“Catching Mice,” by Eoin O’Mara, age 11, is the featured story from our July/August 2014 issue. It starts innocently enough. Eoin is visiting his grandparents in Colorado. It’s a beautiful morning. Eoin and Granny are sitting on the porch, enjoying the sunrise. Birds and chipmunks are nibbling the sunflower seeds Granny put out for them. Then it happens. Granny spots a field mouse among the other animals. It’s the very field mouse Eoin has been observing for the past two weeks with growing affection. Granny hates field mice. She commands Eoin to shoot an arrow at the mouse and kill it. What will Eoin do? He was taught to respect his elders, and he feels obligated to obey his grandmother. But his feelings for the little field mouse run deep. The mouse has done nothing wrong. He is just passing by, lonely, hungry. Why must people hate him? Eoin wonders how the little mouse must feel. He relates to the poor creature. Reluctantly, Eoin shoots one arrow at the mouse, then another. He can’t believe he’s doing it, but what choice does he, a little boy, have, when faced with his grandmother’s command? Maybe because his heart is not in it, Eoin’s arrows miss the mouse, who scampers off to safety. What a relief! His friend is safe for now. Granny is so angry with Eoin that she doesn’t speak to him for the rest of the family’s visit. Author Eoin O’Mara is only eleven years old. His story is only three pages long. But somehow he manages to capture a world of emotions in his powerful story: a boy’s love of nature and animals, a peaceful morning that turns into a nightmare, a complex relationship between child and grandparent. Be sure to read Eoin’s story, “Catching Mice,” and think about what you would do if you were faced with a similar dilemma.
Yes He Can! Challenging Stereotypes with Fiction
Can a boy dancer be cool? Yes he can! And yet Alex, the main character in “Standing Alone,” is teased mercilessly by his classmates because he likes to dance. They call him “ballerina,” even though he actually does contemporary dance, not ballet. They make his life miserable every chance they get. Nobody likes to be made fun of. Nobody likes to be bullied. Everybody wants to be liked and appreciated. In our modern world, we think of ourselves as open-minded. Boys and girls can follow their dreams, no matter what they are. But some stereotypes persist from the past, like the one that says it’s unmanly for a boy to be interested in dance. It’s important to look at those stereotypes and see how wrong they are, how much they hurt people. Then maybe we can get rid of them and become better people. Eleven-year-old author Erin Trefny helps us do just that in “Standing Alone,” the featured story from our May/June 2014 issue. She shows us the world through Alex’s eyes – his love of dance, the cruelty of his classmates, how he deals with his problem. Some of the best stories we receive are stories in which the author is writing about his or her own experiences. In Erin’s case, though, she is a girl writing from the viewpoint of a boy. How does she do it? Maybe she knows a boy like Alex, or maybe she is really good at using her imagination and observations to put herself in someone else’s shoes (or bare feet, in Alex’s case!). Whatever her secret, Erin has created a believable character. She has placed him in a story that holds our interest from start to finish. The story teaches us an important lesson, not by telling but by showing. Read Erin’s story twice, then read it again. Each time you will notice more little details and bits of dialogue that make the people and places come to life. Most of all, notice how Erin shows us, through her well-crafted story, that it is wrong to tease, wrong to bully, and wrong to stereotype.
Everybody Is Different: Varied Characters Make For Believable Characters
No two people are alike. For that matter, no two animals are alike either! One mark of a great story is believable characters, each with his or her own distinct personality and habits. Author Kaley Birchfield is only eleven years old. Her story, “A Home for Barney” (the featured story from our March/April 2014 issue), is only six pages long. Somehow, in those six short pages, Kaley manages to bring to life a whole host of human and animal characters. How does she do it? There’s the narrator, Christy, a young woman who works at a goat farm. From the first sentence, we see that Christy loves nature. As the story goes on, we learn that she is emotional, loving, and a bit of a worrier. Christy’s co-worker, Marla, seems kind of slow at first. Little by little, we see that, while Marla may not say much, she is wise, and she feels things deeply. Their boss, Jenny, is a take charge kind of person, full of confidence. But she has a soft side and feels sad, like Christy does, when Barney the goat has to leave. Then there’s Barney and another goat, Mocha. They couldn’t be more different from each other. Barney is gentle, calm, and affectionate. Mocha is unfriendly and moody. Even the family that arrives at the end of the story has well-drawn characters, especially the bubbly, impulsive youngest sister, Autumn. It would be boring if Kaley simply listed each character’s distinguishing qualities. Instead, she shows us what each character is like through their words, actions, gestures, and speech. Marla seems unemotional, but the goodbye hug she gives Christy speaks volumes. Christy’s emotions are up and down as she and Barney are separated and reunited more than once. At different times Christy’s shoulders sag, she can’t sleep, she has a lump in her throat. She is overjoyed when Barney runs up to her after their separations. When Autumn realizes how sad Christy is to lose Barney, she blurts out her family’s address and tells Christy to come visit. Why do we write stories? Why do we read them? You can probably think of many answers to these questions. Maybe we like to leave our own lives for a little while and lose ourselves in the lives of others. Maybe we have feelings of sadness that we can’t express, and a sad story helps us tap into our own feelings and get them out. And no matter how young or how old we are, we can always learn. We can learn how to be better people, more loving toward each other and our pets, more understanding, better able to cope with loss and change. But before we can get all these benefits from a story, we must believe in it. We must believe that the characters are real.
