So I will often read a little bit of a rough draft and, on the spot, show kids what I don’t like about it. What did I not quite get the way I want to get it? And I think that what happens with kids is they judge themselves really harshly for not getting something right the first time, and they think that revision is a way of proving that they did it wrong.
So if they need to revise something, it must mean that they did a poor job, and what I try to show them by giving them examples of my own rough drafts and my own revision is that it is a process that actually can be fun if you think of it as a way of making your work better. So one of the things that I do is an improvisation game.
So I will ask students to think of a story that we all know, let’s say a story of the — little Miss Muffet sitting on the tuffet eating her curds and whey, and we’ll act it out first the way it normally exists, and then I’ll say, “So, you know, in Hollywood, they never expect to get things right on the first try. It’s always take one, cut. Let’s do this again and see if we can make it even more dramatic or more humorous or more suspenseful, and then we’ll do a take two.”
And as soon as they’ve done a take two on acting that out again, they see that they made it better, and then they think of other things that they wanna make better, so we’ll do a take three, and they’ve learned through that process that that is a revision, and thinking of it instead of as work or as a correction, instead of thinking it in those terms, they’re thinking of it as an opportunity to make it better.
So kids relate to that because they love movies. They love Hollywood, and so I will say that revision is like a take. You’re not gonna get it right on take one. You’re gonna wanna do a take two, and then you’re going to work a little harder and figure out how to make it even better, and that’s a take three, and I’ll show them my revisions and how it’s not just one or two revisions that go into a book.
It’s 12 or 20 revisions that go into a book, and they start to understand that that’s just part of the process.
