Write About the First Child

Remember the first child I tell you about? The child that you will meet at the end of this story?

What are they like? What do they need? How do you meet and communicate?

That’s not my story to tell – it’s yours. So have fun writing it!

All Stories are Connected

After Words is connected to real life events. It’s connected to my history, my imagination and my family.

It’s also connected to every story I ever read, wrote, watched, or played and to all the people I have ever met.

Creating a story is connecting to parts of yourself and to others. Who, or what, would you most like to connect to?

Make Sense of Something

Has something happened to you before that you still don’t understand? Is there a puzzle in your life that you would like to figure out?

You can use a story to do that. Start off with the problem and then create a character who tries to solve it.

Throw lots of obstacles in their way – you might get to an answer you didn’t think possible when you first began. Good luck!

You Get to Decide

The writer is the boss of their story.

You can tell the story of a lifetime in ten minutes, or take ten thousand words to describe ten seconds.

All that matters is that you do your best to make it come to life for your readers. If you care, we care.

Ideas

You can get ideas for writing stories from anywhere – from things you know, from things you don’t, from things you’ve seen, from things you haven’t, but want to imagine.

You can pick a photo, a song, an object, a myth, an event – in fact, you can pick anything you like – and use what you pick to springboard you into a story.

The important thing is to start.

Use After Words

There are springboards for stories all over the story I have written for you – from each photo and song, to each hint of something that happens, or has happened.

Try starting a story from something already in this one and see where it takes you.

The story loop goes on and on.

Write Your Own Story

After Words is only an idea of what might happen to you next. In stories, as in life, we get to write our own versions of ourselves, in our imaginations.

How would you like your life to turn out? Go, imagine it, and then write your own story.