Beverly Aarons’ Story With Writing
Note: This post was produced in 2022 by a participant in DNDA’s Summer Youth Program writing workshop led by instructor Beverly Aarons.
Beverly Aarons loves to write, her passion for writing started out as her telling stories in the third grade. She said she really enjoyed telling her classmates stories about things that weren’t true. She liked the fun in kids believing her stories. It’s when she got older that she actually started writing. She found her true passion in writing stories about people, she said “I had fun learning new things about people while writing about them.”
Beverly Aarons has written in many genres but her favorite genre of writing is Science Fiction. She said, ‘’If I had to pick a favorite genre it would have to be science fiction.’’ Aarons likes to make nonfiction stories about people and she also enjoys writing science fiction plays and books.
Aarons has written about a dozen science fiction stories, six stage plays and a couple of screenplays. One of her most favorite stories you might have heard of, a short story called Gone Red. She said it took place in the future where people were collecting data. Another one of her most recent plays, The Cost of Water and Tea about environmental issues and poor people.
She said it was really difficult writing science fiction, she said, ‘’It was hard because I had to do a lot of research about the topic.” She talked about how she would have to make up the entire world and look into the future. She also talked about how she had to look into the advancements and disadvantagements of the future. Overall she talked about how hard it was finding information that correlates to the story.
Beverly Aarons became inspired in writing when she was really young, by her mother, and her grandfather who was a writer. She said, ‘’My mom always kept lots of books in the house.” She even lived near a library. She became really fascinated by books. Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison were the biggest influence on people in her community.
Aarons wrote a science fiction novel called New Hope City. The book took place in a very small southern town. She said it was really difficult to write a novel because she had to create all the characters and hold them inside her head. It was really difficult because she was talking about a really big story in a lot of pages. Besides this being her first novel and it being really difficult she said she will try and write another novel in the future.
During her elementry school years, she was involved in an advanced reading program. And a writer even came to her school. She first started learning how to write news articles when she got involved in a newspaper, The Chicago defender, when she was 14 years old. She also worked at the radio station W.K.K.C. 89.3 FM, This station had a youth program where they would put on radio shows that were funny and engaging public service announcements. When she turned 16 she got involved in a youth focused magazine.
Beverly Aarons continues writing today because she likes listening to stories and loves sharing them with the world.