Hello Inklings!

This month’s Ink Splat Author Interview features Inklings authors! These youth, ages 8-18, will be published in our upcoming book releases this September. Our Inklings Book 2024 features youth in third through eighth grade, and our Inklings Book 2024: Teen Edition features ninth-twelfth graders. 

In our live interview, these inspiring authors gave our community a glimpse inside their creative process. They shared about what inspired their stories and poems, how they planned and drafted their pieces, how they tackled creative blocks, and strategies they used for revision. We’ve included highlights here for you to enjoy. Creativity is contagious, and we’re sure you’ll catch it while reading this interview!

Learn more about the Inklings Book Contest here.

Writing Challenge

If an Ocean Wave Were Human …

 In our Inklings Book interview, Maya Mourshed spoke about her process of anthropomorphizing numbers and discussed the fun and challenge of creating a story for untraditional characters. When you anthropomorphize, you give a non-human character traits that a human might have. You might create a character out of an animal, an object, a force of nature, a concept, or a phenomena.

Your writing challenge this month is to choose two non-human characters and bring them together in a scene. You might write this scene as a script, in scene-form, as a poem like you might in a novel-in-verse, or even as a page of panels, like you might do in a graphic novel. In your scene, be sure to choose a setting, a challenge for the two characters to face, and consider what the relationship of these two characters may be as the scene begins. Have they met before? Is this their very first encounter? Will they work together to solve a conflict, or will they struggle against one another?

Here’s a list of potential characters to spark your imagination, but feel free to choose your own characters if you prefer.
Tornado
Redwood Tree
Campfire
Clock
Lantern
Snail
Penguin
Queen Bee
Cello
Artichoke
Fountain Pen
Sandcastle
Windmill
Elevator
Doorbell

Once you’re finished with your scene, we’d love to see what you wrote! Did you know that as an Inklings member, you can submit your creative writing on our Inkwell app to share with an audience of enthusiastic readers? You can ask for revision feedback on a work in progress, or submit a finished piece and hear back from readers about what they loved. 

Join us and share your writing on the Inkwell! 

We started our interview talking about inspiration. Many of the Inklings Book authors had been particularly inspired by the books they read.

Q: What are your favorite books? How does your reading affect what you write? 

Eleanor Yue: Some of my favorite books and authors are the Thea Stilton series, The Piper McCloud series, which includes The Girl Who Could Fly, the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, and the I Survived series by Lauren Tarshis.

Amrit Sivaramakrishnan: My reading affects what I write a lot. Like with the character building. My story that I submitted for the book contest is realistic fiction, but my fantasy reading really carries through everything I write. In fantasy, a lot of the characters have classic hero traits like courageousness, and kindness and other classic traits that you would expect a character to have. And I integrated those traits into my character in my Inklings Book story in a way you could see them in real life.

Penelope Wong:  Sometimes when I’m stuck, I try to write in the style of an author. I like how some authors focus on describing everything in the room or on using a lot of figurative language. When I write in another author’s style, it might help me focus more on the character’s feelings or on improving the dialogue.

Olivia Veroy: I get influenced in my writing style, the descriptive language I use and, and like others have said before, the characterization of people in my stories. Especially in the case of Terry Pratchett books–I love his whimsical writing. And I try to incorporate that playfulness into some of the happier scenes in my short stories.

We went on to discuss what our youth writers love most about writing.

Q: Why do you love to write?

Naomi Chi: I like writing, because it’s a concrete way to put thoughts onto paper. It’s a way of answering questions. What if there was a giant library somewhere … with flying books? You get to answer those kinds of questions, and you get a lot of control over what you want to put in your story, too. So you end up with a story that is entirely your own. You definitely get influenced by outside sources, I would say, but the story is also something that you have made yourself. I think that process of creation is fun.

Bella Dowd: I like writing because it allows me to take thoughts and ideas from my mind and put them somewhere else that’s not just in my head. And it can be an outlet for feelings. Also, I really enjoy making characters and stories come to life.

Henley Ferguson: Writing for me is just an escape from the true reality of life. And there are no limits when it comes to fiction. So I always feel like writing makes me happy. And I feel like I’m kind of like in a whole different world when I write.

Annabelle Boak: I agree with Henley. I mean, for me, writing is all about reality. It’s about creating new realities. Sometimes in the hard moments, it’s about escaping reality. Writing also helps me process reality. And, like Henley said, writing just puts me in a whole other mind. And that’s really unique and wonderful.

Mason Hong wanted to create a fictional world that he wanted to see in a book but that he hadn’t yet found in his reading.

Q: How did your Inklings Book Contest piece begin?

Mason Hong: I first started writing my piece as an assignment, a narrative, for sixth grade. But after I finished, I felt like I wanted to expand it. I felt like I wasn’t really able to finish out the story in the time I had and the page constraints of the assignment, so I decided to build upon it more. I got the idea for my setting because I wanted there to be a story set in the sea. I’ve read many books set on land, like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson. Or in the air like Silverwing. But I’ve never really seen books that use the sea as their setting. I wanted a book that focused on family while being at sea, with the bonds of families that never break.

Kimberly Bowman: My poem is called Chronicles of a Younger Sister and it’s written from my sister’s perspective. I’m a senior and this year and I started writing this poem in November of 2023 when I was really getting into writing my college applications. I was thinking about what my next four years are going to look like. During that time my sister was going on a week-long school retreat that I had gone on four years earlier. And when I came back, my mom had said that I seemed different. And so all of a sudden, I was thinking, “Oh my gosh, my sister is going to be different! What is she going to look like in four years when I come back to visit?” So I was writing this piece and thinking about how my sister’s life would look like without me around and how a relationship could change.

 Next, our authors gave us a peek into their writing process.

Q: What was your favorite scene to write?

Khloe Ugarte: I really liked writing the scene near the end when Amy was in the hospital and she was looking for the files. Writing about the clocks and the symbolism there was fun, too. That scene was easier to write than the first portion. And I was more used to writing in a diary format by the end.

Q: And what were the most challenging scenes to write? 

Maya Mourshed: For Outnumbered, the most difficult scenes were when Zero was throwing multiplication signs at the notable and neglected numbers and trying to turn them into zeros. And the reason why that was a difficult scene to write was because I have difficulty writing scenes where the characters are in a crisis that is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. I also tried to make it fun by bringing Zero more into the solution. Actually, as the solution to the equation rather, since my piece is about math. I liked incorporating my math knowledge into my piece.

Q: Did you ever get stuck while writing your contest piece, and if so, what did you do to get unstuck? 

Amaya Chugani: All the time, every single time I got stuck, I just found it best to take a break and say, “Well, you know, I’m gonna come back to this later.” For me, breaks are usually up to a week or two. And even when I came back from my break with this piece, I kept thinking: This is not going to work. This is not going to work. And I kept getting frustrated with myself. In the end, I needed to put away my writing for a while. And I when I finally came back to it, and I had cleared my mind, I said, “Let’s look at this from top to bottom and figure out what’s happening.” Lots of people tell you that when you have writer’s block, take a break. But sometimes taking a break doesn’t work. Sometimes, you’re still going to come back and be annoyed. And the best thing you can do is to be patient with yourself. You have to accept that sometimes you’re gonna get mad and that’s just all part of the writing process. And when that happens, you basically just to sit down with yourself and say, “Top to bottom. Let’s figure this out.”

Faith Parker: Whenever I got stuck, I would just get up and go do something else. I might take a break and go eat. Eating definitely heals the mind. But if you have a bunch of time, then you can also walk away for two weeks, or even a month. You know what I’m saying? And definitely, I feel like giving it time makes my writing even better.

Naomi Lam: I got stuck a lot during the writing process, especially during the end. And my advice for other writers is to write down whatever comes into your mind. Or try multiple different ideas, because you can always edit your writing later. And if you feel demotivated, you can take a break, or talk to your friends or family.

Raya Ilieva: Something that’s been really helpful for me is reading author interviews. I don’t know why. It’s a healthy form of procrastination for me where I feel like I’m still kind of working on writing or something related to writing. I get a lot of insights from those. I have some printed out in my room and I refer back to them. I also love reading writing craft books. And one more thing: I usually I do my first drafts by hand in a notebook because my brain likes that better and I can be more honest. So, when I’m stuck, I can just go back to my notebook and free write about the characters. I put them in scenarios that won’t make it into the final story but that help me get to know the characters a little bit better. I usually find that one of these three strategies help me get unstuck.

Not surprisingly, these energetic creative writers are full of enthusiasm for their next projects.

Q: What are you working on next?

Alex Rodriguez-Bader: In my school, every eighth grader does a recital project which is basically a year-long passion project focused on anything that you want to do. So I chose to write and self-publish a collection of short stories. One of those short stories was The Audition which I also used as my Inklings Book submission. So right now I’m kind of recovering from this big writing project a little bit. I wrote six or seven stories throughout the school year. I put my collection away for a little bit and then went back to read them over and see what I’ve learned. Soon, I plan to start writing new ones. I have the summer ahead of me and I’m not going anywhere, so my main focus is going to be to write some new stories, mostly based on what I’ve learned through doing my school project and this Inklings revision.

 We heard a number of other exciting plans from our writers, and can’t wait to see what they create next. 

The upcoming Inklings Book 2024 and Inklings Book 2024: Teen Edition are full of even more inspiring insight and process notes from these exceptional youth writers.

Stay tuned for announcements about our combined book launch party in September 2024, when you’ll have another chance to hear reflections from this year’s authors, as well as hear them read excerpts from their pieces in their own voices.

You won’t want to miss it!

Check out our previous Inklings Books and all of our recent Ink Splat authors’ works at our Bookshop.org Store.