Thursday, May 03, 2007

Ideas for Writing

I've been thinking that I need to develop more minilessons on ideas - coming up with things to write about. I use Nancie Atwell's suggestions - Writing Territories, the "Where Poems Hide" idea (though actually I don't think I did that one this year), and some others that she has in Lessons that Change Writers. However, I have lots of students who have trouble choosing topics.

Today I read this on Lois Lowry's blog and I'm thinking that I can try to collect a bunch of these - answers to the question "How do you get your ideas?" from other authors.

Does anybody have some useful suggestions on how to help students when you're having them choose their own topics?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This isn't a useful suggestion, but a comment on Lowry's blog entry. It seems to me the step that is missing for so many people is going from the "this thing happened" to the "but what if..." part. They just don't make that leap.

(My 9yo sort of has the opposite problem - he has all these great ideas bouncing around in his head, but can't seem to get to the point of breaking them into manageable chunks for turning into writing. But I suspect that is an easier problem to work with, then not having ideas to begin with!)