NEW!!! SPILLING INK SHORT STORY CONTEST!!!

Short Story Challenge: Invent something you would love to use (for example, a peppermill that dispenses candy, contact lenses that can read people’s minds, or a stuffed animal that springs to life to defend you from bullies). Then write a story about how that invention goes horribly wrong. Or write about how it transforms someone’s life.

Word limit: 1,000 words or less

For ages 9 to 12

First Prize: A Skype visit to your class & a signed copy of Spilling Ink. Ellen Potter will chat with you and your class via Skype for a half hour and answer your writing questions.

Second prize: A signed copy of Spilling Ink

Third prize: A signed copy of Spilling Ink

All three winning stories will be posted on the Spilling Ink Creativity Blog.

Deadline: Monday, January 17, 2011

U.S. residents only

WE DARE YOU TO ENTER:

Type or cut-and-paste your story into the Spilling Ink Contact Form. Remember to include your name, age, and correct email address.

The Land of Our Imagination

 

A warm welcome to Riley Carney! She is seventeen years old and has written eight novels, including a five-book fantasy adventure series for grades 4-8 and an urban fantasy trilogy for ages 12 and up. The first book of the five-book Reign of the Elements series, The Fire Stone, was released in January 2010, and the second book, The Water Stone, was released in July 2010. Riley is also passionate about promoting global literacy for children through her nonprofit corporation, Breaking the Chain, which she founded three years ago because she believes that the key to breaking the cycle of poverty is by increasing literacy. We're so happy to host Riley as our guest Creativity Blogger this week. Here she talks about that "most crucial element of storytelling" - imagination.

The Land of Our Imagination

by Riley Carney

 "The woman stared, her face frozen in shock, as a man wearing a black and white striped shirt ran by the window of the café where she was sipping tea from a yellow mug. Police cars screeched to a halt, sirens blaring. The police officers leapt from their cars and raced after the escaped prisoner, tackling him to the ground so hard that his plastic skull cap popped off. Cars, trying to avoid the police cars blocking the street, skidded into the wall and exploded into a shower of white and black bricks."

 The conclusion to this story might have come later that day or a week later, after my brother and I had spent hours on the floor, clutching the mini-figures of our sprawling LEGO town; mimicking the voices of our characters as they went about their lives and spewing spittle as we made the sound effects of racing cars and trucks colliding into plastic walls. A world of adventure and discovery was opened to us as we created and ruled the city of bricks.

 Years later, I realize how important those imaginary adventures with LEGOs, or stuffed animals, or dress-up clothes and blankets have been in my creative development and growth. As a writer, there is much I can learn from my younger self. During those hours playing with LEGOs and stuffed animals, I discovered something that is now vital to my writing: unfiltered imagination. As we grow older, pure, uncensored imagination slowly abandons us. The magic of childhood games loses its appeal and gullible wonderment is replaced with a resigned acceptance of reality.

 Yet, imagination is the most crucial element of storytelling. 

 No matter the genre, the ability to tell stories comes from the ability to create, and then transport the reader to, a world other than our own. It is true that stories come in all shapes and sizes; magical lands, family struggles, or the terrors of middle school. Some stories are firmly rooted in reality, others are not. But the act of writing is always about imagining and sharing someone else’s story, be it inside or outside the confines of reality. Perhaps there are some slight differences between the imaginary adventures of childhood and the process of creating a story, but at its essence, the idea is the same: to explore, to push our boundaries, to reach for new heights.

 Only by staying connected to our inner child can we create a story that is as fully explored and constructed as it can be. With the exception of a biography or an autobiography, every book begins in our imaginations. Every genre, from children’s fantasy to realistic fiction dealing with difficult personal or social issues, depends on imagination to create plot, characters, and settings. Only through effective imagination and then vivid translation to the page can a story be told compellingly. A reader can instinctively sense when the imaginary world in the story does not feel real to the author, and the only way a story can feel real to the author is if they have fully tapped into their imagination.

Children love to imagine and pretend, no matter how outlandish or improbable their story. It is with that same love of creativity and thrill of adventure that we as authors must approach our writing. We cannot restrict ourselves because we are afraid that we will lack sophistication, or because we are too trapped in reality or in the rules of writing. The technicalities can be addressed later in the writing process. At the beginning, we must put that all aside. In a way, when we write, we must become small children again, reveling in the pretend world our words create and gleefully inventing the lives of our characters.

Writing is about stretching our imaginative capacity to the limit. Writers need to be intrepid adventures, just as my brother and I were years ago when we engineered events and shaped our characters’ lives in our LEGO town. The world of words is an unknown land for us to explore. Sometimes we need to pull on our kid shoes, leave the real world behind, and allow creativity to flourish as we enter the land of our imagination. 

 

Playing Ourselves Into Wide Open Spaces - part two

As if last week's riches weren't enough, here is the conclusion of Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich's wildly inspiring and moving blog piece. Read it... and then go out and play! -Anne

Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich: Playing Ourselves into Wide Open Spaces - part two

A few years ago, I left myself with a week to write about 200 pages (don't ask) of 8th Grade Superzero, then called Long Time No Me. The only way that I got out of that one was through play. I came up with the silliest, wackiest, most ridiculous things -- and I threw them in.  Even though much of the text didn't stay, the anything goes sensibility freed me to get it done, to laugh at myself amidst the frenzy. And one of the characters made up during that week remains, and is one of my favourites.

 • Let go of rigid definitions of ‘writing’ and ‘creativity’.  Celebrate the notes you write to yourself, the doodles, the scratches and sketches.

• Read something from a new-to-you cultural tradition. There's more to life than the Western Bildungsroman, and Aristotle isn't the end.

 • Write a Top Secret note to a friend, and fold it up till it’s tiny and tight. Pass it to them as a surprise.

• Make up your own words. Invent your own language.

 • Make a book, like an accordion book, or a craftzine for kids. I use Ruth McNally Barshaw’s technique of making an 8-page booklet out of one piece of paper constantly.   Mail your book art to yourself.

• Write a song, and sing yourself to sleep.

• Take opportunities to be multiliterate.  Many of us already fool around and mess about in digital spaces. We write differently on Twitter, Facebook, on our blogs, and in articles. Embrace the opportunities for playful writing with digital tools.

 • Make a glog!

 • Make an audio recording of your story. What additional texture does your voice add, the surrounding sounds, the silent spaces?

 Play allows us to “think, wonder, learn, and  explore without worrying about skill" writes Ginger Carlson in Wonder Child. Ask why, and why not. I'm often asked where I get my ideas from, and usually my answer hovers between sarcasm and embarrassed incoherence. Edi at Crazy Quilts opened up so many new stories and worlds and creative opportunities for me just by asking Why Do You Write?.  Jenn at Book Lovers Inc. asked authors "If someone wrote a biography about you, what would the title be?". My answer was one of the more mundane (I had two, either "Overthinker and Underdone" or "Wholly Hybrid"); other authors played freely, coming up with hilarious and delightful results.

 • Do Nothing. Chances are, 90% of the people around you already think that you do nothing all day, and then a fully-formed book and a giant check pop out of your mouth just before bed -- so don't worry about it. Sit. Lie down. Sit on a stoop, on the grass, in the bathroom. Just be.  Do not try to think of something. Or anything. Or that thing. Or this thing. Let the thoughts that have been tiptoeing around the perimeters of your soul, waiting patiently to be welcomed in, waiting for you to give them leave to speak above a whisper.  Two wonderful pieces on the importance of that kind of meaningful rest were include Jim Burke's Holding A Space for Oneself, and Sister Diane's treatise on relentless input and the creative mind.  Read them, and then don't do anything.

On the night before my mommy died, we played together. My sister and I read aloud from the back issues of Readers Digest that were as plentiful at the hospital as the beeping machines. I read the corny jokes and kids-say-the-darndest-things anecdotes. I got to an article about the benefits of bananas, and my mother, a former nurse, hospital administrator, community health center director, teacher, and author who could no longer speak aloud, mouthed that my sister and I should always eat bananas.

 The next morning, we went to the hospital and up to her room; we were the first to discover that she had died.

 We spent the day in a hospital lounge; friends drifted in slowly, shocked and proffering food. I refused, and refused, until finally I barked "Bananas. I'll eat a banana." And I had one, and then another a bit later. And when one of my other mothers was unsuccessful in getting me to eat anything else, and I'd said "only a banana" for the umpteenth time, like a stubborn two-year-old, she laughed. A short laugh that was filled with so much love, kindness, sorrow, and gentle playfulness, it almost breaks me to remember it.

 But the memory of that almost playful moment on that terrible, horrible Day is precious. I can smile when I remember that that particular other mother and mine sat through those endless shows and story plays, boring baton routines and costume changes; even the one where we charged extra for a cake that was made crunchy by the inadvertent addition of eggshells. I can remember to put my whole self into every moment of my life, to play with my story, to be all that I am. So much of my creative spirit was lit by the stories my mother told, of when-she-was-a-little-girl, and Anansi, by singing and dancing to Boney M.'s  "Brown Girl in the Ring" -- I fantasized more about being that girl than I did about being a princess. I smile and remember to play to celebrate the myth and magic of life. I play to remember why I believe in Brown Girls in the Ring, burning bushes, magic wardrobes, fairies, Voldemort, and Heaven. We can play to, as author Amanda Blake Soule writes “fully know, love, and embrace our creative selves".  I play to write all of my stories, the funny parts and the sad ones. I play to take my work seriously, and myself less so.  Play for a while. Play as if your life depends on it. I think, sometimes, it does.

Playing Ourselves Into Wide Open Spaces

Stuck for ideas? In a creative rut? Feeling stale? Just read this fabulous creativity blog piece overflowing with ideas to get you unstuck by Olugbemisola Rhuday Perkovich. She is the author of 8th Grade Super-Hero, called a "masterful debut" in a starred review from Publisher's Weekly, and that was an Amazon Best Books of the Month in January 2010. Check out this excellent interview on Cynsations if you'd like to learn more about her. And now... prepare to be inspired! -Anne 

Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich: Playing ourselves into wide open spaces 

I do many things quickly. I’ve always torn through books, can move my apartment from disaster to passable in moments (with the help of closets and hidden corners), and can whip up a meal in minutes. Writing stories is not one of the things that I do fast. I am a slow, slow writer.  Most of the time, I don’t accept or enjoy this; I get anxious, I feel guilty, I pace my tiny (messy) apartment, talking back to my cat, or worse...just checking out that one thing on the Web.  I see that Author X just got a 'very nice deal' for Book 17 in her paranormal series, while I am still plodding along on sub-normal, solitary Book 2.  I know the things that help me work -- walking, knitting, stitching, browsing, doodling, kneading and pounding...but I am reluctant to turn to them. Why? They feel a bit like...playing, and that’s not allowed.  Why?

 Remember when you were told to "Go play?" When it was the right thing to do? Watching my daughter play out her stories, I get glimpses back into my own childhood. Stories were a whole body activity, whether it was curling up under my mother to listen to a read-aloud and accompanying songs, or splaying out on my grandmother’s sun-splashed veranda, with a handful of living room Canada mints surreptitiously munched, or the countless, endless “shows" that we did, productions small on actual talent but big on enthusiasm and costume changes and and-then-what-happeneds...my whole self was engaged. My daughter today, in creating her shows, hurls her whole self into them, even when it seems to involve an impossible feat of the imagination (I listened to recent story play that appeared to involve Hercule Poirot, Beyonce, and a family of hedgehogs).  There are grand gestures, bellowed songs, and of course endless costume changes.  I believe in the importance of play, of playing into our stories, and playing out, of playing with language and life.  It is a particular creative way, and I cling to its remnants, the memories in myself, because I know that in order to write, my whole self has to ‘play’ along. Twyla Tharp, in The Creative Habit, writes:  “Everything that happens in my daily life is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it."

 There is a kind of 'being', that I think of as play, too. One of my best friends and I have a tradition of 'laying around'. It essentially involves food that someone else has prepared and being apart together, in separate rooms, if space allows, just not doing much of anything. Maybe one of us reads and the other watches TV. It is one of the most important rituals of our friendship, as is the habit of saying a line from the movie Clueless, or sending an inside-joke text that says only "Scone!"; these patterns of playfulness that were the foundation for our work together in making a book trailer for Superzero.  We worked on it with no real plan, or script, or idea of what we were doing in some sense. But we had a long history of laying around and playing around, and when it came time to work, we could play well together (if not always nice).

  Tharp also writes about muscle memory, the way that your body remembers the physicality of days gone by. There’s virtual memory, where you project yourself into feelings and emotions from your past, and let them manifest themselves physically; there’s sensual memory, when smells, tastes, sounds, and colour flood the imagination with images from the past.

 • Play one of your favourite childhood games. Think about the circumstances in which you used to play, what you enjoyed most about it, who enjoyed it with you. Play a current favourite of a child or children today. Play Charades, Simon Says, Twister, hopscotch in any of its global variations.

• Remember. Look at childhood photographs, tell yourself stories of when you were young. Jot them down, or don’t. The important thing is to experience them through the remembering. Recall a particular age, and let your mind just travel back to moments in that time; the music, the movements, the small and large pleasures, the heartbreaks, the sounds, the smells...the deepest joys.

 • Do something you missed out on doing when you were a kid

 • Daydream

 • Run, wheel, or roll as fast as you can

 • Go down a slide, or swing in the breeze

 • Music: Who are the most playful artists on your playlist? Listen, and dance.

• Dance to the music in your head, the way you do in your mind's eye.

 • Invent recipes

• Make yourself a high tea. Use fancy dishes. Dress up.

 • Pig out. Eat finger foods all day. Eat breakfast or ice cream for dinner.

 • Eat a piece of cake. (I just put that there, because, well...it’s cake!)

 • LAUGH

 • Take a walk, and talk to yourself. We're writers! We're allowed to be weird.

 • Go on a neighborhood adventure. I owe much thanks to artist Paul Ramirez Jonas and his Key To The City, a public art project. I call myself an explorer of the city, but participating in this all summer allowed me to play in all kinds of ways in all five boroughs of New York, and the story ideas came at every turn.

 • Dress up for no reason at all.

 Playing with art and craft supplies is an important part of my play. I'm very partial to craft books of the 70s, all of the needlework, stitchery, knitting, -- everything exudes an enormous and unfettered playfulness.  And most of the time, the processes and products involve everyday materials, trash-into-treasure, playing with what you have. One of my favourite artists, Jean Ray Laury writes, “The greatest potentials are often within the smallest things. The person who finds no pleasure in little events rarely finds pleasure in life’s big occasions. It is not necessary to see the Pyrenees or the Himalayas to appreciate the wonders of nature -- you can watch a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis in your kitchen window and witness one of nature’s most spectacular sights. I am not suggesting that it wouldn’t be wonderful to get to the Himalayas, but it’s silly to sigh over the possibility so distractedly that you don’t even see the garden spider or praying mantis you’re stepping on."

 • start a collection of tiny things.

 •find some rocks, and paint them.  Or just let them be.

 • Make or buy some good quality clay and just pound it, squish it, roll it -- make and old-fashioned pinch pot or one of those hand print paperweight thingys

• Make a puppet. And then play with it. Talk to it.  (Come on, you know you talk to yourself ALL the time. Why not a puppet?)

 • Make a collage. Want to be inspired by genius at play? I recently visited the Louis Armstrong House Museum and learned that he was also a <a href=“ http://www.theparisreview.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5835">collage artist</a>.

 • Make a pipe cleaner (chenille stem) creature, a corn husk, stocking, or clothespin doll

 • Play with a dollhouse, or make your own

 WordPlay: Writing, in cognitive science terms, involves complex “problems" that require higher-order thinking skills to be solved. Play helps me think, to sort things out, to figure out what I do think. We acknowledge (sort of, except when we want them to take tests) its importance in child development. The ‘authorities’ tell us, so it must be true:  “Play allows children to use their creativity while developing their imagination, dexterity, and physical, cognitive, and emotional strength," from a statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics, “...play is important to healthy brain development."  As creative people like Emeka Okafor know, play creates change. In Part Two, I'll focus on the importance of playing with words, language, and story, and then, to paraphrase Madeleine L'Engle, letting that chaos settle into cosmos. 

Storytelling Through Comics

 

If you've ever wondered, like me, what exactly is the difference between comics or graphic novels and picture books, prepare to be enlightened. We are honored to host Tracy White on our blog this week. She is a webcomics pioneer who began publishing her work online in 1996. A native of New York City, Tracy has made comics for gURL.com,  AOL, and Oxygen TV, as well as a docu-comic for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum about the experiences of immigrant teens living in New York. Her webcomic has been nominated twice for an Ignatz Award. Tracy is currently an adjunct professor at the Interactive Telecommunication Program, which is part of NYU's TISCH School of the Arts. 

How I Made It to Eighteen is her first book. Booklist called it "a compelling and highly textured story." "Stacy’s story of anxiety, abuse, self-harm, addiction, and depression, is also a story of an interesting, creative young woman and her friends..." said VOYA. "White’s novel uses stark black-and-white imagery to construct her frank and honest story of a fraught adolescence." In this blog post, Tracy offers tips and ideas on the myriad ways of combining words and images.

Tracy White: Storytelling through comics

My favorite way of telling a story is through comics. Comics are different from picture books because images in a picture book generally re-enforce what the text says to help young children read. Go on, take a look at one you have in your house (there must be one somewhere). If there’s a sentence like “It was a bright and sunny morning when Henrietta Pig ran into town”, there will, in all likelihood be a picture of Henrietta the Pig in the morning (the sun will be rising) running down a road that has a sign pointing into town, or some variation on that scene.

Comics, on the other hand, often use a combination of words and images to create a new idea, each aspect providing one part of the bigger picture so to speak. In a comic the sentence “It was a bright and sunny morning when Henrietta Pig ran into town” might be accompanied by an image of Henrietta sneaking away from a farm with a mean looking farmer wielding a knife nearby.  Or you not even have the general description words like “bright sunny morning”, “Pig” and “run” because those details are in the drawing. So the sentence above your illustration could end up being “Henrietta thought it’d be a good idea to take a trip”.             

If you like the idea of combining words and images, but prefer to focus on the words, you can collaborate with an artist/friend who’d rather draw. Or if you like the idea of also doing the graphics but don’t know where to start, or drawing seems daunting you can try using photographs (pose people, dolls, action figures) or cut outs from magazines or any other idea that comes to mind. Don’t underestimate stick figures. They work really well too. Just check out “Diary of A Wimpy Kid.”

Of course there are many other ways to manipulate comics like the use of color. If the story is sad you could have all you drawings in a shade that suggest that emotion. Your choice font can express a mood too: A pointy, jagged thin font conveys something totally different from a round, flowery cursive one.  And then there’s placement of objects within a panel, layout of the pages, the shape of each panel, lighting, detail vs. simplicity; the list goes on.  Each of these decisions, like the paragraphs, periods, commas, verbs, nouns and parenthesis that we use in text based stories, can help forward your narrative.

Mostly though, just enjoy playing with the virtually unlimited number of ways to present your tale.