I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.
From Dave Eggers
People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.
And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.
But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the 'Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help' or something like that. It was 826 Valencia.
Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.
Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.
To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.
The only thing that everyone needs to look out for is keeping the students reading through high school and thereafter.
High school teachers who want to get reluctant readers turned around need to give the students some say in the reading list. Make it collaborative: The students will feel ownership, and everyone will dig in.
If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
5 perspectives
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1 perspectives