Invent Your Own Superhero: A Brainstorming Journal - Deluxe Edition

By Holly Schindler

Create a brand-new superhero with never-before-seen powers and the perfect arch-enemy. Learn to tell an exciting story!

Award-winning author Holly Schindler turns her attention to helping young writers learn the craft of storytelling. This activity book guides users through creating a new superhero character, but it also uses brainstorming prompts to take young authors through the process of constructing a story with solid characters, plenty of pulse-pounding conflict, and a satisfying ending.

This deluxe edition also includes an original superhero story by Schindler. The Adventures of Super Susan features a hero who insists kindness is a superpower. By reading the story and answering the included supplemental questions, young authors can see firsthand how the brainstorming prompts can become a fully-formed superhero tale.

Great for individual or classroom use. Suggested grades: 3-8.

• Language: English
• Publisher: InToto Books
• Release date: Apr 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386587217

Holly Schindler

I'm a critically acclaimed and award winning hybrid author for readers of all ages--both the young in years and the young at heart. My work has received starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly, appeared on Booklist’s Best First Novels for Youth, PW Picks, School Library Journal’s What’s Hot in YA, and B&N’s 2016 YA Books with Irresistible Concepts and Most Anticipated May 2016 YA Books. My YA work has also won a Silver Medal in ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year and a Gold Medal in the IPPY Awards. My MG work is critically acclaimed as well, having made the master lists for several state readers’ awards, including this year’s Oklahoma Sequoyah Book Award and Missouri’s Mark Twain Readers Award, and has been chosen for inclusion in the Scholastic Book Fair.

Book preview

Invent Your Own Superhero: A Brainstorming Journal and The Adventures of Super Susan, both Copyright © 2018 by Holly Schindler

Published by InToto Books

Cover images © Rawpixel.com, Johnstocker, Konstantin Yuganov, Elnur, AboutLife, Sergey Nivens, cheremuha, all courtesy Adobe Stock

Fonts: Bhatoshine by Typia Nesia, Asparagus Sprouts by Brittney Murphy Design, and Lazy Hand by Jenna Maxfield, all courtesy of Creative Market

Invent Your Own Superhero: A Brainstorming Journal

Holly Schindler

Stop!

Before you start writing, read this:

THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB

One of the most important jobs an author has is thinking. It’s every bit as important as actually putting words down on the page. Beginning authors might say they had only loose ideas when they began to write their books. You might hear them say they discovered what their books were about while they were writing the first drafts. But as authors get farther along in their careers and are faced with tight deadlines, they usually turn toward some method of pre-writing. They outline. They figure out the overall plot. They do character sketches, either with words or by literally sketching out what they think their characters look like. They decide what action needs to take place in each chapter. They know all of this before they begin to write their books.

Why? It saves time, for one thing. Imagine spending weeks, even months on a first draft in which all the author is doing is trying to discover who the characters are and what the main storyline will be. This first draft is almost always painfully sloppy and flawed. Most of it winds up on the cutting room floor. By brainstorming, outlining, or pre-writing beforehand, the author doesn’t have to spend weeks or months on a first draft that will mostly be deleted. The entire book can be plotted and organized in far less time. Days rather than months.

Pre-writing or brainstorming also forces writers to really understand their characters, to make sure those characters will all play vital roles in their stories. It forces writers to nail down the themes or overall messages they most want to convey. Pre-writing often provides a much tighter focus, leading to a better book in the end.

Every author comes up with his or her own tricks and tools to develop the best possible stories. This journal takes you through one pre-writing method. Yes, it will guide you through inventing a new superhero, but this journal is also much, much more. It takes you through the process of creating a great story with solid characters, plenty of pulse-pounding conflict, and a satisfying ending. All the elements authors invent during pre-writing!

One of the strengths of this journal is that you can use it over and over again as a step-by-step process to help you construct any character-driven story. Even if your characters aren’t literal superheroes, stories should always have main characters who are the heroes in their own lives, and these main characters usually have some obstacle standing in the way of their goals (if it’s a person standing in the hero’s way, he or she is acting like an arch-enemy).

HOW TO USE THIS JOURNAL

Grab a fresh spiral-bound notebook, a sketchbook, even open a new file on your computer, and begin to answer each prompt. Feel free to write, scribble, draw, list, color, cross out, start again, etc. Write in sentence fragments if you need to. Write all over the pages. Draw and write, if you’d like. Print your pages out if you’re writing on a computer, and then edit them with pen. Scratch out one idea to put down another. Go wild, go crazy, do whatever it takes to dig down deep and uncover your best ideas.

You’ll soon find that idea generation is unpredictable, messy, and insanely fun!

This journal is filled with numbered brainstorming prompts. Many of these prompts repeatedly ask the same (or eerily similar) questions. That’s because your best idea isn’t necessarily the first one that comes to you. Sometimes, it’s the tenth idea, or the twentieth, or the fiftieth. Answering the same question more than once from different angles gives you a chance to grab onto your most original concepts.

TAKE YOUR TIME

You don’t have to get through this e-workbook in a single sitting.