Here at A Grade Ahead, we’re proud to provide your child with educational enrichment that can push their skills to new heights. An amazing way for students to excel and stretch their abilities is to engage in creative writing projects! However, embarking on the creative writing adventure can feel like facing a daunting mountain. Never fear, intrepid explorer! Welcome back to the Creative Writing Corner where we explore the steps to and benefits of engaging in free writing projects. Last time we discussed the process of getting started, but now the climb continues! Let’s set off back along our path!
Continuing Your Creative Writing Journey!
Roughing It!
We mentioned this at the end of our last post, but the most important part of writing a rough draft is the word itself: rough! As you write out your project for the first time, you shouldn’t worry at all about punctuation, spelling, or grammar. What’s important during this step is getting your wonderful ideas from your brain to the page. Everything else can wait! Writing a rough draft is a key step in the creative writing process, but it shouldn’t be one to stress about! Everything can be changed and altered as you see fit later on. For now, focus on the ideas themselves. They are priority number one!
Revise, Revise, and Revise Again!
You finally have all those incredible thoughts written down in your rough draft? Awesome! Now comes perhaps the lengthiest process in Creative Writing. Buckle up, it’s time to revise! Revision can take a long time, so try not to get discouraged! This is when you’re going to go through your draft again and again, correcting mechanical mistakes as well as tweaking other aspects. Revisions can be as large as moving or deleting entire chunks of writing. They can be as small as picking better word choices. All of this is revision!
How many times should you revise your story? That depends and is different for everyone. In the end, it’s all about balance. Having friends or parents take a look at your writing can sometimes help when you’re caught in a revision whirlpool. You want to revise your work so it’s mechanically correct and you’re happy with the choices made, but sometimes it’s hard to see this for yourself. Getting help from the people around you can make a huge difference in this process! They can even see things you may have missed. Of course, our English programs at A Grade Ahead can also help you discover more about how to revise your work and get help from peers in the process!
Till Next Time
Interested in how A Grade Ahead can help your child’s writing skills? Take a free assessment today to get started! Interested in other options? See if an A Grade Ahead Academy near you is offering Time Traveler Tales: an enrichment camp combining history and writing!
That’s all the time we have now in the Creative Writing Corner. Join us next time when we take a look at some of the final steps in the creative writing process! In the meantime, call or visit your nearest A Grade Ahead to hear all about our amazing programs. See how we can improve your child’s skills and maximize their school performance!
What do you think? How do you tackle the creative writing process? What is your favorite or least favorite part? We would love to hear from you in the comments!
Author: Jackie Aukerman, Curriculum Creator at A Grade Ahead
