Storystorm 2021 Bonus Day 31: Jarrett Lerner’s Activities for Inspiration

by Jarrett Lerner

I’ve been wanting to make an activity book for years now. Something that could help kids – and kids-at-heart! – explore and develop their creativity, and turn to as a source for regular and reliable inspiration. In my free time between book projects, I hammered away at the project, making a few activities here or there, slowly building up a stock of them and hoping I’d soon be able to turn to them more fully and put together a book proposal.

Then came COVID. And lockdown. And remote learning.

I was worried that creativity—already not valued and incorporated in curriculums and classrooms as much as it ought to be— would only be further shoved aside. So, rather than sit on all those activities, I started releasing them, and also making more, inspired myself by what kids were doing with the activities already out there, and motivated by the reception they got from kids and their parents and teachers. For the last couple weeks of March, and then for all of April and May, I released a brand-new batch of activities every weekday morning, and then sometimes a few more on the weekend.

Around that time, my agent shared what I was up to with my editor (all of my current book series are with the same one), and she made an offer on a pair of activity books. GIVE THIS BOOK A TITLE came out in December, and the companion volume, GIVE THIS BOOK A COVER, publishes in May. In the books, you’ll find a variety of activities, all of them created with the goal of kickstarting the user’s imagination and inspiring ideas for stories. In addition to the books, you can still find a couple hundred of other, FREE, easily downloadable and printable activities at the activities page of my website. Between the two books and the site, there are approximately 500 activities.

And while all of these activities were made with kids in mind, while GIVE THIS BOOK A TITLE and GIVE THIS BOOK A COVER are both marketed toward kids, I have received messages, reviews, and pictures of completed activities from nearly as many adults as kids. If you decide to check out my activities, I hope they take you down creative avenues you might not have otherwise explored. I hope they leave you feeling like a more confident and capable creator. And I hope they bring you a boatload of joy and an abundance of inspiration.

Jarrett Lerner is the author of EngiNerds, Revenge of the EngiNerds, The EngiNerds Strike Back, Geeger the Robot Goes to School, and Geeger the Robot: Lost and Found, as well as the author-illustrator of the activity book Give This Book a Title. Jarrett is also the author-illustrator of the forthcoming activity book Give This Book a Cover and the forthcoming Hunger Heroes graphic novel series (all published by Simon & Schuster/Aladdin). He cofounded and helps run the MG Book Village, an online hub for all things Middle Grade, and is the co-organizer of the #KidsNeedBooks and #KidsNeedMentors projects. He can be found at jarrettlerner.com and on Twitter @Jarrett_Lerner and Instagram at @Jarrett_Lerner. He lives with his family in Medford, Massachusetts.

Note from Tara:

OK, Storystormers! Time is almost up! The Storystorm Pledge will be posted tomorrow, so if you have at least 30 ideas, you can sign it.

Signing the pledge is on the honor system. You don’t have to prove that you have 30 ideas. (Please don’t send me your ideas! Don’t post them! They are for your eyes only!)

Just sign the Storystorm Pledge tomorrow…or the next day. Actually, I’ll leave the pledge up for FIVE DAYS, through February 5, so you all have plenty of extra time to get-r-done!

Good luck everyone!