This installment in our Author Series comes from Aaron Shepard, the award-winning author of One-Eye! Two-Eyes! Three-Eyes!, The Sea King’s Daughter, The Baker’s Dozen, The Legend of Lightning Larry, and many more children’s books from publishers large and small. His stories have also appeared often in Cricket magazine. Check out his website at http://www.aaronshep.com/ to get loads of free treats and resources for teachers, librarians, storytellers, children’s authors, parents, kids, and more. You’ll also find info on Aaron, his books, and his author visits.

Good writers often break rules—but they know they’re doing it! Here are some good rules to know. (more…)

Target Grade Level: All levels
Keys Concepts: Writing Process, prewriting, drafting, revising, editing

When I first began teaching in the 1990s, “Writing Process” or “The Writing Process” was familiar jargon in the language arts classroom. However, it wasn’t until I went through a California Writing Project Summer Invitational that I began to fully understand, internalize and embrace a process approach to teaching writing.

A few years later, when I started working as a teacher consultant in school districts throughout Southern California, the mere mention of “Writing Process” was sure to spark a heated debate. Teachers loved it or hated it. Some saw process writing as the only way to teach; others saw it as a waste of time and a “feel good” approach that didn’t accomplish anything. I quickly assessed that those who had a strong aversion to process writing simply didn’t understand it, and I enjoyed the challenge of showing them what process writing actually is. (more…)

When did you decide to become a writer, and what steps did you take from there?

When I got out of graduate school and was for the first time writing on my own with nobody telling me to, not part of an assignment, I was getting no grade. So I was a writer. What I was not was a published writer, and yes, it was discouraging. Some folks tend to think that in situations like that you need a thick skin and you don’t really feel the pain of it. But that’s not really the case. At least, it wasn’t for me. It was very painful. Every time I got a rejection slip, I wanted to put my head in the oven. But you keep plodding along, and you discover that in a couple of days, the sun continues to rise every morning. And you put your manuscript in a new mailing, and you put on the postage, and you send it out to one more place. If you try every place with your first book and that doesn’t work, you write a second book. That’s how it went for the better part of fifteen or twenty years. (more…)