I teach the WOW concept in large school assemblies with 200 kids at once, as well as in small classroom workshops with 20 kids at once. It works both ways, and I do ask for volunteers from the audience, so I’ll get one child to come up and be the main character. I will ask for ideas from the audience about who could this character be, and what could the character want?
Every hand in the room will go up with ideas. It’s very easy to come up with ideas when you’re not looking at a blank page. It’s very hard to come up with ideas when you’re staring at a blank page, so the students will get ideas. We will decide on an idea. Then we’ll bring up an obstacle character, and that obstacle character will have some reason to get in the way.
I will be the writer of the story, so I will say the story as it’s going along. We’ll have dialogue. The characters themselves will have personalities. Children are amazing at acting. They love it, and so they will begin to act it out and just naturally give their characters personalities.
When they talk, they are using voice. Many teachers wonder how do you teach voice? How do you get at that concept of voice in writing?
So if you give a child a character, let’s say that child is a grandfather, and the grandfather is really frustrated and wants to get an ice cream cone, it can be something really simple like that, that child will start to talk like a frustrated old man. It’s amazing. They will use a different voice. They’ll use different word choice than they would ordinarily.
They’re illustrating all of the things that a writing teacher wants to see, and it’s coming very naturally, again, because they’re not looking at the page. So when the story goes along, we have this wonderful flow because they remember that there is an arc to the story. There’s the want, there’s the obstacle, and there’s the win. They don’t have to wonder what’s coming next because they know that there’s this formula. So it’s not a recipe, necessarily, or a strict rule, but that W-O-W is more like a guide that helps students through that process to keep it from being scary and to allow them to have fun with all those extra things that they add to it, like word choice, like character traits.
And by the end of the story then they have something that is both familiar because it’s like the stories that they’ve read, and yet it’s brand new because we just made it up on the spot.