Story Writing Hints
By
Gerald D. O’Nan
Author of the
Adventures of Andy Ant Books
(Note: I will try to give you hints and ideas about writing stories using the 8 books in The Adventures of Andy Ant as examples. Having a set of the Andy Ant books available will help you understand the context better, but it isn’t necessary if you have a good imagination.)
The Story Behind the Story – Secret of the Spooky House.
If your town was anything like mine, there were a few houses that I was sure were really spooky. Some kids even thought they were haunted! There was an old three-story house on Main Street where some of the older kids said a wicked old man lived – and he kept some little kids locked up in his basement. I never spent much time around that old house, just in case the big kids were right.
We lived outside the main part of town and we had our own spooky house to deal with. It looked a lot like the house on Main Street and if you thought it was spooky on the outside, wait ‘till you got on the inside. This was a place my mom often took me and I dreaded each visit.
The house belonged to an elderly lady in our church and she regularly opened her home to the other ladies in the church for Ladies Aide meetings. Her husband had died a few years ago and in her later years, she had become a hoarder. You could barely walk into the living room through the stacks of newspapers, magazines, partially finished quilts, and who knows what else. There was no place to sit on the main floor so we always made our way up a narrow staircase to a room on the second floor that was less cluttered but had the very distinct smell of cats.
I would have been tortured by nightmares if it hadn’t been for the love that Mom always displayed to the elderly lady and the other ladies who met there. Somehow, my mom’s calm demeanor had a calming effect on me – though I continued to dread going to the meetings.
The spooky house in my story was based on the distinct and not-so-fond memories of my visits to this house. But, in my story, the person who lived in that spooky house was actually based on my mom. And the dog in the story is actually my own dog, Freckles. The cat in The Secret of the Spooky House was the cat that I could always smell (but never saw) in the room where the Lady’s Aide met.
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