Mentor Text Wednesday: The Red House

Mentor Text: excerpt from ‘The Red House‘ by Robert R. McCammon

Techniques:

• Introduction

Background –

Over the last few years, I’ve really thrown myself back into the horror genre. It began with The Kingcast podcast becoming a fave, and drawing me back into Constant Readership, but rediscovering horror movies and beginning to explore middle years spooky stuff alongside my oldest, I’m way back in. Heck, horror shorts were a presence in my classroom to practice some analysis and essay writing skills.

As I’ve been exploring horror, I’ve been discovering masterful new authors, while revisiting some old faves from my youth. One of those writers is Robert R. McCammon. He was right up there beside King for me when I was a teenager, and revisiting his works lately has reminded me why. As I’m always looking for new texts to drop into the rotation in a classroom, I recently sat down with his collection of short stories, Blue World. There’s great scares in there, and a couple that I think might make it to my classroom next year.

And obviously, with a mentor text column to write, I flagged something to share.

How we might use this text:

Introductions – Friends, who among us doesn’t have some sort of challenge with our writers related to introductions, both in essay pieces and creative work? I’ve had some success using the two part introduction offered by our work with the five part essay – background and narration, working together to provide context and focus for the piece to follow. It does take some work, getting students to “unlearn” the idea that an introduction does all it needs to do in a single paragraph.

That was actually one of my first thoughts as I read the opening paragraphs of McCammon’s ‘The Red House’ – that he’s actually used those two parts of our five part essay in a creative piece. Because the narrator is speaking in the first person, directly addressing their audience, it does read like the beginning of a personal essay.

There is background. We are given a thesis. Like everyone, this narrator has a story to tell. There’s a hook in there. He’s just like us! He invokes the universality of story, reminding us we have our own, while inviting us to hear his. I think our writers could use this idea of connecting with the audience, and finding common ground as a tool within their own introductions.

And there’s narration. I love that McCammon’s narrator, Bob Deaken, doesn’t just tell us that he has a story to tell, but he lists other stories that he could tell. The anaphora in the list of fantastic stories is inviting, but the stories in that list create intrigue. The story he’s going to tell us is more interesting than the ones he’s just listed?! We’re in. I’ve noticed that so many young writers like to have a list in their introductions. I love the power of channeling that impulse in a positive way, and having them list the things they didn’t write about, teasing the impact of the things they did write about.

I excerpted just the introductory part as a specific mentor text. I can also think see us looking at the rest of the story. I think highlighting the fact that Deaken has two paragraphs introducing his ideas before introducing himself would be a move some of our writers, especially if they’re going to be doing some public speaking could be beneficial.

I frequently joke that the worst part of being an English teacher is that everything is a text, and I’m constantly writing lesson plans in the back of my mind. It’s true though. It might be my geeky tendencies, but I especially feel drawn to genre texts. In genre work, we’re sometimes so focused on the tropes of the genre, we don’t realize that we’re also getting great craft lessons.

Do you have specific mentor texts that reflect and reinforce the way you teach introductions? What about other specific parts of writing? Are there genres dominant in your reading that you love to pull from?

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