Your Story Matters

March 15, 2024
Tips and exercises for budding writers from a veteran Canadian novelist. Aside from opening with an ungracious comment that studying how stories work is "more fun than the other things you learn about in school," Scrimger presents plenty of spot-on suggestions and insights for crafting effective beginnings, middles, ends, and revisions. "My hack," he writes, "is to look inside yourself for something you truly care about. It's harder to be boring when you care." Along with this and other essential basic principles, he infuses his discourse with pop quizzes, writing exercises, and occasional recaps that culminate in a closing section of summary takeaways. His claim to an approach that will produce not only better writers but better readers, TV watchers, and gamers may be a bit of a reach, but like all good storytelling manuals, this one provides both warm encouragement and a selection of time-tested tools for hesitant wordsmiths. Given that Scrimger draws heavily on school talks and workshops, the tone does occasionally wax didactic, but the book's mood is lifted by the many amusing examples and anecdotes, plus McFadzean's broadly comical spot art and cartoon caricatures. People depicted in the illustrations are racially diverse. A bit lecture-y, but engaging and useful nonetheless. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 10-14)

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May 1, 2024
Grades 4-7 Children's author Scrimger shares his love for storytelling in this writer's guide for middle-grade students. Although in his introduction he disparages science, math, and languages ("none of these subjects are really fun") in relation to writing, Scrimger uses his passion to offer solid advice through upbeat, useful, and occasionally comical explanations and related interactive quizzes and exercises. He breaks writing down into stages, with extensive detail given to planning before the story itself is even written. He uses a pizza analogy throughout in which the crust (setting), toppings (characters), and oven (the problem that drives the main character) work together to create a delicious story. Other details, like looking to the feelings of fear, sadness, and anger to begin a story and even modeling favorite fiction passages to understand technique, are rarely seen in writing guides for this age level. The section on writing addresses the ubiquitous beginning, middle, and end construction as well as insightful tips on style. Because no writing is complete without rewriting, Scrimger concludes with descriptive checklists to improve story elements.

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May 10, 2024

Gr 3-7-Where do you begin if you want to write a story? Scrimger offers a plan broken into four parts: preparing, modeling, writing, and rewriting. More than that, he provides examples and encouragement with wit and humor that match the cartoons by McFadzean, known for contributions to Mad magazine, The New Yorker, and more. What could be a grind of grammar rules offers surprisingly few, with the suggestion that readers look at almost any published story and make their punctuation look like that. Four types of writing: description, action, dialogue, and insight are discussed. The "Insight" section relates to character motivations. Using a hook to link the conclusion to an earlier part of the story is explained and encouraged. This carefully crafted manual offers exercises and step-by-step tasks to complete a story while being entertaining and encouraging. Significant is the advice to "be careful about telling someone else's story instead of yours." Scrimger bases this work on long experience with presentations to classrooms, dedicating it to students who listened. VERDICT Practical and entertaining, this is a worthy resource for budding story writers.-Janet S. Thompson

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