Writing is a lot like sports, and being a writer is a lot like being an athlete, and I love to make that comparison. Kids know how much it takes to be good at playing baseball or basketball or ice skating. Any kind of activity that requires some skill is going to require a lot of effort, and so I make the connection that doing exercises and learning those skills are not necessarily the fun part.
The fun part is playing the game, and the skills and the exercises help you to get to the point where you are gonna play a great game. Kids understand that. What they haven’t always thought about is how that’s similar to the writing process, so all the things that you learn about writing are — the skills and the exercises that you’re doing, when it comes time to actually writing something like a story or a poem or a song, that’s like playing the game.
And so what you need to bring to that is all of your energy. So I make the connection that it’s great to get yourself psyched up before you’re about to write, so I have kids do this exercise where we stand up, and we imagine that we’re Olympic athletes about to do a big trick, a big event, maybe going down the ski slope or diving into a swimming pool.
And you know that athlete is getting ready right before that, so you can see the athlete psyching himself up, psyching herself up, talking it through, getting the muscles and the energy going in the body. So I’ll do that with students. We’ll stand up, we’ll get the energy going in our bodies, and I have them actually say to themselves out loud, “Come on, baby! Dig deep! Go big or go home!”
And we say it with all of this energy. There might be 20 of us if it’s a classroom. There might be 200 of us if it’s an assembly, and then I ask them to stop and to check in and to feel how they feel on the inside, and it’s amazing because their bodies are tingling. Their minds are alive. They feel so energized.
And I say that’s what you need to bring to your writing so that when you write, you have as much energy as when you’re about to play that basketball game, and it really gets kids excited. I would love it if teachers would bring that into the classroom and have kids stand up before they write and really get psyched up so that when it comes time to write, they actually have that energy inside of them.
