Week 1 Reflection on Teachers Write

I did have an awesome week during Week 1 of Teachers Write! I had one loose goal when I began. I wanted to do the writing exercises not as stand-alone exercises, but I wanted to tie them into a long story. (I’m calling my children’s chapter book a long story  so as not to paralyze me.)

The first day of Teachers Write was 10 July. That was the day I sat in the blistering heat and thought of a short scene about a boy named Bailey. I don’t think I really managed to write it from his perspective yet, which was the assignment.

The next day I continued the idea of making Bailey a part of my story. Four days this week, I was able to think about one character or aspect of my not-that-developed story. That was better than I had anticipated, and the story is starting to come to me.

I wrote just 1400 words, pretty much all in the exercises I did with the various authors.

The pit of my week was that I wasn’t really motivated to write unless there was a prompt. I didn’t really sit down and just write a lot of words to reach a word count goal, which I guess I hadn’t really articulated as a goal. Sometimes during the week though, I tried to, wanted to, but couldn’t do it.

The peak of the week was getting to join some conversations in the comment sections. People are so kind and good and responsive. It was motivating to post and see that people actually read and gave feedback. Very special .

Next week I’d like to add more scenes and character building to my story, even when it doesn’t fit into the exercises. Maybe my word count goal will be 4000 words for next week. Yeah, I think I can do that.

Reflection based on Jen’s post here at Teach Mentor Texts.

Comments are closed.