Jack Trelawny School Author Blog: Ideas for kids

Jack Trelawny's Story House - Ideas for kids - Characters

Who is in the story?

Stories have characters.
Ask the question, 'Who is in the story?', and the answer will be 'the characters'.
Characters could be people, animals, ghosts, monsters, mutants... or even robots!
Stories start with ideas.
I collect lots of pictures to give me ideas.
And I ask lots of questions about the pictures to give me even more ideas.
Question: Who is going to be in my story?
Answer: A dog.

Question: What do I do now?
Answer: Look at pictures of dogs and ask lots more questions...

Will it be a small, sweet dog?

Or is the dog big and a bit scary?

Question: What is going to be his or her name?

Answer: I'll look at some dog names to give me some ideas...

Albert Dribble Fetch Fido Fluffy Patch Rover Spot

For the Kernowland in Erthwurld story, I wanted a dog that everyone would love.

I also wanted people to feel a bit sorry for him.

I chose the name, 'Dribble', because he's always hungry.

He drools and dribbles all the time when he thinks about eating nice food because his master - Mr Melanchol Drym - only gives him a little cold porridge every two days.

Then I gave him very long ears, which he trips over when he walks.

Ideas like this can come from looking at pictures like the one below from Guinness World Records...

Harbor the hound has the longest dog ears on the planet!

If a story makes you feel something, you usually want to know what happens next. So, just to make sure everyone would feel really sorry for Dribble, I made Mr Drym very, very nasty to him.

Below is the sketch I drew of nasty Mr Drym and poor little Dribble for the front cover of Kernowland 2 Darkness Day. You can see that I also wrote some words to help me with the characteristics of the two characters. Characteristics are things about the characters which show what they are like. I think it's quite good sometimes if the characters can be easily recognised by their characteristics.