Among the most asked questions we receive when doing presentations has to do with where we get ideas for our stories and if we are worried we will run out of ideas.
The answer to the first question is that we get our story ideas from a variety of sources. Among them?
Personal experience. Having a love for the Common Loon and documenting its life history in a local lake on film, the first volume of The Adirondack Kids® largely wrote itself!
History books! For The Lost Lighthouse we came across a regional history book that talked about a second lighthouse on Fourth Lake. While there were memories about the existence of the lighthouse, no one could recall how it went missing. That provided a perfect opening to imagine what might have happened to it!
Casual conversations. For The Pond Hockey Challenge we were talking with friends from the Adirondacks and they told us about such a challenge between a few young people from these two communities that had taken place a generation earlier.
Tips from Fans. It is not unusual for those who enjoy our books to approach us with an idea. For various reasons, it is very unusual that any of those tips resonate with us. But when a scuba diver told us about an object sitting on the bottom of Blue Mountain Lake that we might be interested in, the result was not only the making of a story – Spies on Castle Rock – but also the making of some great new friends.
Newspaper articles. When we learned about a helicopter rescue on a mountain near our family camp, we became curious about how many other rescues may have taken place there and learned there were many! Rescue on Bald Mountain sprang from that research and our previous knowledge of the landscape there. In a future blog we will have to tell you a very cool story that happened just a few years ago as a result of writing that book!
The general answer to the second question is we don’t think we’ll run out of story ideas with books that are set in a 6-million-acre park, home to some 55 species of mammals and more than 200 species of birds.
The rich and diverse landscape boasts hundreds of mountains and lakes and islands and ponds and near endless miles of rivers and streams.
And then there are the flora and bogs and caves and camps great and small and some that are abandoned.
There is just enough civilization at the edges of this vast wilderness that when you put three adventurous, curious, energetic young friends together with immediate access to that environment, it is always exciting to imagine what they will do!
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© 2018 Adirondack Kid Press, Ltd.
