I’m not one of those writers who have words tumbling out of them like a rain-fed waterfall. I’ve always envied them, but I’m not one of them. So it made sense for me to focus on picture books and short nonfiction titles for the first part of my writing career: being a slow writer with a compact style tends to work well for those books.

But every time I did school visits with older students, they asked me why I didn’t write something for them. I came up with this great theory to share with them, all about how some authors are great at “writing long,” like artists who start with a huge block of marble and then face the challenge of trying to chisel down to the core story. While other authors—like me—are good at “writing short,” artists who start with a small amount of clay and then face the challenge of building up their creations.

In other words, I told students that because it was challenging to do otherwise, I was better off sticking with writing the kinds of books that felt comfortable for me.

But one of the great things about kids is that they don’t easily tolerate the ridiculous excuses adults make. Which means that some of the best writing advice I ever received came from a 5^th-grade boy. After I offered my elaborate explanation (excuse), he sighed, rolled his eyes big-time, and said (in a “how stupid are you?” tone), “Then just write a bunch of short things and stick them all together!”

Huh, I thought, the kid has a point. I think they call them chapters.

And I gave myself permission to write a novel. Yes, it took me over three years to finish writing it. Yes, there were many times when I was gritting my way through it not just chapter-by-chapter, but word-by-word. Yes, it will have taken an additional four years for it to go from “finished” manuscript to a published book I can hold in my hands in October. But writing the first word of that particular story was the single step that began one of my most thrilling writing journeys.

I meet kids at every school visit who don’t believe they have it in them to write anything worthwhile, whether long or short. If you find those kids in your classroom, too, please teach them what that 5^th-grader taught me: all you need to do is to start with one word.

But here are the career options I was strongly encouraged to pursue:

• Puppeteer
• Mime

With apologies to all the highly paid mimes of the world, I couldn’t help but feel discouraged at this advice (almost the way one might feel if one were trapped inside a glass box).

I was recently reminded of these possible detours on my life’s path when some writer friends shared “Non-Teaching Jobs Twitter Recommends for Writers” (I have already added “criminal mastermind” and “dolphin” to my own bucket list). And all of this popped into my head again at a school visit yesterday, when a student asked me the question I am almost always asked: “How much money do you make?”

The truthful-but-vague answer, as I explain whenever I am asked, is that while a few children’s book writers do get rich, most of us do not. I try to describe to the students some of the other advantages I find in the writing life, but I know that’s not what most of them remember. I worry that those of them who want to grow up to be puppeteers or mimes or even dolphins will give up their dreams too early after they hear my honest response.

So if you have a young writer in your life, go ahead and tell them the truth: most likely, they won’t get rich.  But on my behalf, I hope you’ll also let them know that there’s a lot to be said for loving your work. In having the chance to make an impact on the lives of young people who know you only through your stories. In defining yourself not by how much money you make, but by the richness of your experiences.

Tell them that living their dream may be tough, but that there is more than one kind of payoff in life.

Except she was confused about the deserted island—maybe because it’s nonexistent in real life? And she couldn’t place the giant bullhead statue—probably because the nearest statue of a bullhead is two hundred miles away.

So I had to admit that I’d borrowed those details from other small towns.  After all, what treasure hunt isn’t made more exciting by a pirate-inspired deserted island? And what small town isn’t the more memorable for having an unnecessary but over-sized aquatic vertebrate on a downtown corner?

That kind of geographic collaging is one of my favorite parts of building a story setting. Depending on how fictionalized my story, I have the chance to create a mash-up of all the different places I’ve been, or even wished I could be. If I want, I can fashion a place that exists only on the map of my imagination.

There are lots of ways that young writers can use actual collaging and related techniques to build a setting for their own stories. Hand around old magazines, travel brochures, and catalogs, and ask students to cut out (or draw) images that fit their imagined settings. Then have them paste the images onto larger sheets of paper for inspiration boards. They can make collages to represent a whole town, or they can do it for a smaller component: their character’s bedroom, or the location of some key action in their story.

I also use my cell phone to take photos of anything I see out in the world that seems like it might fit into one of my story settings. Then I collect the photos in small inexpensive photo albums. They’re a great resource when I’ve been away from a story for a few days and need to re-picture the setting.

Pinterest also provides endless opportunities for creating inspiration boards online. Writers can build boards that showcase the details of their character’s home, school, town, or other key locations by mixing and matching elements from all different sources, creating the visual spaces and moods they want for their stories.

Which means that even if your young writers want to add something unusual to their setting—say a giant fish statue, for example—it’s simply a matter of “wish, and it’s here.”

So what happens when you practice something over and over and over again? The repetition builds new pathways in our brains, and anchors skills and patterns into our systems.

The result in my case is that I am the Michelangelo of the hair-twirl. I can tie a figure eight knot, left-handed, on the back of my own head, faster than you can blink in astonishment as you ponder why anyone would WANT to tie a knot in their own hair. All that repetition has allowed me to take hair-twirling to a level of mastery seldom seen (perhaps because, as I mentioned, dedicated hair-twirlers learn to hide it from strangers).

It seems like obvious advice, but here it is: kids will become better writers if you encourage them to do it day after day, year after year, even if only in small doses. That’s why I’m so delighted when I visit a classroom and the students ask me if they should take out their writing journals. I know that the simple fact that their teacher has them writing on a regular basis will make them better writers.

They don’t even have to write about anything more meaningful than hair-twirling; the constant reinforcement of putting words to paper will help them untie the knot that keeps some kids from ever feeling comfortable expressing themselves in written form.

And after untying that knot, a few of them may even turn into word artists someday.

Correctly interpreting the local language can be a critical component of travel.

A character’s language is a critical aspect of who they are in their world, as well—and creating that language is part of what a writer does to fully flesh out his or her characters. One of the most popular activities I do with student writers is walking them through the creation of their own fantasy world. But the part of the activity that really gets them engaged—that grabs their complete attention—is usually the point where I ask them to create a language that would be used in their fantasy land.

Basically, I challenge them to figure out how the dominant creature in their world communicates: Is it a language expressed through body movements? Is it verbal, like what we’re accustomed to, but simply different words? Is it composed of clicks or grunts, or all done through song? Or, as in my favorite-ever Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, do the creatures communicate only through metaphor?

I also ask students to create a few simple words in their language—“hello,” “peace,” “danger”—although given more time, it’s fun to ask students to create other and more personal words.

Nothing immerses a student more in their created environment than getting them speaking the language of their land.

Luckily for me, I was assigned a gigantic pickup truck the day we practiced parallel parking in the student lot for Driver’s Ed class. By the time class was over, I could have wedged the Titanic between icebergs and come out safely on the other side (as long as the icebergs had highly visible orange safety cones sticking up out of the water). Learning to “drive big” served me very well; despite my complete lack of spatial sense or mechanical ability, I passed my driving test with flying colors.

In writing, I actually think the reverse might be true: gaining some early skills with a compact vehicle will serve students beautifully when they move on to test out other rides. Despite their often compact size, which makes poems look more approachable to hesitant student writers (and of course you don’t have to tell them that “approachable” doesn’t translate to “easy”), learning the elements that go into a strong poem will strengthen almost any other kind of writing students do.

Here are a few of the things that I think poems teach best:

• Just a few words, as long as they are the right few, can be enough to convey a strong emotion or experience. While revising, always look for ways you can cut out any excess so that the words you leave behind rise up from the page and grab the reader by the throat.
• Reading is a sensory activity; engage the reader by engaging all five senses.
• Good writing has music to it; play with your language until the words beat out a rhythm or sing a song for your reader.
• Make the reader pay attention; find an unexpected or surprising way to talk about something too familiar or overlooked.

I’ve talked before about how Magnetic Poetry can turn writing into an actual tactile activity that engages even the most reluctant young poets. Hand around cookie sheets and let the writing begin! And if you don’t already have Magnetic Poetry kits, here’s a way students can create their own Magnetic Poetry words (you can buy magnetic tape or precut business-card sized magnets at office supply and craft stores). Or why not create over-sized words so students can turn the sides of your classroom’s file cabinets into poems as well?

National Poetry Month begins in just a few days, and poets will be sharing all sorts of writing tips and tricks online; keep your eyes open for all the fantastic hints and activities that “writing compact” will bring.

Where she went

Looking for Alaska

Chasing Vermeer

Tracking Daddy down

Looking for Alibrandi

In search of Mockingbird

Where the kissing never stops

            Reality check

            Don’t you know there’s a war on?

You

Split

Just like that

As easy as falling off the face of the earth

Down the rabbit hole

Absolutely, positively not

Okay for now

The sky is everywhere

I’ll be there

Forever

You can send your own book spine poems, and those of your students, to the always-creative Travis Jonker to be posted in his gallery for National Poetry Month. Check out his post to see more details and examples.

• How much money do you make?
• Are you married?
• How old are you? (Now that I think about it, I got this question a lot more than usual this week. Note to self: get some rest!)

And then came one that was new to me: How much do you weigh? I admit, I was taken aback. I’m what you might tactfully call a “substantial” person, so I can understand this boy’s curiosity. But I’d never had a student ask me that before. I explained that I was going to decline to answer because it was something I’d rather keep private.

He nodded and grinned, unfazed by my refusal. “I weigh fifty pounds,” he said proudly.

I instantly realized that I had made a false assumption about the intention of his question. He wasn’t trying to probe into information most adults would label out-of-bounds. He just wanted to share the fact that he’d reached the fifty-pound mile marker himself—big news for a kid his age—and had determined that the polite thing to do was to ask me if I wanted to share my weight before he took his turn.

It reminded me of two things:

I love kids. That’s why I chose to write for them.

“Assumptions” cause misunderstandings in life, but they can be a handy tool for writers.

Here are just a few of the ways I’ve used “assumptions” as a writer, so you can share them with your writing students:

I challenge assumptions. I often discover I’ve fallen into the trap of assuming certain things must be true about my character, his or her motivations, what the antagonist is really up to, or what has to happen next. When I shake things up and challenge every assumption I have about the story, it grows more surprising and intriguing.

I have my characters make assumptions about other characters. As I repeated over and over this week on my school visit, conflict is the thing that keeps readers turning pages. And there’s nothing like mistaken assumptions to cause conflict between characters.

I assume that there’s something that I haven’t made clear in my early drafts. It’s likely clear in my head, but not yet clear on paper. So I seek out trusted early readers. I tell them their job is to be honest with me about anything that confuses them in the story, because I need to revise and fill those holes before a broader readership sees the piece.

I passed a mile marker this week, too: I was reminded of the importance of assumptions.

Fortunately, there’s a straightforward revision trick that can rejuvenate such writing: a verb check.

I start by going through the piece and underlining or highlighting every verb. Typically, two different problems reveal themselves. First, I find the work is strewn with way too many functional-but-boring “to be” verbs. Second, even in those cases where I’ve used more active choices, a pattern emerges: I’ve repeated certain verbs way too often, defaulting to them as if they were the over-eager student with her hand in the air after every question.

So I go back through the work, replacing the duds with more active, specific, and varied verbs, packing power into the writing with every change.

It’s a sure trick for revving up your students’ writing as well!

My fangirl status may worry you. But I find the show hilariously entertaining. And there’s a part of me that really wants to believe there are actual Bigfoots (bigfeet?) out there—just like when I visit a house with a cupboard under the stairs, I always hope that I’ll find a boy wizard too.

You may say I’m a dreamer.

But the best part of “Finding Bigfoot” is that it’s strangely comforting. The show rigidly adheres to their storytelling formula. My life is currently revolving around several things that are unknown, unpredictable, and stressful. I find it oddly restful to watch the “Finding Bigfoot” formula play out, show after show, with only slight variations. Even before the episode begins, I know that yet again, despite a close call—an unidentified howl, a shadowy figure, a rustling in the woods—the team will not be bringing Bigfoot home tonight. That is as it should be. Bigfoot belongs to the woods, not to some scientific lab somewhere. So for that hour, all is right with my world.

I created a story-writing formula for students for much the same reason: comfort. In my early school visits, I discovered that while there are many kids who love to write stories—which is the kind of kid that I was—there are also others who are terrified of the whole process. To them, the thought of a writing a story is as threatening as—well, as a hungry Bigfoot!

So I teach them a formula. Of course I want kids to bring themselves and their own creativity to their writing. But I find that with a trail to follow, most students can find their way to the other end of a story.

Where do we start? Basically, I have students choose a character (younger kids especially enjoy animal characters), a setting (real or imaginary) they’d like to visit, and an activity they enjoy (I discourage passive activities like computer games). Then I have them mix those three elements together, and brainstorm a list of things that could potentially go wrong with that mixture. A soccer game would be tough in outer space because of gravitational factors. A polar bear might struggle in Hawaii. A snake would have a hard time holding a paintbrush.

Then the story formula works this way:

Begin your story by introducing your character. Throw some kind of problem in the character’s path almost immediately.

For the story middle, show the character trying to solve the problem, but don’t let them succeed right away. Multiple failed attempts or introducing new problems will add tension to the story.

At the end, allow the character to solve the problem. Show the reader how life will be different now that the character has solved this problem, and how the character has grown through this experience.

With that trail to follow, writing a story doesn’t seem nearly so mysterious!