The Magic Assignment

The Young Writers Program exploded with activity this past November, with the highest win rate for participants in the history of our program. The success of YWP has everything to do with your participation and donations, and with the fantastic educators we get to work with. Laura Bradley, a middle school teacher in Petaluma, CA, graciously shared her experience with us.

The bell rings, my classroom door flies open, and Tony comes hurtling through. "Can we write today, Mrs. Bradley? Please, please tell me we're gonna write today!" He glances at the white board, sees "writing" on the agenda, and throws his hands up in celebration. "Yes!"

In 20 years of teaching, I have never seen students this eager to write. Sure, I have had success in the past with writing assignments that were tailored to engage my often-reluctant eighth grade writers, and I have seen them respond with enthusiasm to many writing pieces. But I am sure that I have never had students beg for writing time day after day. Nor have I seen them write silently and focused for a solid 45 minutes, day after day. So what is this magic assignment?

National Novel Writing Month offers a bold challenge to writers: pen a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I first heard about NaNoWriMo a couple years ago, and my college-age daughter participated last year. Although I was intrigued by it, I never considered offering it to my students. 50,000 words is no small writing task, and the last thing I want to do is set my kids up for failure. Then I discovered the Young Writers Program aspect of NaNoWriMo, and the magic began.

I couldn't sleep the night before I told my students that they would be writing a novel in a month. I told a colleague about the project, and he predicted they would run screaming from the classroom or sob with fear. Write a novel in eighth grade? Write a novel in a month? One seems impossible. Both? Crazy. So I tried to hook them by appealing to their desire to be the first:  "You are about to do something that no student at our school has ever done! No teacher at our school has ever done it either! You are going to write a novel in a month!" Then I promised that they would have time in October to plan their novels, and that I would help them through the process in November. The icing on the cake was that I would suspend all other class work and homework for the month of November; I would only ask them to write their novels.

Also, the Young Writers Program allows students to choose their own word count goal. After lessons on how many words they can write in one sitting and what would be a reasonable 30-day goal for them, we were ready to dive in and take the challenge. "Trust me," I said. They were excited but wary.

When November 1 finally arrived, my students came to class armed with character descriptions, conflict plans, and plot outlines. And they wrote. And wrote. And wrote some more. And they didn't talk. And didn't complain. And had to be told to stop writing when it was time to pack up for lunch. Day 1 of NaNoWriMo was a hit. And so was Day 2, Day 3, and every day that we worked on our novels. They were invested in their writing, took ownership of their novels, and were fully engaged in this crazy "month of literary abandon." They wrote more than they have ever written in their lives. And they loved it.

I wrote a novel along with my students, and sharing the process with them was great fun (and so hard! What a challenge!). Our principal even signed on, and often brought her laptop into our classroom to write with us. For a month, we were all novelists, hard at work.

Photo by Laura Bradley