Don’t you just love the word “why”? It can be one of the most difficult questions to answer but the answers to it can also drive a story. Sure, we want to see who the murderer is, but also why they did it. If you see a person crying at a table in a restaurant,…
Writing Corner: Framing Devices
Normally when we read a story, the narrator is simply telling us the story, whether it is a narrator outside the story (3rd person) or a character in the story (1st person). This is a one-level story. However, sometimes, just like a frame around a picture, one story can be wrapped around another. This is…
Windows on the World
We got one of those Windows on the World packages today, or as the commercials say: “Just . . . WOW!” I was in class when the installers came to hang the panels, and I came out of my room to find my mother sweeping up the packing materials and pushing it all down the…
Spotlight on Writers: South Pasadena Middle School Writing Club
This is the first of a series called Spotlight on Writers. The idea is to talk to writers and writing groups around the world so that we can learn from, and be inspired by, each other. The mission of the Green-Walled Treehouse is to create a global community of young writers, and this is one…
Muse on Monday – March 14, 2022
Writing fiction deals a lot with making connections: connections between the characters, connections between the characters and the setting or with themselves, not to mention connections between the writer and the reader. This is a picture I took near my house and it made me think about all the connections, often invisible, in life and…
Writing Corner: Custom Adjectives
One cool thing about English is that we make words out of everything (an example of this is the verb to word, which means to make a word out of anything). One way we do this is to make adjectives out of people’s names. We usually use last names since they are more distinctive. Here…
Muse on Monday – March 7, 2022
We love stories with heroes. Heroes don’t have to be perfect but they have something in them that we want to see in ourselves, whether it is intelligence, bravery, tenacity, or so forth. That’s why we cheer for them. The best heroes are often unlikely heroes because we can relate to them. Think of Bilbo…
Writing Corner: The Dinkus
This is post about something you have probably seen many times in books but don’t know the name of (at least I didn’t know it until recently.) A dinkus is a break in the writing and is usually made with three stars, like this: * * * How to Use a Dinkus A dinkus is…
Ten Years from Now…
Ten years from now… The bell rang. Fourth period, right before lunch. It was the class that everyone, including the teacher, wished would fly by so they could finally get a break. “Today we’re going to read our essays on where you see yourself in ten years,” Mr. Hurley said. It was his first year…
Muse on Monday – February 28, 2022
Happy Monday on this last day of February. I hope you had a good weekend. One fun part of writing from a prompt is thinking of how you can take it in an unexpected direction. For example, the prompt on January 10, 2022 was “The world ended on a Friday, which was a surprise.” The…
The Green-Walled Treehouse 