What project is this, you ask? Why, persuading my 10th graders to write a 50,000 word novel together. In one month.
As the school year crept onward, I suddenly began thinking about National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo, an event that takes place every November when hundreds of thousands of people attempt to write a novel in one month. You can learn more about the event here if you've never heard of it. Someday I'd love to participate in this event myself, but with a new job and a graduate course, this year was obviously not the year. But I had also read about the young writers program associated with NaNoWriMo, and I got to wondering if I could make this project work with my students. At first I thought that maybe next year I could plan ahead and do this ... but then I decided, why not try now? If it turned out well, I could make it a tradition. If it flopped ... then I'd just have to do my own someday and be happy with that. Over a couple of days, between ponderings of how I would justify this project and how I could convince a group of students to go through with it, I decided to try it.
First I had to decide which group of students to do the project with. I teach a section of about 15 seniors, two sections of 20 10th graders, two sections of 20 8th graders, and a section of 8 junior high kids in a reading class. I pretty quickly narrowed the choice down to 10th grade. The 8th graders this year just aren't ready for that much heavy writing and all working together, and I wasn't sure I could convince the seniors to put in that much effort. Several of my 10th graders, however, had already shown some creativity in writing short stories and alternate endings for textbook assignments. Sometimes the creativity was borderline strange, but it usually made me laugh. There were also enough of them that each person could write a pretty short chapter for his or her contribution.
I spent the rest of September creating powerpoints and charts and schedules and figuring out how to convince those kids that they could write a novel in a month together, and that they should want to. My biggest worry was that some of them would just blow off the project. Well, I guess my other biggest fear was that they would all mutiny and refuse, but I figured if I could get several to decide they'd have to do this project since I, as their teacher, was assigning it, then most of the rest would follow suit.
This is a long post. Feel free to read which parts you are interested in at this point. More than anything, I wanted to get down something for posterity - for next year - so I won't forget the plans and feelings of this first attempt.
Here is how I justified this very, very time-consuming "creative writing" project:
As the plan came together for trying NaNoWriMo with my students, I realized we would definitely have to use the majority of November for writing, though at first I also imagined I could have some textbook-curriculum interspersed. NaNoWriMo rules dictate that participants may not start actually writing until November 1st, but I certainly didn't want us to dive in unprepared. The more I thought about it, I decided that October would need to be a major planning month. Although the majority of October would still follow our regular pattern of textbook/grammar work, there would be days with short discussions here and there to prepare the students and outline the novel. (These got more frequent as we neared the end of the month.) Basically, I knew going in that this project would take up most of two months, although through most of October and for a week or two in November we also had "regular" work.
My justification for this project (in case anyone had opposed it, which no one did once I explained it to them) was that it would work on many different skills. Writing a coherent chapter was obviously one aspect, but the students were also supposed to make sure their chapter meshed with other chapters. They'd each have a deadline for their chapter to be "due" that would be counted for points, a word count to meet, editing and revising to do once they'd gotten their chapter in, and work with the entire class to make sure their chapters were consistent. I think meeting deadlines is a major thing they need to work on. They didn't all do splendidly with that, but most of them got the chapter on time or only a day late. There were a few who needed extra prompting.
In the future, I think I could cut this project down, now knowing what steps are essential and which things I will have to push them to make decisions on quickly. For example, I probably could have made the preparations in October take up less time by having them do a lot more writing out of ideas and then collaborating in a more succinct time period. Also, we spent a lot of time in the computer lab during November. What I originally wanted to do was have two days a week in the lab and then on the other days only have the person whose chapter was due type on the computer in the back of my room or use the library. Instead, when I saw that many of them were starting slow, I used a lot more lab time to work (although there was one week where we kept to the strict two-day schedule and were able to do other work as well). Next time I would be firmer on making lab time count, since once students were done with their chapters it was easy for them to want to play games or do something else less productive.
Here is what I did to allow the students to share chapters:
We used a Wordpress blog to upload each chapter in the novel. I started out thinking something like Google Drive would be handy, but personal email is blocked on our school computers for students, so that was not going to work. Then I checked out Edmodo, which is a really neat site, but to upload chapters the students would have to attach them as Word documents, and they would not be able to search easily for specific ones or to update them later. Luckily, Wordpress is not blocked on the computers (although Blogger is, unfortunately). I set up a blog and set it to private. I made each student create an account and invited them using their username to join the blog as an author, enabling them to write and edit their own posts and to comment on others, but not to edit the posts of other students or to mess with the settings as an administrator (me). I only had about 4 students who didn't have internet access at home, but one of them did a great job at typing up her chapter at home and bringing it on USB the day it was due. Another worked only at school and still managed to write about 2,000 words for her chapter, far more than the requirement of 1,250. They had plenty of time to work ahead, so there weren't many problems except with the ones who procrastinated in class and couldn't work at home (only a couple).
Here is how I tried to convince them that they could do this:
I knew as soon as the idea came into my head that though my 10th graders were the ones most likely to succeed at this, there would be several who would still need a lot of convincing. I hoped that even though there might be a few who shirked the assignment anyway, I could get the majority to work hard and pick up the slack. We had an even 40 students by the time November came around due to a transfer student (I think his coming in on the first day of the project was probably a little scary for him), so each student needed to write 1,250 words for us to hit 50,000. I assured them that, single-spaced, that was really only about 2 pages. I had a whole Powerpoint in which I outlined how much they would each have to write, how we could split up the chapters between our two classes, what our genre could be, how to plan the plot, and much more.
I also made many tabs on our Wordpress site with tips, reminders, the chapter "schedule," and fun things to keep them motivated. There was a countdown, search bar, and reminders of whose day it was to write.
Here is how I decided to schedule the writing:
I split up the novel into 1st half and 2nd half. After lots of talk with the students, we/I gave the 1st half to my earlier class and the 2nd half to the later class. I then asked them to suggest the best day for their chapter to be due, so that no one without internet had a weekend day, and I filled in the days based on their suggestions and my own judgement. Based on who was in each class, it might have worked better if I had switched the halves, because some of our 2nd half students had a tough time getting caught up or finishing their chapters ... for some of them it was because they were writing chapters when the 1st half wasn't completely done yet, but for others it was procrastination. Perhaps if they had had the earlier chapters we could have worked to pick up the slack a little better before we got to the real meat of the story. Or, I could have had a split narrative, like the recent YA novel Legend, and given each class chapters based on who was narrating. Or it could have been random. I think the way we did it worked well except that they were very scared about how the chapter writing was scheduled.
With only 30 days tops to write, there was no way to have one person write per day. Instead, I scheduled our main writing to be done by the 20th of November and scheduled chapters like this: On November 1, chapters 1 and 21 were written. On November 2, chapters 2 and 22 were written. And so on. I understand why they were wary about this; however, I also attempted to work with them to plan out the storyline in GREAT detail. For the early class, this worked out pretty well for most chapters (admittedly, 5 of their chapters were also "exposition," so that made it simpler). Perhaps that is one reason why that class did not have as much trouble at the beginning in getting started writing early. The second half had a lot of holes going into November, which I think is one reason it was easier for them to get stuck in a spot, or for things to go a bit crazy in our story (which they inevitably did ... the other reason for this is that the majority of my later class LOVES horror and thriller movies). I think planning even more thoroughly next year will help - I will try to give more of my procrastinators early chapters so that they will be forced to start working earlier and I can push them longer. Many students who had later chapters wanted to goof off in the lab until it was their day, despite my encouragement to catch up reading the written chapters and then start drafting, even if the chapter before their own was not finished.
Here is how I assessed this assignment:
How to grade this project? I had a rubric early on that showed what I was looking for:
10 points possible for meeting the first deadline for their chapter with a significant amount of words (I mainly took off points if they uploaded more than a day late or if they only had a short paragraph and took a long time to flesh it out, which made it hard for the next student to write)
5 points for meeting the length of 1250 words
5 points each for logical transitions/organization, a consistent point of view and tense, appropriate tone/voice, eliminating most grammar mistakes, and being descriptive
10 points for working productively as a group and on their own throughout the project.
For a total of 50 points.
I kept a sheet made in excel with their names, Wordpress usernames, the date their chapters were due and a space to score that aspect, and a space for notes on how well they worked in class. I used this to note how many words each student had towards the end, as well, so I could tell which ones I needed to push harder and when word count had been upped so I could update those specific chapters in my Word document which counted their total word count. (I could also keep track of which ones were updated by getting emails sent to my teacher email from the blog. There were lots of emails on days we were in the lab, but I could go through them pretty fast and that was helpful for knowing which chapters had had only minor editing and which had been really worked on, since the emails showed what changes were made.)
Here is how I think they did:
Overall, I think they did FANTASTIC.
With Thanksgiving falling right before the novel was due, I was afraid they would all stop at break and we wouldn't make our word count. I tried to push everyone to get their word count up by that Tuesday night (last day of class that week) by making the chapters due that night, but I soon realized that we wouldn't make it that way, and that if they instead had one more day, some of them might write on their day off. I sent out emails to their parents and to them through Wordpress and frantically updated the Wordpress site with pleas to write a few hundred words more on Wednesday, and it did help. We left school Tuesday with over 1000 words left to write (can't remember the exact number). Tuesday night I believe we were around 900, and I made a pact that if we got within 500, I would finish the novel for them, but not more than that. I really wish they'd been able to make it themselves. Every time I'd see an email on Wednesday saying that a few hundred more words had been written, I was ecstatic and thought "We can make this!" Then a few hours would pass and we'd still be 700 words away, and I was sure we wouldn't. I kept holding out, and by the end of Wednesday, we had 49, 634 words. We were within 500, and though I hoped to see a couple of them finish their chapters just after Thanksgiving, I went ahead and wrote an epilogue to push us to 50,000. The students' final count stayed at 49,634, and I am a bit sad that a couple of them couldn't push out a couple hundred more words when they knew we were so close.
But.
The real reason we didn't make it was because of a few procrastinators, as any teacher knows there always will be. What strikes me, though, is that a couple of students who were 500 or 700 words away on Tuesday night actually finished their chapters in time, one in particular who I was sure would not finish. There were about 5 students who never finished. One got sick the last week before break with only 200 words left, so she was really close, but just couldn't get it done. There were a couple who were mid-range, 500 words away or so, about half done. But there were at least 2 who were 900+ words away. I don't say this to complain or make them look bad. I was disappointed but not surprised that a couple of students left this much undone. I say this instead to point out that we had more than 3,000 words unwritten by students who didn't finish ... but we ended up only 400 words away from 50k without my help. I was more than impressed by how much some of my other students wrote that made up for the few who didn't do the work. I had a girl who wrote almost twice as much as was required, several who wrote an extra 200 or so, and many who got in at least 50 extra words to help out when I asked them to.
I chose to help them finish up because after a month, most of them had worked very hard, some going above and beyond what they were required, and in the end, they wrote 49,600 words of a story that MADE SENSE. I mean, granted, it is a ridiculous and crazy story at points, but it has a beginning, middle, and end, is definitely exciting, and had maybe one or two slight inconsistencies. In my opinion, they had already won.
We now plan to do more editing, finish up, and format the novel and self-publish it. Createspace offers free paperback versions to "winners" of NaNoWriMo, so we will get some free and buy any others at hopefully about $5 per book.
I have so much more I could say about this project and I would love to share that with other educators who might want to try a similar project, but I could write pages (well, I already have) about it. If you have any specific questions about how I made this project work, let me know in a comment and I'll answer in more detail.
