Kyria’s Fiction Writers' Club

You must have attended AT LEAST ONE of the following classes:

Character Creation  
Ghost Story Writing Class  
How To Teach Little Green Aliens  
Toasty Tales & Hot Cocoa  
Write a Modern Fairy Tale  
Back to the Future with Short Story Writing  

This 4-week FLEX class creates an environment that encourages the young authors to build up their new stories by adding details, refining their storyline, and enhancing their characters. This class is designed to be more hands-on with the stories they’ve started to write in class without the limited time constraints. As each child brings their unique point of view as a reader, their feedback and brainstorming contributions are key to this class. As the writing mentor, I will be asking key questions to help them get out of the box, provide editor-style feedback, and support the writing fundamentals of grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

I post weekly questions to help the young authors dive deeper into their stories' structure. Each student will post their answers and give feedback and suggestions to the other classmates. I also post live office hours so we can chat about the stories in development and any challenges they may be facing that is hard to type out in the class. 

In weekly video shorts, I will talk about the key elements for each week. These bite-sized videos will help the student understand more about writing fiction.  I will also post "open office hours" each week so we can get together and talk face-to-face. I think the blend of recorded and live is helpful for the budding authors who just need guidance and mentorship.

Lesson plan:
Week 1: Deep dive what motivates the character. We’ll write in a way that will help the reader care about what’s happening to the main character. 

Week 2: Setting impacts your character's behavior just as much as their family history and personal motivation. Painting a picture with words will help the reader feel, hear, and see the setting. After all, you want your reader to stay focused on your book instead of eating a snack. So we’ll need those pesky adjectives in an abundance to create a clear setting for the story to keep your reader hooked.

Week 3: Climb the story mountain and the “One Up” possibilities. We’ll move beyond the standard beginning, middle, end story formatting and explore how the story will draw the reader in with the mountain formula. The write will also discover the One-Up brainstorming that fiction writers use to enhance their stories.

Week 4: Add and/or polish up the dialog to ensuring that the story is believable and true to the characters and to the setting. The dialog is another way a reader connects and relates to your characters. Their location impacts how they think, act and speak. The dialog has a flow, pace or rhythm to it that will be impacted by who they are speaking with. We will dig into those parts of the story to find where we can bring the characters more to life. 

Materials: Google Documents with the comment settings “ON”. I will leave editing feedback as comments for the kiddos to read and correct. Some comments will be questions to help the kiddos think independently instead of relying on continuous corrections outside of themselves.