This is my story cover.
Frances Dowell is an author who lives in Durham, North Carolina, and recently, with my LA class, I did a writing workshop with her. I did a similar workshop with my friends last summer — and both times, it’s been super fun, and I’ve learned a lot.
I started by thinking of What If questions. Basically ideas for stories, but like this: What if humans could fly? What if a whole town burned down? What if a huge volcano erupted and everybody in America had to evacuate to other places? Things like that.
Then we learned how to make a good beginning — how to draw the reader in, giving them enough information but not too much. Then it was learning how to make stick and stone problems. Stick problems are little problems, ones that get solved super quickly and easily. Stone problems are harder to solve. They can’t be solves immediately, and and there needs to be some struggle on how to solve them.
After that, we learned a lot more — about the crisis point, the big monster scene, the resolution, things like that. I’m actually pretty proud of my story — it took a long time to write, and I’m mostly proud of my characters. I think I got across their personalities pretty well.
From time to time, we got feedback from our classmates, and that was really helpful. They noticed things I hadn’t noticed, and I think it’s always really useful to have somebody else read your writing, because they’ll be reading it like a reader, not a writer, and everybody has a different view. Frances Dowell also gave me feedback one time, and that was awesome. It made me more aware of what I’m doing right and that I should do that more.
Here is the link to Frances Dowell’s website! https://francesdowell.com