• Writing Workshop is an important part of the fourth grade experience.  Together we are currently exploring the genre of personal narrative as we collect and share true stories of our lives.  As we embrace this important work, here are some quotes to inspire thinking about writing:


    “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others:  read a lot and write a lot.”
    -Stephen King

    “The writing life is a life with all the windows and doors opened.”  
    -Julia Alvarez

    “It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.”
    –Vita Sackville-West

    “Writers live twice. They go along with their regular life, are as fast as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there’s another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives everything a second time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and detail.”
    –Natalie Goldberg

    “Writing. . .do it every day for a while.  Do it as you would do scales on a piano.  Do it by prearrangement with yourself.  Do it as a debt of honor and make a commitment to finishing things.”                                                       
    -Anne Lamont

    “A notebook can be a clearing in the forest of your life, a place where you can be alone and content as you play with outrage and wonder, details and gossip, language and dreams, plots and subplots, perceptions and small epiphanies.”
     -Ralph Fletcher

    “I write every day for two hours. But it’s what I do for the other twenty-two hours that allows me to write.”
    -Don Murray