The first piece of mine to be officially published was a letter to the editor of the Bemidji, Minnesota newspaper. Seeing my name in print cemented my dream of becoming a writer. I immediately started perfecting my autograph, adding extra loops and whorls to make it as fancy as possible because in my 5^th-grade mind, famous authors should distinguish themselves that way. I lay in bed at night listening to the theme song of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” imagining the amusing answers I would give Johnny when he someday interviewed me as a bestselling author.

I’ve traveled a long and winding road as a writer since then. Among the things I’ve learned is the fact that TV appearances are going to be sparse. And I should have worked to simplify my autograph instead of gussying it up—all those loops wear out my hand out when I’m signing my books!

Newspapers have faced as many changes as I have in that time. But the format still works as a fantastic way to engage young writers. For the last three years, I’ve been mentoring a girls’ writing group. This season, they choose the creation of a newspaper as their big project, and it’s proven to be a goldmine for writing lessons of all sorts. We’ve covered point of view, objectivity versus subjectivity, identifying your target audience, interview techniques, research, outlining, starting with a strong lead, descriptive details, and many other concepts that not only make for good journalism, but make for better writing in many forms.

Each girl is the editor of specific sections (sports, news, food, entertainment, travel) and also works as a reporter on a variety of articles. They’re designing ads and creating comic strips. We’ll begin photo research and layout soon.

And this past week, with them, I got a chance to revisit my own “breakthrough form”: a letter to the newspaper. We brainstormed an advice column format that was suitable for their newspaper’s target audience. Then each girl wrote a letter asking for advice (on behalf of an imaginary reader), I had them switch letters, and they each wrote an answer to one of their friends’ letters. You might not take it this far with your young writers, but for my group I also added another layer of complexity, and I had the girls write their letters as epistolary (letter) poems.  If you haven’t written letter poems in your classroom, here’s a link to an IRA/NCTE website with further details about how to tackle this fun poetry activity.

The lesson for me? When the road is winding enough, you eventually end up back where you started.

I was thrilled when Teenage Nephew 1 grew old enough to mow my yard.  We negotiated a price and then headed outside. I knew that at his house, his father was King of the Riding Mower, so mowing was a completely new skill to Teenage Nephew. So I carefully reviewed the basics with him: mower operation, safety issues, how he shouldn’t plow over my rose bushes.

It never occurred to me that I needed to teach him the concept of a straight line.

As I peeked out windows, monitoring progress and watching for any trouble, I began to notice a strange pattern emerging. Zigzags and curves of mowed grass dissected clumps of uncut lawn. Some sections remained untouched while he re-mowed others five or six times. Even in the thoroughly mowed sections, periodic “lawn mohawks” popped up across the landscape. It was like a disorganized alien had landed to create Picasso-esque crop circles in my yard.

It eventually occurred to me that my natural inclination towards orderliness and efficiency had in this case skipped a generation, and I stopped the yard work long enough to do a little lesson on mowing in a grid pattern.

But the image of those lawn mohawks are a funny and useful reminder to me when I set out to teach young people writing, too: not all student brains are hardwired the same. When I remember to periodically mix up my approach—finding activities that appeal to students who learn differently than I do—I have more success engaging them in the act of writing.

Teenage Nephew 1, for example, is the kind of kid who learns best when he can move or physically interact with something. He would respond best to writing activities like those I describe in my posts “Collecting Souvenirs” and “Forgetting How to Drive.” He’s also an incredibly social person who would perk up as soon as a teacher introduced activities such as the story sharing I describe in “’Driven’ to Write Better” and the peer review I outline in “You Be Thelma, I’ll Be Louise.”

Different learning styles might throw you some curves as a writing teacher, but remember: there are ways to write and teach around them.

One of my favorite student stories featured a character whose beloved pet was a horribly behaved dinosaur—definitely on the T. rex rather than the Barney end of the dinosaur socialization spectrum. As the conclusion of the story, the character says: “But it doesn’t matter if my dinosaur is naughty all nine days a week. I love him anyway. Because he is my dinosaur.”

I’m moved by what that conclusion says about the unconditional love that young writer was obviously receiving from somebody important to him. But it’s also a great reminder that there are some basic story lines that rarely fail to provide excellent starting points for struggling young writers. Ask a young author, “What pet do you really wish you could have, and can you think of how to turn that into a story?”—and most kids are on a roll.

In fact, the hankering for pets (even those less exotic than a dinosaur) has proved golden for established writers too. From my picture book shelf alone I can pull out Peter Brown’s Children Make Terrible Pets, Karen Kaufman’s  I Wanna Iquana, Cathleen Daly’s Prudence Wants a Pet (at one point poor Prudence has to settle for a branch), and David LaRochelle’s The Best Pet of All.

My collection, and the many other titles that would fit into it, can lead to another fruitful conversation with young writers, this time about writer’s voice. The books are all funny, so as example texts, they work well for students beyond the picture book stage. They’re all quick reads, so it’s easy to compare/contrast them in a classroom setting, focusing on the fact that despite similar story concepts, each writer brings their own personality to the tales and makes them different reading experiences (my core definition of writer’s voice).

The Best Pet of All, incidentally, is also my go-to example of how to structure a basic but clever plot—it features a character with an initial problem that morphs and twists into new problems as the story moves forward, but then is finally resolved in a satisfying yet surprising way. All in just a few hundred words!

In other words, a warning: be careful, or books about pets may become your teacher’s pets.