Creative Writing: Build a Portfolio! (Younger Writers Version)

This 12 week course is designed to challenge young writers, spark their imagination, and build their confidence level through peer based interaction and feedback!
During the semester they will improve upon their skills as a writer, learning how to identify and fix common writing problems such as issues with pacing, plot, character development, dialogue, and sentence structure.

By the end of the course students will have a portfolio with 10 completed and fully revised works that showcase their unique abilities as a writer! 

Sharing work and giving feedback will be required aspects of this workshop focused class. The classroom environment will be warm, encouraging, and based on constructive criticism. Students should feel comfortable sharing their work and commenting on the work of their classmates.

The first 5 weeks of the course will be spent writing. Every class will have 2 exciting writing exercises, each followed by a chat about how it went. During these 5 weeks, students will have the opportunity to begin around 20 short works during class time. They should choose 10 of these to finish as homework. 

Those 10 completed (but not revised) works will be due during week 6. In class that week we will be learning how to give constructive criticism and feedback. 

The following 5 weeks of class will be spent workshopping and revising. This means that students will have to read certain classmates’ stories by a specific date, and record their thoughts, feelings, and comments. Then in class we will discuss the story, and feedback, all together. (Note: If there are more than 4 students enrolled, students will be separated into groups and will use monitored breakout rooms in Zoom for workshopping) After the students’ work has been workshopped, they will take that feedback and use it to revise their stories.

The final week of class will be spent finishing up revisions and organizing portfolios before submitting them for evaluation. 

Throughout the course, students will have as much support from me as they need outside of class time, and are always free to message me with questions or concerns!