In our September issue of Writing, we invited you to send us your writing-related questions and promised to send them to some our guest authors to answer.

Question No. 1 was for Ralph Fletcher, author of The Writer's Notebook and Marshfield Dreams. It comes from Chelsea Groyohann:

Dear Ralph,

I'm responding to your letter. For one thing I always can't think of anything to write about. It takes me a while to think of what to write about. Usually when I do finally think of something to write about I can't stop writing. I LOVE Dunkin Donuts. It's like the best place to go in the morning. My favorite drink there is iced lattes. Well, anyway I have a few questions:

   1. How was China?
   2. Was it very different from where you live now?
   3. Did you get any good ideas for something to write about?

Well, I liked your article, and I hope you do great in your future writing.

Sincerely,

Chelsea

This is what Ralph Fletcher had to say:

Dear Chelsea,

Nice to hear from you. You and I share a love of writing and iced lattes at DD. Yes, China was great. So wonderful to get into a completely different culture. And the shopping was great (lots of inexpensive cool stuff!). I didn't get any ideas to write about but I'm sure China will somehow figure in my future writing.
   Hard to come up with ideas, huh? I wish I had an easy answer. You might try making a map of a special neighborhood (where you visited, or where you grew up). 
   On the map, mark: 1) a place where something happened 2) a favorite place 3) a secret place.
   A "story map" like this will generate lots of ideas. Good luck!

Your friendly author,

Ralph Fletcher

More writing tips for young writers from Ralph Fletcher.

Question No. 2 was for Amy Krouse Rosenthal, author of Encylopedia of an Ordinary Life. It comes from Maryellen Carrigan.

Last Wednesday, October 5th, around 9:30pm, a hero of his own art drowned in the Hudson River. 22 year old Dennis Kim of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn was walking along the Christopher St. Pier in the West Village of New York City when he somehow lost his backpack over the railing.

"I can't let that stuff go," he told a friend as he began emptying his pockets and removing his shoes.

On Saturday, as the rain fell in buckets from the pregnant gray sky, I was asked: "What do you dream of doing on a rainy day?"

Blogger Keri Smith has come up with a pretty good list of almost 100 creative ideas. Here are some more of my own:

Invent a dessert. I made an angel food cake with pears, mango, and chocolate.
Splash in a puddle. Then write a poem about wet feet.
Clean out your backpack, wallet, or pockets. Stick all the scraps of paper you find into a blank notebook, and make a word collage of your recent trails.
Listen to your favorite song. Then write your own, using one of the lines you like best.
Play Scrabble in a foreign language. It's not as difficult as you think. A lot of words in English are borrowed from other languages. 

The forecast calls for rain for the rest of this week and the Farmer's Almanac says it's going to be a long, cold winter.  Guess I'll just keep working my way down my own list - and adding to it! Any suggestions?

In the Mindstretch section of READ Magazine--Issue 3, we started a joke that goes a little something like this:

Three men are stranded on an island. They find a genie living in a conch shell. He grants each of them one wish. The first man says, "I want to go home." POOF! He is gone. The second man says, "I want to go home." POOF! He is gone. The third man looks around and says ...

What does he say?!? Well, the original punchline was that the third man says, "Gee I miss my friends. I wish they were here." Ba dum chhhh.

Well, that was pretty corny. The following punchlines are much better and they come straight from you, our READers!

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes collection was released yesterday. I'm not going to buy it. I would (even though the price is just shy of $100), but I already have all the comic books so buying this new set would merely be an act of reckless spending. But oh how I want it.

OH!