Here they are: The Writers Circle’s 2016 finalists in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards!  We have a lot of key winners this year in practically every writing category!  And the FOUR Gold Key winners will go on to compete on the national level.  Since TWC started sponsoring our young students for the awards, we’ve had not only Silver, Gold and Honorable Mentions, but National Gold Medalists two years in a row! With our latest young writers, we’re hoping for a third – or more.

We’re so proud of all our students. Starting with just a vision and their imagination, they put in the hard work, including multiple revisions, and then found the courage to send their work into the world.  It’s a huge accomplishment that will reap rewards in many ways well beyond writing.

Here they are.  (In keeping with our policy to protect our younger students’ privacy, we’ve just used the kids’ last initials. )

Adam W. (Millburn High School)
~Gold Key – Poetry: Songs of Ending

Bella B. (Stuart Country Day School)
~ Honorable Mention – Poetry: “The Disappearing Dancer”
~ Silver Key – Poetry: “Bloody in Love”
~ Honorable – Poetry: “Triangles”
~ Silver Key – Poetry: “Hands”

Cassidy L. (Eastern Christian School)
~ Honorable Mention – Short Story: “Dreams Have No Bearing on Reality”

Hikaru H. (Columbia High School)
~ Honorable Mention – Science Fiction/Fantasy: “Dreamworld”

Kevin W. (Millburn Middle School)
~ Silver Key Flash Fiction: “Memories”
~ Silver Key Flash Fiction: “Sunsets”
~ Gold Key – Short Story: “Time of Ghosts”

Keyonna M. (Randolph High School)
~ Honorable Mention – Poetry: “Unborn”

Mira M. (Thomas Edison Intermediate School)
~ Silver Key – Short Story: “City of Lies”

Olivia B. (who moved away, but still worked with Judith from afar!)
~ Gold Key Flash Fiction: “A Letter to His New Her”

Prisha M. (Millburn Middle School)
~ Gold Key – Science Fiction: “Fantasy Rain Surprise”
~ Silver Key – Personal Essay: Memoir: “Letting Go At Last”
~ Honorable Mention – Flash Fiction: “A Race Lost”
~ Silver Key – Poetry: “For Ms. K”

These are the students we helped directly with their submissions, but if there’s a student from our classes who submitted through their school, please let us know how you did so we can cheer for you, too.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OF YOU!  Thank you for sharing your gifts with us.  We love working with each and every one of you.

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The second week of the Summer Intensives has begun with a great group of young writers who wasted no time diving in.  The expanse of their interests and talents is incredible — from poetry to screenwriting to fiction to sports reporting — all converging in an environment that’s practically buzzing with creative energy.

I know from personal experience how rare it is to find a place where one doesn’t have to be self-conscious or hesitant about creativity, where one can follow every whim of his or her imagination. This week, the kids in the Summer Intensive have found themselves in a nurturing, supportive, intense, difficult, and fun writing micro-universe surrounded by people who share their passions and goals. This is an important and often underrated piece of a young writer’s growth.

It’s easy to give a person a pencil and a piece of paper, sit them down at a desk at school, and say, “write.” It isn’t quite as simple to guide and teach that person to do so willingly. That’s why it’s so inspiring to walk into the room during a morning or afternoon free-write, a time when the kids are ‘free’ to do what they please, and hear nothing but the scratch of pencils and the tap of keyboards.

Throughout the rest of the week, the Summer Intensives will have the kids working with some of TWC’s finest – Judith Lindbergh, Michelle Cameron, Lisa Romeo – sharing their love of writing and reading, and their desire to learn and grow. They’ll explore the town in search of sensory details to integrate into their writing, express themselves through music, work together to edit and curate a literary magazine, help and learn with one another and, above all, hone their craft. I have no doubt that they’ll come away from the experience with a valuable new outlook on the process of creating, and a renewed confidence in their own ability to do so.

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This has produced some wince-worthy stories – like the time they wrote about “poop on a stick.” Farts were big one session. Disgusting aliens. General destruction via an arsenal of weapons that can make the single grownup in the room reel.

This session has been particularly hard. The killings at Newtown are still on everybody’s mind – certainly  on mine – while my boys’ class writes about guns and murder. A simple “head hopping” exercise about a ball crashing through a bay window produces stories where kids kill their neighbors, aliens land, kids kill their parents, the neighbors firebomb the kids… you get the picture.

So, I thought, it might be time to see if we can push this in a creative direction. Having told them (perhaps foolishly) Chekov’s famous statement that a loaded rifle in Act 1 means it has to go off in Act 3, I thought  it might be time to introduce the notion of tension in the bomb that ticks constantly through the story – and doesn’t go off. Save the day, I encouraged them. Give me a story where I’m worried that bomb is going to explode any second. Don’t settle for the simple BOOM.

But – and this is the moral of the story – they’re simply not old enough to grasp the technical sophistication of the suggestion.  They don’t get that the bomb that goes off is spectacle – the bomb that doesn’t is drama.

So instead of weaving the “tick tick tick” of the impending bomb throughout their story, they asked – can we have two bombs? Can one go off? What about guns? Can the hero blast his way into the room by shooting the villain?

And of course, my answer was “yes,” because it always has to be with these boys. Our underlying mission in this class is to allow them to write what they want to write – not what a grownup thinks is appropriate. When we permit their gory and grotesque imaginations to roam free, they embrace writing rather than shunning it. The success of the class is evident when I want them to start reading and they beg for just a few more minutes, when they tell their classmates a new (and probably even more violent) way to move their plotlines, when the class is over and they look at me, bewildered, and say, “Already? Really?”

They’re certainly not writing subtle stories, but every once in a while there’s a spark that excites me. A turn of phrase that suddenly lifts the story out of the mundane. The use of dialogue, even without the punctuation. The kid who did grasp the concept, however dimly and asked – can the bomb continue to tick even after it’s dismantled? A new and startlingly different concept – like the one they invented last week – of opening a portal in their stories and moving, suddenly, to their friends’ stories, finishing them up in parallel-universe form.  And yes, the parallel universe is just as full of violence and gore as their own.

So, the bomb has to go off for these boys. As difficult as it is for me – and probably for the parents who hear what they’re writing on the car ride home – we need to give them the artistic space to invent their own universes, filled with weapons and explosions and scatological humor.  And we have to trust that, in time, they’ll recognize the inherent drama in a story where the bomb doesn’t go off – because they’re excited enough about writing and imagination to retain it as a positive, creative outlet as they mature.

Image by kalhh from Pixabay

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To be creative, you don’t have to be erratic, uncontrolled, addicted or unpredictable. In fact, these qualities are far more likely to kill your creativity as to nurture it.

The word “creativity” shares the same root as the word “create”. In other words, you have to actually make something to be creative. Making things requires discipline, technique, excellent organization and problem solving skills. It’s nice if you have a little talent, too. But even if you don’t, creativity is a process and it can be learned.

In simplest terms, creativity experts summarize the lesson thus: first, you have to embrace the broadest thinking possible; then, you have to make an assemblage of critical decisions.

In an article in Newsweek, The Creativity Crisis, the creative process and its measurable degradation in America since the 1990s were detailed and scrutinized. What makes a creative thinker and how can creativity be nurtured? And where is American education going wrong?

I came face-to-face with the creativity crisis myself when my son was writing a report for elementary school. To guide him in his assignment, he had received a shockingly detailed (to me anyway) outline. Every paragraph not only had to be structured with a topic sentence, three detail sentences and a concluding sentence. He also had to give specific information in each sentence. This outline didn’t require any input from my son, only compliance. In fact, if he didn’t follow the outline precisely, he would be marked down.

This orderly approach was certainly easy to follow, and would be even easier for his teacher to grade. But it gave him no space to consider or explore his topic. It did not challenge him to make his own associations, organize his own research or thoughts. He just had to fill in the blanks. Simple call-and-response. No writer I’ve ever heard of works that way. Even those of us who depend heavily on outlining leave a little room for the possibility that an unexpected thought might fit in someplace we hadn’t thought of before.

In fact, the Newsweek article precisely stated the nature of my alarm. In it, an expert was discussing America’s educational focus with Chinese educators who have historically and notoriously emphasized cooperation over creativity. The Chinese response to our standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing was to laugh out loud: “You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.”

How do we teach our children creativity and preserve it in our culture? Talk to any creative person and they’ll tell you. Divergent thought must come first. Given a problem to be solved or a project to be executed, one must first assess – or even better, “play” with the infinite possibilities before settling on solutions.

As writers, this is as natural as breathing. Faced with a blank slate and the entire world for contemplation, we select a kernel of inspiration, a topic we are curious about, a thought we had briefly while walking down the street, and from it we create entire worlds.

In an exercise I use frequently in my creative writing workshops, I give students a pile of photographs of people’s faces. Some could be just “anyone”, but have curious, emotionally charged or meaningful expressions. Others are faces that are distinctly different, often defined so by unusual clothing, make-up, hairdo, setting and more. I ask my students to choose a face that speaks to them. This is the first decision of a creative thinker. It’s often an emotional choice. Why pick one and not another? Does one image remind you of somebody you love or hate, someone you’d like to meet or are afraid of? Does the expression reflect something that’s going on deep inside yourself?

Once the choices have been made, we don’t analyze. An analytical approach would poison the subliminal brew that’s essential to the creative objective. Instead, at this point, I simply ask students to write free-form for ten to fifteen minutes.

“Don’t think. Don’t edit. Don’t stop. Let your pen flow. Let your thoughts fall onto the page like rain.”

Here, you may think, comes the crazy “bohemian” and her shapeless approach to creativity. But in fact, as each writer works, they are making more decisions. They are looking at the face and choosing perhaps to describe it. Or maybe they start by giving the face a name. Or maybe they decide to write as if they are the person in the photograph. Or as if they’re holding the photograph. Or as if someone else found it in the glove compartment of an abandoned car…

As each choice is made, a new dimension solidifies in each writer’s creative process. Each choice informs the writer about their character and circumstance. Each choice transforms the fleeting sparks of inspiration into concrete words on the page.

With each choice, the options for that particular piece of writing narrow. The more detailed the decisions, the more specific the story becomes until all the divergent thoughts have drifted away and the story, characters, language, pacing and more are completely clear in the writer’s, and eventually the reader’s, minds.

The one thing that is missing in this process is absolute certainty. There are no quantifiable results. Writing is subjective. Each reader is the unique judge of failure or success. And this, I think, more than anything, is what’s scary to educators and administrators trying to shape the educational process. You can’t box creativity. You must let it breathe. It must be left to its own devices, but nudged and nurtured along the way.

It takes a little more energy, patience, intuition and a lot more courage to teach this way. But for our next generation to regenerate the American hallmark of creativity and innovative thinking before it is completely lost, we must let their minds out of the box and let them play.

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It’s thrilling and terrifying. A truly brave new world. But my quandary goes beyond the welfare and future of publishing to something more essential: the preservation and accessibility of information and knowledge itself.

In many ways, information seems more accessible than ever. Certainly when my son has to write a report for elementary school, he can google everything he needs to know right from the computer on my desk. He looks at me in astonishment when I tell him that, in my day, that same report would’ve taken hours of research at the library.

I remember losing myself in the stacks – the long dim, slightly dusty corridors where spines lured me like whispered promises. As a child, my mother used to take me and my siblings for afternoons at the local children’s room where I would lie in a quiet corner surrounded by a carefully selected tower of books, musing for hours about worlds of imagination and possibility I’d never dreamed.

In high school I discovered that I could ask the librarian for the yellowed pages of newspapers published nearly a hundred years before. Not microfiche (which used to give me motion sickness if I scanned too quickly), but actual pages carefully preserved in an acid-free box kept somewhere in the library’s bowels.

It was in the hallowed Reading Room at the New York Public Library that my odd passion for dry academic tomes and archaeological reports bloomed. Their humble Pandoran pages opened like a treasure chest, filled with stories nothing else could have revealed. It was exhilarating simply to hear the subtle crack of a volume that only I and probably a half-dozen others had requested in the last half century.

I could have discovered none of this without the library. Unlike the elite halls of wisdom of ages gone, public libraries in America are an incomparable symbol of freedom and equality. The concept of free public libraries is inherently tied to a free public education, a right that I pray no one can argue against, except perhaps in the hope to making the definition of “free” include “highest quality”.

But in this era where it seems everything is migrating online, libraries are under threat. Here in New Jersey, Governor Christie’s proposed budget includes a 74% decrease in funding for library services. According to a recent Legislative Alert posted on the New Jersey Library Association’s website, this cut will eliminate all statewide library programs and services. It will affect all types of libraries in the state and, once state funding is eliminated, New Jersey will lose $4.5 million in federal funding.

I don’t often take a public political stance, but loss of our libraries is more than a personal affront. It goes to the very heart of the American tenets of freedom and equal opportunity.

As a novelist, I could not do my work without the library. Even today, access to expensive research databases and obscure texts that I often obtain through interlibrary loan are the backbone of my research. The Internet is simply not enough. (And please don’t talk to me about the Devil – I mean Wikipedia.) With all the posting and scanning – legal or otherwise – going on online, there are simply some things that will never make their way into the digital world.

But the issue goes beyond my personal and peculiar penchant for the obscure. Libraries provide essential services to people without internet access (and yes, there are still quite a few!), people who long to learn what they do not know, who need jobs in this crisis economy, who are applying to schools or starting new businesses, who want to introduce their children or themselves to a body of literature that is otherwise out of reach – accessible and free to all.

When so many core values in America have simply slipped away in recent years, this one is simple, affordable, and more than worthy of saving.

Go to http://capwiz.com/ala/nj/issues/alert/?alertid=14842591 to let your legislators know if you agree. The library you save may be your own.

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The truth about craft is that it’s all in the doing. We each confront the blank page or screen time and again. We learn to accept struggle, failure and critique, then go back to do it all over again.

Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award for his novel Let the Great World Spin, is apparently fond of quoting Samuel Beckett: “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

How utterly true!

But we all learn from each other. Certainly in this Writers Circle, we’ve done that week after week, sharing our perspectives, making suggestions, taking them as often as we throw them out. Then trying again.

We can also learn from writers more experienced than ourselves. We’ve all heard grateful praise for Natalie Goldberg’s life-changing Writing Down the Bones. It’s a terrific book of freeing prompts and exercises whose goal is not to produce finished work but to express and observe moment to moment both the outer world and the inner life of the writer.

There’s also Anne Lamott’s classic Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. I love her metaphor – taking it word by word, step by step. It reminds me of that hiking piece I wrote for all of you a couple of years ago. I’ll post it here, since not everyone was around back then.

Stephen King’s book On Writing is supposed to be excellent though I’ve only read it in excerpts so far. And of course, Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer nudges me to link to several lists of Best Books:

• The New York Public Library’s Books of the Century
• Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels
• and Time Magazine’s 100 Best English Language Novels from 1923 to the Present

Reading the finest writers with a critical eye to how they manage to create their prose is perhaps the very best way to learn the literary craft.

But if you must ask for a holiday gift this season, what any spouse, child, parent, boss, friend or neighbor should know is that the #1 choice any writer would ask for is TIME.

Writing well truly doesn’t require an MFA, a trendy concept or even particularly abundant talent. What it needs more than anything is exorbitant amounts of focused, uninterrupted time.

Happy holidays, everyone. I hope you all get the gift you most desire. I look forward to hearing from or seeing all of you in the coming year.

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But “finished” is in quotations for a reason. If a piece of writing is ever really finished, it can only be because the author has passed beyond. Even I still have, tucked high up on a bookshelf, a copy of The Thrall’s Tale tagged with changes I would make should I ever have the opportunity. As writers we are always hearing something different, seeing something in our work that we hadn’t noticed before. And we are always maturing creatively and personally. Our vision shifts with each moment of life’s breath, until the truth itself has found another form.

So this 1962 essay, When Does Education Stop? by James Michener, seems appropriate. It is written with a focus on college education, but the message reaches further, to the burden of taking on really challenging tasks and accepting the effort they require. The truth is that we are all always learning, that we cease to learn at our peril, and that the breadth and depth of our understanding are critical to the shape our work and our lives will form. Anyone who attempts to write quickly realizes that even a short story or a three page essay can take days, weeks, months to perfect. We all must search within ourselves for that quality of effort and find the stamina to persist toward a goal that may remain forever just another draft away.

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