“What in the world am I writing about?”
I was in the middle of a picture book draft and had just pasted in and deleted essentially the same two sentence six times. I thought I’d created pretty interesting characters, a cool setting and the basic plot outline, but where was my THEME? (I can still hear my 4th grade teacher Mr. Fornek.) Was this a story about friendship? Or courage? Or plain cleanliness? Here’s a way that might help you figure out what you’re writing about when you’re stuck…Go to http://www.wordle.net. It’s free, you don’t have to fill in personal information or sign up. If you haven’t used WORDLE™ before, it’s a tool that generates a graphic word cloud from text you insert. The WORDLE™ is based on frequency of use in your text. Click “create” and paste in a good chunk of text from your work in progress (at least two pages.) Hit the “Go” button. SURPRISE! You’ll see a pretty WORDLE™ graphic generated from your very own writing. Now look at which words are bigger and which smaller or missing all together. Are you writing about what you think you’re writing about? You may find that the word “friend” shows up the largest, that nothing describing your setting shows up at all or that a minor character’s name comes out larger than a major one—all useful stuff for finding a theme and revising.
If you’re feeling super motivated today, write a letter to or from your main character using the seven largest words in your WORDLE.
My theme is invention, what’s yours?
Note from Kate: You can do this with any writing…your journal, your work-in-progress…even one or two of your quick-writes combined.
Quick-Write option #2 today is from me (though I am away this week with super-limited Internet, so I may not be able to reply to comments on this post) and it’s about exploring points of view.
For those working on a piece of fiction, or nonfiction that involves people…
Choose a scene in your story that’s important to the main character or primary figure. Write that scene from a completely different point of view — the antagonist, or the character’s childhood friend who shows up, or the clerk at the grocery store. How does the scene change?
For those still brainstorming ideas or working on something without a main character…
Choose a scene from one of your favorite books that you’ve read, and rewrite it from a totally different character’s point of view. You might try this from a few perspectives. For example, a character who is friends with the main character is one option, but what if you wrote from the antagonist’s point of view? What if you wrote from the point of view of a child? Or someone much older? Or the family dog?
Sometimes, this writing prompt will lead you to discover something you never realized before. Other times, it may help you to see your character through someone else’s eyes.
If you discover anything interesting or fun or important, stop by later on and let us know with a comment!
The Accident
My nose hairs immediately froze
when I stepped out the front door.
I quickly forgot about the cold as we ran into the old garage to grab
the runner sleds. We each grabbed
a rope handle and trudged through the snow banks to cross the road to our
favorite icy sliding hill over at Old Lady Haskell’s. It took us forever to get to the top. Rodonna would be almost there, then
slide back and knock Karen and me down like dominoes so we had to start all
over again. By the time we got to
the top, we were toasty warm and ready for a full day of sliding on the
runners.
Rodonna went first. She was the oldest of the three of us,
so we always let her go first. She
sat on her sled and placed her feet just right so she could steer the
sled. We watched from the top, as
she became a blur on the fast ice.
She nailed the bottom turn just as we had all mapped out at the
top. “Yes, that was a blast,” she
screamed from the bottom, “I’m doing it again!”
Next it was my turn. I thought it might be safer to lie on
the sled. Karen held it while I
positioned myself perfectly: belly
on wooden slats, legs bent at the knee so my feet were up in the air and my
mittened hands grasping the handles for dear life!
I yelled, “OK, let go”, and I was
off. I was flying down that icy
hill. I was flying out of control
and I couldn’t think. I was flying
so fast I started screaming and just closed my eyes and let the sled take me
for a ride. My belly was tickling
and I know I was smiling through my screams. That’s how fun it was at that very moment. The fun didn’t last. As I approached the bottom, I heard
Karen yelling from the top, “Go left, Kim, go left.” Just as I began to turn my handles to the left, I opened my
eyes and right there in front of me was the pile of lumber that we all had
planned to carefully to avoid. I
didn’t even have time to plow off my sled. I ran smack right into the lumber pile. I screamed again, but this time it
wasn’t a scream of joy. It was s
scream of pain.
My face felt wet and I wiped my
mitten across it and saw blood all over my mitten. Rodonna reached me first and said, “Oh no, mama’s gonna kill
us!” Karen approached and said,
“We’ll just clean it up and she’ll never know.”
Karen washed all the blood off my
face with snow and Rodonna made me an ice pack with her mitten.
For the next few hours, I was a
queen sitting high on my sled pedestal, while Rodonna and Karen took turns
pulling me around the lumberyard until we thought it was safe enough to go
home.
We didn’t take anymore runs down
the hill that day and my face was all puffed up, but we went right back out to
he hill the next day and I never hit that lumber pile again!
Today's assignment I'll attempt: Write that scene from a completely different point of view. I am going to write this story from my sister, Rodonna's, point of view instead of mine.
I flew down the icy hill in record speed, grabbed my rope and began dragging the runner seld back up the hill to do it all over again. Karen was at the top holding the sled while Kim was getting into position. What on earth was she doing? She was laying flat on her belly on the sled with her legs, bent at the knees, sticking up behind her. I heard Karen counting down just as I started yelling, "Sit up, you idiot. Don't go down on your belly!'"....2, 1..." Karen yelled and let go of the sled and off Kim went. She was flying out of control and I knew what was going to happen before it even happened. She began to rapidly approach me on the hill and I could see the big smile on her face slowly disappearing as she sled begin going down the hill with a mind of its own. She closed her eyes and I knew right then, it was over. I stopped on the hill and watched her go down. Karen's screams of "Go left, Kim! Go left!" couldn't be heard over the sharp runners cutting into the ice. At that moment, time froze. Kim flew right into the lumber pile we had all planned to carefully to avoid. Before the blood curdling screams came out of Kim's mouth, Karen came sliding down the hill on her bottom but I was closer, so I got there first. She was laying comatose on the sled and I thought she was dead until I rolled her over.
That's when I saw blood all over her face. She picked up her mittened hand and wiped the blood off her face and that's when I said, "Mama's gonna kill us!"
The wise one of the bunch said, "She'll never know, we'll just clean her all up and mama will never know what happened."
Karen washed all the blood off Kim's face with snow while I made her an ice-pack with my mitten. For the next few hours, we dragged her all over the lumberyard until the swelling had gone down enough to go home.
The next day, we all went back to the hill and Kim never ran into that lumber pile again!
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