Beginnings

Beginnings

“I have to write a story.”

“I can help! What’s it about?” Jeff jumped in.

Janet flinched, she was babysitting for seven year old Jeff, and thought he was in his bedroom. Kicking herself for saying it out loud, she said, “ I guess…, I thought you wanted to set up your trains.”

“Yes, but I like stories better. What story is it? Is it about something that happened, or is it made up stuff?”

“How do you even know this? You barely know how to print!”

“I’ve been hearing stories since I was born.”

“Oh… that’s true. Well, I have to write a story with the sentence, ‘I‘ll think about it,’ in it.”

“What will you think about?”

“It doesn’t matter as long as somebody says ‘I’ll think about it’ in the story. Oh, and it has to be about three hundred words.

“Three hundred words?! That’s a lot of words!”

“Not really. We’ve probably said way more than three hundred words each since I got here.”

“Really? I don’t think I even know three hundred words!

“Yes you do, that sentence you just said had ten different words in it.”

“Sentence?”

“A sentence is a bunch of words that say something together. Like if I said ‘Go get the cat,’ that’s a sentence. But if I said ‘Go get the cat,’and then said ‘He’s at the back door’ that’s two sentences.”

“Wow…”

“Wow?”

“That sounds exciting!”

“It does?”

“I can’t wait to write stories! I think about them all the time. Real stuff and pretend stuff, like the books I have in my room. I can’t wait!”

“Well, then let’s start today, you can help me write this story.”

Jeff did, and he published his own first book when he was nineteen. He dedicated it to Janet.