Spotlight on Student Innovators
PHS writers lead one teacher (me) forward.
If you were to put into a single building all of the readers following three Prospect writers, you would need a colosseum. Over the past three years, junior Hannah Thornton, senior Natalie Carioti, and freshman Grace Kelley have quietly collected nearly 20,000 online readers.
Thank goodness for proud mothers. I might never have known about Hannah Thornton’s writing if I hadn’t run into her mom at a neighborhood party. “Oh, you’re an English teacher!” she said. “My daughter loves to write. She has thousands of online readers.”
I asked Mrs. Thornton if Hannah would agree to talk to me, and soon after, I met this talented young writer in the English office at PHS.
Hoping to avoid appearing completely clueless, I did my homework before she arrived. I explored a few of the online sites attracting young writers and looked especially at Wattpad, a social book-writing site. There I found every imaginable genre and writers of all ages, but teenage fan fiction, romance, and fantasy dominated the user libraries. Some of the writers were gifted storytellers. Others weren’t. I discovered that the award-winning writer, Margaret Atwood, is active on Wattpad and uses the site to sponsor contests for young writers. I also learned that Wattpad is the site where the infamous E.L. James first developed her fan base. She turns out to be one of many writers who have sold their books by first gathering thousands of online fans.
Hannah had warned me via email about some of the off-color content I would find on these sites.
She was right, of course. Some of the content was crude, racy, or violent. But no matter what the plot twist or tone, I saw thousands of young writers writing and editing thousands of pages. Sometimes they offered criticisms and suggestions on one another’s work, but they mainly encouraged and supported one another’s efforts. Many of these writers were improving before my eyes.
“People leave such cute comments,” Hannah told me when I asked her about her motivation. Then she sent me a screen shot of one of her comment pages so I could see for myself.
One reader wrote, “I practically sit by my subscriptions waiting for you to update and the fact that we got TWO FREAKING AMAZING UPDATES makes me love you.” Another said, “I was squealing throughout the entire chapter since I saw the notification that you had updated.” Others commented on her character development or wrote about scenes that they especially loved. It was easy to see why Hannah loved posting her work.
When Grace and Natalie enrolled in my writing classes this year, I discovered that Hannah was not the only PHS online writer. Like Hannah, they started using fan fiction sites as readers, found the writing they most liked, then began posting their own work. Gracie posts poetry. Natalie began posting fan fiction and now writes stories about the daily dramas of high school students. She is also working on a murder mystery.
Because of Hannah, Grace, and Natalie, I’ve begun taking online writing sites more seriously as classroom tools. My writing students create Medium and Wattpad accounts and earn credit when they make a poem or story public. My freshmen compose their fiction on Medium knowing that I will share their work with their families at the end of the semester. Recently, one of my students wrote an essay on Word Press describing his experiences with diabetes. He had over forty readers within an hour of making his post public. Another student collected hundreds of readers on Wattpad as she worked on a horror story.
My role as a classroom writing teacher is changing. Students are no longer writing for my eyes alone. They are beginning to treat me like a senior editor, someone who they can use as they prepare their writing for an authentic audience. Instead of being a task-master, I’ve become a tool for motivated writers because a few precocious teenage writers were willing to show me the way.
