Hi! I’m back from our first nonfiction bookwriting workshop, followed by four intense days of watching 14-year-olds play volleyball in Orlando. Both were fantastic, and they kind of tied into one another.
My daughter’s team placed first in the bronze bracket, earning a championship title after a tough season. I’m the unofficial team photographer (this is how I manage anxiety when she’s on the court), and loved watching her and her teammates peak at exactly the right moment with some great coaching and very minor adjustments to moves they’d been working on all season. There’s a tradition in volleyball (and I think cheer, church camps, band, probably anywhere that teens gather) where the players decorate clothespins and, when other players, coaches, refs and parents aren’t looking, they get clipped with these little notes of encouragement, joy and silliness.
I’ve heard kids exclaim “I got clipped!” hundreds of times in my life as a volleyball mom.
I’m telling you this because the week before that big volleyball tournament, I brought this tradition into journalism. 🤭
At Breaking Into Books, I woke up the second morning and knew I needed to make a few changes to the schedule for more interactivity. A set of gold clothespins happened to be sitting out where I could see them. And I thought, you know what this lot of professionals who are known for being skeptical and critical and unsentimental might be into?
Decorative, affirmative clothespins.
But, I thought, they just might go for it because of how quickly our inaugural class of authors bonded with each other. So maybe they’d enjoy this and even have a little something to take home with them?
That morning, I introduced the concept, pointed to a table in the back with colorful gem stickers and Sharpies, and braced for sneers. On our very first break, the table was full of people decorating clothespins. Throughout the morning, they left the clips on each other’s nametags. At least once, I heard an adult exclaim, “I got clipped!”
It was delightful.
Our class learned so much from the great Sam Freedman and the other stellar journalists and instructors we had with us, from the changes journalists have to make to move into the publishing world, to common terms most of us had never heard of, to what goes into finding an agent and submitting a book proposal. There were a lot of big ideas and breakthroughs.
There were also a handful of small, decorated clothespins encouraging them to keep it up.
Like with my daughter’s volleyball season, the big stuff mattered, but the small stuff did, too.
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