Inspiration for a new Fiction Project

Sharing ideas for outings, day trips, overnight adventures with other families is something I really enjoy, and has become a tremendous passion in my life.

Recently I published a small guidebook called San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park West - 5 Family Explorations - Day Trips on the West Side of the Park. This was my first professional dabble into sharing some of my favorite outings.

The book did ok, but I felt like it could do better. I actually have a couple of interesting ideas to improve upon it as I finish up the companion volume that will cover the east side of the park.

Eventually, this will be followed up by a book with 52 weekend adventures around the Bay Area, the idea being that I can develop good methods with the smaller Golden Gate Park books before tackling the larger project.

While I’ve been working on that non-fiction family guidebook project, another idea came up for writing a fictional story called “Separated on the Paris Metro”. Guidebooks are great for adults but tend not to be as engaging for kids, no matter what treasure hunt or coloring pages you include. Kids tend to be more engaged through a story.

So what if there was a story that was centered around characters they could relate to who experience an adventure in a popular vacation city. This started me down the path to create a middle-grade young adult fictional story, something I never imagined doing.

As I was writing the main story centered around two sisters, it struck me that it could be interesting to write the story from both of the central character's points of view.

It tells almost the same story from the other viewpoint, offering the same shared dialogue, but a slightly different interpretation. Then at one point, the characters split into two different directions giving them each their own separate adventure, eventually joining back together to complete the story.

This created something interesting, reinforcing the story through repetition, but with a slightly different story, it keeps the reader engaged to create a more complete story of the events that unfold.

The book itself is divided into 3 parts, the first two parts being the stories told from each character's point of view, followed by a third section that offers supporting material for the reader and a parent or teacher.

This final section contains character itineraries for primary characters, with a little blurb about each spot. This can help identify more ideal spots to take kids based on their ages or interests which may not be that obvious. You can also find character biographies, a family tree, a small phrasebook containing all the foreign language used in the stories (along with a few other helpful things), and a map of locations visited by the characters. Then at the very end is a summary of the story (in case a caregiver doesn't have time to read the whole thing), and book club questions that can aid in a discussion of the story with your reader.

I’m really excited to finish editing this and get it published. I think it will be an exciting and engaging tool to combat boredom on a trip for younger travelers, and maybe even get them to be more engaged with deciding what to visit.

So, this is the idea behind the story, and what is included in the book.

The next few articles will be about where I drew motivation from for the story and characters.