Author Advises Bolingbrook, Romeoville Students

Photo: Author James Kennedy inspires nearly 200 Valley View School District 365U students at the 8th annual VVSD Middle School Writers Conference at the Bolingbrook Golf Club.

Submitted by Valley View School District 365U

Pay attention to everything going around you.

That’s the advice author James Kennedy gave to nearly 200 Valley View School District 365U students this morning at the 8th annual VVSD Middle School Writers Conference at the Bolingbrook Golf Club.

“Getting ideas is easy. Writing is hard. Listen to your friends. Watch the news. Watch TV. You get some great ideas from TV,” he told the aspiring writers. “Go through a lot of ideas in your mind and learn how to fail quickly and move on.”

Kennedy equated writing to having a swimming pool full of poop in which someone places a diamond ring every day.

“You have to learn how to go through the poop every day to find that diamond ring,” he said. “You have to blow through it fast to find that ring.”

The author of “The Order of Odd-Fish” admitted to being inspired by books like “Harry Potter” that included a male hero experiencing good fortune generally in a forest our mountain setting. As a result, his writing was an urban fantasy focusing on a young girl who was cursed.

“I worked on it for a couple of years and put it away for a while,” he said. “It helped that I walked away from it.”

Kennedy spent time with groups of students, showing them how to choose characters and write a short story about their fully-costumed battles in his “Dome of Doom.”

Students also attended several other break-out sessions led by VVSD language arts teachers including:

●Using images to inspire your writing

●Where ideas live: Characters, plots and pieces

●A story in six (words)

The VVSD Middle School Writers Conference started as a way to help Brooks Middle School students discover their personal writing talents. In recent years it expanded to include all VVSD middle schools.