Our first visit to Hawthorne - Feb. 9

Today we ventured to Hawthorne Public School and met the students we would be mentoring over the next four weeks. My student, let us call him ‘Prince’ (his nickname), is an ambitious fiction writer who hopes to publish his stories one day. Despite repeated attempts I could not get him to focus on any A Midsummer Night’s Dream work – indeed he even indicated that he did not know what I was talking about and thought our time together should be focused upon his creative writing. He has been working on a fictional post-apocalyptic story in which mankind has very nearly eradicated itself with nuclear war and the survivors are divided into three categories – or classes of humans. His division of the classes is reminiscent of the castes present in Brave New World where each individual has his place and role within society. The twist brought about in his story – one caste has been pushed out of their living quarters by the robots and is moving into another area of living quarters; thus pushing out the next caste of citizens which is in turn pushing the final caste up onto the surface and into danger.

Thrown into this melee of human versus human are three other threats which can be found on the surface – the robots who have achieved consciousness/intelligence and want to overthrow the humans; the mutants who have been affected by the nuclear radiation; and the alien invaders who have come to take over the planet. He shared with me some of his writing so far and I was able to get a glimpse at his story development to date. I would say that he falls somewhere between a 3 and 4 on the Beginning Writer’s Continuum [http://schools.nyc.gov/documents/d75/ais/BWC.pdf] in relation to the 6+1 Writing Traits.

I found our biggest challenge lay in getting a coherent narrative. Prince has lots of great ideas but is very reluctant to sit down and think/write out where he wants his story to go. So what gets produced is a rambling chain of words that lack focus or purpose. He has a general idea of what he wants to happen, but hasn’t solidly planned out the storyline – indeed he is not even sure which characters will survive the story, what is actually going to happen, nor which faction will be the victor in the end. There are even parts in the narrative where it almost seems as though he deviates with a side-story that has no major contribution to the plot. At one point we get a flashback into Scarlet’s childhood but there does not seem to be any important message or purpose for the flashback. At another point we go on a meandering exploration with Bug that serves only to reiterate the bleak description of the landscape which we already experienced earlier in the chapter. Another big setback is his tendency to change tenses often: the story will switch from first person to third, and past tense to present tense frequently and without justification. There are frequent spelling mistakes, some repetitive word usage, and some shaky sentence structure which are all indicative of a developing writer (level 3) who is progressing towards becoming a capable writer (level 4). I think that with the benefit of someone to work with him on his writing that Prince is fully capable of honing his writing skills and progressing to the next level in his writing abilities.

I believe my plan for trying to help Prince develop in his writing will involve the following:

• Work on brainstorming techniques so we can hammer out a plan for where he wants his story to go.
• Work on getting his ideas laid out in an easily-comprehensible manner.
• Work on going through his text together (proof-reading) to make editing corrections [things such as spelling, sentence structure, idea cohesion, etc.]
• Work on identifying the key components to the story [beginning, middle, end]
• Work on creating a story outline.

He has lots of great ideas and has a general notion of where he wants his story to go, but I think he could benefit from a session of sitting down and trying to organize his intentions for his story. Our next session following Family Day will focus on trying to brainstorm and mind-map his storyline. I will first and foremost try to get him focused on the assigned class work, but he seemed very adamant that his assignment involved writing fictional work and that his story is what he wants to work on. I recall Mr. Harder talking about the need to find the self in all of our writing work and so I think our focus will be on trying to create solid, believable identities for our main characters.