Publishing Project

A reflection on the writing-publishing process of your short story is due by Monday, January 14th, on your blog. Your reflection must include these parts -
Title:
Author:
Genre:
Pages:
Mentor Texts:
Audience:
Writing Process:
Publishing Process:

Example -


Title: Putting it All Back Together: A Messy First Year Mosaic
Author: Cady Staff
Genre: Memoir/ Personal Narrative
Pages: 41

Mentor Texts:
Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman

During the Winter Break of my first year teaching, my supervisor in my Masters/Credential program at UCSD recommended that I read this book and write a book about my first year teaching. She told me that in her career, she'd never had one of her students have such a challenging internship, or a classroom that produced so many interesting stories. When I began writing my own story, I used the multi-genre approach of Up the Down Staircase which combines journal entries and memos to tell the story of this first year teacher. It also uses self-deprecating humor, which I also use in my writing.

Freedom Writers by the Freedom Writers and Erin Gruwell

When I saw the movie version of this collection of diary entries, I was inspired to finish my own project. I saw a lot of parallels with the movie and my personal experiences that first year, but I also felt that there were enough differences to make my experience unique and worth writing about. I felt the story of my students should be told, because those remedial English classes were being forgotten and pushed under the rug (given to brand new teachers) at schools around the country. I liked the rawness of the diary entries and that it inspired me to put in some of the poetry and writing I kept from my students that first year. Also, I put in some of the poetry I wrote that year, because the diary I keep often comes out in the form of poetry. Mainly in the poetry sections, you can see the influence of the Freedom Writers as a mentor text.

Audience: As I was working on my writing project, the audience I had in mind was the group of future interns going through the year I was writing about, as well as my supervisors and good friends from that program. I have already given copies of my writing to close friends from that year and my UCSD supervisors. Marcia, the UCSD supervisor, who encouraged me to write this book in the first place, said she would have her group of new interns read it each year. In that case, I don't know my audience personally, but we share an experience.

The Writing Process: I did a lot of the editing process for this piece of writing on the computer. I printed out three drafts along the way, so that I could see how the writing project was looking all together and how each chapter, poem and excerpt was transitioning onto the next. I used Word to edit the text, but sometimes, I just needed to print out the Word document and edit each section with a Crayola Marker (my editing tool of choice). This was the one of the longest writing projects I have worked on, spanning three years. It was one of the many projects I have been working on and I found that taking time off from it and then revisiting the text taught me a lot about revising and looking at a piece of writing with fresh eyes.

The Publishing Process: I used Pages, a program on my Mac at home, to put my writing into book-form. Finding that program that came with a template for classroom scrapbooking provided a lot of graphics and user-friendly formats that made it fun and easy to make the book look the way I wanted it to look. Most compilations of stories have uniform formats that link all the stories, together. Since I used different genres within one piece of writing, I used a variety of formatting techniques and fonts to transition from section to section, but I used the template throughout to make sure the book was a cohesive unit, in the end.