“Fruits Like Heaven,” painting by Christian W. Wagari, 11. Published January 2018. A note from William Rubel I have a project for you today, but I want to start by addressing the adult newsletter readers. To our adult newsletter readers Amazon has a program called Amazon Smile that gives to a US charity on our behalf every time we buy something. It costs us nothing. Here is how it works: You do your shopping at smile.amazon.com and then Amazon donates half a percent (0.5%) of the total you just spent to your selected charity. If you click on the links above, then your half a percent will go to us at the Children’s Art Foundation. This is the quintessential Stone Soupproject. If just one of you starts using Amazon Smile not much good comes of it. But when every one of you starts using it, the amount we receive will be significant. Thank you. And, of course, the greatest help of all is to subscribe. William’s Weekend Project Life doesn’t always go as we expect it to. I am not one who is big on sports analogies—but in many cases, the expression “Life threw a curveball” provides a good analogy for an unexpected outcome. A curveball, for those of you who don’t know, is a baseball pitch that starts out going straight but then unexpectedly veers off to the right or the left. The story “Sketches,” which you will find below from the January 2018 issue, is a story that throws a curveball. You cannot imagine from how the story starts that it will end up where it does. This weekend, I want you to write a story that starts out seeming to go in one direction, to have one plot line, one mood, and then for the story to suddenly change directions. Write a story that take us somewhere we couldn’t have imagined at the beginning. “Sketches” opens with a routine argument between two brothers but ends up taking us somewhere else entirely. This is a common structure for stories—after all, the shift to the unexpected is almost the definition of what makes a good story. You’d be a pretty boring storyteller if the stories you tell your friends all turned out exactly as they had expected! Sleeping Beauty is another example of a story with a curveball plot. It starts out at a party celebrating the birth of a princess with the “happily ever after” plot we all expect a princess’s life to follow, and then: Bam! The evil fairy, named Carabosse in the ballet version and Maleficent in the Disney version, pushes the princess’s life in an unexpected direction, making a much more exciting story in the process. Send us your finished story when you are done. Until next week, Get ready for a summer of reading with a Stone Soup subscription The school year is coming to a close. For those of you who don’t yet have a Stone Soup subscription, this is a good time to start one. Summer vacation is a great time for reading, thinking, dreaming, and getting into projects one doesn’t have time for during the school year. Besides, you can’t get fully immersed into the inspired and inspiring worlds conjured up by Stone Soup’s writers without being a subscriber. Eleven issues a year. Available as print or digital formats. Plus, with the online format, you get over 20 years’ worth of back issues, writing and art projects, our fabulous blog writers, and more. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com. Vandana reviews Wendy Mass’s Finally. The main character, Rory, is about to turn twelve. Here’s what Vandana has to say about the book: “Frank, funny, and full of surprises, Finally is a story that spins many themes together, and consequently appeals to a wide range of readers. For one, it portrays the pressure to grow up before one might be ready, which nearly every middle schooler experiences at some point in their life.” Read more here. Alex Baker, a writing instructor for the youth writing group Igniting Writing, wrote a guest post on our blog this week about some strategies to engage young writers. Some of his suggestions include games and fun writing prompts. Do you have any ideas? Let us know by leaving a comment on the post! From Stone Soup January 2018 Sketches By Saenger Breen, 12 Painting by Christian W. Wagari, 11 That morning at breakfast, Dylan sat perched on his usual seat at the table, sketching happily. I grabbed the milk and a spoon and sat down. I poured myself a heaping bowl of Cheerios, most of which spilled on the table. Dylan’s pencil scribbled away, and he periodically blew huge breaths over his paper to get rid of the shreds of eraser. Curious about what he was working so diligently at, I leaned over to get a better view. “Dylan!” I shouted. He was adding onto one of my drawings, and had already reshaped a good portion of it. Startled, Dylan looked up. “What?” “I’ve been working on that forever!” I snatched my notebook out of his hands. He’d made the people cartoon-like and unrealistic, and shaded in all the wrong places. “You totally screwed up the whole thing!” I yelled. “I didn’t screw up anything!” he said, defensively. “I’ve told you a million times not to touch my stuff, and specifically not my sketchbook!” I flipped through the pages to see if he’d ruined any other drawings. He hadn’t. I flipped back to the drawing he was working on. I examined it closely, looking for flaws to point out. The faces of the people had become less dimensional and smudgy. Dylan always drew details with tons of shading, most of which wasn’t necessary. Sometimes I’d teach him where to shade, and help him with drawing figures, but he still resorted to his box-like, over-shaded style. He’d added onto drawings before, but those were just sketches I’d whipped up in a few minutes. I’d been perfecting this one for at least a month. The paper
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Guest Post: Creative Writing Activities to Engage Young Writers
Every young writer is looking for an outlet. Some will choose to write stories. Others will try poetry. Some will even have a go at fanfiction, short stories, blogging, script writing or something else entirely. But each of them will have their own unique ideas and writing voice that they’re developing; you only need to look at the number of teens that publish their writing in online communities like Wattpad and Archive of Our Own to show that there are countless teenagers out there with overflowing imaginations and the urge to connect with others through the art of storytelling. Of course, online communities have their pitfalls as well as their benefits. So what about writing as a group, sitting together face to face with other like-minded aspiring writers? Trying out new writing styles, building friendships, sharing story ideas – sounds great, right? But what sort of writing activities work best for getting teens to write together in a group? If you know some friends that love writing and you want to try it together with them, here are three ideas to get you started. Thinking on your feet Prompts drawn at random from a hat are a surefire way to generate great ideas for one key reason; they give writers direction. Every writer out there knows the horrible feeling of staring at a blank piece of paper with no idea what to write. Prompts from a hat avoid that problem by providing a rough outline, but simultaneously the freedom to explore it in your own way and tell a story unique to you. Random prompts also encourage writers to adapt quickly and put aside any preconceived notions they have about the topic, with the random selection having the potential to lead into some fantastic discussions with other group members as everyone shares their prompt and their initial ideas. For example, if you were doing a creative writing group session on dystopian stories, you could come up with a series of prompts for everyone to draw that focus on an element of society that the dystopia is centred around (eg one prompt could be something along the lines of, ‘Society becomes obsessed with physical appearance – plastic surgery is seen as not just normal but a necessity to ‘fix’ people, with even the slightest physical blemish or deformity looked down on as being horrifying and disgusting…’ whilst another could be something like, ‘Conformity is so deeply engrained into the social norm that everyone acts almost identical and follows a strict regime – even wearing bright colours is enough to make you an outcast in your community…’). The prompts don’t need to be long – a sentence opener, a title, even a collection of random words will do fine – but whatever writing style or genre you’re focusing on they can plant the seeds perfectly for young writers to flourish. Writing and Gaming – when worlds collide… Ever heard of a concept called ‘gamification’? It sounds complicated, but basically it means applying typical elements of games (eg point scoring and rules of play) to other activities. It’s an idea that fits perfectly with writing activities – rather than just getting everyone in a group to sit quietly and write to the same theme or prompt, get them to engage through roleplaying and similar styles of performance based games. Fantasy is a genre that is perfect for gamification – imagine that everyone in the group was all given the same task of writing about a magical quest, but each had to write about a different path? For instance, say your quest was to collect ingredients for a potion – each person in the group could write about collecting a different ingredient and have a different magical spell or weapon to help them on their quest. It’s like Dungeons and Dragons come to life! Making it silly? Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it… Making a writing task deliberately silly and nonsensical might sound counter-productive, but there’s method to the madness. For a start, it’s a great way to make the writing activity interactive – laughter is a great method to break down those barriers of social awkwardness, shyness, uncertainty and so on to get everyone in the group feeling easygoing and friendly. And it can help with the actual writing too. For example, a horror writing session could focus on having everyone come up with a silly title to a cheesy, low-budget horror movie – inevitably everyone would come up with corny, laugh out loud titles like ‘Curse of the Evil Lawnmower’ or ‘Attack of the Undead Pandas’! When everyone comes up with their title, they would then have to share it with the person next to them, who would be tasked with writing a horror story based on their ridiculous title. But even though the title would be silly, the regular ‘rules’ of horror, such as building suspense and creating frightening scenarios would still be in play – just think of all the creative ways in which lawnmowers or pandas could be written to make them genuinely creepy or threatening! Those are just a handful of ideas on how to make writing in a group both entertaining and inspirational. Got any suggestions of your own? Get in touch to share your ideas. Find out more about Igniting Writing here. Plus, check them out on social media: Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.
Finally, Reviewed by Vandana, 12
There is magic in everyday life. Sometimes we overlook it or take it for granted, but it is there. There’s magic in friendships, in perfectly timed coincidences, in the learning space between childhood and adulthood. The optimistic, lighthearted novel Finally by Wendy Mass celebrates this fact and highlights the uniqueness of even the most seemingly average people and places. The protagonist, Rory Swenson, is about to turn twelve. She’s been waiting for this day her whole life: when she’s twelve, she’ll finally be able to do a multitude of things that her friends have been doing without her for years. Get a cell phone. Wear makeup. Exchange her glasses for contact lenses. Babysit . . . Rory is used to feeling overlooked, left out. She’s heard people call her “mousy” and “bookish.” She’s quickly forgotten in a crowd; and stemming from this is perhaps the most hurtful thing of all: she feels she doesn’t matter. Rory hopes her big day will change all that. But as each long-cherished wish is granted, Rory is forced to consider the difference between what she needs to do to fit in and what she truly wants. I first discovered Finally at the school book fair in fifth grade. I was captivated before I had finished the first page. I had found a person just like me in the honest, cheerful Rory, and I walked home that day feeling like I had just made a new friend. Two years later, Rory has accompanied me through all the ups and downs of school and summer. Her chatty, entertaining voice brought sunshine to my darkest days, and though Finally is no action thriller, the protagonist’s hilarious mishaps and sensitive heart weave the kind of tale which never grows old. Frank, funny, and full of surprises, Finally is a story that spins many themes together, and consequently appeals to a wide range of readers. For one, it portrays the pressure to grow up before one might be ready, which nearly every middle schooler experiences at some point in their life. It touches, with a fresh take on the classic coming-of-age story, on the search for an identity both unique and “normal.” At the end of the book, quiet Rory realizes that in her own, brown-haired, makeup-free way, she has changed lives. This is the part which I always treasured, because it reminded me that while some people are special in different ways from others, everyone is truly unique. Under a captivating layer of humor, action, and frank reality, Finally broadcasts a powerful message, like pills dissolved in jelly: everyone is different, although it can be hard to realize. The pull to satisfy the mirage that constitutes the idea of “normal” can be strong, but it is possible to fight it. And when you do, the magic inside you will be unleashed. Finally by Wendy Mass. Scholastic, 2011. Buy the book here and support Stone Soup in the process! Have you read this book? Or do you plan on reading it? Let us know in the comments below!
