What Helped Jacqueline Woodson Learn To Write

Question

Her journey from childhood reading to becoming a celebrated YA author fascinates me; what early influences shaped her narrative voice and craft?

shylove143 · Answer

The author talks about finding her voice by reading widely and discovering authors who are similar to her in experience. When people find authors who are similar to them, it can really help writers find their voice. A story like ‘Teach me, Mr Blackwood’ explores the subject of mentorship and learning a skill. It’s a story that focuses on the quiet learning moments between a master and student and the characters inner growth.

Eva · Answer

Celebrated author Jacqueline Woodson discusses how influences and a strict work ethic have shaped her life and career as a writer. The young author was exposed to stories often in her childhood and her family. Most importantly though, the stories in her family and community inspired her and taught her how to use language musically. In addition to being influenced by the stories around her, Woodson was affected by many of the books she read as a child. Most of the books she read were analyzed by her in order to better understand how the author created characters and developed a setting for the story. This approach to reading greatly impacted the way that Woodson writes.

The author also mentioned how seeing herself in literature was extremely rare but had a profound effect on her. Thus she continues to strive to write stories about people of many different backgrounds. This author had the good fortune to have had several mentors, teachers and even librarians who gave her the right book at the right time. But most importantly, she got feedback on her work from her peers in various writing workshops and from communities of writers. She writes that writing is both art and craft and must be worked at regularly.

Vance · Answer

In this video, celebrated young people’s author Jacqueline Woodson looks back on her writing life and talks about the two environments that nurtured her as a writer. She grew up in a home where stories were a regular part of family meals, so her stories are also written with that same kind of vibrancy and closeness. Her second home was the library, where she met up with authors who wrote different kinds of stories than she was reading, helping her to realize how many different stories could be told.

She wrote against the backdrop of the stark absence of minorities in books read by white authors; thus, much of what she wrote was directed towards minority children. As a writer of habit, Ms. Woodson continued to work daily to hone her craft. Importantly, she shared her work with a handful of chosen peers and mentors who continued to help her see her work from different perspectives, all the while steadfastly upholding her unflinching commitment to truth and authenticity. The writer adeptly transforms moments of quiet in life to fully developed narratives, always able to convey deep observation and passion for her craft of storytelling.

Samuel · Answer

Jacqueline Woodson is one of my favorite authors. Her way of writing is so wonderful and unique. Often in interviews Jacqueline talks about her childhood love for stories. She loved hearing them and telling them. She comes from a family of oral storytellers, so she grew up with the rhythms of spoken words and emotions that were evoked by them. This has greatly affected her way of writing with lots of lyrical language. The libraries were also a very important part of Jacqueline’s childhood. She got lost in so many different worlds and learned about the narrative structure of stories. Teachers that saw potential in Jacqueline encouraged her to keep writing and to develop her voice. Persistence was also an important factor for Jacqueline. She even wrote every day even when it was hard for her. She managed to express her personal and cultural experiences in stories that contain universal themes. She must be a very observant person and she must have a lot of insight into the human condition because of her ability to reflect on her own experiences and on the world around her.

Miranda Kemp · Answer

Pay attention to your dreams and the subconscious mind. Many writers use their dreams to get ideas for strange images, scenarios or feelings that they can incorporate into their writing. By remembering your dreams and writing them down, you can discover unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated things. The way that dreams go in a non-linear fashion and use symbolism can create a unique and powerful narrative and even affect the overall structure of a piece of writing.

Honoring your intuition and surprise. That haunting image from a dream could become the central metaphor for your novel. Writing relies on the processing that is happening 24/7, whether you are at your desk or not. Paying attention to your dreams and your subconscious is part of learning to be a good collaborator with your own mind.

Victoria L Baldish · Answer

When I listen to interviews with her, she speaks a lot about silence and space to think. This isn’t a writing technique; it’s a prerequisite for writing creativity. Learning to write means creating space for your inner self to be heard over the cacophony of the busy household of your childhood or noisy city you now call home.

In silence, you can fully explore your first drafts, detecting mistakes, hearing bad rhythms, feeling where your writing stumbles. All of this allows for a deeper revision than just going through a draft for grammatical errors to arrive at a finished work. So, even though we like to talk about the influences and the workshops, the main discipline for a writer is to cultivate a mundane habit: that of saving time and mental space.

Preethi Stephanos · Answer

The feedback loop of public readings and book tours. By reading from your work in front of live audiences you can learn so much about where people will lean in, when they will chuckle, when they will go silent. You can even feel the rhythm of your sentences. A phrase that you worried sounded a bit awkward on the page can sound clumsy out loud and you will know it right away. But that same phrase that you feared sounded awkward on the page may sound surprisingly powerful in silence.

This nonverbal feedback is particularly immediate and valuable. It can inform a writer about the pacing of a work, where to place emotional beats, and most importantly the sound of the writer’s own voice. In connecting the solitary act of writing to the social act of storytelling, it reminds the writer of the oral roots of literature. For a writer concerned with voice and memory, this connection is likely to be particularly vital and informative.

Sai Karthik · Answer

This student writes in huge numbers across all ages. From what I can gather, her main teacher is her consistent application of writing. Yes, you can read up on all the theory ever written on storytelling but until you have written a million words and thrown most of them away you have learned very little. But from each finished story, even the unpublished ones, she learns new things and gets more confident in solving problems as she goes along. Just like any craft (woodworking, painting etc) her writing develops through her consistent application of it.

So much writing is happening at so many different ages that the biggest teacher is simply writing a lot. You can read as much as you want about writing, but until you write a million words (most of which will be terrible and have to be thrown away), you aren’t really learning. Each finished work — whether published or not — solves new problems. Writing a lot helps you learn how to write, and finished works give you confidence.

The abundance of writing at all these ages also allows for a lot of play. There’s no reason that every writing project has to be a novel. There are picture books and short stories and poems. Each of these forms of writing teaches different skills. For example, a picture book is incredibly compact and so requires the writer to be economical in every respect, also to be a symbiotic collaborator with the illustrator. A short story is a very small space in which to develop a complete arc with a complete resolution. Writing in many different forms helps to keep the muscles of the creative writer flexible so that the writer won’t get stuck in a rut with just one way of writing.

What Helped Jacqueline Woodson Learn To Write

8 Answers

Kaugnay na Mga Aklat

The Child She Wrote out of Her Life

I Gave Away an Ivy League Admission Letter

The “Useless Parent” Who Built a Kindergarten

My Daughter's Work Won an Award, but the Credit Went to a Classmate

The Teacher’s Daughter

Pen & Passion

Kaugnay na Mga Tanong

What inspired sandra cisneros author to write The House on Mango Street?

Where can I learn more about letting go rehash?

What lessons can be learned from the Interlopers book?

How did Harper Lee influence modern literature?

What inspired Japanese author Murakami to start writing?

Who is the author of 'Born in Blackness' and why did they write it?

What exercises help writers clarify characters'life motivations?

What episode does Alya learn Marinette is Ladybug?

What are the best social-emotional learning books for teenagers?

What lessons can we learn from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet?