On August 1, I will begin what I plan to make an annual tradition. I’ll begin a deep dive into Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting. Tuck Everlasting is a Celebration of Time–Time as it relates to the Seasons and the Seasons of Life–and TIme as it relates to the clock. Most people are deeply aware of…
Category: Descriptive Writing
Tuck Everlasting Chapter 6 – Winnie Is Whisked Away but Calmed by the Music Box – Power of Music
At the end of Chapter 5, Winnie and Jesse were tangling. She wanted to drink from the pool in the Wood, and Jesse did not want her to do that. Suddenly. she was whisled away:: “Afterward, when she thought about it, it seemed to Winnie that the next tew minutes were only a blur. First…
Tuck Everlasting – Chapter 5 – Winnie’s First Venture into the Wood – Read to Learn about Mankind’s Connection to Trees, Nature Writing, Description, and Creating Characters – Jesse Tuck
Chapter 5 takes place the morning after Winnie, her grandmother, and the man in the yellow suit heard the twinkling sound coming from the Wood. “Winnie woke early next morning. The sun was only just opening its own eye on the eastern horizon and the cottage was full of silence.” Babbitt, Tuck, pg. 22 Winnie…
Tuck Everlasting Chapter 4 – A Brush with Darkness – Read to Learn to Write with Literary Themes – More Character Development & The Use of Ambiguity in Writing – Celebrating the Moon
Chapter 4 of Tuck Everlasting deals with the literary theme of Darkness Versus Light. Not surprisingly, this chapter takes place during the Evening — the Dark Time of Day, but right away, we realize that Winnie is catching fireflies–an actvity that introduces light into the darkness. She is not a dark character. Like a firefly…
Tuck Everlasting Chapter 3 – A Lesson in “Showing” and Not “Telling”
. In Chapter 3 of Tuck Ever lasting, Natalie Babbitt teaches potential writers a lesson about “Showing” and not “Telling,” as we meet Winifred Foster. Babbitt doesn’t “Tell” us much about WInifred in this chapter. Rather, we are able to glean an unerstanding of who she is [or“See” her] by overhearing her conversation with a…
Tuck Everlasting Chapter 2 – A Lesson in Creating Characters, Conflict, and Foreshadowing in Writing
Chapter 2 of Tuck Everlasting provides us with a beginning Character Study of Mae Tuck, as she is about to enter a new chapter of her life — a New Dawn. And so, at dawn, that day in the first week of August, Mae Tuck woke up and lay for a while beaming at the…
Tuck Everlasting Chapter 1 – Capturing the Essence of the Spiritual in Nature: A Lesson in Descriptive Writing – Read to Learn to Write
Chapter 1 of Tuck Everlasting contrasts the eternal, perfect freedom of nature, as opposed to the rigid, confined existence outside of nature–specifically to that in the Foster’s Home in Treegap, the town at the edge of the Wood or Nature. “The road that led to Treegap had been trod out long before by a herd…
Free Memoir Writing Challenge Day 4 – Write in a Stream of Conscioiusness – Be Free
Yesterday, we talked about adding figurative language to writing. Today, I want you to suspend that process for a while. Today, we are going to begin writing a paragraph or two about November, and I want you to suspend your search for metaphors and similes for a while. In fact, I want you to suspend…
Harvest Your Past Memoir Challenge Day 3 – Using Similes and Metaphors to Empower Your Writing
A few days ago, I launched a free memoir writing challenge. I began by referring to Cynthia Rylant’s picture book In November. If you have not read that post yet, please do. In that post, I showed how Rylant had captured the essence of November in precious few words, and I asked the participants of…
Harvest Your Past Memoir Challenge – Write More to Write Better – Write to Heal Yourself
Before I tell you about today’s Memoir Writing Exercise, I want to share a true story with you. Today, I am a fairly prolific writer, but a few years ago, I couldn’t force myself to write. After my spirit had suffered several blows, I had become creatively mute. Depression had set in, and it seemed…