The Creative Community at Grosvenor School!
Hello friends at Grosvenor School!
I was so fortunate to work with most of you last year when we did Scraphic Novels – and couldn’t believe it when I learned I’d be visiting the Grades 4,5, and 6 classrooms again this past October! We had a great time, didn’t we? It was so cool ‘re-connecting’ and seeing how you have grown as people and writers since the last time we worked together.
We spent the week mostly in the fabulous Grosvenor library, going through the writing process, or more specifically my writing process. Thanks for ‘trying it on’ and seeing how it fit you as writers! I also learned a lot from you and your questions and insights, since not everyone approaches every stage of writing the same way for every story.
Two classes began with a fictional character and built the foundation of a story from the character-on-up. Another class used a beautiful piece of artwork they’d created to inspire their story – some pieces featured characters as well, but others had landscapes and intriguing story worlds. It was a first for me, and I thought you did very well indeed! (In fact, I made a few colourful Scraphic Novel backgrounds recently, and have decided to use them to inspire a story – so, visual art will inspire my text, as it did for you. Thanks for the idea!)
With a whole week together – and since this was pretty much a ‘second time around’ – we got to go even deeper with our writing. We had more discussions and more small group conferences. We talked about similes, metaphors, symbolism and the power of names. We even talked about the very subtle difference between personification and anthropomorphism. Big words to suit your big ideas! And of course, we were able to spend time exploring and practicing revision. I hope that you start to see revision as another very important and very creative part of the process.
Thank you for having me back at Grosvenor for what I believe was a fruitful week delving into the craft of creative writing together. We were able to let the ‘cadence and rhythm’ of story sink deeper into us, helping to make us better writers. I’ll be back again in March to make new friends in Grades 1,2 and 3 – but I will be sure to stop in and say hi to all the special writers I’ve met at Grosvenor.
Have a great year – see you in the spring!
Karin 🙂