Day at the Museum

On Saturday we went in to London and visited the Science Museum and Natural History Museum. The trip reminded me of an early lesson writing fiction, from when I was 10:

We had been on a school trip to the same two museums and the next day were asked to write a story about the museum. Thinking I was being cunningly original, I wrote a story about how the dinosaur skeletons came to life and chased us around the museum. Of course, it turned out almost everyone else in the class had written the same story. The teacher chose to read out one girl’s story about getting trapped in the lift. That made a real impression on me, and from then on I always gave a lot more thought to any subject we were to write about and tried always to avoid being obvious.