Local Author Visits SFJH

Submitted by david.thacker on Thu, 12/01/2016 - 13:16
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Mr. Anson’s novel writing class recently had a guest speaker, Tifani Clark. She is a local author of six books, such as Shadow of a Life and On Liberty’s Watch. Her first book was published in early 2014, and only took six weeks to write. She spoke to the novel writing class and 9th grade honors English classes, presenting a creative way to create a plot. She presented her ideas in a series of questions:

  • GOAL- What does the protagonist want/need to accomplish before the end of the book?
  • CONSEQUENCE- What will happen if the protagonist doesn’t reach his or her goal?
  • RESOLUTION- How does the story end? Is it satisfying enough for the reader?
  • HOOK- Does your reader open the book and get completely caught up in what they’re reading?
  • HAZARDS- Is the protagonist willing to make sacrifices or suffer pain to achieve the goal?
  • PAYOUTS- What good things can happen to your protagonist as they try to reach their goal?
  • WARNINGS- Is your reader worried about the goal being reached?
  • SUBPLOTS- What else is going on in the story?

 The class found these methods very helpful, and will hopefully help write great novels later. Ms. Clark was an amazing speaker, and she helped us take our plots and turn them into creative stories with lots of structure and detail. The audience was very engaged with the lesson, helping create wonderful plots out of simple concepts, such as “A boy at school is being bullied” or “The protagonist must defeat the evil wizard”. Getting us to think of plots sparked some creativity in us, and I’m sure that there were at least a few people coming up with stories during our plot-creating.

 Overall, Tifani Clark was very helpful to us, and we hope she will come back soon.

 

Attributions
By Kaylee Ashdown, student