Writing, Writing, and More Writing

            Since I will be out of school on Friday, I decided that I would work today on my project instead. After thinking about my writing strategy last night, I decided that it would be best for me to write an “A-Z” book about Siempre Verde. Although the book might not be an action-packed thriller, it would be the best way to organize all of the different things that I love about Siempre Verde. I started the writing process by listing out all of the different words I could think of when I thought about Siempre Verde – Arriba trail, hot springs, hammocks, Intag, etc. Then, I organized them in a list and looked at the letters where I had multiple items listed. For example, in my list for “S,” I had Santa Rosa, Siempre Verde, soccer, sugar cane, and Spanish in the same category. I tried to combine ideas where I might be able to overlap information. For example, I moved soccer to my category for the kids at the school because we play games with them whenever we visit.

            Though my list was pretty rough up to this point, I started to write commentaries for each of the letters to serve as the text for each of the pages. I wrote multiple commentaries for letters where I had more than one word to see which idea I liked explaining better. For example, I started writing about exclusively birds in the “B” category and decided that it might be better to put all animals and plants together in a flora/fauna category of “F.” I cranked out the first 10 letters pretty easily during my first hour of sit down work. After lunch, I spent two extra hours working on the last 17 letters and a few pages with extra information about Siempre Verde. I was surprised by how quickly I wrote a rough draft for these pages. However, after a brief read through, I knew that these pages would need A LOT of work in the coming days. I also needed to decide which words to focus on in the story and which words to leave out, or perhaps add to similar categories. Overall, I had an incredibly productive day today and cannot wait to show my work to my project advisors tomorrow!