Group items tagged

PIZZAZ! is dedicated to providing simple creative writing and oral storytelling activities with copyable (yes, copyable!) handouts for use with students of all ages. Permission is given to use these resources for in-class, non-profit use only. Generate ideas for class topics and open channels of communication.

This features a really great tool for moving any story along: the 1-Page Synopsis.

"Charles Darwin's Beagle Diary The Beagle Diary was later used to write Darwin's famous book 'Voyage of the Beagle' (1839). The narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836. Darwin describes each day of the voyage, some in intimate detail, during the Beagle's circumnavigation of the globe."

Members site full of educational tools for the writer.  Worth joining.

This site features a very informative video that writers should view.

In an age of digital storytelling, the distance between author and reader is rapidly shrinking, and the roles those parties play are rapidly changing.  One of the most radical concepts that I've come across during my research of transmedia storytelling is the "unbook."

When I first used Queneau's Exercices for teaching, I would hand out photocopied passages from nineteenth- or twentieth-century French authors, and students would work on these texts, changing the tense, point of view, sequence of events, and so on, as needed. More recently, I have used practice texts from a single work, Albert Camus's novel L'étranger , whose stylistic simplicity lends itself admirably to the purposes of the course. The students are given a two-paragraph excerpt from the novel for written assignments and a different passage for in-class practice. The advantage of having a single text is that in a short time the student has committed that text to memory, knows it in minute detail. The vocabulary and syntax are not an ever-renewed obstacle, and the student can proceed directly to stylistic modification of the text.