Teaching Writing Through Music with author Ben Winters

Doing classroom visits with young writers is probably my favorite part of being a writer, narrowly edging out the actual writing. Kids inspire me; they give me new ideas for characters and stories; and, most importantly, they crack me up.

Plus, when it comes to doing classroom visits and giving “writing prompts” to the kids, I’ve got a head start: my first middle-grade book, THE SECRET LIFE OF MS. FINKLEMAN, actually has a writing prompt as a central plot element. The ogreish Social Studies teacher, Mr. Melville (spoiler alert: he has a heart of gold) assigns his seventh graders to deliver a report that solves some mystery in their lives. Our enterprising heroine, Bethesda Fielding, tackles the assignment by digging up some dirt on a particular teacher (spoiler alert: her name is in the title), and all heck breaks loose.

The problem is, the teachers who invite me to their classes wouldn’t be too happy if I assigned their students to dig up dirt on them. Thankfully, I have an alternate prompt, one that touches on another big theme in Ms. Finkleman and its companion novel, The Mystery of the Missing Everything: Music. Long before I was a fiction writer, my early efforts at creative expression came in the form of song lyrics, written for various bands in which I played bass, beginning in middle school and extending through my college career. (One of my former bandmates, a guy named John Davis, is today the driving force behind a terrific pop band called Title Tracks).

Music has remained one of my primary wellsprings of inspiration, and I love to bring it into the classroom and see how it can inspire and excite young writers. So here’s the prompt, which never fails to generate some excited conversation and really interesting writing.

1. I give them the quote, often attributed to Elvis Costello, that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” We bat this around for a while, eventually landing on some version of the main idea, that the sublimity of music is basically impossible to express in words, and then I deliver the punchline: “but we’re going to do it anyway!”

2. I play some tunes. I then plug my iPod into some speakers and play two pieces of music, one after the other, pointedly not revealing the titles or artists. (You should pick stuff you know and love; I usually do the fourth movement of Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D Major, followed by the deeply weird Tom Waits song “Kommienzuspadt.”) The students are to be either listening carefully or writing the whole time the music is playing. They write either…
a. about the music. “What instruments do you hear? how fast or slow is it?”
b. about how it makes them feel, or
c. a little story INSPIRED by the song.

3. We share.

The sharing is always the really fun part. I never tire of hearing the incredible sentences that come pouring out of young writers when they let themselves be carried away by songs:

“I hear trombones, and about a million violins, and I think someone hitting a piano with a trash can lid.”

“This song makes me feel like I’m super excited, but in a sort of sad way.”

“There’s a bunny, and she’s hopping in circles around a bonfire, and then a train comes rolling by and it’s got her a carnival on it.”

These gems cue up a long and wide-ranging conversation about the special way that music makes us feel, and also the vocabulary of writing about music, the specificity that’s required — and, hey-what-do-you-know, it turns out that that kind of specificity should be a part of all great writing. Other lessons are abundant: Writing doesn’t have to be a dry and serious activity; good writing is a combination of wild emotional uplift and careful, meticulous craft; sources of inspiration are all around us, if we know where to look.

Around there is when I pack up my iPod and go home; usually to go put on an old favorite song I haven’t heard in a while and do some writing of my own.

Thanks so much for joining us, Ben! These are such fantastic ways to get kids writing! And just for fun, pageturn readers, here’s a cover of Tom Waits’ “Kommienzuspadt”: