Gail Carson Levine's Blog, page 2

2024 First Class

There are my notes to myself for the first writing workshop of the summer last year. The workshop this year will run from 7/14 to 7/31, Mondays and Thursdays from 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm:

Things (for me) to bring:

Writing Magic and Writer to Writerthis page!PadWELCOME!My phone #, email address. Don’t share. Website, can share. Take a screen shot.My name & pronouns. Intro Jen and Debbie

Go around & say pronoun, what grades they’re going into. What do they hope ...

Guidelines for Smooth Writing

These will help you delight your readers.

In prose—including fiction, reports, essays, papers, newspaper articles—clarity is more important than anything else. Readers won’t enjoy our exciting plots and fascinating characters if they don’t understand what we’re saying.The most powerful parts of speech in English are nouns (people, places, and things) and verbs (action words). We sometimes need adjectives (modifying nouns) and adverbs (modifying verbs and adjectives), but they’re weaker...

7/24/24 Prompts

You can use these as starter sentences or as the idea for your story:

When it rains toothpicks, you-know-who is coming.Ms. Chenchy said, “Copy down the homework,” and began to write on the blackboard in letters that weren’t familiar to Pat and didn’t even seem to be letters. Everyone else was writing as if nothing was wrong.When I finished washing my face, I looked up and saw an unfamiliar face in the mirror—on top of my neck, above my tee-shirt.The leader of the world’s sm...

7/22/24 Homework

Write toward one of these endings. You may not get there, but head your story in its direction:

They parted friends.The stain never came out.That was the moral: finders really are keepers.The dog stopped barking.The castle was closed for repairs.

7/18/24 Homework

Your main character is the friend everyone goes to when they’re unhappy. Your main character is keeping more secrets than they have fingers and toes combined. But two secrets don’t add up. Someone is lying, and someone is going to get hurt. Have them delve into the thoughts and feelings of her friends to find out what’s really going on.Take a minor bad characteristic, maybe something that drives you crazy when someone does it. For example, could be tickling people whether they want to be ...

7/15/24 Prompts

This prompt combines science and Greek mythology. Scientists have recently discovered that carpenter ants can perform successful leg amputations on injured ants in their own colonies. In Greek mythology, almost all the inhabitants of an island have been killed by a plague. To repopulate the island, Zeus turns the ants that live there into people. In your story, this transformation to human form happens during an amputation. Your main characters are the injured ant, the ant who’s doing the amput...

7/15/24 Homework

In 1277, in England, there were no banks and no paper money, only silver pennies, which were worth more than pennies are today. For example, two dozen eggs would cost a penny; a fashionable gown, sixty-three pennies; a horse to pull a plow or a wagon, 240 pennies. An unskilled laborer would earn two pennies a day, and a master carpenter, four. People kept their money at home, in wooden chests in the “counting room.” These chests were locked, but locks weren’t very good back then.  Front doors h...

Dialogue Helper

Start with quotation marks, like this (double, not single, in American English):

            “Ouch! My toe hurts.”

Punctuation in dialogue, including exclamation points, question marks, periods, commas, belongs inside the quotation marks, like this:

            “Ouch! My toe hurts.”

It’s called a speech tag when a speaker is mentioned by name or by pronoun, like this:

            “Ouch! My toe hurts,” Fred said.

            “Ouch! My toe hurts,” he said.

Notice that the peri...

Prompts, 7/11/24

Your main character, Sam or Sami, can’t make up their mind, regardless of what the options are. After graduating from space travel academy, Sam or Sami is offered a choice of destinations: a planet inhabited by dragons that may or may not be friendly; a planet where the air is only sulfur, but the creatures are friendly; or a planet a lot like earth except that the only food that isn’t poisonous is bitter, gluey jellyfish stew. Sam or Sami has an hour to choose and pack and be ready to leave. A...

Homework—7/11/24

The year is 1997. No one has cell phones, and there is no online banking. The Pimson Town Bank is crowded. A person enters the bank, intending to rob it. The teller whose station the robber chooses has been on the job for only four days. Among the bank’s customers are a deaf person, a teenager who shoplifts, and a journalist. Pick one of these people to be your main character and write a page of the story. Stop and pick a different person to be your main character and write a page. Stop and pic...