It’s a dark and stormy middle school novel
By Matt Brennan For The Beacon-News November 18, 2010 4:14PM
Herget Middle School eighth-grader Jacob Foote, 14, writes intently as part of his project for National Novel Writing Month. | Mary Beth Nolan~For Sun-Times Media
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Updated: April 19, 2011 5:16AM
Melissa Hill is working on her new novel. It’s called “Middle Child Mess,” and it’s about what happens when the middle child in a family falls for a guy who likes her sister.
“It’s kind of a true-life story,” she said. “Not all things turn out how they want.”
Hill is a young, up-and-coming author. So young that she’s a Herget Middle School student in Jennifer White’s eighth-grade gifted class. About 60 students in White’s classes are writing novels as part of November’s National Novel Writing Month.
Since Nov. 1 the students have been working on novels. Their goal is to write between 5,000- and 10,000-word books by Nov. 30.
White thought of involving her students after participating in the project herself last year. She saw a section on the National Novel Writing Month website, www.nanowrimo.org, for a youth program and wanted her students to try it.
“I’m just pleased they jumped in and took the challenge,” she said.
On Tuesday morning, White’s fourth-period class worked in NaNoWriMo workbooks. The workbooks are from the website and are designed to get the students thinking creatively about their stories, White said.
They ask questions about plot and character, but also get students thinking of books they have read in the past that they enjoyed, White said.
Some of the students have a fair amount of work left to do this month, but others are already done, White said. In the back of the classroom she has charts marking her students’ progression.
By Monday of next week, the students need to be at least half finished with their stories, she told her class. By Nov. 30 they will have to be all the way completed.
A few of the students were intimidated by the size of the project, but then she explained that 5,000 words is about 10 pages, she said.
Kyle Lindley has enjoyed the project. His story is about two people who end up becoming pancake batter entrepreneurs.
“I think it’s really fun to write the novel because I get to be creative and just have fun with it,” he said.
Madison Runyan has simply enjoyed the experience of making up stories and writing them down, she said. She has worked one to two hours a day and is almost done.
At the end of the project, the students will get the reward of a finished work. They also will have their novels bound by the National Novel Writing Month organization.
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