Working Through the Worry: The Miracle of Composing a Collaborative Novel

In addition to the main NaNoWriMo and Camp events each year, NaNoWriMo provides free creative writing resources to educators and young participants around the world through our Young Writers Program. Today, educator Nick Kleese shares the success story of his class:

The first tears of our class novel came on the second day of writing. I remember: I was kneeling beside a desk, squinting at the laptop screen bright with the white glare of the early morning sun, attempting to guide a student through writer’s block. “What else could there be to write about?” the student demanded, nearly shaking with frustration.

I rambled for a moment, brainstorming through my own tired, foggy thoughts, before noticing the heaving beside me. I looked up from the screen and saw a face flushing red and eyes swimming with a writerly angst that was both very real and very unexpected.

Now, this is my first year teaching high school, and I’ve become good friends with anxiety and fear and their cousin: that feeling of I-have-no-idea-what-I’m-doing. I’m good friends, too, associatively, with existential despair. 

Regardless, I have hope. I’ve gone back to my hometown, and I am comforted by its familiar, sprawling cornfields and calloused hands. As a farm kid, I see myself in my students: some, I know, will attend four year schools and then scatter. Many will opt for technical or vocational two-year programs to become certified welders, truckers, cosmetologists, administrative assistants. Others still will head straight to work, which, in my hometown, is a decision celebrated for its innate devotion to the art of work itself. Despite the initial emotional upheaval, I believed NaNoWriMo’s tangible–albeit lofty–goal would well suit my students’ pragmatism. I knew I could lean on my students’ proud diligence to get them through writing an entire novel–even if they believed writing wasn’t, as they put it politely, for them.

Our process, depending on the observer’s disposition and pedagogical beliefs, was either vibrant and bustling, or chaotic and terrifying. We spent the first few days frantically studying novel structure and character development, then two more days planning our own. I’d dug out a long, dusty scroll of white paper from the school’s storage closet and had it unrolled across the white board. We tacked it up, as a class, and drew Freytag’s Triangle long and uneven across it.

“Okay,” I said, turning to my apprehensive class standing with me. “What should we write?”

My students understood that, frankly, I had no idea how the novel would turn out. In my mind, we would plot the story in detail on the scroll, then divide it into twenty-some parts–one for each student to write. The students would meet with those whose parts came directly before and after theirs to discuss transition points, contemplate continuity issues, and debate the project’s potential to flop. My room became a hodgepodge of notes and diagrams and character sketches and spilled coffee grounds and chatting students who were wary, confused, frazzled, but willing to work.

“By positioning myself at desk-level, student level, the project became less about learning concepts and more about practicing, collaborating, and creating.” 

We worked nearly every day for a month. I’d write, too. My youth and scrawny frame helped me blend in–so much so that when the Dean of Students would enter with a clipboard of truancies, he’d stop, glance around, and ask, “Where’s Kleese?” The students would point me out among the desks, hunched over, typing away, perhaps only distinguishable from them by my coffee-spotted earthenware mug and tie.

By positioning myself at desk-level, student level, the project became less about learning concepts and more about practicing, collaborating, and creating. Voices would call across the room, directed at a peer or me or everyone, asking: “How do I punctuate dialogue?” “What if I want the ‘he said’ to come before the words?” “Where do I break paragraphs?” “What’s a synonym for ‘blue?’” Sometimes I would answer, and sometimes a student would beat me to a response. In this way, the novel not only forced students to ask authentic, necessary questions as writers (ones that I could only dream of being asked otherwise), but it also revealed writing’s vastly different meanings and challenges for each individual student. Some struggled to punctuate a sentence. Some were behind, as they worked a full time job outside of school. Others volunteered to spend their class time helping others. All wanted deeply to write the damn thing and to make it good.

Despite these differences, however, I would, at times, find my attention drifting during class, away from the novel and its hiccups and its chaos to the miracle around me. Everyday, in face of the difficulties and drama and anxieties that exist outside of my classroom, students showed up to write. Farm boys and doctor’s daughters, athletes and English Learners, artists and mechanics all sweat and cried (no bleeding, that I’m aware of) over a story about a teenager who redefines home. In a year marked by division and worry and uncertainty, I found affirmation in the spectacle manifesting daily in my classroom.

We wrote the damn novel. And, because we did, I have hope.

Nick Kleese is a first-year Creative Writing teacher at his alma mater of Washington High School in Washington, IA, where he also serves as the head Speech coach. If not in the classroom, you can find him helping on his family’s farm or running the crushed limestone trails of the Southeast Iowa prairie. He is currently working to transform his youthful naiveté into lifelong, sustainable optimism.

Washington High School is the local high school serving the farming community of Washington, Iowa, whose vision is to “prepare students for lifelong learning” by engaging, inspiring, and empowering every student.

Top photo by Flicker user Informedmag.