So my primary mission is to remind kids that writing has power, and that writing is something that they can do, and the way that kids can get at this in a more natural and fun way is to get away from the page, and that sounds a little odd because we think of writing as putting words on a page, but really, writing is about having ideas, about having an idea in your head, in fact, that is so exciting that you want to share it with the entire world.
And so one of the things that I do is I teach kids this very simple process of making up a story. Not yet writing a story, but making it up, and I call it the WOW, and it’s very simple. There is a character in the beginning who wants something, so there is a want in the beginning of the story. That’s the first W of WOW.
If the character gets what he or she wants too easily, it’s not an exciting story, and so there has to be an obstacle, so that is the O of the WOW. But if the story ends with the obstacle getting in the way, it’s not a satisfying story, so the character has to win in the end in order to make the story feel like the kind of story that we all know. This is the classic story.
This is what Aristotle told us thousands of years ago about what makes a story great, and I’ve just made up the simple way for kids to remember it, W for want, O for obstacle, W for win. So I will encourage kids to think of these kinds of stories, to act them out. I’ll do it with them on the spot, and what they find is that they are not having to come up with the story all at once.
They’re just taking it step by step. So as soon as you think of a character who wants something, a cat who wants a saucer of milk, then it’s pretty easy to think of an obstacle. You could think of ten different obstacles. So there’s a mean dog that gets in the way, and then as soon as you think of that obstacle, you can start to imagine how could the cat get around the dog? And there are lots of different ways.
So I’ll ask kids to give me five different ways, and then we’ll choose one. We’ll act it out first, and acting it out is a great way for kids to understand that writing is not just about putting words on paper. Writing is about making something so fun and so lively that it is entertainment. And so then, after it’s all over, what I find is that kids will often be eager to write that story down.
They love it so much they want to write it. They want to write it because they understand that writing it is the way of both remembering the story, being able to read the story and enjoy the story again, and being able to share it with other people.
