Write. Then write more.

How’s this for a to-do list?

Sunday: Write a 1,500-word nonfiction essay.
Monday: Take that essay and turn it into fiction. Oh, and add 500 words to it.
Tuesday: Add another 1,500 words.

It is a production schedule that could make a professional author shudder. Yet it is just half a week’s work for the 12 students in John Adams’s summer school creative writing class. And it’s even a bit of a reprieve from the previous week’s homework, which was to write 1,000 words and read an assigned short story every night. Adams’s students range from ninth graders to seniors, all with the same goal: to become better writers. By Thursday, they are deep into editing the work they’ve done over the past few days—both their own and their classmates’—and Adams, with teaching interns Naomi Ritz ’07 and Jessica Bonnem, puts them through their paces.

“What we’re looking for is grammar, punctuation, good sentences. You need to read every sentence out loud. Then read the next sentence out loud. Listen to how the sentences sound together. It’s that slow a process.”

Working on creaky school laptops, the students make their way through each other’s work. “Ooh, you took my advice!” one student exclaims. “Yeah, I changed that part completely,” her partner says. There are conversations about colons versus semicolons, and the appropriate use of dashes. Then one student editor gets stuck; she is skeptical of her partner’s casual grammar choices. Adams prods them to work together.

“Can you go with it?” he asks the editor. “Or is it so unclear that you don’t get it?

“Don’t back off too easily,” he advises the writer. “You’ve chosen a narrator who’s actually speaking, so you have the freedom to be non-grammatical.”

Adams has taught at NMH, in both the summer school and the academic-year program, for nearly 30 years. He is an essayist and a poet, and finds that creative writing is “pretty accessible” for teenagers, no matter what age they are. “It’s about intellectual curiosity and diligence,” he says. “And they’re ready to accept guidance, as long as I’m willing to buy into their world.” That world—at least during a class lesson on character development—contains people like an lonely old lady who surrounds herself with cats and eats mashed potatoes for dinner every night, and a dwarf who likes to stand on a chair in front of the mirror and flex his muscles.

But beneath the quirky character development, the students are building their concentration and overcoming their own technical glitches—i.e. grammar. “Yes, grammar has got to be a part of it,” Adams says. “You’ve got the inspiration, the emoting, all that, but grammar is not just a mindless exercise; it helps you become a better writer.”

So does practice, which leads the class back to its busy production schedule: finish the edits; polish a final draft; and move onto poetry reading, writing, memorizing, and reciting at the end of the week. And then, on Sunday, they’ll begin again, with 1,500 more words.