Sizzling Starts

Jen McVeity, the passionate and engaging creator of the Seven Steps to Writing Success

The AATE/ALEA Cutting Edge conference has been a whirlwind adventure these last few days, with bravura performances from international keynote speakers like Dr. Steven L. Lang, Linda Hoyt, and Professor Elizabeth Birr Moje, and brilliant snapshots of the skills and understandings being taught across Australia by our own teachers and educational consultants.

One of the great 'snapshots' I got to experience today was Jen McVeity, the highly-esteemed creator and CEO of the Seven Steps to Writing Success - a model for chunking creative writing into discrete pieces to assist students with digesting skills for future use. The idea here is that:

Repetition makes writing skills into muscle memory.

As the session was a brisk 35 minutes long, McVeity used the time well to concentrate on just one of the 7 skills: Sizzling Starts. 

From the website, a sizzling start is described as "Start where the action is. Not at the beginning of the day where nothing is happening. Begin when the volcano starts oozing lava or as you walk in the door to the big disco competition". McVeity impressed this upon us in around three minutes before letting us try out some sizzling starts on our own. We were given five prompts with a minute each to write our attention-grabbing story beginnings. 

I decided (against my own better judgement) to undertake this activity by hand. 

I would describe my handwriting as resembling something a sloth would write if given a pen for the first time. Keep in mind that this sloth probably doesn't even know what words are. That's how my handwriting looks... I have a lot of trouble reading it even a few minutes after committing it to the page. 

But I digress. Here are the five prompts:

And here are my responses:

1. I burped and fire enveloped the dinner, my mum screaming as tendrils of flame rippled across her best tablecloth as if on a slick of oil.
2. Timmy cried as the shoe spun to a stop in front of him. His best friend Roger had just disappeared forever into the hollow of the tree. With a last gasp of hope, Timmy reached into the black yawning hole in the trunk.
3. My phone exploded once again. It was one of those days - the sort where the car won't start, your computer crashes, and the toilet decides to fill up to the brim rather than flush. I hate technology.
4. I never imagined I would be here, standing on this cliff. I'm afraid of heights but, you know what? A million dollars is a million dollars. Time to bungee-jump.
5. Everyone hated Matt the Brat, especially when they found bits of him in their chocolate bars. Ms. Treving never imagined the excursion would turn out like this. 

As you can see, there isn't much you can get done in 1 minute per response, however, the rapid-fire nature of the activity forced me to keep practising the same thing with little room for drifting off-topic. McVeity compared it to standing in front of the tennis ball launcher while practising your backhand - the ball is aimed right at you so that you only have to practise the hitting of the ball rather than moving around to meet it. The analogy she's making here is that this is the aforementioned scaffolding provided by the prompts and chunking.

Resource from the workshop

I think my last one about Matt the Brat is my best attempt at a sizzling start in the rapid-fire scenario. There's something about humourous cannibalism that works as a great attention-grabber in creative writing. Obviously, I can't start every story with a character ending up in food eaten by other kids but, you know, I think the spirit of a sizzling start is there!