to me describing with wonder how she had cried uncontrollably while she wrote the scene in her novel in which her heroine died. She was amazed and I was pleased that she could feel so deeply for someone she created. I smiled and nodded, remembering the times when I , myself, have lost my heart to a character.

Upon completion of the project, all students’ names and word counts were posted on a bulletin board in my classroom, and any other passing student who dared to comment negatively on someone’s lower word count was asked how many words they had written last November. I never had that problem with the participants. Those other students got my point fairly quickly.

This year we plan to start outlining in October. We will approach it in a more organized manner, and I hope to complete more that 1900 out of my own 50,000 word goal. I also plan to offer NaNoWriMo Young Author support groups to teens in the Chicago area that are planning to try. Anyone interested in having a support group in their community can contact me at TeenWritersAndArtistsProject@gmail.com. Or they can visit our weblog and online journal link at TeenWritersAndArtistsProject.blogspot.com or through our page on myspace.com