Mt. Nebo Writing Class: Writing (History Week)

1. Read Part I of "Julie of the Wolves", by Jean Craighead George.

2. Write these paragraphs from the book in your CP books in your best handwriting. Notice the proper nouns, and make sure you capitalize where needed.

Miyax pushed back the hood of her sealskin parka and looked at the Arctic sun. It was a yellow disc in a lime-green sky, the colors of six o’clock in the evening and the time when the wolves awoke. Quietly she put down her cooking pot and crept to the top of a dome-shaped frost heave, one of the many earth buckles that rise and fall in the crackling cold of the Arctic winter. Lying on her stomach, she looked across a vast lawn of grass and moss and focused her attention on the wolves she had come upon two sleeps ago. They were wagging their tails as they awoke and saw each other.

Her hands trembled and her heartbeat quickened, for she was frightened, not so much of the wolves, who were shy and many harpoon-shots away, but because of her desperate predicament. Miyax was lost. She had been lost without food for many sleeps on the North Slope of Alaska. The barren slope stretches for three hundred miles from the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean, and for more than eight hundred miles from the Chukchi to the Beaufort Sea. No roads cross it; ponds and lakes freckle its immensity. Winds scream across it, and the view in every direction is exactly the same. Somewhere in this cosmos was Miyax; and the very life in her body, its spark and warmth, depended upon these wolves for survival. And she was not so sure they would help.

3. Write 2 more pages in your handwriting books. I hope your handwriting is improving! Work hard on forming beautiful letters.

4. Start writing your narrative. You should have been thinking about what kind of story you want to write. Now you get to put it on paper. You will be writing a 1,500 - 3,000 word narrative. That's about 3-5 pages. Long enough for a good story, not too short, and not a novel!

Not everyone has the same style of writing. Some authors say to write out an outline, some say to just let the story flow and develop as you write. You can decide what is best for you, but either way, you need these key elements in your story. Here is an outline you can use if you want. Narrative Outline Just print it out and fill it in, or just kind of follow it if you want to type. Don't actually edit the document. If you choose not to use the outline, you should have a rough draft of your story.

Please bring your outline or rough draft to class.

Key Elements: Go ahead and click on the links if you want, they will help explain any questions you may have about the elements. (even though they are explaining how to write a novel, they are still helpful)

Character – The characters are essential. It’s extremely difficult to tell a story without them, as character development is one of the best parts in narrative writing. Think of your characters as the driving force of the narrative.

Conflict – This part of narrative writing is where the tension comes from. Conflict of any form, whether it’s between characters, between elements in your setting, or even in your plot, is essential for not only a good book, but for narrative writing.

Plot – This is the main point of your story. Where is it all going and what’s happening while we get there? This can often include any conflict, but is usually a bigger “main” portion of your story, and therefore the narrative.

Setting – The setting of a story is really what determines its genre as well as its learning curve. The learning curve refers to how much readers need to learn about the world, aka, how different it is from our own. The setting adds to this extensively because if your book is in a new world, more worldbuilding is necessary, which means it will bleed heavily into your narrative.

Theme – These are embedded into your story even if you’re not trying to. Narrative writing tells a story and with any stories, lessons are learned and these become the themes of your story. Whether you mean to or not, your own thoughts about the world and important values bleed into your work within the narrative writing.

Narrative Writing Arc – This is the story structure the narrative takes. This includes things like the inciting incident, key milestones like the first slap and second slap, the climax, the resolution, and even nuances like the character arc.

5. Spelling! Hip Hip Hooray! These words are taken directly from the book. Study these words for our next spelling bee.

Parka - a large windproof jacket with a hood, designed to be worn in cold weather.

Arctic - relating to the regions around the North Pole. very cold.

Harpoon - a long spear-like instrument used in fishing, whaling, sealing, and other marine hunting to catch large fish or marine mammals such as whales.

Desperate -feeling, showing, or involving a hopeless sense that a situation is so bad as to be impossible to deal with.

Predicament - a difficult, unpleasant, or embarrassing situation.

Eight - a cardinal number

Somewhere -in or to some place.

Immensity -the extremely large size, scale, or extent of something.

Survival -the state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances.

Attention -notice taken of someone or something; the regarding of someone or something as interesting or important.

Recognized - identify (someone or something) from having encountered them before; know again.

Jaeger - any of the smaller kinds of Arctic-breeding skuas. (applied to any predatory seabird)

Whimpered - (of a person or animal) make a series of low, feeble sounds expressive of fear, pain, or discontent.

Deference - humble submission and respect.

Difference - a point or way in which people or things are not the same.