Scar Island

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Emotions, Weather, and the Story (Stories) of Your Life”

In this activity, students will flex their creative writing muscles by coming up with stories that, as Dan Gemeinhart does in Scar Island, connect the inner emotional lives of characters to external weather patterns.

From ominous clouds to furious storms, the external weather reflects and reinforces the inner emotional world of the book’s main characters throughout Scar Island. In this two-part activity, you will draw upon the weather to tell your own stories.

Before you begin writing, review key moments in Scar Island where the weather is featured prominently, particularly in the novel’s final chapters, in which the storm around Slabhenge gathers strength and intensity with the emotional crescendo in Jonathan’s story.

• First, select an important moment in your life that you’d like to write about. This could be anything from the birth of one of your siblings to your sports team winning a big game.
• Next, you can either decide to: (a) describe the weather as it was that day, picking and choosing which elements of the weather to enhance depending on the emotional tone of your story, or (b) create a fictional weather event to enhance the emotional meaning of your story.

Your story should be no more than a page long and be sure to explicitly name no fewer than 2 elements of the natural world throughout your story.

Teaching Suggestion: As students write their stories, it might be beneficial to have them call out the many emotions—sometimes conflicting—that may appear in their stories and have the weather reflect that accordingly. For example, if a student writes about their sports team winning a big game, they may have felt excited, happy, and nervous; in this case, they could fictionalize a storm that dissipates into sunshine. Instruct them not to shy away from emotional contradiction since being true-to-life will enhance their story’s realism and dynamic thrust.

Students might also read The New Yorker’s “The Ten Best Weather Events in Fiction” to learn how other authors use the natural world to tell stories about their characters and to use it as inspiration when writing their own stories. (Subscription may be required to view.)