In a 2009 interview for Newsweek, renowned children’s book writer Maurice Sendak is asked the following question: “What makes a good kids’ story?” At first Sendak dismisses the question saying that he just writes the books, but then remembers the experience of hearing stories told by his parents when he was a child with his siblings. “My parents were immigrants and they didn’t know that they should clean the stories up for us. So we heard horrible, horrible stories, and we loved them, we absolutely loved them.” This week, write a short story inspired by a particularly gruesome or frightening story you heard as a child. Whether by word of mouth or from a book, how will you adapt your terrifying tale to the plot line of a short story?
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