Hello Teachers and Welcome to our Final Teachers Write Monday Morning Warm-Up! I've had such a great time reading your work and being inspired by your enthusiasm and energy! I hope you've had fun, too.

For our last exercise, I thought I'd focus on strong beginnings and having the confidence to dive in to your story, trusting yourself and the reader to fall into an engaging, active scene. Now that you've been working on pieces all summer, you know you characters, you know your story, now it's time to try working on a beginning that pulls the reader in, and gives you a strong foundation from which to write from every day.

Four authors who I think are masterful first page writesr are Laurie Halse Anderson, K.L. Going, and Jack Gantos. If you want to study strong first pages, go read and reread their openings. That's how you do it.

Last year, I was a judge for several writing contests and read many beginnings and I can tell you after a while, you begin to see patterns and common mistakes. I outlined these in detail in this entry:

http://jbknowles.livejournal.com/484416.html

Then, a wonderful reader put all that information into a rubric, for writers to use when looking at and evaluating their work:

http://www.shannonrigney.com/2015/01/28/fun-with-rubrics/

Pretty cool, huh?

So today's Monday Morning Warm-Up is to let yourself go and start on a CLEAN piece of paper. Think of it as a White Page Day Do-Over, and try a new beginning, after reading some good examples and all my notes from the link above. Don't think about writing a strong beginning, which I fear is what hung up so many of these writers. Instead, envision where your story starts, what your character is doing, thinking, feeling. Let all of that emotion and longing and setting fill you up. Breathe it in and really place yourself in the moment. Then, let yourself drop into the scene and say what's going on. You'll see that's exactly what Anderson, Gantos and Going do. They trust their reader to drop in with them and take off. Now it's your turn!