Welcome to the weekend, or whenever you’re watching this video through the magic of time travel!
Now, the way I’m structuring this is that there are two lessons and activities during the weekdays are shorter to account for any work days or school or extracurricular activities. But the weekend task is something a little bit longer, and hopefully something extra fun to look forward to.
So this weekend, let's plan a movie night at home.
If you want to make a big trip to the theater to see something you've been wanting to see, that's fine, but this would work best to be able to occasionally pause and talk about what just happened, or discuss the story or the character and why they made the decisions they did.
Also, I hope the tic-tac-toe activity brought to life some fun and crazy combinations that might fuel some story ideas that you can both bring to the table when we get to brainstorming and outlining in the next section.
Something to think about when you come up with a story idea is the 'big What if' that both makes a story interesting and also makes it easy to explain to someone else.
Like, "What if a boy gets a letter to a wizard school?" or "What if toys came to life when you weren't in your room?" We'll get more into how we structure things, but a lot of times the part where things get interesting happens about 10 minutes into a movie and it's called the inciting incident.
With some of your tic-tac-toe examples, see if they spark any what if questions that would be really interesting. It could be something based around a place or location "what if there was a city underwater and everyone there lived in a big bubble." or around a character "what if there was a kid who could fly" or an event "what if one day a new teacher replaced the old teacher and nobody knew why."
The hope is that when you think of the big What If, it gets your imagination going and your reader will find it interesting too.
Now, the next big question is WHO. Who is this story about? There's an old saying that goes 'write what you know,' and it might be good to have a main character that is a little bit like one of you.
For my kids, we usually create a character that's a year or two older than them since most younger readers tend to prefer to read about a character they might look up to instead of someone younger.
What does a main character want?
What comes with character is figuring out what they want, and why they can't have it. In a lot of animated musicals, one of the first songs often has the words "I want" literally in there so we all know that there is a difficulty in this character's life. They want something and they don't have it and they believe life would be better if they just got what they wanted.
However, here's a big trick to unlocking how stories work.
What they want usually isn't what they NEED, they just don't know it yet.
So often times, a story can simply be broken down into
Character wants something, but can't have it.
Character gets an opportunity to chase after the thing they want because something special happens.
Things are fun at first, getting to pursue what they want.
Then things start to go wrong, and they realize what they wanted either isn't possible, or they messed up.
Finally, because of the journey they have been on, they have changed and grown (hopefully), and discover what they really, truly need, and it's usually something deeper than what they said they wanted at the beginning…and figuring that out is the key to unlocking the end of the story.
Phew, that was a lot. And we'll go into all of that way more in depth later.
Activity: Movie Night!
Okay, I've thrown a lot at you, but what I want you to do is to find a movie that is one of your favorites, and one you've seen a time or two. Maybe you can pick something from a bracket, or maybe you can do a bracket of your favorite films and figure out what to watch.
However you decide, when it's time to hit play, I want you ready to think about the main character and WHY they are the main character for this story.
Figure out what they want, what is stopping them, how they go after it, and how they figure out what it is they REALLY need by the end of the story for their life to be better.
Now, not every story will be like this, but odds are pretty good that the one you pick will have some of these basic plot structures.
Feel free to pause and talk about things when you come across certain moments that you recognize. Finding those moments will help you tell a story about an interesting character, and your reader will want to spend time with an interesting character and follow them wherever the story takes them.
Oh, and don't forget the popcorn.
Share this post