A Fifth-Grade Anthology

Elizabeth Sawyer first saw the boy on her 30th birthday.  Afterwards, she saw him at least once a day.  It took her a week to figure out that no one else could see him.

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I wrote that paragraph during a cross-country flight.  It popped into my head as I was chatting with the passenger in the seat next to me, and I jotted it down on the back of an airline napkin.  I had some vague idea that I might eventually write a story about this mysterious boy, who could only be seen by one woman.

A few weeks later, I wrote that same paragraph on the dry erase board when I was giving a presentation to one of the Fifth Grade classes at my daughter’s school.  The kids and I were discussing the writing process, from raw idea, to first draft, to revised manuscript, to published novel.

I explained to the students that I had no idea where this story idea was going to lead.  Was the boy a ghost?  Could he be a time-traveler, or an alien boy with strange powers?  Was he a figment of Elizabeth’s imagination?  I admitted that I didn’t know the answer yet, but I was definitely looking forward to finding out.

By the end of the workshop, we agreed to turn it into a challenge.  Each of the children would write a story using my opening paragraph, and so would I.  Then, we would all revise and polish our stories, and -- when they were finished -- we would compare them.

The resulting stories are collected in this book.  Twenty-seven of them were written by Fifth Grade students.  The twenty-eighth is mine.