The Ink Splat is our monthly activity letter filled with inspiration sparking challenges and resources guaranteed to inspire your creativity. Featured in this Ink Splat is Elisabeth Dahl, author of Genie Wishes. Submit a response to the writing challenge for a chance to be published online! What are you waiting for?
The Challenge: Growing Up
Think of a scene or moment in your life that made you realize that you were growing up. Maybe you reacted to your grandfather’s teasing differently than you would have a year or two earlier. Maybe you put on your previous spring’s baseball pants and found they were too small. Maybe you realized that suddenly you had a crush on someone you’d played flashlight tag with as friends for years. Be sure to pack what you write with lots of concrete details so that the reader really feels what you’re feeling, hears what you’re hearing, and sees what you’re seeing. Remember: in most cases, showing works better than telling.
Submit your response for a chance to be published online HERE.
Genie Wishes by Elisabeth Dahl
This sweet, funny novel follows fifth-grader Genie Kunkle through a tumultuous year. From the first day of school, Genie knows there will be good, bad, and in-between. The good? She’s in homeroom with her best friend, Sarah. The bad? Sarah’s friend from camp, Blair, is a new student at their school, and is itching to take Genie’s place as Sarah’s BFF. The in-between? Genie is excited to be elected to write her class’s blog, where she’s tasked with tracking the wishes and dreams of her class. But expressing her opinion in public can be scary—especially when her opinion might make the rest of her class upset.
Elisabeth Dahl authentically captures the ups and downs of a tween girl’s life, and the dramas—both little and big—that fill the scary transition between childhood and adolescence.
An interview with author, Elisabeth Dahl
1. Authors often draw upon life experiences in their writing. Did you encounter any of the challenges Genie faces in your own childhood?
Oh, definitely. Although blogging, e-mail, and cell phones weren’t around when I was in fifth grade, the emotions associated with the transition from childhood to teen- and adulthood don’t really change. It was a happy but sometimes wobbly time, a time of dawning realizations. Like Genie, I was a faculty/scholarship kid at a private school and my family was a bit unconventional and I was a little on the plump side and by fifth grade I was really pretty aware of these ways I was different from my classmates. Fortunately, I didn’t have the friendship drama that Genie experiences in fifth grade, but I saw classmates experience it.
I lent Genie one particularly choice memory: the time a more “mature” girl shrieked upon noticing that I didn’t shave my legs. I felt so unjustly accused. Who even knew that was something you were supposed to do? I didn’t have an older sister or cousin to clue me in to this sort of thing, and neither does Genie.
2. In Inklings classes we play theater games to explore our characters. Do you ever think about your characters in everyday life? At the grocery store or in the park?
I love the idea of exploring characters through actual theater games–that’s cool!
I definitely think of the characters in everyday life, especially since I may use them in other books. For a while, I was tweeting on Genie’s behalf, commenting on little things I’d come across that I knew she’d like. If I found a photo of baby hedgehogs (hedgehoglets!), for instance–a photo I knew she’d adore–I might tweet about it. And whenever I walk into our pool, I picture Genie and her friend Sophie there, the summer after GENIE WISHES ends. Characters really live on inside you, whether or not they continue to appear in books.
3. What about the line drawings in the book? Did you do them, and if so, were they part of the project from the start?
I did do them, and yes, they were part of GENIE WISHES from the very first hour. I love books with illustrations. (I wish more books for adults had them!) I particularly like relatively simple line drawings, the kind you see in everything from the ORIGAMI YODA series to THE LITTLE PRINCE to the columns of the NEW YORKER magazine. I felt that I could create illustrations for Genie that would offer readers another glimpse into her as a character. Her father is an artist and art teacher, so art is part of her life, even though I don’t think Genie herself is on the path to becoming a professional artist.
4. What book are you reading now?
Because I write for both children and adults, my bedside table stocks both kids’ books and adults’ books. Right now, on the children’s side, I’m reading Lisa Greenwald’s MY LIFE IN PINK AND GREEN. And on the adult side, I just finished Maria Semple’s WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE? I tend to read mainly what I write–character-driven, realistic fiction.
5. What advice do you have for aspiring young writers?
Oh gosh. First of all, as a practical matter, it’s not a bad idea to get your name (or something close) as a URL, for a possible eventual website. Then again, maybe by the time you’re writing professionally, there will be some new, more flexible technological information venue. Anyway, I’m glad I had the foresight to nail down www.elisabethdahl.com long before I really needed it.
Also, on a far more important level, try to take classes where you read books, stories, essays, and poems not as a literary critic (what most English classes teach you) but as a writer–that is, from the perspective of the writer. I’m talking about classes where the instructor will guide you in talking about why the writer made the choices he or she did at the points he or she did, and where you do lots of writing too–and workshop that student writing as a group.
Keep a notebook of ideas and observations–small, specific things. You never know what detail or thought might fit into something you’re writing later. Also, you won’t always be the age you are now. The notebook will help the older you remember what it was like to be the you that you are now! Thank you, Elisabeth Dahl.
You can learn more about Elisabeth Dahl by visting her website.
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