Let’s map our way through story time!

My four-year-old I sat down the other day to do some writing, but instead of doing it the usual way (in which he narrates something for me to transcribe), I decided I’d roll out an activity I often do during an author visits at a school or library: Interactive mapping.

Mapping is a fantastic strategy for brainstorming ideas or to simply getting the creative juices flowing. I have many students (especially older ones) who find it hard to sit down and begin the process of writing—they find it hard to turn off all the other things that are pestering them. This sort of activity can serve as a “warm-up” exercise or a transition for the brain. Plus, it’s fun (and shouldn’t creativity be fun?).

For Hiro and I, we started out in one corner of our respective pages, and mapped our characters’ journeys toward treasures in the opposite corner. We created specific problems and obstacles along the way. We both did separate maps, building off our own ideas, though Hiro asked me to swoop in at certain points to do some drawing and labelling for him. (Hiro had an “ice” theme in his adventure—I especially like his “ice monster.”)

As mentioned above, I do this kind of thing with elementary and middle school students all the time, but it was the first time with a preschooler, and it ended up being far more entertaining for him than I would have guessed. 

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Activities for kids: Small room—BIG world

It sure feels like our world is shrinking with the covid-19 crisis. We’re stuck at home, can’t gather, can’t visit.

Personally, I’m reverting to my age-old survival tactic: Disappearing as much as possible into my imagination.

As a children’s author and specialized arts and creative writing teacher, I’d like to help kids do the same, so I’m presenting some of my favorite activities.

Recently, I posted about building a shrink ray with household items. The bonus project was to imagine that every member of the family was shrunk by the device by building peg-figure versions of everyone!

Well, if you can imagine you’ve an inch or two high, then your world is now suddenly BIGGER. So, I invite you take the next (tiny) step . . .

Map your GIANT world

I’ve done this project with schools I’ve worked with in Canada, Korea, and Thailand, and will be posting some examples of my students’ past projects.

What you will need:

• Paper
• Drawing supplies: pencils, colored pencils, markers, crayons, fine-liners—whatever you like to use.
• Hey, I’m not going to stop you from using stickers or glitter either . . . but you know: the CLEAN-UP!
• A BIG imagination!

In this activity, you’re asked to imagine a single room in your house as an epic landscape that you have to cross as a miniaturized person. So, for example, a pile of dirty laundry might become “Mount Clothes” or a tipped-over soda can might become “Fizzy Falls.”

This is a fun way to think about perspective—and, also, to just imagine a bigger, vaster world.

Here are some examples of past maps—and at the bottom of this post, I’ve posted links to handouts that you can use to help with this project. I always find a bit of brainstorming helps at the beginning of every project!

Handouts

First of all, here is a map template.

Of course, you can do it on blank paper, but a whimsical frame makes everything more fun, if you ask me. (Also, I want to point out that this is the exact same frame I used for the map in Kendra Kandlestar and the Box of Whispers, which, by the way, is also about tiny people).

Here is a “Small Room — Big World” brainstorming sheet to help get you thinking about the types of items and pieces of furniture you might want to include in your map, and how to convert them into landscape items.

If you’re looking to add a writing project to do this—NO problem! Just imagine you have to navigate your way across this vast—and possibly dangerous—landscape! (Also, I’ll post a nice little wrinkle for you in a couple of days to make this epic journey even MORE fun!)

Stay safe, stay well, and stay tuned . . .

How a new children’s book series reminded me about the magic of world-building

Author (and friend!) Kallie George recently wrote a guest post on my blog in which she described her world-building process for her brand new children’s book series, The Heartwood Hotel. 

Since that post, Kallie officially launched the series with a fun and engaging event at Kidsbooks, our local bookstore that specializes in catering to young readers.

The launch was a stupendous success. Families were lined up down to block as they waited for the doors to open, clamoring to hear Kallie share her new world. For Kallie, that mean not only mesmerizing the kids with a reading of the first book in the series, but also providing amazing and tangible pieces that were completely interactive.

I was reminded, once again, about the magic that can happen when you really put the “build” into world-building.

Mapping

In the earlier post on my blog, Kallie talked about using mapping as a way to construct a believable and interesting world. If you haven’t read that post yet, then I really encourage you to do so.

Mapping has long been a key technique that I use in my own writing process, and, as Kallie describes in her post, I helped her map the Heartwood Hotel, too. Personally, I map all kinds of spaces in my books, everything from entire worlds to one-room settings. I find it’s a great way to “stage” a scene and to help make it logical.

These maps don’t need to be slick and professional for the purposes of the author’s writing, but, of course, they can end up becoming the basis for something your publisher can use for the final book.

Dioramas

The kids who turned up to meet Kallie at her book launch were in for a real treat. Kallie and her husband Luke put in many late nights working on a model of the Heartwood hotel–a sort of doll house complete with furniture and accessories.

The only thing missing?  Well, that was the figures. But no worries! Kallie provided wooden peg figures so that the kids could make their own animal critters that were the perfect scale to roam around the Heartwood Hotel environment.

Of course, the kids got to take their peg figures home with them, but I love the idea that they could imagine that they got to stay in the hotel first.

Props

Well, if you’re going on a vacation, you also need a suitcase. Kallie provided miniature suitcase templates that could be cut out and folded into shape.

If you weren’t so lucky as to attend the launch, you can still make your own Heartwood Hotel suitcase. Just head over to the official website to download the template.

The final activity that I wanted to mention was that the kids attending Kallie’s book launch also had the opportunity to leave behind a record of their stay at the Heartwood Hotel by filling out an entry in one of the many pages in the beautiful guestbook created specifically for the book launch.

I thought this was a fabulous idea . . . the kids could base the entry on the peg figure they created, or even put their own name (though, really, no humans are allowed at the Heartwood!). This guestbook really helped immerse the kids in Kallie’s world.

Why put the build into world-building?

If you’re a fantasy author—especially a fantasy author for kids—I think you have a really great opportunity to bring your world to life in every way you can. Maps, dioramas, really can make for a magical book launch or school visit.

Building for your readers

We live in an interactive but highly-digitized world. More than ever, there is something enchanting about kids being able to look at a tangible, three-dimensional prop and to hold it their hands. I can’t tell you the number of times a child has examined one of my dragon eggs or magical potions and asked, “Is it real?”

So, these add-ons can really help attract kids to the worlds you have created or deepen their affection for the love they already have for a story. If you ask me, they are a must for a book launch or school visit!

Building for you

So, making magical potions, building a diorama, sketching a map . . . they might be great for promotion, but what do they do for the book itself? Do they make the words better?

I think so. The writing process can be arduous and taking a break from the screen to build something connected to your world can really help you examine your story from a different angle. I like to think of it as getting to play in my world, but in a different way than using words.

I can recall so many times in which I’ve imagined a magical item, written about it, then built a prop of it, only to realize that the final prop is vastly different than the way I originally imagined it—in a much better way. So, in essence, prop building helps enrich the ideas in my story. When you’re a fantasy writer, that’s critical.

Building for teachers

Kallie and I have worked as creative writing teachers, often in tandem, for many years and we have always taken the philosophy of putting the “build” into world building seriously. We often encourage our students, young and old to draw maps of their worlds, build diorama of key settings, create costume designs for characters, and to find or fashion important props.

Of course, these techniques can also be used to help kids connect to books as readers. In my time as an author, I’ve seen pictures of kids connecting to my worlds through costume, dioramas, and figurines. Recently, one student even made her own history book or “EEN-cyclopedia” of my worlds!

What do you think? If you’re a teacher, do use these techniques? If you’re an author, do you use them? If so, which ones?

 

 

Mapping an adventure—and the plot for a story

I love maps. My own Kendra Kandlestar books certainly feature a few of them (you can check them out at kendrakandlestar.com). There are also plenty of maps that I do in my sketchbooks just to help me plot out critical scenes or sections of my books. It’s an approach to writing that I try to bring into my author visits to schools—like today.

I spent the day at John G. Diefenbaker Elementary school as part of an outreach literacy program sponsored by the Richmond Children’s Arts Festival. While I did my monster design for the youngest group (the kindergarteners to Grade 2s) I decided to do the mapping activity for the rest of the student body.

It’s a fun activity, to be sure, but what I especially love about it is that it combines so many different aspects of writing, such as brainstorming, plotting, character development, and setting design.

It works like this . . .

I’m at the front of the class with an easel, where I design an adventure with ideas from the students in the audience. But the great part of this situation is that the students are also armed with paper and pencils so that they can design their own individual adventures, putting in their own unique ideas.

We start by drawing a stick-figure version of a main character in the bottom lefthand corner. Then, in the top righthand corner (so as far away as possible from the character), we draw an object that was stolen from that character. Then, it’s just a matter of getting the character to the object—but not without making said character deal with a whole slew of obstacles first!

I led two different sessions of this map making activity at Diefenbaker Elementary. During these two sessions, we certainly came up with some intriguing problems—and solutions. Not only did we have the ever-popular exploding volcanoes, deadly deserts, and spooky forests, but also giant sand worms, a trick trap door, and a school of chicken piranhas (don’t ask).

By the end of each sessions, the students ended up with basic plots that they could then transform into words or, as I like to call them, instant stories!

Below is a smattering of the maps that the students created. I know many of them are going to take their raw brainstorming and redraft them into more polished maps, but I love the energy of their initial output!

Mapping your way through the muddle

Writing is hard. Especially for me. I’m just not one of those people that can sit at a computer screen and have magic instantly flow from my finger tips. For me, it seems my ideas always have to take shape through notes, doodles, sketches . . . and maps.

I’ve been doing a lot of mapping lately, more than ever before. Sometimes I work on detailed maps on the computer to help conceive of a world or building. However, these days I find that I’m doing lots of quick sketches in my notebook to quickly diagram a specific room or space while writing a scene. This is more or less so I can just track the logistics of the character movement. I guess I just don’t have the type of brain that can figure it out until I map it out on paper.

This photo of my sketchbook shows some of those maps, which, of course, make no sense to anyone on the planet except for me. But they helped push me through a couple of scenes, so they have served their purpose. The other diagram is the more detailed floor plan of a world I’m building. After a while, I find I have to print out a computer-generated map and just mark it up the old-fashioned way.

I also did a side view of this particular environment. I must have done five or six versions of this building so far.

I’m also helping the editor of my Kendra Kandlestar series, Kallie George, work on the world for one of her new projects. These are just some of the rough sketches so far. They need to be very much refined! In any case, I think she is going through the same evolution as me, and deciding that she needs to rely on mapping more and more. It not only helps her figure out a world for herself, but so that she can communicate it to her editor.

Mapping a plot

For day 3 of my writing camp at CBIS international school in Korea, we focused on mapping out our heroes’ journeys as they searched for their boxes and other treasures. We started by examining some of the common elements of fantasy settings and then together brainstormed a map in which a hapless hero (in this case, ME) went in search of a treasure. My students had quite a lot of fun during this activity, adding obstacles to get in my way. By the end, I had fallen into a pit, was whirled away by a tornado, and was even hunted by one of my students who had taken on a Gollum-like form.

This exercise really helped them understand how complications are intrinsic to a good story. When we were done the group activity, they then made their own individual maps. Here some photos of their work in progress . . .

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