What an Opportunity

Today we had the opportunity to chat with a real live author. Granted, he’s just starting out, and he’s not one of the voices we’ve encountered in our class readings, but he’s an honest to goodness author whose son attends our school.

One of the downfalls to teaching English is that we rarely get the opportunity to speak with the person who wrote what we’ve read — those people are dead and rotting — and so we never get to have that one-on-one conversation with the author. (We good readers do that on a regular basis, but we do it through our reading of the books. Kids struggle with that because they’re just starting this process of reading and stand distant from that understanding that someone wrote for them; someone wrote to challenge them and to create a discussion somewhere between the author, the words on the page, and the reader.)

Our author came in and read from his book: The Dreamer, the first in a trilogy.

Matt treated his discussion with our students by introducing himself, stating that he’s the father of a student at our school, asked if there were any questions about writing, and then got straight to reading from his novel. As any author at a book signing might, Matt read through a few chapters, and then went into a discussion about the process of writing. Most interesting to me was the fact that Matt didn’t hide things from the students. He mentioned his luck of finding a publisher on the first try, and he also mentioned that he went through roughly 100 drafts of the novel before settling on this final version.

He also mentioned that this novel is far from perfect; that he learned so much about writing through the editing process — in which his editor helped him create backgrounds for certain characters, name certain places, and ultimately enliven the story.

The coolest part about the students was that I worried about their involvement. I knew this author was coming (another teacher arranged the meeting), but I thought he was coming later in the month. Therefore, when the kids showed up today, they had a surprise, and then they got to sit and listen to a story.

When question time came, I was impressed by the students’ questions about the writing process, about the editing process, and about finding publishers. They asked about drafts and they asked about specific characters. They were hungry to find out more about these characters, and they were (surprisingly) equally interested in just what it is that a writer does to call himself/herself a writer.

If you have the opportunity, and a spare twenty bucks, please consider Matt McMillan’s The Dreamer for some summer fun. The story centers around Molly, who unexpectedly loses her father, and who has the opportunity to get him back if only she can rescue the kidnapped Mother Time.