Life on Mars

One of the hardest parts about writing is understanding your limits; one of the best parts about writing is learning you don’t have any.Today, the kids were given the challenge of writing a full story in exactly fifty words. Kids, particularly these ones, naturally have a lot to say and therein lies the challenge; how do you even begin to condense a whole world into one paragraph? To make it even harder, these couldn’t be just any stories. They were stories that had to be a little less than ordinary. Stories about places…no man had gone before…about not just any frontier…but the final one…And thus they were introduced to the wonderful world of science fiction writing. So, essentially, they weren’t fitting one world into a story, but a whole galaxy. Their paragraph could only serve as a minor snapshot of it, a brief introduction to endless possibilities.Sort of like a writing itself. With space, we can look out at the stars and see possibility in everything; life, death, beauty, love. And that’s what we do when we write. Creativity means going beyond the possibilities of existence—it’s an expression of the the fascination we feel, the freedom we need, and, most importantly, it’s our way to live boldly.-Ashley, camp intern from The College of Idaho. Artwork by Jimmy Folwell, Picture This, 2015.