Just Write from CreativeCommons
Hello and welcome back to my blog! I am going to be telling you about the story I wrote while working with author Frances Dowell!
Francea Dowell is an author who lives in North Carolina. My classmates and I worked with her on our stories for three to four months using the methods below.
The process started with What If? questions. We generated questions that started with “what if”, like “What if I could fly?”. Then we would take that what if question and turn it into a starting scene.
The starting scene had to have action to draw the reader in. We had to generate a paragraph to kick the story off. We didn’t put too much detail in or too much information about the character. We just created action.
After the starting scene, we wrote something called a background check. This is where we would share information about the character and their background. We detailed who they were and what their families were like.
Then we did stick and stone problems. These problems were problems that got bigger as the story went on. The stick problem was just a little problem, a “stick” in the path. Our characters could get over this problem pretty easily. The stone problem was a little bigger, but our characters worked to solve it and with a little time and effort, they fixed the problem.
Then came the big monster problem. This was the hardest problem to solve, and it required a lot of effort and thinking to get through it. Our resolution came after the monster problem scene, and that’s when everything got fixed.
After we wrote our stories, our classmates and Mrs. Dowell gave us feedback. This was a time for revising and editing what we had written. I learned a lot from the feedback my friend and Mrs. Dowell gave me, such as to make sure that I had equal parts dialogue and informational texts, and to make sure that I described things that people maybe couldn’t picture on their own.
I love to write, and this project was super fun to do. I am very proud of the work that I did and I owe a lot of my help to Mrs. Dowell!
Check out her website below!