Revision with Room 102
Last week, I met with my friends in Room 102 to talk about revision. Revision is when writers look again at what they’ve written. They ask themselves lots of questions, like:
What do I like about my story?
What things does my story make wonder?
Can I add juicier words in some places?
Are there any details I can add to really make my writing shine?
They also ask for feedback from their friends, write it down, and think about it. Quite often, feedback from friends helps to make your story even stronger.
So, this is what we did together!
We started with the rough draft of a short story called Ruby and Her Cuzzins.
We talked about how the revision step focuses on improvements, adjustments, polishing up, and adding creative details into the rough draft. (We noticed that there were some spelling corrections to make, but we agreed to wait until the end when we could edit or proofread our final draft.) Revision is all about making our rough draft come to life!
We brainstormed a few details we wanted to see included in the next draft:
After this, we split into pairs to brainstorm some juicy words:
We thought that maybe we could bring some of these words into our story, to show how our characters talked (and make our readers see their different personalities!).
We also decided to really bring that secret forest we liked to life. We used our senses to imagine what it would be like to actually be in that forest along with Ruby…
Then, we put it all together, adding in our new details, ideas, words, and descriptions into our Rough Draft.
It was almost time to go home for the day. I took all of our wonderful work home with me, and typed in our revisions. I was even inspired to build on your feedback and add in a few extra ‘tweaks’. I think you’ll agree that the story is REALLY coming to life because we took the time to do some revision!
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting even more excited about this story now that we’ve done some creative revision. I think there’s even more that we could do to make this story shine. Do you have any other creative ideas? Would you make any more creative changes? This is why I love the revision step!
Thanks again for a terrific and creative session together. Congratulations on your wonderful work!
Till we meet again,
Karin