Waves Crashing Just Like Me Story and Writing Prompts

On this page, author Kelsey Gallant shares the story of how she wrote her novel Waves Crashing Just Like Me! Writing prompts can be found in bold. It is best to complete these three prompts as a full set, in order.

​These prompts are designed for high-achieving writers in grades 7-10. The focus is on creating surprising twists.

​Since I Didn’t Plan This had worked so well as a school year book, I decided to write another school year book the following year! I kind of worked backwards in developing this story. The first aspect of it that I came up with was a single piece of information that you learn toward the very end of the book. I was excited about this, and hoped readers would be surprised when they got to that part.

Writing Prompt 1: Have you ever gotten to a part in a story that makes you gasp in surprise? Stories with unexpected twists can be very fun to read! Oftentimes, twists involve things not being how they seem. Sometimes they involve someone having a double identity or secretly being related to someone. In a mystery story, the twist might be that the solution to the mystery is something completely different from what everyone thought. Brainstorm some ideas for twists that would shock your readers.

Once I knew what readers would learn at the end of the book, I had to develop a solid plot that would lead up to it. I figured out who my main characters would be, then decided where the story would take place and how things would progress. I wrote for 5-15 minutes each day at school (sometimes a little longer) and finished the first draft by the last day. I did have a little bit of a setback when the flash drive I was storing my work on suddenly corrupted—fortunately I had a fairly up-to-date backup copy! Always back up your work!

Writing Prompt 2: You might have a really cool twist planned out for your story, but you can’t write a book that’s just a twist. You need other plot elements as well. Select one of your twists that you came up with in the last exercise. Now work from there to figure out some information about your characters and setting, and what the main plot of the story will be. You can also think about the circumstances under which the twist will be revealed, and whether it will come as a surprise to the characters themselves or just to the reader.

I read through my completed story and made the edits I thought were necessary. Then I had some of my family members read it. Remember that little piece of information that I’d be hoping would surprise everyone toward the end? Well, one of my readers predicted that very early on, because I’d written in some clues that made it too obvious. I had to go back and make some edits to make the clues a little more subtle.

When writing any kind of mystery or story with a twist, you walk a fine line between giving too many clues and not enough clues. You don’t want it to be so obvious ahead of time that everybody figures out the twist before it’s revealed. But you also want it to make sense in hindsight. A twist like “guess what—it turns out the main character is an alien!” when there’s never even been a hint that aliens exist in the story’s world probably wouldn’t go over so well. You want your readers to go, “WHOA!!!!!” not, “…um…?”
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Writing Prompt 3: Using the information you came up with in the last two writing prompts, brainstorm some subtle ways you could hint at the upcoming twist while not giving it away prematurely. For example, if you want to surprise your readers with the fact that your main character is an alien, you could throw in a couple mentions of alien sightings , or make a brief passing mention of your character having a certain characteristic that in a different part of the story is briefly mentioned in conjunction with aliens.