How To Start A Fiction Story – In terms of point of view (POV), many writers write in the first person (with the pronoun “I”) or in the third person (with the pronouns “he”, “she”, or “they”). Here I discuss the ins and outs of first person, including:
First person is a very versatile approach, and its limited scope is both a blessing and a curse. As for the benefits, you can…
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How To Start A Fiction Story
The audience gets access to the main character’s deepest thoughts and feelings. Readers see the world through that character’s unique lens, as if they were listening to a story told by a close friend. In the case of sympathetic characters, their emotions often determine the audience’s response. Their happiness is your happiness; Their pain is your pain.
A Short Story
But first person can inspire empathy for villains or antiheroes that is hard to achieve in third person. Book reviewer Andrew Lim said:
“By putting you in the shoes of the criminals, writers create dilemmas and distort our emotions, instead of letting us reject them in disgust.”
First person can be great to use if you have a character with a strong voice and an interesting outlook on life. The writing style reflects the main character’s attitude and provides consistent characterization.
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10 Seconds That Ended My 20 Years of Marriage It’s August in Northern Virginia, hot and humid. I still haven’t showered from my morning walk. I’m carrying my stay-at-home mom… It’s mid-May. Spring is in the air in the Northern Hemisphere and Memorial Day is right around the corner in America. In many classrooms, the end of the school year means closing, celebrating, reflecting, going out. Many teachers admit that they vacillate between wanting to complete a million and one agenda items and wanting to let go of the wheel.
Perhaps this realization is never more evident than during a writing workshop. We want to make sure that our students take away everything they need for next year, that they meet end-of-year benchmarks. We want to make sure we cover as many writing courses as possible, even if that means holding mini-lessons in rooms that quickly fill up with end-of-year performances, gatherings, and picnics. However, we also want to be able to step back and appreciate the routine and freedom we’ve worked so hard to achieve. We tend to sit back and read books in the corner because our students are writing with more vigor and autonomy than ever before.
What can be helpful when dealing with this time of year is to choose a writing pad that is familiar to children and that offers plenty of room for growth. Realistic fiction is such a unity. It is possible that this will not be a new genre for children, which will allow teachers to skip instruction on the characteristics of this genre and go to instruction on how to make writing better, better, better.
This is a good time to ask your students to complete another on-demand assessment so you can plan your lessons. Time will be tight, and likely to be tight, so it’s important that all your learning is as targeted as possible. Since this is a well-known genre, you can skip a good part of the suggested course.
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You can ask your students to write a short story, a personal story, or a scene from a realistic fantasy story. Whatever you choose, it’s important that you get your students to write what they can reasonably write in a writing workshop.
Before studying your students’ writing, think about the larger goals you have for your students’ writing, and create these lenses that you use to study them on demand. Douglas Reeves’s writing on power standards (via Larry Ainsworth) can help you choose goals that really matter to your students. Reeves explains that three criteria can help teachers choose the standards (or skills) they want to emphasize in their curriculum. First, there must be skill
Outside of that unit or school year. In other words, it should always be a skill that is important to the student. Eventually it should be
For the next level of learning. Ask yourself which writing skills best fit these criteria, and plan to emphasize them in your teaching.
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After you’ve assessed your students’ writing against your objectives, you can choose teaching points that will provide exactly what students can do before the end of the school year.
You may decide to focus your education on unpacking what “show, don’t tell” really is, and how to do it. Together with your students, you can show how authors feel through their words, actions, and thoughts. Or you can study how writers open up details of the setting during the action rather than fleshing out places and dates at the beginning.
If you teach reading using a workshop model, you can reflect on the work your students have done to get to know the characters in their fictional books and tailor your lesson plan to help them create characters and stories that match the books they are teaching. For example, upper level students can try writing stories in which multiple characters go through multiple storylines.
Alternatively, you may choose to focus the unit on helping your students bring deeper meaning to their writing. Teach them to think about what their story will actually be from the beginning. One way to do this is to think of lessons readers can learn from the story. Then put the beginning, middle, and end in the corner to support these lessons.
Ending Where We Began: Writing Realistic Fiction
By choosing one or two areas of focus for this unit, rather than giving equal priority to all parts of a larger unit, you can support depth and transfer in these areas.
It’s that time of year when reviews become meta. Ask your students to do plenty of self-reflection using familiar checklists, rubrics, or other tools. Then rate their reflections. Are they honest? Can they point to several places in their work where they have tried certain skills? Can they explain what the skills mean or are they just ticks? Sending your students to the next class with the ability to reflect honestly and realistically on their writing is perhaps the most important skill of all.
When celebrating, really think about whether an intimate or large gathering feels more appropriate. As the end of the school year often brings melancholy as you move on, consider asking students to leave their mark on your classroom by dedicating their writing to the classroom library for next year’s class to enjoy.
Of course, there are many writing units that make for a wonderful end to the year. Perhaps you are following a set course and don’t have much choice in the unit. Consider any methods, skills, habits, and ways to emphasize depth that you often want your students to bring with them next year and forever.
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Anna is a staff developer, literacy coach, and author based in New York City. She has taught internationally in places such as Sydney, Australia; San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and Auckland, New Zealand, in addition to New York, before becoming a staff developer for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University (TCRWP). She was an adjunct instructor in the Teachers College Literacy Specialist Program and teaches at TCRWP, where she helps participants bring rigorous literacy instruction into their classrooms. Anna recently brought history to life with co-author Lucy Calkins, part of the 2013 Units of Study in Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing (Heinemann) series. She was a researcher for Lucy Calkins and a major contributor to Pathways to Common. Core (Heinemann, 2012) and Navigating Nonfiction (Heinemann, 2010). View all posts by Anna Gratz CockerilleFlash fiction, also known as napkin fiction or micro-stories, is a form of fiction writing in which stories are about 1,000 words. Because all forms of flash fiction are short, the emphasis is on story progression or progression rather than characterization or complex plot twists. For this reason, your basic plot or story idea must be brilliant from start to finish, otherwise it won’t work. Here are 50+ flash fiction prompts to inspire you to write the best flash fiction ever!
While the
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