Advisor Night

Dear Students,

I have some great news.

Each semester, we each work with an advisor. An advisor is a teacher who helps us to improve our writing -- and I'm not talking about speling, grammer, or punctuasion. The advisor gives us constructive comments and suggestions on how to improve the craft of our writing.

Remember when I told you that revision and editing are two different things? Well, the advisor reads work that we have and helps us to revise it -- re-visit it, or re-vision it. A piece of writing may start off one way, and then through the revision process it may change completely. The point of view may change, the tense may change (past or present?), entire sentences, paragraphs, or chapters might be added or deleted. Students in my creative writing workshop have heard the two different beginning to my novel. They are very, very different. In my case, went from a very distant point of view to a very close third person. I went from starting out with description to beginning in the middle of action. Revision is a scary thing, and I know that's why so many of you out-right ignore any comments or conversations about how to make your writing better. It takes a lot of work, but I promise, in the end, it will be worth it.

And now, for my advisor announcement. Thus far, I have worked with Sarah Ellis, Sharron Darrow, and Leda Schubert. This semester -- my last semester -- I will have the pleasure of working with Margaret Bechard! This is exciting to me for a number of reasons, but I think that this is probably exciting to a number of you because Hanging On To Max is really popular in the classroom this year. In fact, many of you spoke about it at Book Bistro.

I can't wait to get home now and start my semester.

I miss you!