Frances O'Roark Dowell: Hi, I'm Frances O'Roark Dowell. I'm the author of How to Build a Story ... Or, the Big What If. And this is a book on writing for kids, and I should rephrase that to say it's a book for kids about writing. It's not to teach adults how to write books for kids, but to help kids' stories. And I wrote this book because I had been teaching a lot of creative writing workshops and I really enjoyed being in writing workshops with kids.

But what I found is most of the kids I was working with, they really wanted to write stories and they were great at coming up with ideas. They were great getting started. Like that opening action scene, they could do it and then they kind of just lost steam. And you can go into a classroom and say, "How many of you have started a story and then just puttered out?" And everyone raises their hand, or almost everybody. People love storytelling and kids love storytelling. But the hard thing is what do you do after you've gotten through that exciting opening and kind of don't know what to do next?

And so I began developing a workshop to help kids get through what I call the terrible, horrible middle of a story and as a creative writer myself, that's the hard part for me too. It would be fun to be able to share this with more than just the 10 kids who I have in my workshops at any given time. So, that was how I came to write this book. It was enormously fun and enormously challenging to walk through it step by step and explain myself as clearly as possible, especially because when I'm teaching, when I'm in front of a group of kids, they could ask questions. Writing, I had to anticipate what problems would kids run into and I had to teach myself a lot.

How do you put a story together? What are the parts of the story? And then as a teacher I had to figure out how do I walk kids through the story-building process. And my hope is, is that someone can go chapter by chapter through this book, that a kid can go through it and by the end have a really good, really well developed first draft of a story. I think as a young writer, this book would have helped me a lot because I was also a kid who started a lot of stories and then didn't finish them because I didn't quite know how to do it.