A few months ago, a collaborative book project was proposed by a friend. He knew that I had been working steadily on a novel and making good progress at the time, so the project was given every expectation of being deferred until the novel was finished. Despite the word count climbing, I kept hitting snags with the novel's structure. Major ones. Despite characters with depth and an interesting concept, I could not answer very basic questions like "What is the protagonist doing?" and "What is this story really about?"
Stories without answers to those kinds of questions are dead in the water. I stopped, and decided to step away for a bit. Still needing to write, the collaboration moved to the forefront.
As initially described by my friend, a university Professor, this was to be a project for "inquiry-based learning". Not knowing what that phrase meant, I had to spend a few hours doing research. As soon as I learned about concept maps, I put one together. When I felt that I had a starting point, I contacted my collaborator for input. He was excited that I had picked this up and started running with it. Then it was time to start writing the story.
The idea driving the project is to present a story or a series of stories for students to read, adding questions at the end to guide students' discussions about the topic(s) and also guide educators who might not have in-depth knowledge of the subject matter presented. Originally intended for college students, we discussed the likelihood of use for secondary education as well, and this drove a guideline for complexity, appropriate vocabulary and so forth. Within the next couple of weeks, I did some additional research and put together a 7400-word story about a murder, and sent it to my friend, worrying that it was too short.
"It's too long," he said. "Students don't generally like assigned reading." I struggled to accept that a ten-page short story could be considered "too long". "Too many students won't know what some of these words mean and they won't look up the definitions." I staggered over that one as well. These students were preparing to be analysts and investigators?
To his credit, he identified the portion of the submission which aligned with his initial idea and instincts. He hadn't really known what he wanted until I unintentionally showed him what he didn't want, and from there he was able to segregate what worked from all of the extra stuff. I pulled out about 2000 words from the last three pages, debrided and sutured it, and re-submitted the product in short order.
He was thrilled. He sent back a bank of questions to append to the first chapter, and we discussed possible directions for chapter two.
About a month later, three chapters are written, the project has taken off nicely, and both of us are happy and excited to see progress.He's been responsive to emails asking for opinions and other feedback, and I've been left alone to do my end of the creative work. We hope to have the book completed and to start proposals with publishers during the spring.
No comments:
Post a Comment