TopShelf Magazine Holiday Edition, 2017 | Page 15

TOPSHELF KIDS

GETTING KIDS TO READ & WRITE

by Mark Cheverton ( TopShelf Columnist ) Twitter @ MarkC _ Author | MarkCheverton . com
I love hearing from teachers and parents and am thrilled when I hear how excited many kids are to read my books . It seems like Minecraft and my characters , especially Gameknight999 , has ignited some excitement amongst students about reading and writing .
I ’ ve heard from many teachers and parents about how my books are getting reluctant readers , especially middle-grade boys , to read again . We all know about the statistics of reading literacy with boys when they enter into middle school . You ’ d think they all became suddenly allergic to the library .
One of the really surprising things about my books is that kids , especially boys , are excited about reading my Minecraft novels . This has opened a door for teachers and parents to get kids off the computer games and into a book . And the irony of it is that the books are about a computer game ! Watch this boy when he gets the next book , https :// youtu . be / Z-yuXEPLS78 .
I would love to talk with any teacher or parent out there about how we could use my books to get more kids to read . As a past educator , I know the importance of good reading skills and would love to help if possible .
If you ’ re interested in discussing this , I can easily be contacted through my website . Just send me an email , I answer every one , but please be careful with spelling your email address . Now and then I get a message that I cannot answer because the reader mistyped their email address , so please be careful . I answer every email I receive , personally .
An added bonus I ’ ve received with publishing all these books is that I receive

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many stories from kids every week . Because these kids know a lot about Minecraft , many of them feel confident about creating their own stories ... which is fantastic !
If you go to the BLOG tab on my website , you can see all the stories that I ’ ve received from kids over the past couple of years as well as their artwork . This has been very exciting , seeing the creativity of young kids blossoming as they send in story after story . There are even a couple of kids in the process of self-publishing their books online ... WOW !
After writing nearly 20 novels and reading countless books of plot construction , character development , scene design , setting , dialogue ... I ’ ve come to learn a few things about writing . I have broken these learnings into bitesized pieces that are digestible for kids , then put them together in a set of workshop materials that I will be sharing with you as we move forward in this TopShelf Kids journey together .
The materials we will be discussing in issues to come have been workshop and teacher-tested , and have been received very positively . I hope that educators and parents will use these materials with their children , inspiring them to write and send me their stories so I can post them on my website . The stories don ’ t need to be about Minecraft ; they can be about anything . I just want kids to write ! What you read translates into how you write . Then , practice , practice , practice !

And finally , preparing yourself as a writer means that you understand how long it will take to write a novel . It depends on your style ( i . e ., fast and furious or slow and steady ), whether you ’ ll be able to write every day , how much description you will include , and whether your novel will be long and complicated like War and Peace , or short and easy like Love Story . A typical novel is between 80K and 100K words but can be as columns

few as 40K or as much as 250K . If that scares you , look at it this way . Write a thousand words a day and your novel will be finished in 3 months .
I ’ ve spoken with many kids about Minecraft , no big surprise , but I ’ ve also spoken with them about writing their own stories . A couple of things emerge as constant themes : 1 . Kids want to write their own stories .
2 . Kids don ’ t know how to write their own stories . So I put together some materials to help them understand the basic elements of a story . When I started writing , I knew nothing about story structure . I just knew I wanted to write . The way I learned about story structure , dialogue , character development , setting ... is I started to write . I quickly realized I knew nothing about writing . I purchased lots of how-to books and took a little piece here and a small morsel of insight there . I attended conferences , and I listened to many webinars , learning everything I could . As I wrote more failed books , I discovered that my writing wasn ’ t as smelly as it started out ; it stunk a lot less , and in fact , sometimes my writing actually smelled pretty good . As the structure of the story began to formulate in the back of my mind , I started to see the patterns and the science of writing , and that ’ s when my books started to become successful .
I have distilled these learnings about the science of writing , and I am excited to share them with you here , in this exciting new TopShelf Kids column designed to encourage children not only to read and write , but also share their thoughts , ideas , and written works with others .
I hope you and your children will join me next time as I dive into the science of how to write a Minecrafter ’ s adventure novel .
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