It has been both fun and challenging to tell the Spaceheadz story across media. Print is a controlled, linear form of storytelling. As the author, I control the pace of the story by its position on the page. In contrast, digital storytelling is a whole different form; different parts of the story can be accessed at different times and in different ways.Guest Blogger: Jon Scieszka
It has been both fun and challenging to tell the Spaceheadz story across media. Print is a controlled, linear form of storytelling. As the author, I control the pace of the story by its position on the page. In contrast, digital storytelling is a whole different form; different parts of the story can be accessed at different times and in different ways.
So I’ve been asked to talk about an element of writing my book, The Emerald Atlas, that I struggled with, and honestly, it’s hard to pick just one thing. I could talk about the number of times I pulled my hair out for imagining that I could write a mind-twisty time travel story. Or I could talk about the difficulty of working in a genre as well-established as children’s fantasy, a genre in which I would be using characters and tropes that readers had seen a thousand times before and it was my job to figure out how I was going to breath new life into those dusty conventions.
Elementary students love series titles. They enjoy the comfort of familiar characters, settings, and structures. This is especially true for emergent and newly independent readers, whose reading success with these titles encourages them to seek similar books. (Me personally, I learned to read thanks to Matt Christopher’s sports books.)
One of the wonderful things about stories is their ability to allow us to explore and make believe. Whether as a reader or a writer, stories give us the chance to try on different hats. To see things from a new or different perspective. Or to share a bit of our own perspective with others.