Today, Marissa Doyle, author of the historical young adult novel, Bewitching Season, talks about which teacher inspired her to become a writer. Take it away, Marissa...
The teacher who got me started writing was…
I think that it was actually one teacher and assignments given by two other teachers that helped make me a writer. Coincidentally, they were in grades 3, 5, and 7.
In third grade my teacher, Miss Billington, was very happy to let us go to the bookshelf and read when we’d finished our classwork…but she also liked us to do projects about the books we read when we were done reading them. I cut my hands into ribbons carving a dugout canoe from a hideous bright gold bar of Dial soap after reading a book about Pocahontas, so it was with great relief that at Halloween we were given the option to write and illustrate a spooky story. My illustrations were (and still are) limited to stick figures…but I had a great time writing about a little girl named Geraldine who didn’t believe in Halloween and who ended up being sacrificed to the Halloween God for her impiety by an outraged group of witches, ghosts, and vampires. I’ve since come to prefer happier endings, but I still remember how exciting it was to create that story.
In seventh grade I discovered the usefulness of writing prompts when my English teacher Mrs. LaBelle sent around little bags of words in strict order (adjective-adjective-noun-verb-adverb-adverbial phrase) that we had to pull one word out of, then write a paragraph or story based on the sentence we formed. Almost miraculously, my sentence read, “Several confused stewardesses fell bitterly without stopping”. No, I didn’t peek when I pulled my words…and darn, I had fun with that topic sentence.
But my fifth grade Language Arts teacher, Mr. Souza, gave me the most valuable writing gifts of all--those of discipline and craft. He assigned us projects that involved A LOT of writing--chapter summaries (I wrote a summary of every single chapter of Little Women, all fifty-odd of them), informational paragraphs culled from reading the classroom encyclopedia, or our own original stories and opinion pieces. By the end of that year, we'd each written a couple hundred one or two paragraph essays. You’d better believe I learned grammar and usage…and how to sit my backside in a chair and just write.
Thanks, you three.
1 comment:
For me, it was my grade five teacher and English high school teacher. Something about that fifth grade, eh? :) Great post, Marissa!
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