Yours truly,
Arthur Bean
JANUARY
January 1st
Dear RJ,
It’s probably best to write down my resolutions for this year now so that I don’t break any of them before noon HA-HA-HA. Anyway, here are my resolutions:
1. I will win the writing competition. This is number one!!!
2. I will not leave my dishes in the sink for longer than three days.
3. I will tell Kennedy I love her and make her love me back.
4. I will like Shakespeare’s plays and not just pretend to like them.
5. I will knit a sweater for my dad.
6. I will read the newspaper more often to know what is going on in the world.
7. I will read War and Peace.
8. I will try not to get annoyed with Robbie Zack during tutoring sessions so that I don’t “accidentally” punch him in the head.
9. I will stop eating spicy food at school, since it gives me really bad hiccups and then kids make fun of me.
I think this is enough to strive for this year. I don’t want to set my expectations too high.
Happy New Year, RJ!
Yours truly,
Arthur Bean
• • •
From: Kennedy Laurel ([email protected])
To: Arthur Bean ([email protected])
Sent: January 1, 13:00
Hi, Arthur!!!
How was your NYE party?? Mine was pretty fun! There was a karaoke machine LOL!!! I can’t believe your cousin’s name is George! That’s so funny! I thought only old people were called George LOL!
After I sent you that email, I remembered that it was your first Christmas without your mom! I’m SO sorry! I should have remembered that and not talked about MY Christmas! I’m glad your cousins were there! I hope it wasn’t TOO sad! I’m sending you a HUGE email hug!
I’m so excited that you will be in drama with me! Robbie is going to be in the class too!! It took some convincing at the party last night, but he finally admitted that he loves Shakespeare too, so the three of us can be the witches in Macbeth LOL!!! Double double toil and trouble LOL!!!
Your last email was HILARIOUS! I’m glad that you haven’t lost your sense of humor even though your Christmas must have been SO sad!!
Anyway, I don’t want you to KILL me for knowing how your story ends before it begins LOL!!! Can’t wait to see you in THE THEATER LOL!!!
Kennedy :)
From: Arthur Bean ([email protected])
To: Kennedy Laurel ([email protected])
Sent: January 1, 13:05
Hi, Kennedy,
I didn’t end up going to the party. George got food poisoning or something, so Luke and I watched movies until 3 a.m. It was fun anyway. They are leaving today, which is too bad because if they lived here you could meet my cousin Luke. Anyway, glad you had a nice NYE party. See you in a few days. Thanks for the email hug too. Christmas was fine, and it wasn’t too sad. Luke got a new video game so we played that and it was awesome. Well, it was awesome once we returned it and got the game that worked with his PlayStation instead of the Nintendo version.
Yours truly,
Arthur Bean
• • •
January 2nd
Dear RJ,
All right, RJ. It’s time to get serious. No more thinking about other stuff. I have a story competition to win. It’s going to be hard, especially since Kennedy is about to fall in love with me. I wonder how famous couples deal with it when one person is more famous than the other. Luckily, most girls at school are always reading magazines that give them love advice and information on famous people, so I’m going to let Kennedy do the research on that. Ha!
But no more jokes about love advice, RJ. I’m going to just think about writing and work on being famous, and then I can stop thinking about my mom and worrying about my dad (all his unwrapped presents are still sitting under the tree—he hasn’t even put them away! Pickles has clawed through one of the scarves I made for Dad already. I put the other one away for him). From here, it’s all about me, RJ!
Yours truly,
Arthur Bean
• • •
Assignment: Character Sketch
Our next unit is creative writing, and it’s my favorite unit to teach! I hope that our assignments over the next few weeks inspire you to find new ways to tell stories. For those of you participating in the short story contest, you might find some of these exercises strengthen your story. For others, I hope that this unit inspires you to continue writing outside of the classroom.
Write a few short paragraphs about a person who means a lot to you. This assignment will be a jumping-off point for developing a character for a short story you will be writing later in this unit. What does this person wear? What do they eat for breakfast? How do they interact with other people? Focus on creating a full character sketch, looking at their positive and negative characteristics, as well as their physical traits and personality.
Due: January 7
• • •
Peer Tutoring Program—Progress Report
Session: January 4th
Worked On: Character Sketches
Ms. W: I dont feel right about shareing my work with Arthur Bean. He may steel it and use it for his own work
—Robbie
Robbie is overreacting to something he knows nothing about. Perhaps his parents shouldn’t have taken him out of school early to go to Hawaii for Christmas. I believe all the sun has gone to his head. I tried to explain to him (the same way I explained to you) that my work might seem similar on first glance, but that it is much deeper when you look at it. The symbolism is clear to very smart people. However, my explanation fell on deaf ears, and Robbie just spent the hour spitting on my paper. This is a waste of time.
—Arthur Bean
• • •
A Character Sketch of Margaret Bean
By Arthur Bean
Her name was Margaret Mary Bean, but she always went by Marg. She hated being called Margaret. Marg Bean loved the ocean. She grew up on the Prairies, but she always wanted to live beside the ocean. She always wore blue and green, and she read lots of books with blue covers or pictures of boats on the covers. She said that she found it soothing to have a blue-covered book, even if it was actually a book about pirates or something.
Marg’s pants were always too short because her legs were really long. She tried to wear really big shirts to make it seem like her pants were long enough, but it actually just made her pants look even shorter.
Marg Bean was prettiest when she was watching television or reading a book. This was because her face would relax, and her mouth would be closed and her hands would stop moving. Any other time her face was always really tight, like she was sewing her eyebrows together in her mind. Marg Bean got tired walking almost anywhere, and then she would breathe through her mouth. It made her seem really old, and she kind of looked like she was embarrassed because her face would be beet red.
Her voice was always louder than someone would expect it to be, and she seemed to be yelling all the time, but she was actually just talking. She was the person in the public library that everyone looked at when she would ask for books at the counter. “DO YOU HAVE ISAAC ASIMOV BOOKS?” she would say, and the librarian would say in a voice even softer than the one he used with everyone else, “Why yes, they are just over in the corner over there.” “ARTHUR, I WILL BE IN THE CORNER. LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU HAVE YOUR BOOKS.” And everyone would then look to see who she was talking to, and they would raise their eyebrows and judge me, like they didn’t like anyone who knew her.
Marg Bean always had porridge and coffee for breakfast. Her favorite lunch was egg salad sandwiches, as long as there were no green onions in the egg salad. Curry made her go to the bathr
oom a lot, and she thought pepper was too spicy. She made perfect roast beef, and always made asparagus to go with it, which is the best vegetable to eat with roast beef. She also made really good spaghetti and meatballs, but she said they were too much work to make all the time, so she only made them a couple of times.
If Marg Bean were a character in my book, she would be a zombie mom who was the leader of the zombie pack. She has to be a zombie, because she isn’t alive, and vampires are stupid. She would be super strong and have a zombie cat companion who would kill zombie mice. This is because Marg Bean loved cats—even Pickles, who is actually part cat, part demon. She hated mice, but not as much as she hated spiders.
Dear Arthur,
Your character sketch is an excellent beginning to our short story unit. You have captured the essence of your mother’s personality through your choice of moments in this character sketch. However, you don’t need to make your mother a zombie in your book if you don’t want to. Many great stories are reflections of the person in their prime and don’t need to be completely true to life.
Ms. Whitehead
• • •
January 8th
Dear RJ,
Drama class started this week, and Kennedy is in it too! It’s nice to be in a class with her where we don’t have to sit at desks, and we can sit wherever we want. I will always sit beside Kennedy and show her how charming I am in real life every day. It might even be okay that Robbie is in the class too, except that he’s always talking to Kennedy. They have this thing from when they played baseball together. It’s this weird high five thing they do all the time and it’s really dumb. We also have to sing in class, which I think is stupid because it’s a drama class, not a choir, but Mr. Tan said that a good actor is a “triple threat” if he can act, sing, and dance. I would like to triple threat Robbie out of the class, but not with acting, singing, and dancing. More like kickboxing, karate, and ninja moves.
I’ve been writing too. I started a dumb story in Ms. Whitehead’s class about zombie cats, but it’s definitely not going to be famous. I tried to base it on Pickles, but she’s not a zombie; she’s just kind of possessed. My story for the contest will make readers laugh and cry and realize how smart I am. I’m going to write something really deep. I think it needs to have lots of description. Ms. Whitehead is big on description.
The computer sat alone on the table, in a faded gray room. The chair was brown, cracked leather digging into anyone who sat on it. The sun shone yellow through the dirty windowpanes. There was nothing more to say…
Yours truly,
Arthur Bean
• • •
Assignment: Interview a Friend
As we heard in our author talk today, some authors sit down and think about interviewing their characters to help develop back stories and other quirks that can turn a flat character into a well-rounded one. To practice this technique, I would like you to interview someone in your life. Come up with five questions that you feel will provide you with an accurate portrait of this person’s likes and dislikes, and provide some insight into their outlook on life. In your assignment, please provide both the questions you posed and the answers from your interviewee.
Due: January 14
• • •
Peer Tutoring Program—Progress Report
Session: January 11th
Worked On: Interviews
Artie was really rude today, and I even tried to be nice to the looser. He refused to help me fix my interveiw with Kennedy to make it a better assignment. I dont know how you think this tutoring is good for ether of us can we change now? Hes in my drama class now to and hes as annoying there as every where else.
—Robbie
Ms. Whitehead: I would like an extension on this assignment. I was going to interview Kennedy Laurel, but Robbie already interviewed her. My interview was going to be much more in-depth, but I don’t want you to think that I stole his idea. If anything, I think he stole mine, because I was talking to Kennedy in drama class and it was pretty clear that I was going to ask her to be my person to interview. Now I have to think of a new person to interview, and I don’t know if I will have time to do that by Friday.
—Arthur
Arthur,
I will give you time to interview Robbie during class on Thursday, which should give you enough time to hand in your interview for Monday morning.
Ms. Whitehead
• • •
From: Kennedy Laurel ([email protected])
To: Arthur Bean ([email protected])
Sent: January 15, 15:20
Hi, Arthur!
How much fun is drama class!?! Mr. Tan was saying that there are going to be auditions for Romeo and Juliet soon! How awesome will that be?! I’ll answer that for you: SO AWESOME LOL!!!
ANYWAY, how is your story coming along? I totally realized that I haven’t read ANY of it yet! I think I’m almost done with mine! I made it so that the aliens are really good at mind control and then my main character doesn’t know if she’s under MIND CONTROL or if it’s all a dream! If you want, you can send me your outline!! Of course, only if you’ve actually written something! Just kidding—I’m just making fun of you since you haven’t sent me anything! You’re so SECRETIVE! LOL! But seriously, you can TOTALLY send me something! I want to be helpful! PLUS, I’m going to send you the rest of my story SOON too!
Kennedy :)
From: Arthur Bean ([email protected])
To: Kennedy Laurel ([email protected])
Sent: January 15, 17:03
Wow, Kennedy!
It sounds like your story gets better every week. I love the new twist! It reminds me of that thing that Shakespeare talked about—a dream within a dream—but I think your version is way cooler.
My story outline is still pretty rough. I’m just torn over what story to go forward with. I have so many stories almost done, but I don’t know which to finish first. Anyway, maybe you could help me choose one.
Here is a list of my story ideas:
1) There is a boy who is the going to be the King, but he is too small to do anything and he is really poor. He meets a wizard who is living backward in time, and he trains the boy to become the greatest king of all time. Then the wizard ends up getting stuck in time, but the boy becomes the King anyway because he finds the sword of the True King, and then leads a really great army and falls in love with a beautiful woman who becomes queen.
2) There is a boy who lives in a society that doesn’t have any memories, but he becomes the Memory Keeper for everyone in their village. He learns that his parents are part of the group of people who are making sure that no one has any memories. Then he finds out terrible things about the community and has to do something to change it.
3) There is a land over the stars where everything is very magical. A boy who lives there is the leader of a group of orphan boys and he can fly. He leaves the land and comes to New York. He meets a girl and her brothers and they have adventures with the boy. They meet pirates and mermaids and lions that can talk and stuff. They love being there, but then they realize that they would rather be at home with their parents, so after fighting with the evil guys on the island they end up flying home and being happy.
4) There are these pirate aliens that take over spaceships and then make the people in them do different things. But everyone in the spaceship gets old really fast and then they die. They don’t know what to do so they go to Earth and get in the bodies of the grandparents. And then there’s this change in the old people and they become really happy and energetic all the time and they start to play like kids. They take over the playgrounds, and the kids get mad. So the kids go to the elves that live under the bridge in the city and they want to get their playground back. But the elves are fighting with dragons outside the city, so they need to get the giants on their side of the fi
ght. But the kids don’t know that the dragons exist so they decide to get the dragons to help them fight the grandparents. But the grandparents all disappear and get on the alien spaceship, but they don’t have enough oxygen to go back to their planet so they stay floating just above the city. So one boy who doesn’t have parents realizes that the spaceship has his grandparents in it because he lives with his grandparents. Then he finds the giants and they fight the aliens, and they win. And the grandparents go back to being themselves, but they have to share their houses with the giants because the giants won the war. And then they all have to get used to having a giant living in their house.
5) Maybe something about racism.
I’d love your feedback on which one you think would be best.
Yours truly,
Arthur Bean
From: Kennedy Laurel ([email protected])
To: Arthur Bean ([email protected])
Sent: January 16, 10:59
Hi, Arthur!
You have so many ideas!!! And they are all so complicated! It’s like you have the whole plot of the Hobbit trilogy or something!
I don’t want to be super harsh, but um…they are pretty big plans! All of them sound like you could write like 100,000 pages on them and still not be done! A couple of them sound like other things too. Isn’t your second idea the same story we studied in sixth grade? And I think your first idea is the same story as King Arthur, and idea three is a lot like Peter Pan. NO OFFENSE! Maybe I’m reading something into them! And I don’t even know what happened in your last idea!! There’s like 8,000 plots in that one!
As your creative writing partner, I just wanted to point that out. I don’t want you to get accused of cheating later! I may want to win, but I don’t want you to get kicked out as my competition LOL! ANYWAY, I always hear people say we should write about stuff we know about. Maybe you should try something more realistic. PLUS, you are so funny! You could totally win with a hilarious story about your cousin George or something!
Just a couple of thoughts from your FAVORITE writing partner LOL!
A Year in the Life of a Complete and Total Genius Page 6