Johnny Benched: Mentor Text

     In wake of recent events like the Boston Red Sox, and the inspirational Patrick Myshrall my children's book idea has changed for the last time. Rocky III and Eleven Seconds  was my mentor text, my guidelines for how I am going to write my book.
     The whole plot to Rocky III was a man, Rocky, who was on top of the world he had won the championship life was good then it was all taken away by someone who wanted it more and would work to hard to achieve something, this taught Rocky never take things for granted and that even at the top you have to work hard. My story is called Johnny Benched, it is about a boy, Johnny, who came from nothing. Johnny is an orphan who's parents both died at a young age he has had a tough life but the one constant in it has been baseball. The idea that I am going to take is after Johnny has become famous in the town he already was the underdog and won the championship for his team. So this is Johnny's Rocky III, he's on top of the world in his second championship game and gets injured and his team loses. It's about a comeback story, man against the odds because his injury is he lost an arm in an accident. What I really got from the Rocky III movie was the message of dedication, dedication is such a strong emotion and belief that it can set the entire tone to a plot. Without dedication there is no drive, without drive there are no results. The main thing I wish to accomplish with this story from what I learned from Rocky is that second chances do exist not just second but third and fourth because mistakes do not make the man, man makes the mistakes and grows from them.
     My other mentor text Eleven Seconds is a story about Travis Roy a BC hockey player who just after eleven seconds into his first game ever in college broke his neck and is now a quadriplegic. I chose this as a mentor text because I had read the book over the summer and the message that it sent out was one of hope. Hope is a funny thing because there does not seem to much of it these days with the whole economy being the way it is and all these terror threats. So of all the lessons I learned from Travis Roy the one that I hope I get right is instilling that aura of hope because I feel as though if a story has hope then the reader will connect to it on a totally different plane of thought.
     Books are a funny thing because like this blog I am writing now it doesn't seem at first like it is possible. Sooo many words, so many connections. But it really does come down to what my English teacher told us at the start of these project(I'm paraphrasing) "If you care about your writing it will become that much easier to write about.