Authors Live Extra: The Crossover by Kwame Alexander

Kwame Alexander's book The Crossover is about twin basketball players called Josh and Jordan. Josh uses the sport as a way of thinking about himself and his relationships with his family and friends.

It can also help us learn about:

• how to tell a story in verse and what that means

• effects created by how writing appears on the page

• how rhyme and rhythm work with the themes of what we're writing about

It's not always a bad idea to judge a book by its cover - and its title. Writers choose their titles very carefully to tell readers what to expect when they open the book.

For The Crossover, Kwame Alexander has used the name of a basketball move for his title. A crossover is where the player switches the ball quickly from one hand to the other, often to trick their opponent into thinking they're going to pass it in the opposite direction.

Think about the title, and the above cover illustration of Kwame Alexander's The Crossover.

• Why would the author choose the name of a tricky basketball move for this book?

• Why has the designer of this cover made the basketball out of words?

• What do you think this tells us about what is in the book? What do you expect from this cover and title?

The Crossover is the story of Josh and Jordan Bell, basketball-playing twins, and how their lives play out both on and off the court.

Basketball is used as an extended metaphor throughout the book for the different situations the boys find themselves in, and particularly at crucial moments in the story.

Watch Kwame read from The Crossover on Authors Live:

The Crossover is a verse novel.

Novels, or fiction books, are usually written in what is called prose.This means that the text isn't deliberately trying to include rhythm or rhyme throughout. (This article is written in prose!)

A verse novel, on the other hand, is a novel that does make use of poetic forms, rhythms and rhymes.

Each scene or event in The Crossover is presented in a single poem:

Some using common poetic structures like haiku and rhyming couplets (where two lines of poetry rhyme). Others are in free verse, or use rap rhythms. You can learn more about how to rap here.

Writing The Crossover in a wide variety of verse forms means that each individual poem can have a different effect on the reader. This allows Kwame Alexander to experiment with tone, and include a wide range of emotions in the book. The sections where Josh is playing basketball are often very rhythmic, and full of action.

In this opening poem, called 'Dribbling', the words of the poem appear on the page in a way we might not expect.

When read aloud the sound of the words has a rhythm or a beat, because of the rhyme. Kwame has done this by using lots of verbs ending in '-ing', so it feels very active. This helps the reader imagine the pace and beat of basketball - players' steps hitting the court, dribbling and passing with a ball, different movements.

The use of UPPER-CASE letters tells us where words or syllables should be stressed and this helps us to find the intended rhythm of the poem when we read it aloud. We can also see that how the words are laid out on the page helps us imagine the action taking place in this scene.

Look at the word 'SLIPPING'. The way it is written as if slipping down the page mimics the opponent slipping down. It also encourages us to read it aloud more slowly, like a slipping movement. All of this adds to our complete picture of what is happening in the scene - images, sounds and actions.

Thinking about the rhythm of words and how they appear on the page as well as their meaning is a huge part of writing poetry.

Think about one of your hobbies or something you like to do regularly. In The Crossover, it's basketball, but it could be anything - a sport, a craft, gaming, reading.

Think about the rhythm of any actions involved, maybe it's the thud of a ball, the scratch of a pen drawing on paper, or a knife chopping or spoon stirring while you cook.

How could you capture this movement in writing? What form would it take?

You could:

• Try making a few notes about the rhythms of your chosen activity. These can be sounds rather than actual words!

• Think about word lengths and what kind of effect they have. For example, shorter words together, especially with lots of consonant sounds, can create a quick, tapping rhythm called consonance.

• Read aloud and listen to the sounds you've chosen. Techniques like alliteration and onomatopoeia can be very helpful in creating a rhythm and an atmosphere. (For example 'rat-a-tat-tat' is a short rhythm that sounds like knocking - this is onomatopoeia as it sounds like the action it's describing).

• Think about line breaks and punctuation to create rhythm. For example, you could encourage readers to pause by putting in a comma or a full stop. Like Kwame, could you use capital letters to emphasise certain parts?

Watch Kwame read from 'Who is Josh Bell?', one of the first poems in the book, where we are introduced to Josh, the protagonist of the story. Listen to the information he chooses to include and how Josh describes himself.

The themes in The Crossover all work together, like players on a basketball team, or words in a sentence. They play with metaphor and combine to create a complete picture. Here are a few of the major themes that you'll notice as you go through the book:

The way these themes work together creates patterns of extended metaphor throughout the book.

In the poem 'Basketball Rule #1' this is made very clear in only a few short lines, but the ideas of basketball, family and talent continue to play off against each other for the rest of the story.

In this game of life
your family is the court
and the ball is your heart.
No matter how good you are,
no matter how down you get,
always leave
your heart
on the court.

Try and put together a short poem that brings together:

• the hobby, or thing you do regularly, you thought about in the last activity.
• the sounds you imagined that give us the rhythm of the action.
• how you feel doing this hobby, or what you're thinking about when you take part in it.

Here are some things you might use:

• use pieces of the sounds between lines of description - Kwame uses 'SWOOP' and 'Swooooooosh' as sounds that demonstrate the action.
• if you have a steady rhythm, you can think about how you might use that rhythm, but substitute words in its place. (The example we used earlier, 'rat-a-tat-tat' could become 'rat-a-tat-tat, playing the drums', because saying the words 'playing the drums' aloud has the same rhythm as 'rat a tat tat', but describes the action even further).
• how does this hobby or activity make you feel, or what are you thinking about when you take part in it? Are there sounds or rhythms that fit with that to help the reader understand?

This is just a first go, and it's meant to be fun, so it doesn't have to be perfect, finished, or even include all of these elements!

But if you're already thinking about sound, and action, and the rhythm of your words as well as their meaning, you're on your way to writing something special. Keep writing!

After Kwame's brilliant Authors Live event, pupils from Boclair Academy in Bearsden interviewed him with the help of the LAB team. Here are some more of his thoughts on being a writer.