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So, You Want to Be a Writer?
Teacher's Student Activities
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Language Arts, Communications, Social Science
- Students gain insight into both the motivations and the processes of becoming a writer.
- Students gain an understanding of some of the many career avenues open to writers.
- Students learn about the importance of focus, persistence, and contacts in reaching their goals.
- Students gain some understanding of the impact of technology on the careers of some writers.
Examine these guide materials.Have students complete the pre-program activities so they will be ready and able to participate in discussions regarding the program.
Originated from New York City; Oxford, Mississippi; and the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana.
Students will join panelists Rita Dove, John Grisham, Thomas McGuane, Agnes Nixon, and Susan Sheehan, who will share through conversation their own stories about their chosen writing career, their success, their failures, their vision and what has and is changing because of advances in technology and changes in the world itself, their views of what is enduring.
Rita Dove
Rita Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, the lyric poet of her generation, and the Poet Laureate of the United States. She was a high school honor student from Ohio who went on to graduate summa cum laude from college. Dove then earned a Fulbright Scholarship. She authored "Thomas and Beulah," a 44-poem collection evoking the lives of her grandparents. The book earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. This "poet for the people" is the youngest and the first black American to serve as the nation's poet laureate.
John Grisham
John Grisham is the best-selling novelist in America. His books have translated into 31 languages, with more than 60 million in print worldwide. The son of an itinerant construction worker, he spent his childhood traversing the South. Grisham was "an unremarkable student and avid jock" in high school who showed no early interest in writing but was inspired by the novels of John Steinbeck. He later graduated from the law school of Ole Miss and set up shop as a small town litigator. In 1984, he dropped by the courthouse and observed the trial of a 10-year-old girl testifying against a man who raped her and left her for dead. Grisham was overwhelmed by the emotion and human drama in the courtroom, and decided to write a novel based on that trial. He got to the office at 5 a.m. six days a week to find the time to work on his first book, "A Time to Kill." Grisham then received 28 rejections before he found a publisher. At age 36, he had his career as a novelist skyrocket with his second book, "The Firm," and then authored "The Pelican Brief, "The Chamber," and "The Client."
Thomas Mcguane
Thomas McGuane is a novelist, scriptwriter, essayist, journalist, and "counterculture hero" from McLeod, Montana. At age 10, he was inspired to become a writer after collaborating with friends on a novel that was never finished because its juvenile authors got into a fist-fight over the description of a sunset. His father's compulsive working and drinking provided grist for a consistent McGuane theme: unresolved business between fathers and sons. He attended an exclusive boarding school but, at age 16, ran away to a Wyoming ranch. McGuane returned as an "avowed sociopath," rebellious and only interested in writing. He flunked out of the University of Michigan and finally enrolled at Michigan State and edited the college literary magazine. He then spent three years at the Yale School of Drama and earned a fellowship to Stanford. McGuane authored the critically acclaimed novels "The Bushwacked Piano" and "The Sporting Club," which featured themes of hip, ironic, and alienated young outsiders. He went on to author "Ninety-Two in the Shade," "Something to Be Desired," "An Outside Chance," and "Nothing But Blue Skies." This consummate literary stylist and "intellectual cowboy" continues to search for meaning in contemporary life and explores the state of American society and culture.
Agnes Nixon
Agnes Nixon is the premier storyteller of daytime television. A native of Nashville, she was a solitary child who cut out paper dolls and made up stories about them. Nixon was driven to achieve by her parents, but felt lonely and inadequate, which provided her with a writer's insight into the hidden emotions that so often shape people's destinies. In college, she won competitions for writing and directing the best play. After graduation, she was hired to write soap operas in Chicago and mastered the craft of interweaving plots and writing steamy dialogue. Nixon migrated to New York and became a free-lance writer for "Hallmark Hall of Fame." In 1968, she was recruited by ABC-TV and offered creative control of her own program. She created "One Life to Live" and developed "All My Children" with story lines that grow out of the shenanigans of rogues, scoundrels, temptresses, liars, busybodies, social climbers, and the lusty folks who populate Everytown, USA. The "Mother of All Soaps: has had a serial on the air five days a week, 52 weeks a year for over 30 years. Agnes Nixon was recently inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.
Susan Sheehan
Susan Sheehan is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wellesley College. For the past 33 years, she has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. Sheehan is the author of "Is There No Place on Earth for Me?" a vivid portrait of Sylvia Frumkin, a paranoid schizophrenic, which chronicles Frumkin's frightening and horrible experiences in and out of mental institutions. The book earned Sheehan the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. She recently authorized "Life For Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair." The book charts a terrifying legacy of institutional abuse and neglect of foster children, shows the damage that has been inflicted on foster children, shows the damage that has been inflicted on three generations of one inner-city family, and paints a haunting portrait of children growing up without childhood.
Regardless of what curriculum you are teaching, your students will benefit more from the program if they read the student handouts and complete the pre-program activities. Discuss featured guests and the reasons they are on the program.
Writing is surely among the world's oldest professions. The medium has changed over the millennia -- from pictograms on cave walls to E-Mail. The audience has changed over time -- from people in one's clan to the world at large. But much about writing endures. To oversimplify, the process of writing -- regardless of its medium, message, audience, or form of transmission -- has three stages:
1. FOCUS: In the pre-writing or first writing stages the emphasis is on gathering information.
2. FORM The next stage is finding the best form or structure. In good writing the form should emerge from the first-stage material, rather than be imposed from outside.
3. RE-FORM Revision is the last stage of the writing process. Part of what happens in the second stage of writing is that the writer elaborates on the first stage. The final stage involves a refocus, eliminating any material that gets in the way of the writer's focus.
These three stages of writing are, indeed, over-simplified. But whether the writer is writing an advertisement or an ode, these three stages are necessary and organic. Each emerges from the one before it.
Ask students to discuss their past experiences with writing and their feelings about writing. Students will probably discuss fears and mental blocks. Suggest they be alert to whether or not the program guests, successful writers, have had the same experiences. And, if so, how they dealt with them.
Write about something in your classroom you think no one else has noticed. Then share and discuss with your classmates.
Keep an observation/speculation diary in which observations are written on the left page and speculations about the meaning of the observations are written on the right. You may select the subject of your observations, or you may become accustomed to this technique by doing one of the following:
- Select a person or place you can visit frequently.
- Take notes on your observations using your five senses.
- Write a letter to one of the program guests in which you continue a discussion begun on the program.
- What kinds of careers are available in writing now and in the future?
- Are these careers expected to grow?
Following are a number of terms. Define them as they apply to
- writing
- atmosphere
- character
- conflict
- deadline
- draft
- genre
- narrative
- novel
- plot
- point-of-view
- rewrite
- theme
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