On Monday night, my student “John” and I used Gail Carson Levine’s new book Writing Magic: Creating Stories That Fly as the basis of his lesson.  John is a really really bright fifth grader with a strong vocabulary, excellent spelling skills, and the ability to clearly and concisely verbalize his thoughts.  John just doesn’t like to put those great thoughts down on paper, and this is the reason that I brought Levine’s book along for this week’s lesson.  According to the bio on the book flap, she has presented writing workshops for kids many times over the years, and this book was born out of her experience teaching.  The first chapter of the book is titled “A Running Start,” and after nine lines of introductory text, Levine throws out some great story starters and instructs her readers to write for at least twenty minutes.

Turned out this was a fabulous way to get John writing.  He and I each picked a story starter, and then silently wrote for twenty minutes.  I turned out two pages of an unfinished story, and he wrote a full page of a great, finished short story.  This lesson was all about flow, getting words on paper, and keeping in the writing groove, so after reading our stories aloud, we moved on to read a bit that Levine has written about shushing our inner critics, and then we used another of her story starters to write for another twenty minutes.  Once again, though his hand was tired, John turned out some great writing; those thoughts of his got down on paper, a real victory for him.

We’ll continue to use this book for our next couple of lessons, and I highly recommend it to anyone of any age who wants help getting started writing.  It’s fun and wise and witty; a pleasure to read and to use.