Welcome to the first in what we hope will be an on-going series of Check It Out blog posts on student authors here at OPS. We begin with Ava, a sixth grade student here at OPS who recently began posting her story Nine Spirits on the social storytelling platform Wattpad. Here is a brief synopsis of the story: "If you ask for Ash, you'll get a shy boy who knows nothing of his past. What he does know is that he has one task he needs to accomplish: find his long-lost mother. With some help from a companion, of course. But when the time is set until the sundown of his sixteenth birthday, things get, well, impossible. Would it be too late for Ash to revive his mother? Would the fate of the world crumble beneath his fingers? The following is an interview we did with Ava about writing Nine Spirits: Nine Spirits is the story of Ash, a boy who wakes up in a hospital with only a few scattered memories of how he got there. He is a mysterious and intriguing character. What inspired this character and his story? Ava: So I made the plot of the story and thought that it would be interesting to have this boy that is lost on a totally different Earth compared to the one we see now. I see him as this clueless but curious teenager that really wants to find out his past and, more importantly, his family. I feel like this motivation drives the story and makes the plot exciting. What has been your approach to writing this story? Did you have the entire narrative arc thought through before you started writing or are you letting your writing take you wherever you feel the story needs to go? Ava: I usually just plan out the setting and the characters, and just the overall plot in general, and then I just follow along the characters to wherever they need to take me. It's like I'm not just creating this world, but I'm living in it too. Stephen King said that he lets the characters take over, and I had to agree. To me, the characters and their personalities run the story, and not just the author playing the puppets. Is writing a hobby or something you’d like to do professionally at some point? Ava: Before third grade, it's never really occurred to me that I could be a potential author. That time fiction hasn't even played a role in my life, as I was literally writing, by hand, an essay four to five pages long. That was second grade, when I was learning in another school. During third grade, that's when I really got motivated about fiction. With the help of my teacher, Mr. Tucker, I became more and more interested in the art of writing. Based on your story tags, climate change plays a role in Nine Spirits. Is climate change an issue that you are interested in and something that has had an influence on your storytelling? Ava: So what happens in the book is that Ash tries to revive his long lost mother, for the sake of the Spirits that created the world, and the sake of the people on Earth. I thought that without the "Earth mother," that is what is slowly causing climate change and other things, like plastic pollution. It does not play a major role, but is also important to consider in this story. You are using Wattpad to share your story. What about this online writing platform interested you? Ava: I was introduced to Wattpad about April or May this year, and suddenly I realized that this could be the source I could share my writing with. Before that, I've always used documents and never had a chance to express my writing. So for a few months, I used it to read other stories and to work out some story ideas with drafts. This is my first published story, and it had been nagging me for about a month before I put it in the computer. Then I found a writing contest on the website, and I immediately became interested, as I have been itching to prove what I can do with a keyboard and some creative ideas.
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