Thursday January 20th Adam Gidwitz, author of A Tale Dark and Grimm, spent time with Younge House discussing the writing of fairy tales.

We are getting ready to write our very own versions of Cinderella and our minds are swimming with ideas about our characters, settings, and plots.   Adam shared his experiences with the stories by the Brothers Grimm and told us about how he approaches retelling these stories.  He actually likes to start, not with the beginning, but with what he feels is the most exciting part.  Not only does it give him the energy to just start writing, but then he knows how to structure the beginning so that the exciting part makes sense.  His advice? Make sure to build tension.  Action without nail-biting, knuckle-whitening tension isn’t very exciting at all.  Afterwards, he read the resulting tension filled moment from his book.

After such a rousing reading, we were very inspired and ran off to write our own most exciting parts!