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.)
Getting the Idea
Write about something you know, something that happened to you, something you would like to happen to you… Remember, if you are writing a fictional story, it doesn’t need to be true – it’s fiction – and you as the author can make it as exciting as you want!
As an attorney, I had the privilege of writing a lot of stories, I told a lot of stories and I listened to a LOT of stories. Those stories were ALL supposed to be true. One of my jobs was helping the judge determine what was true and what was fiction. As you write stories you get to determine whether you are telling a factual account or if it is fiction. All of the Adventures of Andy Ant started in my mind with something that happened to me when I was a kid.
The story behind the story: The first Andy Ant story I wrote was The Swimming Hole Disaster. Clearly, the story is fiction but the event prompting the story was very real! Here’s what happened…
The events happened when I was about 8 or 9 years old. It was a hot summer day and two of my cousins were visiting our home in Colorado from where they lived in California. Our home in Colorado was perched on a large cliff overlooking the Gunnison River. My dad had always warned me to never go swimming in the river unless he was there. It was a very stern warning and I knew he meant it by his intense look into my eyes and the way he recounted a story or two about kids who didn’t mind their parents and had drowned.
My brother and cousins thought it would be great fun to go swimming in the river. The idea was proposed to my dad and he agreed to hike with us down the trail to the river. We all started getting ready for the adventure when the phone rang. It was a call for my dad, who was a preacher, and it seemed that someone would always call him at the most inopportune time. He could tell that we were all getting antsy to cool off in the chilly river – so he told us we could take our innertubes and go down to the river. But, he warned us not to get into the water until he arrived.
We scurried down the trail to the river, some 175 feet below our house. When we arrived at the river the first thing my cousin, George, decided to do was get in the water. As he sat on his innertube he kept telling us how good the cool water felt… and that is the beginning of The Swimming Hole Disaster!
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