Setting Goals and Beginning a Whole New Phase of Writing I step out of my grandparent’s big white house, the snow is falling, pouring down from the sky to make a thick blanket of snow. I shoot out my tongue to try and capture a piece. This is my favorite snow in the whole world. There’s just something about a Wisconsin snow. I take one last smell of the snow and step into the car. It’s much warmer in here-the heats on. I look around. My cousins and grandpa are already in the car waiting. I slam the blue door shut and plop down next Becca, my favorite cousin. She’s shivering like me, ”You Cold?" I walk out of my grandparent’s big white house and take a deep breath, one last smell of the Wisconsin snow. “I’m ready,” I announce to both the world and myself. And ready I am wearing a Packer hat, A Packer turtleneck, a Packer coat, all over green sweatpants. I nervously open the navy blue van that we rented and step in. My cousins are already in there. I have a seat on the cushioned bench next to Becca, my favorite cousin. Wiping the cold Wisconsin snow off of my face, I turn to her and ask, “Are you excited?” She nods her head. I’m going to burst with excitement. Read Henry’s writing. What do you notice?

Writers, today is a big day. Starting today, the writing workshop changes, so that instead of generating new stories, you will, today choose one of those stories to be what writers sometimes call a seed idea, and then you will grow that seed across a bunch of days into a piece of publishable writing. Today you will decide from a piece of writing that you have been working on this year so far. How many of you are experienced at rereading your notebook and choosing one entry to function as your seed idea? Those of you who are experienced at doing this work, will you quickly teach the kids around you what to do, since we’re going to spend just three minutes right now, doing this really important work. Paperclips or sticky notes needs to be placed on the writing piece you will be working on.

Today you will be working outside your notebook, working on clean sheets of draft paper. You’ll be flash-drafting your story, writing the story as literature. You’ll be writing your story that’s not all that different then Each Kindness.

What I want to remind you of is that writers fill themselves up with the true thing that happened, recall how they’re decided to start the story (the where and how), and then, keeping their minds fixed on the mental movie of what happened, let their pens or pencils fly down the page. Writers write fast and furious, pages and pages, finishing ( or almost finishing) a whole draft in a day. **While writing the room is going to be absolutely quiet. I won’t even confer with any of you because I don’t want any talking to break the spell. Instead, I’m going to write as well- a story of my own. Each one of us will write pages and pages. We will write almost as if we are reliving that time, putting the truth of our experience all down on the page. The writing might be amazing, and it might not be, and that is OK. But there are things you can do to make it likely that this is a magical day for your writing. ●You are silent ●You listen. You listen for the part of your story that makes a sound in your heart. ●You replay that part again, like a movie in your mind. ●You listen, you watch, you try to remember what you can’t quite recall ●You re-create something that feels right.