Writer's Block

As I pecked away at my laptop in a Southtown coffee shop, I spotted someone at a nearby table with writer's block. It was painful to watch. He just sat there with an upright, motionless pen and that familiar, strained look. In contrast, last night, my son came flying through our front door, scrambling for a pen, "I just thought of the best lyrics. I gotta get this down."

As a teacher of writing, I realize that some days are the former and some the latter.

Tips for the unmotivated:

• Tell your kids about stream of consciousness. Tell them just to write what's in the brain and try to make sense out of it afterwards or see where it takes them. Think of all of the conversations you've had where you went off on a tangent. During shared reading, my students like to interject with their connections to the text and I always find that we eventually get way off the subject. This would be a great time to show them how stream of consciousness works and how really good ideas are generated from such routes. One of my students tried it last week and his piece ended up very Seuss-ish. He got a kick out of that!

• Provide choices. Students need room to wiggle both physically and mentally. Give them choices. This doesn't mean always give them free choice; that can cause a lot of "I don't know what to write." Give them two or three prompts like Tell me about a time when you were proud of yourself or someone else. Not: One rainy day, the clown was at the circus and then.... Think about how much you've put in that scene. What if rainy days remind the student of something sad? What if he or she has never been to the circus? What if she's like me and gets really freaked out by clowns? (I do have Free Choice Friday, though.)
  

• Write when they write and share your own moments of brain freeze, even if you have to fake it. "Today I started to write about the time my mom won a marathon, but then I started to think about my son's birthday, which is tomorrow, and I got distracted. I'll write more tomorrow." Show them that writer's block is OK once in a while.
  

• Cut out pictures from a magazine (and laminate them if you want them to last for a while). Place these pictures in a box and students can choose a setting or a character or something else to which they've connected. "My dad once took me fishing..." Try to get pictures from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds. This could be a great way to dispel stereotypes and/or discuss the media's intentions.

• Keep examining text from the writer's perspective when you read with your kids. The more they think about the writer, the more they'll rely on some of those choices when they're writing.

• Keep providing those experiences for them. They can only write what they know. Stick them in front of a TV all day, and they're passively taking it all in. We want active learners with lots of experiences to draw from for their writing, not this: