This week's post was written by intern Emily Imbarrato.

This week we had C. Alexander London, Laurie Calkhoven, and Geoff Rodkey visit us at Imagination Academy. C. Alexander London kicked off this week by telling us about his many books, as well as his up and upcoming project, The Wild Ones. Some of his other books for children and teens include Dog Tags, Tides of War, and Proxy. He told us that when he was a child he hated to read but he loved to tell stories to his friends and this helped him decide to become a writer. He explained what a story needs: a plot, conflict, setting and characters. Then we did an exercise where we created our own characters.  The childrens’ characters included a hamster, a chocolate chip cookie, a superhero and a cat. Alexander told us that our characters should be very descriptive and that we should know our characters better than anyone else. The participants filled out a worksheet called “Getting to Know Your Character.” They figured out what their characters looked like, dreamed about, and kept secret.

Laurie Calkhoven joined us on Wednesday for a fun-filled day of history. Laurie is the author of many non-fiction and historical fiction books, including the Boys of Wartime series, I Grew Up to Be President, and Heroes of Olympus. She told us that she got her idea for the first Boys of Wartime from a biography she wrote about George Washington. She learned that George Washington used spies for his tactics during the Revolutionary War, so she thought that would make a wonderful story, which it did. In the first Boys of Wartime book, Daniel at the Siege of Boston is about a twelve year old boy who works as a spy for George Washington after the Boston Tea Party. She told us that ideas can come from anywhere but you have to keep your eyes open. According to Laurie, we can get our ideas from other books, assignments, eavesdropping, dreams, people and places.  As a writing exercise, everybody picked a word and we were to use all of them to write a small story. Some of the words that we had to use were: ice cream, cherry, awesome, violent, and friendship. Laurie then had us write a story as a group, which rapidly developed into an epic battle over the life of a blue bulldog. It was truly an exciting day.

We ended this week with Geoff Rodkey, who is the man that has written many screenplays such as Daddy Day Care and RV. He has also written children’s books like The Tapper Twins and The Chronicles of Egg. This was a fun filled day of laughs and lessons. Geoff taught us that in order to write we have to be bored, but not boring. The more bored we are the more of our imagination we will use. He also taught us that writing is re-writing. “A good writer writers once but a great writer writes and writes some more,” is something that he told us. Geoff also told us that we have to be prepared to face rejection because “no matter how good you are, you’re going to fall flat on your face,” but we have to try and try again.

Can’t wait for our last week of Imagination Academy!