(…and wow, has it really been almost two years since this interview? Time flies!)

“But Ms. Dyck–please don’t be so hasty to seemingly condemn homeschooling, through guilt by association.”

Ellie, if you read a bit more around the blog, you’ll find that I was homeschooled from K-7 by parents who pioneered here in Canada, and my husband was HS’ed from Gr. 8-12. Our children, the oldest of whom is now 15, are entirely home-educated.

Please don’t be too quick to condemn me for standing up to hyper-authoritarian methodologies that have been demonstrated to have negative effects on child development. I feel pretty strongly that it’s my duty as a longtime member of the HS community to engage in discussion on these things, in good part so that our autonomy is not removed by outside authorities who claim there’s not enough HS “supervision” by “those who know best.”

We’re on the same page–this interview’s comments section just happened to turn into a lively debate, because there was much in the media about Michael Pearl right then, and I had also just run an interview with Hillary MacFarland regarding her book on extreme patriocentricity (Quivering Daughters).

Thanks for adding this info to the thread. I believe it’s important for people to understand as well. People need to understand that when we get talking about problem factors, that’s the HS community taking responsibility for itself to educate among parenting peers and filter out poor materials.

But Ms. Dyck–please don’t be so hasty to seemingly condemn homeschooling, through guilt by association. My husband and I had our first child in 1981 and our last in 1995. We were there, raising our kiddos when the Ezzos rose to popularity. One look in a bookstore convinced us their ideas were not for us, but we did have dear friends with an out of control son who actually tried the “blanket across our laps means Mommy and Daddy alone time” method. (Yeah, it did no good. It’s tough to build on a faulty premise.)
However, we also homeschooled our gifts from God, as we believed God willed. Our children are all pretty much grown now, and are loving, hard working, respectful, college educated (Dean’s list and everything!), productive, fantastic people. I don’t mean to imply that we give homeschooling the credit for that–clearly any glory there is God’s. But I do think it’s a great way to educate children, and it has helped make and keep our family close.
And most importantly, not all Christian parents who choose to homeschool are whackos. Nor are we all suscpetible to unbiblical beliefs.

I do apologize for defending homeschooling based on one little remark. It’s simply that we know so many marvelous young adults who grew up in homeschooling families: doctors, missionaries, veterinarians, nurses, teachers, engineers, and “ordinary” people who love Jesus and have learned to be in the world but not of it. We know kids who were educated in government schools who are just as terrific, too, of course. But I fear for the future of the homeschool movement that so many people fought hard to make legal.
I see trends in this country that mirror those in Europe, and the freedom for parents to educate their children as they see fit appears to be vanishing there. Our president spoke about strengthening the federal government’s grasp on education law in his most recent address to the nation.
So many people under 35 don’t seem to realize there was no federal Department of Education before the late1970s. Constitutionally, education legislation belongs to the states. But if things continue in the trends being followed currently, private and home schools may no longer be a legal option in the land of the free. And I suspect if will be our own faults.

Thanks for allowing me to speak my mind. Thanks for an interview that was such a pleasure to read. And thanks, Kerry, for sharing your God given gifts with me. You took ordinary words and put them together in such a way that my spirit rose up in spontaneous praise to the Living God. That’s a gift I’d receive (and pay for!) as often as you’d like to make it available.

For me, my stories start in different ways. Sometimes it’s just as simple as me being at the keyboard and thinking of two random words that normally wouldn’t go together and then finding a way to create a sentence from them. That becomes the first sentence and I write from there. Usually though, that’s just an exercise to get my creative juices going (see how much of a story you can come up with starting with these two words used in the first sentence: ibuprofen & crab – e-mail me with your result at beyondthecharts@beyondthecharts.com – not a contest, but something to talk about – just let it be a freeflow kind of thing and when you get to your stopping point where you can’t think too much on it, you’re done!)

One time I started a story with a sentence where I flipped the usual order of the words by accident and was a few sentences later when I saw it and decided it worked. It’s a great opening line that I won’t mention here as I intend to complete that story, but I got my story from it since before I noticed how I wrote the line I really didn’t know what I would write about and was just writing. Once I noticed it, I knew what had to be written. It was like the whole story just started unfolding before my eyes.

A lot of times I might get an image in my head of something, usually the “opening” scene. When this happens, I usually don’t write right away. I’ll think on it and try to figure out what’s happening with it. Sometimes the story will just come to me then and I’ll pretty much know what’s going to happen from beginning to end that I need to have in the story. Then it’s just a matter of writing it out and seeing what else happens. Not long after the Columbine shooting I started a novel like that. I saw two students approaching each other in the hallway and I knew that one of them was going to do something really bad, while the other one was a really good guy that could hang with anyone and that they were good friends. Then I had to figure out from there where the story would go. Once I had my ending, I started writing.

Over the years, for the most part, I don’t write notes. My general thought is that if it’s a good enough idea it will stick with me. And that’s usually the case. Then a while back some ideas that I really liked started to elude me when I would try to remember them. Now I try to write down those ideas when I really like them at first. Others I let go of. Some of those come back, some don’t. But I’m making sure I don’t let any more that I like escape me on that first go round in case I may want to use them later on.

When I’m writing a novel, I have all the information within me. It’s coming from me anyway, so I should know what the story is if it’s there to be told. Sometimes I’m writing and the story unfolds as I write, while other times I know exactly where I’m going because the story has already unfolded for me. That’s the difference – usually – of whether I started writing before I’ve thought things out. Typically, I try to have the whole story (not word for word, mind you) in my mind before I start on it, so that way I know what I’ll be writing. I read a comment (I thought on here so I could quote it exactly, but after looking around maybe not) about how in an interview Ted Dekker had mentioned having about three other complete stories going on in his head that he hadn’t written down yet. As long as he meant that he didn’t have the word for word novel in his head, then I can relate to that as right now I can pluck a few stories that have floated in my head for quite some time and if you were here I could tell you what I know about them.

So, I don’t use an outline. In fact, when I was in chat session recently sharing a story I’m writing with a fellow author who has commented on here, that person asked me to send them my outline. I said I didn’t have one. It’s all in my head. That person had to go so it was insisted that I took the time to write it down. So I had to actually write an “outline” down for this person. It was late at night and I didn’t finish it, so I sent what I had written. To me, writing an outline is time better spent writing the story going on inside of me. An outline is the story without the details. Since I already know that, I want to find out the details. As I use up enough time with other things than just writing as it is, when I’m sitting down for my story, I want to actually be WRITING it, and not writing down everything I already have in my head about it.

Oh, and although I’ve had a lot of interesting dreams over the years – some being prophetic dreams – I have never, and I mean NEVER, been lead to turn any of them into a story. I can’t say that won’t change one day, but for now, that is NOT an avenue my story ideas have approached me from. They prefer parkways and boulevards.

So for better or worse, that’s how I come up with my ideas. Hope it either helps you out or maybe you find it entertaining.

I do write about people, I mean here in the posts I do, but it’s only the awesome ones that make it into a Scienda vignette.

This comment threading with the template changes is pushing me over the edge. Completely. As of Monday night, it will all be better.