The Ink Splat is our monthly activity letter filled with inspiration sparking challenges and resources guaranteed to inspire your creativity. In this Ink Splat, the book and author spotlighted is Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu along with an author interview! Submit a response to a challenge and you may have a chance to be published online! What are you waiting for?
The Challenge: What’s Cooking?
Go into a kitchen and choose 3 ingredients. What do these ingredients look like? Smell like? Taste like? Using your senses describe these objects without giving away the name. Post your descriptions and see who can guess your ingredients!
Try using this new word in your writing:
Gallant is an adjective meaning brave or heroic. For example; she had made gallant efforts to pull herself together.
Published Submissions:
1. By Gianna B.
Thing 1: This is hard and smooth. The bottom is uneven. It smells good. It comes it many different colors and flavors. Green, Red, Sweet and sour… Etc.
Thing 2: This comes in a container and i keep it in my fridge. it smells of strawberries. and i like it on my bagels.
Thing 3: This comes in a box that is tall and thin. some people like them dry and some like them in a bowl with a “cold, white liquid” there is an “original” and a “honey nut” flavor.
2. By Naomi D.
Ingredient One: This ingredient is small, black, and round with white flecks. When I bite into it, it stings my tongue with spicy flavor, almost too spicy all by itself. When I put my nose in the bottle that holds this ingredient, my nose itches and I feel like I might sneeze.
Ingredient Two: This ingredient is pale green and comes in a clump. Each small oval is smooth on the outside and sweet and juicy on the inside, and the smell reminds me of summer picnics.
Ingredient Three: This ingredient is tan and white, and each one is a tiny, crunchy knot. It tastes salty, and is delicious dipped in chocolate or peanut butter. It smells a little like baked bread or crispy pizza crust without the toppings.
3. By Emily G
Ingredient 1: When I hold this ingredient it feels smooth and bumpy. It’s about the size of a ball your dog would chew on. It’s yellow, and it smells like summer.
Ingredient 2: I like this ingredient on sandwiches and hot dogs. It’s also yellow and it comes in a plastic bottle or glass jar.
Ingredient 3: This ingredient is yellow, too, and also comes in a plastic jar–but this ingredient is see-through. On your fingers it feels slimy. This ingredient helps food “stick to your ribs.”
4. By Kiarra
Ingredient 1: one is brown, smells good and is bumpy
Ingredient 2: Another is yellow rough and sour
Ingredient 3: Last but not least it is purple smooth and sweet
Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu
Hazel and Jack are best friends. They play together, go to school together, and hide from the harsh realities of the world together. But one day Jack’s heart grows cold and instead of sledding and making up epic superhero baseball stats with Hazel, Jack climbs into the sled of an icy woman in furs and enters the unknown of the magical woods. Hazel, being one of the few that does not believe that Jack is away visiting his elderly aunt, follows the breadcrumbs into the forest and plans to only return with Jack by her side. Will Hazel be able to get Jack back or will she be fooled by the Snow queen into asking for something completely different?When you have a great imagination like Hazel, it is not always easy to let go of the fairy tales you grew up with and focus on making new friends at your new school. Lucky for Hazel it is her imagination and big heart that serves her in the end. This month’s Spotlight on pick is the perfect mixture of real life adventure and a little bit of magic. Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu tells the story of Hazel and her best friend Jack growing up in a world that does not always make sense. Breadcrumbs is 320 pages and is suitable for ages the 9-12.
Order Breadcrumbs here.
An interview with author Anne Ursu:
1. In the Cronus Chronicles, you based a large part of your story on mythology, and now, in Breadcrumbs, you have incorporated many of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale characters and themes. What appeals to you about building your stories around classic literature
I think some of it is that I just liked these stories so much when I was a kid. I loved Greek myths, and I love the clash that happens when you take these old great myths and put them in the real world. I loved fairy tales, too, and I think it’s really interesting to tell contemporary stories through their lens. These old stories have such powerful themes and there’s so much you can do with them. And I think it makes what the characters go through feel more epic and important—which of course it is, to them! Fairy tales, folktales, and myths are great ways of finding inspiration.
2. You went through many options before settling on Breadcrumbs as your title for this book. A lot of our young Inklings have trouble finding the just-right title for their books–can you describe the process that you went through?
It’s so hard to find a good title. When I settle on one, I tend to get wedded to it, and suddenly it’s impossible for me to think of the story as anything else. This was always called “The Snow Queen” in my head, but it wasn’t a good title for the book since the book strays so far from the original fairy tale. So I made lots and lots of lists, did a lot of brainstorming, looked through the book for good phrases that might work, complained a lot—and it finally just came to me. But it required a lot of thinking and flailing to get there.
3. Your revision process on this book was extensive. How did you feel when you got a really, really long editorial letter from your editor, after you’d worked so hard on the book already? What was your revision process like?
The first draft of my book was about 150 pages. And when I handed it in, I felt pretty good about it—I couldn’t see what needed to be done. So when my editor gave me a 22 page letter with comments for revision I was pretty freaked out. The process of revising always feels really intimidating at first—you feel like you already wrote the book, now you have to write it again. I was very overwhelmed. But I kept reading the letter again and again, and started to take notes on some of it. With revision I tend to start doing the small and manageable things—because it’s too hard if you think about doing all of it. I picked little things at the beginning of the book to work on and didn’t even think about the rest of it. That way, I could really get back into the rhythm of the story again. And then I just took it piece-by-piece. The final draft of the book was over 250 pages!
4. One thing that many of our Inklings love about your writing is all the humor you build into the story, particularly through the intrusive narrator, who’s always commenting on the action of the story. Some of our young writers have tried to use an intrusive narrator in their own work, too. Do you have any advice for these writers? How do they strike the right balance between storytelling and playfulness? How does one create an intrusive narrator?
I think the first thing to do is to read a lot of books with intrusive narrators just to get the hang of it. Maryrose Wood’s The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place is great, and N.E. Bode’s The Anybodies, and A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz. The trick with these narrators is that they are guides that lead you into a story, but after that you want the characters to really take over. You want your story to be told through active scenes, and if the narrator’s getting in the way of that you might need to tell him to pipe down!
5. If you could give young writers one piece of advice, what would it be?
Read. Read everything you can. And read books again and again; you’ll discover so much about how the author does what she does that way.
6. If you, yourself, could live inside any story, which story would it be?
That’s a great question. A lot of fantasy worlds are pretty dangerous. I think I would like to live in The Phantom Tollbooth—everything is so imaginative and so funny! And there’s only so much trouble you can get into, most importantly.
Thank you Anne Ursu!
Order Breadcrumbs here.
Visit Anne Ursu’s website here.
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