Are you looking for a way to get your kids more interested in writing, or to help teach a child who wants to write how to create and sustain a writing practice? Author Natalie Rompella is here to help with Secrets of Storytelling: A Creative Writing Workbook for Kids. She walks kids through the beginning, the middle, and the end to help them understand how to craft a story well and how to stay excited about writing.

With a focus on short stories, Secrets of Storytelling offers 100 story prompts for young writers along with lessons on conquering the blank page, capturing ideas, building worlds. writing description, plotting, creating characters, writing believable dialogue, finding balance in your story, coming up with a successful ending, and editing your work. The prompts are interspersed with the short lessons, so they learn to build on what they just learned and put in into practice.

The workbook is filled with whimsical illustrations and lots of encouragement, inspiring quotes from well-known writers, and fun illustrations. The exercises include writing for a minute about the first thing that comes to mind, think of a writing idea for every letter A-Z, write your own back cover book description for your story, come up with character names for several illustrations and then choose two of those characters to have a conversation by texting, insert yourself into your favorite book and think of how you’d feel, and write a backstory for Goldilocks.

She encourages kids to look at a situation and ask “What if?” to come up with new ideas, list historical events that interest them, draw a map for a fantasy place they invented, write down an overheard conversation and rewrite it, and finally to focus on writing for 20 minutes. She teaches kids concepts like Writer’s Brain, tension, conflict, cliffhanger, dialogue, mood, and self-editing. There are even mini-lessons in formatting punctuation in dialogue and a Q&A section that includes questions like, “Do you have to know the where your story is going before it starts?”

But perhaps most important is the encouraging words about finding the joy in writing, facing the times when the words don’t seem to come, and creating a mood board for inspiration and keeping a notebook or file just for saving ideas for the future. There is no judgment for setting aside a story that’s not working or writing a first draft that’s really rough. Secrets of Storytelling is a fantastic resource for writers aged 8-12. My only complaint with is that it wasn’t around when I was a kid. I would have loved this book and read it so often that the type would have been partly worn off the page!

A copy of Secrets of Storytelling was provided by Rockridge Press through the Callisto Media Publisher’s Club, with many thanks.