I'm just plugging away on the outline. I have, what I believe to be, a strong opening that captures the overall theme of the movie and the main character. The beginning is set up where the crazy family is encountered for the first time.
Many years ago, my wife and I wrote a Christmas Children's Story. We really liked it and read it to a few kids that we knew (we didn't have any kids of our own at the time) and had some parents read it to there kids. We made notes on what they thought worked and didn't and wrote another draft. But we didn't know anything about the children's market so it was filed away.
We first envisioned it as a picture book, but as we are now well acquainted with how they are structured, we knew that it was too long and wouldn't fit. We were at the library a few weeks ago to get some prizes for our kids for the summer reading program. There was this book called, "The Notebook of Doom: Attack of the Shadow Smashers," by Troy Cummings. It was a children's chapter book for early readers around 1st to 3rd grade. I showed it to Eileen and told her maybe our Christmas story would work well like this.
I found the first book in the series, "Rise of the Balloon Goons," at the library and checked it out. We both read it so we had a good feel for what the structure is like.
She went through and made the reading level easier and made sure our scene changes worked well for chapter breaks. We started going over it together this week and I think it turned out wonderful. It had been so long since I've seen it, it was great to read it again. It's a fun story with a good character arc, and I think it works well for a chapter book.
We also started working on names for the chapters which has been almost as much fun as writing the story.
No comments:
Post a Comment