Fiction Writing for Kids - Guest Post by Hank Quense

Fiction Writing Workshop For Kids


Writing a story is a tough job, especially for a kid. There’s all that stuff about characters and setting they have to remember. And then there’s the plot. How is a kid supposed to figure that one out?

A few years ago, the Valley Middle School in Oakland NJ asked if I would visit the school and talk to their seventh graders. On visits like this, authors usually talk about their books and read scenes from them. I hate reading scenes! I find it boring and I’m sure I bore the audience with my monotonous voice. Instead of torturing the kids this way, I decided to show them how I create a short story.

The slide talk worked like this: I gave them the overall story idea, one that they would want to write about. After that, I used a handout with a series of text boxes with questions to have the kids come up with ideas on characters, setting and plot. Finally, I broke the story up into six scenes and showed the students how to use the text box ideas to write each scene. The talk was wildly successful.

Last week, I spent the day in the Norwood Public School (NJ) with the 7th graders. I attended three 90 minute classes.
The students were in the process of writing a personal memoir and I expanded my talk to include similarities in writing a memoir and a short story. Afterwards, I spent time reading some of the memoirs and suggesting improvements. The memoirs impressed me, as did the experiences the kids wrote about. The ones that stand out are: a six-year-old’s first day in the USA after leaving Russia; getting accidentally separated from her parents in Seoul, Korea; getting her hand stuck between elevator doors.

Besides the schools, I’ve given this talk in libraries and expanded the concept to include two more story ideas. While I love doing this, my talks are geographically limited. To remove this limitation, I used these three talks as the basis of a book. It’s an ebook called Fiction Writing Workshop for Kids. Using the advanced technical capabilities of ebooks, the book has graphics, audio and video clips embedded into it. The videos show the text boxes and coaches the kids on how to use each text box to develop the characters, setting and plot. Each story has a final video clip showing the students which text boxes to use in each scene. Finally, there is a set of blank worksheets the kids can use to develop stories on their own.
The suggested audience for the ebook is 4th to 7th graders.

I’ve written a lot of books, but I’m more proud of this one than any of the others.

The ebook is available on iBooks at https://apple.co/2CJYDjN and Kindle at https://amzn.to/2RnU5Yo.

You can learn more about the workshop by watching this short video: https://youtu.be/SjkIvhfTPHc and by visiting this web page: https://padlet.com/hanque/a7zx74mjcgrg