Saturday, May 19, 2007

Another Writing Challenge - Can You Remember? Can You Adapt It?

What is your first memory, or your second one or third one?

Try writing a picture book based on one of these memories.

Try writing about it the way it happened, or take the memory as a seed and plant it, then imagine how it might sprout and then nurture it.

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Writing Prompt for Today - TimeCapsuleChallenge

The library system in Queens County, a part of New York City, is celebrating its one hundredth anniversary. One way library goers are celebrating is selecting things to be put in a time capsule made of two steel trunks. Among the items to be put there: the children's book THE POLAR EXPRESS and  a sleigh bell to ring while reading this popular children’s book. (excerpted from the "Queens Courier" newspaper online, April 28, 2007)
A challenge for you - which children's book would you select to be put in a library's time capsule, and why? OR which type of children's book would you like to write and get published so it could be put in a library's time capsule?

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Writing Prompt for Today - From Printed Word to Movie Screen

The new children's movie "The Last Mimzy" (2007) is based on a classic science fiction story featuring children - "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" (or "Mimsy Were the Borogroves") published and written in 1943 by Lewis Padgett (pen name for Catherine Lucille [C.L.] Moore and her husband Henry Kuttner). There are similarities and differences between the original story and the movie version, as seems inevitable when printed stories are made into movies. Both "Mimsy" and "Mimzy" each in its own way features a young someone noteworthy in the history of children's literature, and each features the young main characters in different although similar ways. Think about the ways the young characters are featured in each version, and how the young literary person is important in each version, then consider writing your own fictional children's story that features either a real literary person or a literary character from classic literature.