One strategy for helping kids become writers is to give them five words on a card and have them work those five words into a story. I've been doing this with my sixth graders, but it's five card draw from a MadLibs card game.
The words today were: choirboys, heartless, computers, romance and cell phones. Here's what I came up with:
It was quiet in the Nave. The choirboys had left their seats only moments before, and the rest of the cathedral personnel were in their offices, filing papers and shutting down computers. The visitors were gone for the day as well; the silence would not be broken by the loud chatter of tourists, the squeals of small children, or the buzzing of cell phones.
A darkened cathedral was a good place for romance to come alive. The soaring buttresses and the dim, colored illumination from stained glass windows lent a certain kind of gloom to the Gothic structure's interior. It was a gloom that reflected true romance, the feeling that something supernatural was going to happen at any moment.
"I wouldn't be surprised to see a ghost," thought the heartless man who was the sole occupant of the gradually darkening room.
The echo of a footfall reverberated suddenly from the back of the room, traveled to the front, then slowly slipped and slid up to the ceiling, around the room, and back to its originator. By the time the echo faded, the cold figure in black had slipped silently into the shadows.
:) My students are amazed that I don't know who this heartless man is, or what is going to happen next. Even I kind of want to know where this story is going. That, I think, it was a good fiction writer does: discovers stories rather than creating them.
