In my last post of this series I talked about The School Story by Andrew Clements and how it influenced me to want to be an author. This post is going to focus on the series Boys vs. Girls by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor which influenced my writing in other ways. If you haven’t seen the last post yet head here,
When I started researching about the book industry, I tried finding books with advice from authors. In a few of them was a suggestion to observe what was around you. Observe how people talked or acted, observe the environment, etc. I took this to heart and started doing that. Just like those authors, I was able to write better because I could write a scene or dialogue and base it off of something I saw. Even The Skateboarding Dream has a few details like that.
The Skateboarding Dream has lots of interactions between girls and boys. There were things I wanted to tell and show in The Skateboarding Dream so, that maybe there could be a little more understanding of each other in the world. Also I wrote it into The Skateboarding Dream to give a better example to the tweens, and teens.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Boys vs. Girls series tells of a couple sisters and a couple brothers who compete with each other and kinda go at it a little bit. When I read it as a tween/teen I thought it was hilarious. It made me laugh, and lightened my mood a bit. The Boys vs. Girls series was one of the first books that started me in the direction of writing humor and having a focus be tween/teens interacting with each other. It wouldn’t be the first to set me in this direction.
After reading the series, I wrote a few of my own stories that were a lot like it. The Skateboarding Dream was not one of those. Eventually there were other story ideas that came into my mind that I worked on instead. Many of my stories that I started in my tween/teen years had similar scenes in them. A girl who can get along with boys, someone trying to understand how that could be possible or how to do it, school, friendship, humor, etc.
In the next post, I will be going over the Phantom Stallion series by Terri Farley.
