A Crafty Writing Session

I’m really excited about the crafty books we are going to sell this year at Carnival.

This spring we embarked on a bookmaking journey, and I thought it would appropriate for my Crafty Girls to write, make, and sell their own books at the “Made By Me” booth. The idea is for each girl to write about a craft, make it, photograph it, and put together a book. And who in her right mind would help with the editing, designing, printing, and binding of this crafty book?

Me.

I can’t help it. The challenge of getting these girls to focus on such a crazy project just gets my juices flowing, I suppose. Or I like to suffer. Whatever the reason, I’m in this thing knee deep.

The smarted thing I did this spring was to split the group in two. Last Friday was the first group, which included My Girl, Irish Stepper, Dancing Girl, Den Mother, No Socks, and Bright Eyes. We talked about some of the ideas the girls had about their crafts and how to write instructional text.

I had an assortment of craft books and magazines piled in the middle of my living room floor.  The girls sift through the books and magazines, and then I handed out notepads and pencils so they could jot down their ideas. I made the mistake of including own book in the mix. Okay, it was more like books, plural, as in multiple copies of the one thick craft book I’ve written. Narcissistic? You bet. And as it turned out, 3 of the girls chose crafts from my book. And then started to plagiarize me. Which I guess is flattering, but my head began to hurt when I realized that I was correcting my own bad writing instead of a third grader’s.

Bright Eyes came prepared on Friday, with samples of her craft. We talked about writing down an introduction, and she took 30 minutes to come up with the following run-on sentence:

“Plain old doors can always use a little more pizzazz and this is the perfect craft to give your door more pizzazz because it’s got pizzazz.”

I don’t have the heart to change one word of it. If you could only see how hard she worked to find the right words--or, in this instance, just one word. Writing advertisement copy ain’t easy, especially when you’re only 9. 

I can’t wait to see what the second group comes up with this Friday. Stay tuned.