Overcoming the BLANK page

Chris created this because I (a homeschooling mom of 3) saw a great need for a truly helpful creative writing curriculum. It needed to be easy to use, not require too much of the parent, and let the kids have fun. So many workbooks and texts that I previewed simply didn’t give the foundation for what is needed to tell/write/film a good story. They jumped straight into write a story, and skipped the careful process of laying a foundation of everything that must go into a story. Since Chris had worked for years with storytelling professionals, and had already developed a very successful method of guiding them through the storytelling process, it was simply a matter of making it accessible for a middle schooler. Chris created it and we published it back in 2016, and since then, we’ve had hundreds of conversations with homeschoolers and educators about how this creative writing curriculum is actually meeting a real need in the homeschool community.

One of the biggest surprises was this: the problems that a professional writer is faced with when writing a story are the same problems that a junior high kid has in writing a story as well - the same thing.

The heart of that thing - the thing that all of us struggle with in creative writing - is the blank page. Imagine someone sits you down, say, a teacher in a classroom, and gives you a blank piece of paper, and says, “write a story. Write anything you want.” Now, on the one hand, this seems generous: you are free to write whatever you want. But in fact, for most people, this is terrifying! It’s utterly overwhelming, even for most full time writers. What are you going to write about? There are a million possibilities, and you’ve got to decide: what is the one thing I’m going to write about?

Creativity actually works the exact opposite way. Instead of being given utter freedom, creativity flourishes when you are given constrictions and boundaries.

Even though they seem very simple when you listen to a story, or watch a movie, or read a book, stories are actually very complex things. Doesn’t it feel like it just came out of the author that way? But when you understand that it can take a writer years or even decades to write a novel, or make a movie, you can start to see that there are so many moving parts going on below the surface.

This is one of the challenges of writing in general. When we have our kids sit down to write, it can be very intimidating to them - it can be overwhelming, daunting, and many kids just shut down and don’t function any more. All too often, this is how writing it taught. It’s a tragedy, because it doesn’t have to be this way. We have a solution.

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Overcoming the BLANK page

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