Episode 158: Teaching Novel Writing with Tavia Stewart & Laura Bradley of NaNo 2.0
National Novel Writing Month might be gone, but its founder, Chris Baty, and a collection of former employees and volunteers are making sure the writing tradition continues. Next month, their new organization, NaNo 2.0, will encourage writers all over to start and complete a novel, while also providing support through resources and camaraderie.
In this episode, Lily talks to Tavia Stewart and Laura Bradley from NaNo 2.0, both of whom played integral roles in the original NaNoWriMo (with Tavia being its first employee!). Laura was an eighth-grade teacher who incorporated NaNoWriMo into her writing lessons and saw her students fall in love with the hardest writing assignment she had ever given in her 33 years of teaching. She’s now one of the tradition’s biggest advocates.
Tune in to hear why Tavia and Laura believe in NaNo 2.0 and how it helps foster a love for writing. You might want to write a novel after listening!
Topics Discussed:
The challenges of teaching writing to children
How Laura taught novel writing to middle schoolers
How to integrate novel writing into your own classroom
Resources mentioned:
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Read the transcript for this episode:
Welcome to Educator Forever, where we empower teachers to innovate education. Join us each week to hear stories of teachers expanding their impacts beyond the classroom and explore ways to reimagine teaching and learning.
Tavia Stewart and Laura Bradley played integral roles in National Novel Writing Month, which has recently relaunched as Nano 2.0 Laura Bradley was an eighth grade teacher, and after 20 years of wrangling eighth graders to write, Laura stumbled across the young writers program of NaNoWriMo, and her life was forever changed. At the time, it felt like stepping blindly off a cliff, but the reality was even more exciting and far less painful. She saw her students jump enthusiastically into the most challenging writing assignment she had ever given, find their unique and powerful voices and proudly share their clever, chaotic stories. Their creativity inspired her to pen her first novel along with them, and Tavia Stewart was employee number one at NaNoWriMo back in 2006 she co authored Ready Set novel and created the original K through 12 curriculum and novel writing workbooks for the young writers program. Over the course of 10 years, she served as nanowrimo's Young Writers program director and leader as COO before leaving in 2014 to co-found Chapter 510 a Writing, Publishing and bookmaking center in Oakland, California. She's the co-founder of the Flash Fiction Institute and now works as a nonprofit consultant. Welcome Tavia and Laura. So nice to have you here.
Laura Bradley 1:15
Thank you. It's great to be here.
Tavia Stewart 1:17
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Lily Jones 1:19
Absolutely Well, I could talk about National Novel Writing Month all day, but before we do that, I would love to hear from you like, what is National Novel Writing Month, and how were you both involved in it?
Tavia Stewart 1:32
Yeah, so National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo, is an annual writing challenge that was started in 1999 by an individual here in Oakland, Chris Beatty, where people, you know, back then, it's where people sign up to write a novel in a month. And it's happened every November since 1999 it used to be just a bunch of folks in Chris's living room, and then it grew to an organization and a Writing Challenge where hundreds of 1000s of people all around the world wrote a 50,000 word novel in November in hundreds of chapters all around the world, as well as classrooms, and who hosted the event with their students. So we had teens and kids writing novels in the young writers program and and those they don't, they did not have to write 50,000 words in a month. There was you could set your own word count and Lily you had purchased. How many years did you participate with your kids?
Lily Jones 2:42
I think three or four maybe. Yeah. So I was, I was doing National Novel Writing Month as a grown up, and then I was talking about it with my first graders one day, and they were like, can we write novels too? And I always tell the story, because it was, like, truly amazing. You know? I was like, Okay, I guess, you know, like, I guess, let's just make our next writing unit all about novel writing. And so I was just like, trying to translate what I was learning as a grown up into first grade language of what it looked like, but it was so cool and inspiring. And then I got to meet you all and work on the curriculum, like, from that place of working with first graders. And it was my very first curriculum job. Like, I always tell it. I was like, How was like, how I got started as a curriculum developer, was helping with this curriculum, and it was so awesome because it came out of this thing that I was doing in my classroom. And then I got to collaborate with amazing people like you.
Tavia Stewart 3:33
Oh my gosh. I did not know that was your first curriculum job. It was the best. So, yeah, so I was employee number one at NaNoWriMo. I was hired around 2006 and we there was no young writers program yet, and so it was like a twinkle in board member's eye, and I hopped on the opportunity to develop the young writers program, which was amazing. And I brought in Lily and other educators who had already been doing NaNoWriMo locally with their kids to create curriculum and a website, and I could not have done it without actual classroom teachers. I had good ideas, but then they were, you know, the classroom teachers who came along really made the curriculum work. So thank you, Lily. And then speaking of classroom teachers, Laura, tell us how you....
Laura Bradley 4:28
Yeah, so in I first heard about NaNoWriMo in 2010 my daughter discovered it. She was in college, and she has always been a writer. It's sort of like she breathes writing, and always has. And so I still have the Facebook conversation between her and a friend when they found it and they were talking about, are you going to do it? Let's do this. Let's do this. And and so I started looking around online to learn more about it, and came across the young writers program, and it. Was already, I think, September of 2011 when I first found it. And and I thought, Oh, God, this would be so cool if my students could do this. And so I asked my principal, you know, I said my plan would be that we would throw out everything that we're doing and we would just do this because they have to be doing all of this writing in order to be successful. And my principal, at the time, she had been a science teacher, I didn't expect her to really, you know, understand the English classroom, but immediately she said they'd be writing every day. This is fantastic. And so we didn't have enough prep time that year, but we dove in anyway, and and it was absolutely life changing for the kids and for me as a teacher, it was so unexpectedly successful that they would like when you assign a piece of writing to eighth graders, usually the first thing they say is, how long does it have to be? And so to assign something like this and say, we're going to write all of you know, all of November, you just figure, I mean, I had a colleague who was a beloved English teacher who was like, Don't do it. Don't do it. The kids will run screaming from the classroom. Don't do it. And but I did, and it was just amazing. I was just blown away. And I did it for eight years with eighth graders, and every year I would think, are you know, are they going to resist? Are they going to refuse to do it? Is it going to fail this year? And every year, they surprised me. I could not get over the ideas that they had and the enthusiasm they had and the commitment they had to their stories. It was just incredible.
Lily Jones 6:41
That's amazing. Well, I would love to hear you know how NaNoWriMo has evolved into its next chapter. But before we do that, fill us in in the time that you both have spent since starting at NaNoWriMo to like what do you do now? What's your life like now?
Laura Bradley 6:58
Well, I taught for 33 years Middle School, and in 2024 retired, and but about 12 years ago, I started working part time for Edutopia, the George Lucas Foundation. And so I continued to do that. That's from home. It's part time. And so it keeps keeps me connected to education, and so I continue to do that, and also read books to my brand new baby granddaughter and Edutopia. Actually, I wrote quite a few articles for them about NaNoWriMo, and so they came out to my classroom a number of years ago and filmed my students. And those videos just really show the ownership that they have over their writing. You know, they just speak with such authority about their stories, their characters, and it has to end like this. And you know, they it's just so powerful.
Tavia Stewart 7:56
Yeah, those videos are something that would be great to share along with this podcast, too Lily. They're really just fantastic and very inspiring for educators. So since NaNoWriMo, I left NaNoWriMo after working there for a decade. I worked there my whole young adult professional nonprofit life, and after a decade of working in this amazing Online Writing Community, I really wanted to create a community in my own physical community of Oakland, and I joined with another nonprofit, amazing literary powerhouse, Janet Heller, who came from a program called writer's core in San Francisco, and we got together and started a young writers program in Oakland. It's a writing center called chapter 510, and it's a writing center where youth come to bravely write in beautiful spaces. We work with kids eight to 18, and that was in we started in 2015 in the last 10 years, we've worked with over 6000 students who've been published in over 100 books. And for me, like NaNoWriMo, is how I got to where I am now, and to see students write books and hold their published novels. So we got to, like, take it from, like, their drafts and get them actually published with real ISBN numbers and sent to the Library of Congress, and having those moments with students. And also I had not had the opportunity to actually teach the curriculum that I created, which is like embarrassing to say it was tested, tried and true by teachers, but I never got to do it. And so one of the first things I did after I started chapter 510, is to work with a group of 10. 10 middle school students, best age sixth graders, and write with them every single day, and bribe them with like, you know, Wendy shakes and Starbucks and and do word sprints and then see their stories come alive. And and students say things like, I was made for this, you know, like, I'm like, You were made for this. This is amazing. And, yeah, and just recently, we got in touch with one of the students, holla, who was, like, such a reluctant writer. And it was, like, it was hard. She was a hard one. And then in the end, she wrote this amazing book that she's so proud of, and it's one of the she said is one of the best things she's ever done, and she's in high school now, so I just like, yeah, I am so proud of what I did at NaNoWriMo and what we've done with chapter 510 and yeah. And now I'm now, I'm out here. I'm not at chapter 510 full time anymore. I'm a nonprofit consultant, and I think that's why both in Laura and I had the extra time, not a ton of extra time, to start Nano 2.0 but we did. Laura has more time than me.
Lily Jones 11:15
Well, tell us about that. What is Nano 2.0? How did it come about, and what's the vision?
Tavia Stewart 11:21
Yeah, so Nano 2.0 came about because within the last year, unfortunately, National Novel Writing Month, or nanowrimo.org as the organization, had to shutter due to various heartbreaking and hard events over the last few years, leadership transitions nonprofits in this world post covid, and when that happened, you know, Chris Beatty and I, and grant Faulkner, who was the last Executive Director, got together, and we were heartbroken. We were like, what do we do? The websites, they just took them down, and the organization is gone. But all of the work we did over the last 25 years, including the young writers program and the curriculum and all the resources, were gone, and like, we need to do something about this. And so we quickly did, which I can't believe it like, in three months, we then kind of put a call out to some of the most amazing NaNoWriMo educators, including Laura and volunteers from the past, and put together this like ragtag team of amazing, talented humans, and started having meetings, and then the meetings grew to a website, and now We have a website that just launched October 1. And it's not the same, you know, we don't have we used to have forums where people could talk to each other and like profiles, kind of like Facebook for writers. But we had. We've gathered all the materials, all the young writers, program, curriculum, tons of resources for adults and kids and teens to write and track words and write their novels. You know, we're going to have pep talks from authors sent out. So it has the same spirit of this positive, encouraging. We're all doing this together without all the bells and whistles. But honestly, people are out there writing novels. I was just talking to a friend this morning who's like, I never even went to the site, like, I just knew it was November and I needed to write a novel. Like, I don't like, she's like, logging in, it's hard, you know. So I think it's, oh, you know, what we have is simple, and it's just a place to help keep the magic alive. And the other thing I want to say about this is there's so many communities already out there. There's volunteers all around the world who are running local chapters to write novels together, and they've put up, you know, popped up websites and or they just do it through social media. So there's, there's lots of other people doing great things, like one of our, you know, volunteers, has something called novel quest, which is another website where you could write your novel. We also have Christina Horner, who's on our team, has a podcast called write your damn novel, and it has, like, a whole slew of encouraging stuff. So it's really just like also us highlighting other folks who are doing this amazing thing. And Laura and I, our biggest goal is to make sure that educators know where to go. And so Nano 2.0 is a place where educators can find all those resources curriculum, get some newsletters from us occasionally and and because otherwise it's nowhere, you know. So it's really making it so the young writers program, which is now the young novelist challenge, has a home.
Lily Jones 14:55
It's so inspiring. And thank you to all of you for doing that and for not letting it die. I mean, that's so awesome that you all rallied to keep this going and give it a new home and new life in that way. So thank you. Thank you. And I would love to hear a little bit about the resources for teachers and the young novelist challenge.
Laura Bradley 15:18
So when I first the first year that I did NaNoWriMo with my students, I was actually in grad school, and NaNoWriMo became part of my thesis, because I was focusing on writing and how technology can improve how middle schoolers write and how writing communities and and big writing projects and things like that. And so it became part of my thesis. And so part of that work was I created a website for teachers because I thought this is so cool. But the curriculum alone isn't enough. We need teachers. Need like, how do you deal with all the stuff that comes up when you take on a project like this, and what are some things that I learned through the years, and what are some some strategies and things like that? And, of course, I created some of my own lessons, just because that's what we tend to do. So the way that I found out about this, this attempt to bring it up for everybody, again, was that I had contacted grant, and I said, I have links to the curriculum on the old site, and they're going to go away. So I wanted to ask him, is it okay if I take the copies that I have and keep them on my website? And so that's how he connected me with the Nano two group, and then I started this big, long process of taking the old curriculum and workbooks and kind of rebranding them as the young novelist challenge. And it took me way too long to finally notice that Tavia, in her brilliance, had copyrighted them. Creative comments, share, share, alike and like, Oh, thank goodness now we know that we can do this, and all is good. And so the so the workbooks and the curriculum are there again, and my site has been updated, you know, to deal with all those. And even Edutopia has updated all my articles to take out the broken links and to add in this update about nano two Dotto. So, so that was really good news, because it just kills me seeing that stuff floating around that has that has bad links. So now I can't remember the question, but the four teachers we have, the workbooks we have, and actually the curriculum is like, day by day, by day by day. You know, teachers are like, I can't have my kids write a novel. How do I do that? Well, this breaks it down. It so beautifully. And in Spanish, k2, 35689, 12. You know, all the grade grade levels are covered so and then other teachers also jumped on board, and so I've been collecting resources from them. A friend of mine who teaches eighth grade, also created four rubrics as a way to assess excerpts, because teachers are like, I can't read. You know, they're all writing this. Really don't do that. And so he created these rubrics for shorter excerpts. So, so there's a lot, there's actually a lot more now than when I first started teaching it in 2011 because we have sort of this, you know, community collection of resources.
Lily Jones 18:38
So fantastic. I love hearing about how it's grown and being used in different ways. And so for our teacher audience out there who might be thinking, yeah, maybe I do want to teach novel writing, what advice do you have for them?
Laura Bradley 18:55
Let's see, start in August. Every year I would say, I'm going to start a little bit earlier, a little bit earlier, a little bit earlier. And and that really makes a difference for the kids. And the funny thing that happens is, there's this you can't start till November 1. And so for the first time ever, ever in an English teacher's career, you have kids coming in going, please, can I start writing my novel, you're like, nope, nope. Can't start yet. Gotta wait till November 1. So there are just so many different ways that you can amp up that enthusiasm in the planning of it. So there's lots and lots of resources for planning that gets the kids pretty excited about writing. And then another, another recommendation I have is to let the kids tell each other what to write about. I'm terrible at fiction writing. That's never been my favorite thing. I don't I feel like I don't have good ideas and so, and so I didn't assign it to kids because I didn't think they would like it either. And as soon as I said, What do you want to write about? Holy cow, I couldn't believe the things they came up with. And then one of the activities that I kind of created and had them do was was called Ask and suggest. And I would have the kids prepare like a, you know, just a summary of what their story was about. They would read it aloud to the class, and then they would say, ask me any questions that you have about my story, but they're not allowed to answer them. They're just and then I would type the questions into a doc for them, so that gave them ideas to write about. And then the suggest part was suggest ideas for my story. And again, I would just write them down. They weren't allowed to say, no, no, no, that won't work, and it just provided them with a long list of ideas when, especially for when they get stuck in the middle of November. So let the kids do a lot of the inspiring I think, and then also start the prep early are my two suggestions.
Tavia Stewart 20:58
Right? For those of you out there teachers that are like, Oh no, it's October. Plenty of educators have been like, I just found out about this. Let's just, you know, I think you know, one recommendation for starting, like, if you've never done this before, is having, like, a lunchtime club. That is what, how I started it at at a middle school where I was running the program is, I just had, like, sign up for a lunchtime noveling Club. And that was a great way, you know, if, if you are a club person, or if there's another lead in your writer, a young writer, and you're in your school who wants to lead it, that was a really great way to kind of test the waters and have people like kids self select at the middle school or high school level, but it is a seat of your pants adventure. And another one is writing along with your students. That's another great recommendation, because they love to see you writing, and they want to ask you about your story, and they really feel like you're doing it with them. And good news is NaNoWriMo has also opened up the 50,000 word goal used to be like, you know, that was it. That was the what you had to do. You had to write 50,000 words in a month. But Nano 2.0 is open it up where you could set your own goal. You could just be like, I'm working on my manuscript, I'm finishing my dissertation like but you're just writing every day. Is the is the point. So that's just another way to engage your students, I think.
Lily Jones 22:32
I think that's amazing. And for a lot of our listeners, too, they may be thinking about starting a creative project or finishing a creative project, and so having that flexibility of setting that goal and writing every day, I think is so helpful. Well, it was so nice to talk with both of you. Can you tell folks how they can connect with you and learn about Nano 2.0
Laura Bradley 22:54
So you can learn more about us at nano two.org and you'll find we have a blog there, sharing what is new and what we are working on and some inspiration. We have got a page of writer tools and writer inspiration. We have got a page just for young novelists. We have a contact page as well if you wanted to reach out, if you had questions. And then my site is nanoteacher.org, and so that's where I've added a lot of my own tips and tricks. So those are the two, two places that you could reach out to us.
Lily Jones 23:31
Wonderful.
Tavia Stewart 23:34
I'll just add to that, you can sign up for a newsletter. It's more of a general newsletter with pep talks from authors that you could share with your students and stories about other folks in the community. And we'd also love to feature any educators out there who are going to participate. So if you do sign up for the newsletter, do send also send us a little note through the contact form that you're doing NaNoWriMo. And it would be fun to either feature your students during or even after on our blog to celebrate their amazing accomplishment of writing a novel in a month,
Laura Bradley 24:10
And we're also on Instagram and Bluesky.
Lily Jones 24:14
Amazing. Well, thank you both again, so much, and thank you for keeping this alive, and we can't wait to see where it goes.
Tavia Stewart 24:21
Thank you, Lily, thank you. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai