What tips do you have for 4th grade writers?

The first one should go without saying. Listen to your teachers. Mrs. [the teacher that set up the interview] knows everything, and that’s not hyperbole [Ed. note: My teacher friend had a kid in class who pronounced hyperbole as hyper-bowl and was utterly convinced his was the right pronunciation. This was my veiled attempt at giving her further fodder to fix his phrasing.] Just like a car doesn’t work unless all of its parts are put together in the right way, writing doesn’t work unless all of its parts are put together correctly either. If you want to be a professional writer when you’re older, you have to learn how to spell correctly, and how to construct a sentence the right way, and when to use commas, and where to place apostrophes, and all of the other things you get drilled on all the time.

Use interesting or sad or funny stories from your life. If an experience made you feel something, you want to re-tell that story so that the person reading it can almost feel the same way you did when you went through it.

If you’re really serious about writing, try to write something every day, even if it’s only 100 words. You can keep a journal about the things going on in your life and how you feel about them, or you can write short stories. Or, like my nieces just did, get with your friends and come up with a book idea and have each friend write one chapter of the book.

And the best tip to become a good writer? It’s the same thing I told you at the beginning. Read. Read as much as you can. Read books that are interesting to you, but every once in awhile, try to read something that you don’t think you’d like, or by an author you’ve never heard of. Ask your friends what they’re reading. Ask your teachers to recommend books. Good writers are great readers.

So go and read. And write. Then read some more. Then write some more. Then ten or twenty years from now, send me your first book. I’d be happy to read it.

What was the favorite book you published?

[Awkward silence]. Unfortunately, I haven’t published any books yet.

… or your favorite blog?

[Slightly less awkward silence, followed by a quick recap of this post: Her Name was Desiree. Retelling the story felt strange since I didn't relate exactly what I got out of the experience, but one of my follow-up thank you notes from the kids said, "I relly injoyed hering you say that you rot a story abot the gerl."]

Which stage do you take the most time on?

Tell me the names of the stages so I know what you’re calling them. [After the fact, I felt bad that I put this particular kid on the spot with a pop quiz, but she passed with flying colors].

Pre-writing, rough draft, revise and edit, and publishing.

Pre-writing is where I often take a lot of time. It helps you get your ideas clear before you start writing so that you don’t waste a lot of time when you’re actually writing. I try to spend a lot of time brainstorming about what, exactly, I want to say, who am I saying it to, and why I’m saying it. Getting all of those questions answered earlier can make the writing easier and a lot more fun sometimes.

Is it ever stressful or is it just plain fun all the time?

[I laugh]. Like any job you may get when you grow up, it’s both. It’s stressful sometimes and it’s real fun at other times. Sometimes when I write something that I’m really passionate about, then it’s fun, because the writing comes pretty easily. But other times when it’s something I don’t know a whole lot about, and you have to do research, and research isn’t that much fun. For the most part, I really like it. One of the ways I learned that I wanted to become a writer is that when I start to write, I lose track of time, just because it’s one of the things I really enjoy doing.

—

The interview lasted 15 minutes, but I hope the effect on the kids and their writing lasts much longer than that. I know that their encouragement to me will last for decades:

This encouraging experience occurred because one of their teachers also happens to be part of my homegroup at church. Her school had a technology day and the kids had been preparing for their TAKS test (if memory serves correctly). I believe this would also mark the first year they’d be tackling a written portion of a standardized test. Recalling my own trepidation when faced with such a task as a grade-schooler, I was happy to help.

My teacher friend provided me with three of the kids’ questions before the interview. However, the first kid asked the second question. Unpracticed as I am at public speaking, I momentarily lost my place in my notes, which led me to tell the kids that I write things that I think about. I’m sure they were enthralled by that piece of Madden-esque commentary on the writing life. However, I was (mostly) able to regather, and we had quite a fun time. At least I did.

For your amusement or inspiration, here are a few of my answers, with more to come later this week.

How do you decide what you’re going to write about?

If I’m writing for work or for myself, I usually write about a question that won’t leave my mind or a really interesting experience I’ve had. It’s through writing that I start to understand things about myself that I didn’t know before. It’s a way for me to wrestle with things going on in my head. The next time you’re really angry or sad or happy or something interesting has happened in your life, try writing about it. Sometimes when you write, words and thoughts and feelings come out that you didn’t even know you had.

If someone gives me a writing prompt (which happens when I write for magazines sometimes), then I think of something that’s happened in my own life that was funny or sad or weird or happy. Then I try to tell that story in an interesting way, using the fun parts of English that your teachers have been teaching you, like metaphors and onomatopoeia.

Sometimes when I get a prompt, I just start writing whatever first comes to me. It’s kind of like stretching your muscles before you start working out. A blank page can be scary sometimes, so I try to get words onto the page as soon as possible. More often than not, I’ll get past the first few paragraphs and then really get into the article. I’ll re-read the article and typically take out the first few paragraphs. Since those were only my ‘stretching’ paragraphs to get me ready for the ‘race,’ I don’t need them anymore.

How’d you decide to become a writer?

Mr. Nowitzki when we're not hanging out. (Image via Wikipedia)

I loved to read. You have to be a good reader to be a good writer. When I was your age, I read books like the Chronicles of Narnia and Encyclopedia Brown. I still love those books. All of those words and images and metaphors and stories and similes seeped into my brain so that when I started writing, I could tell what sounded good and what didn’t.

Even though I received a lot of encouragement in school for my writing, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I decided to become a writer, and the way I did that was . . . I told myself “I AM A WRITER.” Being a good writer means being confident in yourself, but not so confident that you don’t ever ask for help. All writers need to learn proper grammar and spelling, and they need to be OK with hearing what other people think about their writing.

Being a writer isn’t necessarily about being good, at least at the beginning. Writing is just like any new sport you may start. You’re not sure what the rules are and you’re going to make mistakes, but that’s the way you learn how to get better. It takes a lot of practice to get really good. If you really want to become a writer when you’re older, you have to write something every day, just like a basketball player has to practice every day to be as good as my friend Dirk.

At this point, I held up a picture of local hero Dirk Nowitzki. Much laughter ensued. (I was later told that one of the kids asked their teacher, “Does he really know Dirk?” I wish.)

Plus, I’ve always wanted to see my name on a book. It hasn’t happened yet, which means I better do as I tell you and start writing every day!

——

More to come later this week, plus some of the funny things the kids sent to me after the interview.

In Texas, the University Interscholastic League sponsored contests between schools covering a wide range of academic topics. In Junior High, I tied for 6th in a U.I.L. spelling contest. Unfortunately, the powers that be at that particular contest failed to notify me of the tie. I missed the ensuing spell-off, only to later find my test with “7th Place – Didn’t show up to tiebreaker” scrawled across the page. My little, proud, Junior High mind was crushed, not only at the fact that I wasn’t first place, but that I also didn’t even get the chance to compete to sustain my 6th place position.

So, years later, after stuffing my feelings by devouring as many words as I could, I attempted the journalistic competitions set forth by the U.I.L. It’s been far too many years since then, but I recall participating in Feature Writing and Headlines. I did so poorly in both of them that I can’t even recall my place in either competition. This may have been the beginning of a subtle aversion to the pursuit of writing as a legitimate means of self-sustainment.

Now, even more years later, writing (thankfully) is a part of my job. Learning to craft concise, creative, compelling copy (while attempting to avoid the adolescent allure of alliteration) is an art form I enjoy attempting to master. It’s a journey without a final destination, but if I can inch ever closer with each new day, each new writer I read, and each new voice that speaks wisdom into my life (and there are many of those at my current job and in my real-life circles), then I’ll consider it a day well-spent.

But headlines still cause me a tightening of the throat, a muddling of the mind, and a blankness of the brain. Consequently, I’m highly appreciative of posts like Matt Thompson’s 10 Questions to Help You Write Better Headlines.

While headlines have to convey much more information in a smaller amount of space versus your standard tweet or Facebook update, there are similarities to be found. The pressure of limited space leaves little room for error or vagueness, but carefully crafted content calls out for a memorable, clickable headline. As with your updates, so too with headlines. You want something that tells the truth, but begs for interaction.

Maybe the essence of any headline is this: How do you compress your meaning so that it’s an irrepressible invitation to interact?

So . . .

• What inter-scholastic competitions did you compete in, and where did you place?
• Or, what’s the best or worst headlines you’ve ever read?
• Or, when you compose a tweet or Facebook update, do you linger over exactly what you want to say and how you want to say it so that someone will reply, click, or like the post?

CC Image • Emborg on Flickr

In high school, I was one of those kids.

Nerd. Dweeb. Dork. Maybe the most appropriate descriptive is “bookish.” I loved to read, and for some strange reason after I entered High School, I got onto a classics kick. I devoured Dickens. I dared Dumas and Dostoevsky to entertain me. The most egregious of my prideful reading sins was battling Tolstoy. I read War and Peace in High School.

I didn’t go on many dates that year. And by “many” I mean “none.”

If you ask me now what I know about War and Peace, I’ll tell you that war happens, and peace happens, but that’s likely not what the book is about. There is no reason for a 15-year-old to read War and Peace. The only reason I ever read it is because it was the longest book I knew existed and I wanted to be able to say that I read an incredibly long book, regardless of the fact that I likely only understood ten percent of it.

Which leads me back to Bruce’s post about the long novel. He links to an article by Mark O’Connell entitled The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels which proposes that readers, like captives, can became attached to their kidnapper if even the smallest amount of goodwill is shown to them at any time during their captivity. It’s a great read.

A paragraph that Bruce pulls from that piece resonated with me (emphasis mine):

“You finish the last page of a book like [Pynchon's] Gravity’s Rainbow and—even if you’ve spent much of it in a state of bewilderment or frustration or irritation—you think to yourself, ‘that was monumental.’ But it strikes me that this sense of monumentality, this gratified speechlessness that we tend to feel at such moments of closure and valediction, has at least as much to do with our own sense of achievement in having read the thing as it does with a sense of the author’s achievement in having written it. When you read the kind of novel that promises to increase the strength of your upper-body as much as the height of your brow—a Ulysses or a Brothers Karamazov or a Gravity’s Rainbow—there’s an awe about the scale of the work which, rightly, informs your response to it but which, more problematically, is often difficult to separate from an awe at the fact of your own surmounting of it.“

That’s why I read War and Peace. In some strange way, it was an achievement that made a socially awkward and quiet kid feel confident in himself.

Allow me to humblebrag for a moment. (You’ll have an opportunity as well). Since then, I’ve read a number of long books that have held me captive:

• The Count of Monte Cristo: One of my favorite books of all time
• The Bible: Also one of my favorite books of all time
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: Series count for this list
• The Harry Potter Series
• The Faerie Queen: This is what happens when you become an English Major
• Steve Jobs
• Bonhoeffer: This is the book likely responsible for this post. It took me months to finish, but I recently finished it.
• David Copperfield: Yep. Read it in H.S.
• The Book of Basketball: One man’s fascinating look at the top NBA players of all time
• Crime and Punishment
• Moby Dick
• East of Eden

Since reading Bruce’s blog and seeing that Infinite Jest was on the list, a book which I’ve started before but didn’t even get past 100 pages, I’m encouraged to give it another try.

Here’s your chance to humblebrag: What long novels have held you captive?

But first, I heartily encourage you to do one or all of the following:

• like the FaithVillage Facebook page
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That way, you can get these articles when they go live, instead of a few weeks or months down the line.

Also, use the right sidebar at FaithVillage.com to sign up as a Charter Member. Go do it now. I’ll wait.

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Done? Good. Now you’ll receive our e-newsletter, but you’ll also be invited to partake in our beta launch, meaning that you’ll get the opportunity to try out our site before anyone else. And let me tell you, the latest updates I saw just today are visually amazing. You’ll want to test our site out when it launches, so if you failed to heed my instructions from earlier, get to it now.

You should also know that we do a GiveAway every week, like this one. And sometimes we have featured GiveAways made possible by generous contributors, like this one. So you should definitely check our site on a regular basis, leave a comment, throw us a like on Facebook, and RT our links to all your friends! OK. Enough of the salespitch. Sometimes I can get carried away . . .

As for my favorite articles over the last few months, here they are:

1. [CONCERT REVIEW]: MUTEMATH at Common Grounds in Waco, TX
2. Why Are Young Christians Leaving the Church? An Interview with David Kinnaman
3. [BOOK REVIEW]: Radical Together, by David Platt
4. Six Steps to Establishing Your Church’s Online Identity
5. 10 Top Mobile Apps for Church Leaders