A child corrects the book
Be someone else · 20 minutes · Published
Read this first
You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Project Gutenberg #76
The prompt
Write as a child who knows a book has been written about them and wants to set the record straight. Start the way Huck starts in the passage: name the book and its author, grant that it is mostly true, then name the stretchers. Use the child's own grammar and the child's own idea of what counts as a lie. Keep the voice whole for a full page, then read it back and underline any word the child would not use: each one is where your own voice slipped in. The child should be fair to the author, mostly.
Set a timer for 20 minutes.
Short version · 10 minutes
In ten minutes, write the child's first paragraph correcting the book, in their own grammar.
The move
Be someone else. Write from a voice, a time or a situation not your own.
Tags: voice and point of view.
In a group
A way to run it with a writing group:
Call and answer. Whoever is about to read calls out a ritual word, and the group answers before the reading begins.
Where the page goes next
Scrin is a home where pages grow into books: you keep writing, from an untitled line to a chapter, and Scrin keeps the rest.