As fiction writers, we began this unit by brainstorming story ideas in two distinct ways: what stories could we imagine from real-life moments, and what stories or characters do we wish existed in the world? Rather than go straight into planning a plot after this initial brainstorm, we delved into creating a fully dynamic character. We used strategies from real writers and wrote this character into a variety of scenes to see how they moved, thought, and felt. Then we let our stories take shape. We also did lessons on symbolism, theme, dialogue, and sentence structure, to name a few. Enjoy the variety found within the Realistic Fiction genre!