Welcome to the second week of Writers Camp!
Hopefully you had fun telling your own story, whether you did our COVID-19 Stories, or if you just started journaling. Today we are going to start talking about writing stories. I’m going to assume that most of you are writing stories in your free time.
I always do a bit of pre-writing before I start a new story
or idea. If you are already invested in a story you might want to back track
and think about some details about your characters and setting to keep your story focused.
When it comes to characters and settings for your story,
knowing who they are and where your story takes place will give you better structure
as you write. If you know your main character is a 14 year old girl who lives
in the Milwaukee suburbs, the story will be vastly different from a 2,000 year
old mage who lives on a different planet.
Writing about your characters is a good way to think about who your story is about and it may help keep your story on track. You may not need all these details in your story, however
knowing these things about your characters will help you keep things consistent
as well as give potential depth to supporting characters. Follow this link for a work sheet about
creating characters for your stories. Click here for getting to know your characters.
Where your story takes place is also really helpful. Time,
space and place all meet here. For example, if you start a story at the
beginning of the school year, and then have Prom right away, that wouldn’t make
much sense. You want to make sure that the details in your story are both
possible and make sense. One way to get a sense of space is to make a map of
where your story takes place. Even a simple drawing of where places are in relationship
to each other can help.
Take time this week to think about the who(s) and where(s)
of your story. Next week we will start working on the plot of our stories!
There are still teen writers kits available! Stop in the
library, sign up and take home your own writers kit!
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