Practical fiction writing: Settings in children's fiction

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Sophia Bishop. I'm a junior fiction writer. I've been published in 17 countries by several major publishing houses. The meat of the most exciting thing about writing for children is settings. And today that's what I'm going to talk about in this class on using settings in junior fiction. By the end of this class, you would have completed a series of journal exercises in remembering and imagining childhood places. This can be used to help develop the settings for a story you already have in mind. Or it might spark off ideas for a whole new story, either is fine. All you will need is a notebook or a Word document. However, you prefer to work. Settings to me are crucial in writing for children. Studies on adult memories of childhood reading show how much time you spent daydreaming about settings, playing games in settings, sometimes physically rebuilding the world. The setting in a book that dwarfs the amount of time we spend actually reading it. Getting your setting right is giving a real gift to your child reader that will go beyond the book. But what makes some settings so powerful at this age? Of course, every child is different and we are going to experience a different world. I had experienced it in different ways. They're all sudden commonalities, however, G2 in developing brains and our newness in the world in middle childhood. So six to 12 is where I'm mostly focusing reference research in this area. But what I'm really interested in is getting you to remember for yourself, you were a child once. That is your most important resource. What we are not looking for is some nostalgic, idyllic idea of childhood unless you actually grew up with sheep yourself. I'm having done a bit. There's a great study by a guy called sebum comparing adult, adult memories of childhood special places with children's reports, if that special places and adults overwhelmingly talked about nature and for children, the thicker was less than half who brought up a natural setting. So just watch out that you're not letting your ideas of what childhood should be dominate your memories. There was kind of understand EQ turn in children's literature in the first half of the 1900s. And it brought us a lot of our best loved classics. But that kind of dominate our idea of what kind of setting a children's book should have. Try to keep that out of your mind and really immerse yourself in what your childhood was actually like. The first-class, we'll be starting with some very simple memory exercises. And then I'll look at five ways of seeing and dreaming about the world. And for each we'll do another remembering exercise and an imagining exercise that you'll be keeping a journal. Finally, I will be talking about taking these ideas put into your work. I love doing this kind of work. I really hope you'll enjoy it too. I'll see you there. 2. Memory exercises: Hi, Welcome back and welcome to the first class. I'm going to begin by asking you to write down memories based on for fairly general prompt. In each later class, I'll be asking for more specific memories. But first I wanted to see what comes up for you before I start interfering. This doesn't need to be good prose, but it points, mindmaps, whatever works for you. I suggest maybe spending about five minutes on each. Obviously, if lots of ideas come, feel free to spend longer. Just a few points first about what you're aiming for here. When dealing with sensory details, I want you to try and remember how you experienced the place at the time, not what you know objectively was there. Try and describe what felt important in the moment. Think maybe about what you would do in that place. And think also about what you felt in that place or about that place. You can pause this video after each prompt. Spend your five-minutes or so on it and then start again. Here is your first one when you're ready. Some way that was private for you or for you and your friends? Somewhere that you were allowed to go by yourself, perhaps the first place you are allowed, if you can remember that. Home, if you moved house a lot, choose one that fields richest in your memory. Obviously this is a huge task. Just thinking about the social layer of home, what belonged to who, and how you use all the different parts of the house. Imagine child who is giving someone a tool. And finally, some way they dreamed about, maybe it was an entirely imagined place. Some way You De, dreamed about. Hopefully, this has started to bring up memories for you. The IUD may be forgotten about these a full path of areas for emotionally rich memory and you can come back to them anytime here they are again. You've got more than one space you can use for these, you've probably had more than one private space, more than one Daydream. Anyway, you did something new. What we're given some kind of new autonomy will work for problem number two, any home turf or what for prompt number three, that might include your school, your grandma's house, and so on anyway, where you felt safe you were in charge. You might want to come up with some of the themes that we're going to cover over this course in the exercises you just did, Let's take a look. If you played any games in these spaces or you made up any rituals around them, we'll be covering that next and transformational seeing, if anything you saw was new to you or you now realize looking back on it, you misunderstood it. I will be covering that in a rational thing. If you hit behind furniture, built yourself dance, established passwords, organized secret societies or spaces hitting carpets. We'll be looking at all of that in small kingdoms and you are not alone if you play it anywhere and in-between spaces. So that's alleys or gaps behind hedges or other nowhere spaces. We'll cover that in in-between welds. And finally, you might have mentioned something cozy and that is a whole category of its own. Before we move on though, I want you to take a quick look at the sensory detail you've chosen to write down. Here's a list from a paper by Luca shock and Lynch mostly I've added a couple of my eye and they interviewed adults about their childhood memories of cities. And these are the details that came out. Texture and patterns were more important in people's memories than colors. The ground was really important guys, I didn't know what to say. I realize it sounds like I'm just saying children are short, that know what I mean, but this is true for me. I could draw for you the pipe and outside my house which had been repaved loads of times because people have dug it up to do things and I'd follow those patterns on my scooter. And then there were these square paving stones on the road you got turning, write out my right where I'd play the game about not stepping on the cracks and I loved their smoothness. The ground mattered. I think it's true. Tactile detail kind of related to the last two. The detail of touching things very important. A sense of space, big space, more space on the quality of the light. And I put a question mark by this one because it was not true for me. But according to Luke's token, Lynch's reset, a lot of childhood memory is dominated by whether things were clean or dirty. Clearly, some children were much tinier than I was. You might find some of these details are already there in the memories you've written down. We might find yourself going, oh yes, I'm wanting to add things, drop them down while you remember them. I'll be pointing out as we go along how often passages of texts from great torch and diluted to get this stuff right. You see it everywhere once you've started looking out for it. And I believe that's because these authors remember. In the next class we'll be looking at our first important way of seeing the world transformation are seeing, do you make sure to download the class resource that has all these prompts for you. I'll see you then. 3. Transformational seeing: Welcome back. In this class we're going to be looking at transformation are seeing this is a term borrowed from a paper by Babbage, which is itself a survey of children's literature and how places are presented. It's a really important part of tapping into a childlike way of viewing the world. It's also a really useful starting point for more magical settings and fantasies. Let's take a look. Transformational saying is engaging in imaginatively with the world around you. This might be a few different ways using the space for game. I've given Harriet the Spy as an example here, she turns her whole town into a spy rate. So the ordinary trees and wolves take on significance for what they allow her to spy on. Let's extreme version would be the ritual of avoiding stepping on pavement cracks. It's a small game that's associated with a particular place. Then as fantasy landmarks are locations that are just understood to have magical or fantasy properties, even though they're not part of a whole game. I say understood. I didn't mean believed as such. It's sort of an immersive suspension of disbelief. I've given here the example of the ring of trees in the 100 acre, which it's magical because the trees are impossible to count. These stories about places that I don't have to be magical. When I was growing up, there was an elderly lady who would always be at her window. What I walked home from school and she would wave. I made up a whole world for her. It wasn't magical, but it was a fantasy. Finally, there's a sense of wonder. This isn't developed as a fantasy. It's more just a sense that this is a sort of place where something magical is about to happen. Let's take an example for the Phoenix and the carpet by Ynez bet. The children are trying to perform magic. Wonder how you begin. Robert looked around the room, but he got no ideas from the faded green curtains or the drop Venetian blinds or the warned brown oil cloth on the floor. Even the new carpet suggested nothing though it's pattern with a very wonderful one and always seemed so it would just go into, make you think of something. Notice by the way, the focus of the textures and patterns of the room. The focus of the magic is literally the pattern on the ground. The important thing here is to remember how constantly sort of engagement is during childhood. You can pepper in, throughout your prose and it will bring a sense of realism of childhood to the whole thing. Here is a passage from my book, The Secret at the night train. The three morale children and their parents always had dinner together around a long table in a dark green dining room with candles and all the right capillary tonight max, with imagining that it was a gallery of a pirate ship to liven things up. She was the ship's captain and they were going somewhere exciting, although she was a bit vague about where exactly grip test old, buttered I fiercely in case any of the others were planning a mutiny. Again later, a sense of wonder. That day she made her notes and sat and thought for awhile and watch the clouds shifts slowly overhead skylight. The slides of sky always made her feel like she could go anywhere and do anything. Another use of transformational seeing is to use it as a starting point for fantasy. I'll keep coming back to this theme. But I think that fantasy worlds are satisfying when they capitalize on and play out the emotional response we have to the real-world. Any of these imaginative and transforming Ways of Seeing can be a great starting point for a fantasy wealth but satisfying. Take Diane Owen Jones, enchanted glass in this book, each color pain in the stained glass window offers a view onto a different layer of reality. This is still exactly how it feels when you see as being gloss window. So that makes them magical concept, really satisfying. Next annual journal, I want you to try and remember places that had gains attached to them, places that had fantasy stories attached to them, and places that just evoke a sense of wonder. If you're interested in fantasy writing, you might want to jot down some ideas next to each for how the idea could be pursued in a magical world. If you find you're having trouble with the memory approach, don't worry. I didn't think I've ever transplanted again directly from my childhood into a book. It's more about remembering the sense of the thing. And for every memory exercises, I'll also do an imagination exercise. If it's easier for you to imagine from scratch. Great. He is your imaginative exercise for today. I want you to think about your road now. Walk along it if you like, really paying attention to it and pick out a place where a game or ritual might be played. Place to be the object of fantasy and a place that might suggest possibility and wonder. Then write up this child's eye view description of your road. Honestly, this is just a lovely way to look at a place and font to do anywhere, anytime. Good luck. I'll see you next time for another concept from beverages, paper, irrational seeing, See you there. 4. Irrational seeing: Welcome back. In this class we're going to be looking at another concept from Ultron Babbage, irrational seeing. This refers to writing which tries to capture the experience of a child who is seeing something. They don't fully understand. Extreme caution. All ye who enter here, children are not stupid, especially at the high jump, talking about six and up. They've already seen and assimilated a lot. Use of this viewpoint needs to be very light touch. One way you can lean into it more heavily is to have a younger sibling character or an animal character who gets into scrapes because they do not understand things. This is a beloved sorts of humor as long as the child is on the side of the y's, you can go to town on this joke. It is the protagonist child viewpoint that is not fully understanding everything. Then you need to be much more restrained and cautious in using this. But it is worth mastering because the experience of being someone new and basically tried to understand it and assimilate it is a common experience of childhood and it will be relatable and feel real. It is really worth mimicking. There are specific things that can help us do this. Let's start with an example from CS lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The children of just the grade, they would explore the large old house that they are staying in. Everyone agreed to this and that was how the adventures began. It was assault of house to you never seem to come to the end of it was full of unexpected places. The first few doors they tried to read only and spare bedrooms has everyone had expected that they would. But soon they came to a very long room full of pictures that I found a suit of armor. And after that there was a room all hung with green with a harp in one corner, and then came three steps down in five steps up. And then a little upstairs Hall and adore that lead out onto a balcony. And then a whole series of rooms that lead into each other. And we're aligned with books, most of them very old books and some bigger than a Bible in the church. And shortly after that, they looked into a room that was quite empty except for one big wardrobe, the sort that has a looking glass in the door. There was nothing else in the room at all except a dead blue bottle on the window sill. Notice by the way, the transformation are seeing also the attention to the floor and the attention to the sense of space. He gets it. But in terms of experiencing the new, There's a few things to notice. He very subtly drops the formal name for things. Galleries and music rooms become described by their contents. He makes comparison to things that are already known. He categorizes the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of the sort that has a looking glass in the door. I didn't think the salt that has a looking glass in the door is a category of wardrobe in Ikea. It's just feet to the wardrobe might have, is not a group of wardrobes, but children are free to draw whatever categories they like. The sort of pencil that breaks when you sharpen it, the sort of straw that always splits before you finish drinking the sort of tree that's suitable for climbing. The sort of novel that has a ribbon attached for keeping your place. This is while you're still developing your own categories, instead of only using the ones that are maybe socially recognized. I'm going to add one more to the list that doesn't make it into the CS Lewis example. And that's taking an interest in objects that are typical to the place. For example, the first time you go to a theatre, you might notice the velvet fold-out seats and talk about them a lot. If you are a regular theater goer, you will not be like, oh look, velvet fold-out seats. I'd expect you to describe something specific to that theta. One way you can show that somebody is new to a place by having them describe its typical features and take an interest in them. One of these encourages us to see things in a fresh way without using established and hackneyed descriptions, which is what we should be trying to do anyway. So it's a double win for the next exercise. Try and remember some things are places you saw for the first time that made a big impression on you. This one tends to be a little trickier. Our brain doesn't have much incentive to hang onto our data frames of reference, so we tend to discount them. You've got the tools earlier, they might prompt something for you, but I've also added a list of prompts into your resource if you're finding it tricky. Whose house did you MV? Why did you ever go to your parents place of work? What did you make of it? Anytime you changed schools, what struck you forcefully about the new place? Think of some places you only went once or rarely. Now this is going to depend wildly on your childhood. Some general categories may be whatever you did for treat with the cinema, the theater, a restaurant, bowling ready, those unusual to you. Transport what did you not often go on buses, taxis, airplanes are fairly new places you might have spent the night. You'll first time in a relative's house, or a hotel or a tent, maybe somewhere bureaucratic, You have to go bank or solicitors office. Now write down everything you remember about those places. And what struck you as remarkable that you now realizes generic to all those places, for example, well, for me, in banks, the metal pen attached to a chain was just the business. I now I'm sad to say, don't notice so much when I got into Bank, somebody offends attach to Jane's. Let's look at some of our other tools. What categories did you form? The squishy kind of cipher, the artery kind of light. What comparisons were available to you? And what would you not have known the formal name for? The imaginative exercise for the day? Choose a place, you know fairly well, it has quite a specific function to a child weren't necessarily have come across and try to imagine the answers to these same questions. The place you work might be a good choice. I'll end again on the caution that we should be using this viewpoint with restraint in our writing, a couple of light touches is enough to bring a sense of the joy of exploration, the excitement of munis. If you overdo it, New York protagonists just starts to seem a bit dim. Use it with moderation and enjoy it. I'll see you next time. We'll be moving on from Ways of Seeing into white daydreaming and playing. I'll see you there. 5. Small kingdoms: Hi, welcome back. Today we're discussing a really important part of childhood play, small kingdoms. The term smoking them's was coined in a paper by febrile. Upcoming back to that. First, I just want to mention a great study by fissure that highlights the universality of one kind of play. That we start out hiding behind furniture. And then we graduate to building or appropriating dens. And this made me feel very smug because I had written this passage in my book, The Secret of the night train. Max's house was full of thick curtains, dim lamps, and soft carpet. It was a nice enough House, but a heavy sort of place and it was difficult to think anything new there when everything was so sleepy and still in exactly the same as yesterday, max had to find her own private places for thinking. When she was small, she used a regular into a gap behind the SOPA, but she couldn't fit that these days. So she had moved up into the attic instead. This is what I mean when I say your own childhood is a perfectly good substitute for attempt at Twitter, I hadn't read about this, but I myself hid behind the gap to insert from the radiata. Very cozy. And then when that became a tight fit, the cupboard under the stairs, classic. These spaces we choose or construct for ourselves can vary a lot in their actual form. But this is where I think so bells paper about small kingdoms can be incredibly useful because it pulls out the common features. These five features I think are really useful starting point, ownership, how they found altered, came to own it. It's important. Secrecy, how is it hidden or disguised? Safety? Give an example of what it's meant to keep out organized, describe its key design elements. And this can be things like you've brought in a box, biscuits and hidden it. You've arranged cushions that there's enough room for three, or you've brought in a lab, you know, whatever you've done to make it a home. Empowering. What can you do in here? Smoking thems At describe all of these criteria are rife in beloved children's literature. It can be made incidental to the story. Think the famous five, The Secret Seven, they often seem to involve some sort of cave as base camp or similar. I've used this trick. I had a scene that wasn't quite working. I transplanted it to a den in a tent for no real reason except that it was fun. All consider the babysitter's club a very ordinary sitting in which everything except secrecy from so bells list is there in loving detail. The ownership, safety organization and empowerment. All the whole appeal. On the other hand, holds stories can be based around these kingdoms. The Secret Garden is a good example. We spent a long time on how Mary comes to find the garden on its hidden this on the misery outside. She leaves behind and then dedicate the book to her, organizing it and transforming herself in the process. Then there are the fantastical and the downright fantasy in the mixed up Files of Mrs. Baddeley, Frank Weiler. They live in the mat. It's so cool. And a lot of the book is dedicated to how they get themselves out, how they keep themselves hidden, and how they organize their lives once they are there to the point where the focus as an adult reader can feel a bit excessive. It's like we've stopped the plot to talk about that. But the child read it, that is what you want to know. Peter Pan's Lost Boys have the classic fantasy example, their own home in their own land. A more recent great take as a lock with series here, only people over a certain age can be harmed by ghosts. The children become the Ghostbusters and they form these firms. So Lockwood has formed a company. They all live together in a house. They bust ghosts. It's great. So again, we can use these spaces for realism or for fantasy. First remembering, want you to remember as many of these bases from your own child has. You can see, can you remember the organizational features, how you maintain the secrecy and privacy, how you found them? Checking off everything on sleigh bells list. Again, we'll then imagine a space. Think about where you live now, where and how a child might establish a base. Again, taking off each point on the list, I wrote a quick imagined space to show you what I mean. The shed belonged to the abandoned house. So add reason that nobody else needed it and it wasn't really trespass. Besides, they could sneak their from their own garden behind a thick hedge and the windows were hung with ID. Even if it was trespass, nobody was going to find out. Sarah wasn't told that this was morally irrelevant and it's sometimes kept her up at night. But when mom and dad were having one of the exchanges of views, she would always follow Sarah along the gap behind the hedge inside the shed. They were cushion, so taken from the attic, borrowed as an emphasized. A few hours might be passed in peace, Co dopamine with library books. If you'd like to follow along with so about lists, you can see how I've tick them off in order. It's always covered by numbers. It forced me to fill the world out a little more. And I find this really nice starter for a new setting. As before, when you've written a realistic version, you might want to think about what this suggests for a fantasy setting. How could you capitalize on the feeling of this place and make it something magical? Have fun. I'll see you next time. When we'll be looking at another kind of playing in-between spaces. See you that. 6. In-Between Places: Hi, welcome back. We just looked at small kingdoms, and now we're going to look at in-between spaces. This is another area where children's literature classics have anticipated research into childhood play. Bell, who we met last time, talks about play in interstitial spaces. Behind hedges, ditches, alleyways, the edges of railway trucks, places that don't really belong to one world or the other. He is AIML on the subject. Halfway down the stairs is a stat where I sit there isn't any other stare quite like it. I'm not at the bottom, I'm not at the top. This is a stat where I always stop halfway up the stairs is enough and isn't down. It isn't in the nursery, isn't in town. And all sorts of funny thoughts run around my head. It isn't really anywhere, it's somewhere else instead. Often in his poems, million hits the nail on the head. And I think this fascination with the in-between runs much later in childhood than the age of this poem. I pulled an example from Diana and Jones. This is Wilkins tooth. The pulse took them down to the tangled rusty fence on the reverse side if the allotments it was the kind of fence nobody cared for the part of it. So we're not old old barbed wire, we're made of bits of iron bed stead, and it was held in place just by being overgrown with whitish wind, tree grass and brambles. The path dwindled to a muddy route where the offense meant the wool and squeezed its way up and round a loose piece of old bed. Friend congest squeezed with it into the waste white grass beside the river. It was hot there. Allison smelly because the big willow trees seem to keep the windows open because it was low lying. The river spread out secretly under all the white grass. When Frank had been younger, he had thought this the most exciting place in the world. You never knew what you might find. Incidentally, Diana, when Jones is the master of children protagonists, who remember what it was like to be slightly younger, like 10-year-olds. Remembering being eight is something that's quite unique about her writing. And so real to childhood. These spaces in-between spaces, they're rife and fantasy. Dynamin Jones, again, there's a place between which connects a multiverse. Cs Lewis does something very similar with wood between the worlds in the first of the Narnia books. I think this all links back to that sense of possibility in wonder and transformational. Seeing an in-between space feels pleased for something to happen. Once again, I have a remembering exercise and an imaginative exercise for you. First, remembering any in-between spaces like this from your childhood. Maybe they were visited often and beloved. For me, there was an alleyway at my church, it right alongside the car park under this sort of Vine canopy. It was great. Or maybe it's something that only was fitting and appeared once when we were selling all so I felt we put it on the pavement. People were late to pick it up. There was this hour where I can say on the cipher, but I was outside, inside, outside, neither blew my mind. Try and remember any of these, whether they were beloved or fleeting, that you could maybe draw on. Then for your imaginative exercise, I want you to practice constructing a world that is between two worlds. So eat my dump. We're going to start with an alley between two houses. One is your protagonist house, and one is the abandoned house next door. Given you some steps to help make sure your description includes one feature that belongs to the protagonists house, one feature that belongs to the abandoned house, and one feature indicating that the place is neglected or undesired is there by accident? It's just a gap. Good luck. See you next time for our final class, for I do a wrap-up to close and that will be on snuck Nas and other thrills. See you there. 7. Snugness: Hi, welcome back. I hope you enjoyed your in-between spaces. For our final exercise, we'll be looking at stuckness and other thrills. A borrowing snug this from a great book by Griswold, feeling like a kid. He surveys children's literature and finds five themes early. One is really relevant to settings, so that's what we're focusing on. It's not miss guys, I wish I had something clever and literature say about this. I just don't snug, miss his powerful snug scenes. A great, I could go on all day about the snug and cozy settings in children's literature. But I'll just stick to a few Little House on the berry. It's in the title really. They have a little house in a big white prairie. Rules will be chased. There was a character who lives in a cave with geese that keep him warm. Danny, champion of the world. He and his dad live in a caravan with bunk beds and lumps and bedtime stories. Little Women. Basically the whole aesthetic as I'm sitting around the fire or sometimes going out to get cold and help poor people so they can come back to the fire again. I'll take a more extended example from a little princess because I think it really helpfully shows a lot of the features that go into making a cozy atmosphere. In this scene, she's trying to help her younger friend Lottie, come to terms with her new home in the attic by making it seem more appealing than it is. Notice that she's engaged in a lot of transformational saying she's paying attention to texture and light. She's organizing and empowering a small kingdom. There was a lot going on in this passage. Here it is. She was walking around the small place, holding his hand and making gestures which described all the beauties she was making herself see. She quite made latae see them too. Not he could always believe in the things are made pictures of. You see? She said that could be a thick soft blue Indian rug on the floor. And in that corner there could be a soft little sofa with cushions to curl up on, just over. It could be a shelf full of books so that one could reach them easily. And there could be a fair rock before the fire and hanging on the wall to cover up the whitewash and pictures. They would have to be little ones, but they can be beautiful. And that could be a lamp with a deep rose colored shade at a table in the middle with things to have tea with an a little fat copper kettle singing on the hop. And the bed could be quite different. It could be made soft and covered with a lovely sort cover that it could be beautiful. Perhaps we could coax the sparrows until we made such friends with them that they would come and Beckett the window and asked to be let in. Oh, sorry, I cried Lottie, I should like to live here. No, you wouldn't latae your romanticizing poverty. But in her defense, Sarah is very evocative. As usual, there's going to be a memory exercise and an imaginative exercise. First, try and remember the details of any place or time that felt cozy. Campaign sleepovers with friends or safe space at home. Again, you might want to use that list of sensory details from the very beginning and think about what sort of things will evoke that coziness. Then it's an imaginative exercise, an idealized space. What kind of things for you would make a space ultimately cozy? Before you go though, I wanted to add one more thing. Snack spaces are fairly universal thrill and there's something about the looming darkness outside and you being cozy within that taps into something very human. But you probably also had your idiosyncratic throws as a childhood. May I loved office smart. I don't know. I I wanted ring binders, I wanted labels. I asked for swivel Jeff, my birthday, best birthday present ever. Got on to write a book, trouble in New York, the protagonist gets to spend an extended amount of time in the shop world of 1960s newspaper reporting in New York. This was basically just me playing IT, spending time in an office I loved go into my dad's office as a kid. I wrote this book thinking how much time can I get to spend using very cool office stuff? If I tell you the other throat places for me were old bookshops and trains. You begin to see how I work. The third exercise for today is to jot down a list of places that health is thrilled for you. And think about what stories you could come up with that would spend a lot of time in those places. Can you do it in a realistic story? I use sleeper trains. It's not a realistic story, but that aspect is, or what do you need a pinch of fantasy like my family who go to live in acute and wonderful old bookshop. This can be a really useful starting point for coming up with ideas for stories. And it will feel unique and fresh because it's drawing on your own childhood. Then your journaling with me, it's finished. I once again, that's remembering it's not space. Inventing an idealized workspace and remembering other places that Frodo. Then we're all done. I'll see you about kids to talk about how you're going to use this journaling going forward in your work. See you there. 8. In conclusion...: Hi, welcome back. One last time you've now completed this course. To recap, we have looked at sensory details, transformation are seeing irrational, seeing small kingdoms in-between spaces, snuggling and other thrills. You can return to this list anytime you need a jumpstart, getting a set into life. More importantly, I hope the combined experience has started to help you bring back to life certain ways of seeing and at a powerful source of memory that is available to you as a children's writer. I recommend returning to memory, not to transplant your stories directly exactly, but to refresh this sensation. And the four areas we used at the beginning are always a useful starting point for this. Somewhere that was private or play space, somewhere that you had new autonomy, somebody that was home turf, including your school, your best friend's house, and so on. And the places you daydream about and imagined. Then how do we use this? Well, we've touched on this throughout as we go along, but I thought it would be useful to wrap up by putting it all in one place for you. So you might use these to enliven the description of ordinary settings in your story. An ordinary house, an ordinary school can be brought to life by imagining what might be played there or what fantasies might be attached. We saw this with me having a game played in the stuffy dining room. You might add settings into your story that will spark a little bit of extra fun. I mentioned the iron started attempt then into his story, just a ring the changes. I am not the children's author to get wise to this. So anything can take place in a slightly sparkling setting. You can use settings that give you a thrill to spark the whole idea for your story. My ideas nearly always start out from somewhere. I'd like to spend time, as we saw in the last class. I'm relatedly, you can build satisfying fantasy settings by paying attention both to the emotional suggestiveness of real settings and to the games you played in those settings. Fantasies that provide small kingdoms that pay off wonder, that use in-between spaces. These all richly satisfying. Have fun with this. Honestly, this is just a great way to see the world, to keep this part of your live. And I like to play some of these exercises wherever I am. I think to myself, how would I transform this place? What gains rituals and fantasies? How would I describe it? It, it was the first time I'd seen a place of this type. Where in this place would I establish my small kingdom? Where are the in-between spaces, the edges of forgotten spaces that haven't quite been designated as for anything. What here has the potential to thrill. So good luck and enjoy it. I'd love to hear what settings you end up writing about. Thanks so much for watching and please enjoy.