Writing IS Teaching

I have spent nearly my entire life in classrooms. From my earliest attempts at finger painting in nursery school to running a recent workshop, my time in school is like a duck paddling around in its favorite pond. I’m home.

Because I love learning and because I love teaching, I waited a long time before taking the jump to concentrate on writing instead of lesson plans.

You know what I found out?

Writing IS teaching.

It doesn’t matter if I pen an informative blog or create a scene with my characters. With both projects, I use my life’s experiences to share a topic worth learning. The manuscript becomes my lesson plan, and the best lesson plans connect with my students, in this case, my readers.

I’m giving a book talk at a local school today. As I planned for what I would say, I became more and more enthused. I’d be back on old stomping grounds. I outlined my lesson plan (the book talk). Effortlessly, I slipped on my teacher persona and came up with a great “anticipatory set,” or as writers say, a great “hook.” I raced through the rest of the outline, knowing how I would move from one concept to the next. I am teaching again. About writing!

Scene by scene, my novels teach lessons on a theme.

As I learn a little more about writing craft each year, the sense of teaching via the written word has become stronger and stronger.

My World Without Sound series teaches loyalty and family love. The first of my Cracked Quartet series teaches the consequences of misplaced guilt and shame and offers the solution for peace in a person’s soul.

Many of you in ACFW Indiana are teachers or have been teachers.

Have you made the same connection between teaching and writing? Do you get excited about a story as you see how the plot is aimed toward a specific outcome? And how your characters are going to discover the beauty of that outcome? I hope so.

Recognizing that I am still a teacher feels so good! That realization solidifies the purposes God has for me. I may not choose to be in the classroom every day, but I can see I’m at the center of His will. I am content.

 

Linda Sammaritan writes realistic fiction, mostly for kids ages ten to fourteen. She has completed a  middle grade trilogy, World Without Sound, based on her own experiences growing up with a deaf sister. Book One, Reaching Into Silence, was an ACFW Genesis Contest semi-finalist and a First Impressions Finalist.

Linda had always figured she’d teach teens and tweens until school authorities presented her with a retirement wheelchair and rolled her out the door. However, God changed those plans when He gave her a growing passion for writing fiction. In May of 2016, she blew goodbye kisses to her students and dedicated her work hours to becoming an author.

A wife, mother of three, and grandmother to eight, Linda regales the youngest grandchildren with “Nona Stories,” tales of her childhood. Maybe one day those stories will be in picture books!

Where Linda can be found on the web:

www.lindasammaritan.com

www.facebook.com/lindasammaritan

www.twitter.com/LindaSammaritan

www.instagram.com/lindasammaritan

 

Stating the Obvious

A beagle sits atop his dog house, head tossed back, ears dangling, eyes closed in intense concentration. A burst of inspiration pitches him over his typewriter and he composes the first line of his novel: “It was a dark and stormy night…”

Our comic strip shows him stuffing a padded envelope into the corner mailbox. Soon after, he receives a letter congratulating him on the publication of his novel and containing a fat royalty advance. The next frame shows him atop his dog house again, staring at a blank sheet of paper in his typewriter. Then another surge of inspiration prompts him to write: “It was a dark and stormy night…”

The canine author is Charles Schulz’s Snoopy. He’s using the first line of an 1830 novel by Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, a line notorious for describing the obvious. (What sort of night was it? Dark. What sort of weather suited a mystery? Stormy.) 

Lord Lytton's opener has become such a running joke that an annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest invites authors to create an opening line for the worst of all possible novels. This usually turns out to be an overwrought description of what need not be described at all, such as this:

It was a dark and stormy night, made darker still by the melancholy that gripped the drainpipes of my soul in a plumber's wrench of despair...

Stating the obvious--even stating it elaborately--is what Jerry Jenkins calls "on the nose" writing. It doesn't gain the trust of our readers. In fact, it's laughable. We want a story that hooks our curiosity and teases us with the unexpected.

In fairness to Lord Lytton, he gave us more than a trite opening line. He also originated this one: “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Indeed it can be, especially if we write with insight and originality.

Joe Allison writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN, with his wife Maribeth.

 

Getting Your Creative House in Order

 

Getting Your Creative House in Order

-Darren Kehrer-

 

This may only be my limitation, but I find that it’s hard to be creative when my actual daily life has “to-do” items populating the virtual list in my mind. That list tends to muddy the waters of my creative wellspring of ideas.

Knowing that limitation, I try to clear the plate of immediate, necessary tasks so that my brain isn’t spinning away on those items and soaking up available creative bandwidth. The way I see it, you only have a few options to offset this logjam to creative productivity:

1.    Get those tasks completed so you have that sense of satisfaction and your non-writing slate is clean.

2.    Get out of the environment that is “homeport” for those tasks. Head to your favorite local coffee shop, tea joint, or cubby in a corner.

3.     Realize your limitation with this obstacle, be honest with yourself, and then structure your creative writing time around it to form a better navigation strategy.

Maybe for you it’s the laundry, fixing dinner for the family, getting the kids homework completed, getting the lawn taken care of, balancing your checkbook, or just other tasks from your “day” job (if that applies to you).  

There are SO many things that can clog up the creative pipelines. Identify yours and put a plan into place to clear those out before your creative writing time begins. The persons that will benefit most from this are your future readers.

Epistolary Novels--Not What They Used to Be

 Since I will not be able to attend our informal Zoom meeting on February 21—yes! It’s on for tonight—I wanted to toss around ideas about a little-used subgenre in today’s fiction. The epistolary novel. 

The epistolary novel (emphasis on the second syllable):

“a novel told through the medium of letters.”

For the record, I hated them. As a kid, I refused to read them voluntarily. In junior high, I had no choice. The first epistolary novel written in western civilization was Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). I had to look that up for this article. I have no idea if Pamela was the novel I read in eighth grade. At that point, it was: read the book, take the test, throw out the knowledge to make room in my brain for something more worthwhile. I never read another epistolary novel, never changed my mind until—last week.

Along came Pepper Basham’s 2022 epistolary novel, Authentically, Izzy, on my library’s “New Fiction” shelf. Pepper is a member of ACFW, and can she make romance and wit zing off the page! She performs her magic via emails and texts flying between main character Izzy and the people in her life. I’m guessing ninety percent of the four hundred-plus pages is based on written communications and only contains standard prose for key scenes when the two heartthrobs are together in person.

I’ve begun to appreciate the healthy exercises epistolaries provide to writers.

1. Our main character, or whoever is writing the letter, naturally has a subjective point of view. There is no way we can fall into the head-hopping trap.

2. We are forced to write inner monologue as the character shares thoughts and feelings with the recipient of his/her letter.

3. Author intrusion is impossible.

4. Written communication between characters automatically allows for more than one point of view within the novel unless the person who receives the letters never responds. (That would make for a boring and depressing book!)

5. We have to move the story without benefit of dialogue.

The major pitfall to watch out for is this:

The characters must be able to psychoanalyze themselves as they pour their hearts out to a friend. They have to recognize their own virtues and vices. How many of us can do that in real life? So, the writer has to figure out how their characters can be so talented at introspection without stretching the reader’s suspension of disbelief to the breaking point.

Which is why epistolary novels fell out of favor by the turn of the nineteenth century. Readers wouldn’t take them seriously.

Writing Challenge

When you find the time (am I hearing hysterical laughter?), try your hand at an epistolary short story. Submit it to a literary magazine. Who knows? You may be ACFW Indiana’s next award-winning author!

Linda Sammaritan writes realistic fiction, mostly for kids ages ten to fourteen. She has completed a  middle grade trilogy, World Without Sound, based on her own experiences growing up with a deaf sister. Book One, Reaching Into Silence, was an ACFW Genesis Contest semi-finalist and a First Impressions Finalist.

A wife, mother of three, and grandmother to eight, Linda regales the youngest grandchildren with “Nona Stories,” tales of her childhood. Maybe one day those stories will be in picture books!

Where Linda can be found on the web:

www.lindasammaritan.com

www.facebook.com/lindasammaritan

www.twitter.com/LindaSammaritan

www.instagram.com/lindasammaritan