“After The End” – Barry Lane, Chapters 1-5

I was thrilled to read this book by Lane. He offers SO many practical ideas about teaching the writing process that I feel like I can use! These are a few of the things that I found to be particularly useful to me.
In Chapter 1 about questions, I really liked the strategy he talks about called “Growing Leads.” With this technique, you start off by telling the students a story with huge holes and gaps, leaving them wanting more information. This, in turn, will lead to questions! Students will come to understand that when they glance over important information in their stories, they leave the reader “hanging,” wanting to know more to clarify things that did happen in the story.
Chapter 2’s focus was on details. In this chapter, a section called “Digging for Details” tells how you can use a simple, but unique, object to have students describe. First, with generic descriptions, next with specific details to give another reader a real “sense” of the object if they were not there to observe it.
The strategies of Snapshots and thoughtshots in chapter 3 help to give the writer some techniques for making their writing have more depth. Using a “Magic Camera” snapshot technique, students pretend that they have a magic camera that can freeze a moment in their story. This camera allows them to not only see the details from the picture, but all smell, taste, touch, and hear important details. What a marvelous strategy to teach our students, or even use ourselves!
Building a scene is the focus for chapter 4 and I found the most useful tool in this chapter to be “Build a Scene.” Encourage students to write about a scene in their story without using dialogue to describe what is happening. Building a scene can include snapshots, thoughtshots, along with dialogue.
The last chapter in this selection is chapter 5, about exploding a moment and shrinking a century. I love the idea about exploding a moment in your story to make the action last longer. It gives the reader a sense of your story, the setting, what a character is thinking and feeling, the sights, smells, sounds, etc. Lane tells his students that it is like writing in slow motion.
Many of these techniques or strategies are too complicated to use with Kindergarteners with their writing (for obvious reasons), but I still like the idea of giving them examples of each of these as we find them in the books we read, talking about the power and impact the author can have on his/her audience, and why it is important to think about these things in our own writing.