So on my last day in Chesterton, IN, I visited Liberty Intermediate, and I had fun talking with 5th and 6th graders. They were really good listeners. One of my favorite questions about the writing process came from a very attentive girl sitting in the front row. We were talking about how you can write down story ideas in your journal so you have them ready when you go to make a book. This curious student asked what the process is for taking an idea from a rough journal entry to a finished book. I think that’s pretty insightful for 6th grade. I talked about how my books are basically nonfiction, ecological stories. But over the top of the exciting science about cacti or salamanders, I like to add a layer of fiction. The human characters and their adventures are made up. So I could use my journal to record science facts, or I might pull an interesting adventure or character from my journal for use in the fiction part of the story. Some of the experiences that happen to the characters in the story actually happened to me. Thank you, Liberty Intermediate! Keep up the good work!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 11th, 2005 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Author Visit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.