Just Googling the Most Painful Way to Kill Someone
And other adventures with middle-school novelists
Have I told you all about the cohort of young novelists I get to work with this year? They are a group of 9-14 year old girls, mostly fifth and sixth graders. We meet weekly throughout the school year, while they endeavor to write novels, and I do what I can to encourage that ambition. This is the kind of educational situation that feels more like blowing on sparked tinder than like instruction.
I do teach them things. We’ve talked about all kinds of craft considerations, and I give them prompts and things to focus on in their scenes. We close read excerpts of other novels. We throw around words like “point of view” and “narrative arc.” This winter, each of them gets a week where we read and discuss some of their novel, light workshop style.
But I think even if none of that was happening, these young writers would still be excited about class. They’re so fired up. They are never late, almost never absent. Once I was sick, and they met without me. They could spend the whole hour just talking at high speeds about ideas for their novels and each other’s novels.
Every week they ask me if the agents who’ve asked to read my novel manuscript have gotten back to me. Every week I say, not yet. On the week when I bring them better news, there’s going to be some serious cheering. More like screaming. These kids are in it for all of us. When I walk into the lunch room at the homeschool co-op where I teach this class, and have that old middle school “who will let me sit with them at lunch” lurch in my stomach, these students will flag me down from across the room and make me sit with them.
And their novels are so fun! Lots of fantasy situations, portals and dragons and trolls and magic books. Lots of friend-betrayals. A subtly handled story from the point of view of a dog. And a story where the main character (who is already dead but has come back to life) seems to kill someone, that or eat gummy bears. It’s fabulously psychopathic and awesome.
What I love most about it all is that these kids have figured out one of the best parts of being a fiction writer: the ability to try on lives and characters, even fantastic or murderous ones, and come home pretty much unscathed for dinner. People talk a lot about how fiction builds our capacity for empathy, which I think is true. But it also lets us be things far outside what ten-year-old girls generally get to be: dragon savers, lion-befrienders, troll-defeaters. And cold blooded gummy bear loving murderers.
Not to mention, authors.