Month: January 2020

Today I have a poem for you, but before that I want to give you an update on how the Blank Page project is progressing.

January has been a crazy month, but a good one. The response to the blog has been incredible. The fantastic people at the school library service helped to get the word out to all the schools during the first week of January and within about ten days all 25 of my resource packs were spoken for! There are brand new creative writing groups being set up all over the country as we speak and I can’t tell you how thrilled that makes me!

The other piece of good news is that I might be able to rustle up some more packs! I managed to get some of the resources cheaper than expected, and then the ever-wonderful David at No Alibis bookshop gave me a hefty discount on the books just because he likes to support all literary endeavour especially encouraging young readers and writers, and my saint of a husband did all my website stuff (isn’t it good!), saving me hiring a tech-expert, so there is some funding left over. So if any more schools would like a pack for their writing club, do get in touch. And if you’re using the blog for tips and resources, remember to subscribe for notifications of new posts.

I think it’s just mindblowing that new clubs are being set up and might even continue to run for years and years, giving so many kids the opportunity to let their imaginations run wild after a hard day at school. I’m first in line to complain that there isn’t enough time for reading and writing for pleasure in our education system, but it’s so nice to see that we can make a difference ourselves even if our politicians are a bit rubbish.

The project was all about NI schools but I’ve even been contacted by schools in England to say they’re using the blog too, which is a fantastic bonus and I hope it will continue to spread and be helpful to anyone who wants to encourage creativity in young people.

Anyway, January has been spent in a deluge of packing materials and trying to figure out how courier systems work

but the boxes are finally out for delivery and I really hope they’ll inspire your writers.

Speaking of inspiration in a box, in the meantime, you could show your writers this poem by Roger Robinson, who was just announced as this year’s TS Eliot Prize winner. The poem is available to read in this Guardian article and it’s called A Portable Paradise.

 

A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson

And if I speak of Paradise,
then I’m speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
That way they can’t steal it, she’d say.
And if life puts you under pressure,
trace its ridges in your pocket,
smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,
hum its anthem under your breath.
And if your stresses are sustained and daily,
get yourself to an empty room – be it hotel,
hostel or hovel – find a lamp
and empty your paradise onto a desk:
your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.
Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope
of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.

 

You could read it to your writers and, if any of them want to use it as a prompt for a story or poem, they could think about:

• What would your paradise be?
• How would you carry it around?
• When might you need it and how might you use it?

 

I’m off for a bit of a writing retreat paradise next week but I’ll be back the week after with more tips and resources! Thanks everyone who’s contacted me so far, and good luck with your writing groups. This is all so exciting!!!

      

Dialogue is one of those marmite things that you either love writing or hate writing. I’ve noticed that writers who love writing dialogue (e.g. me) tend to write a bit like scriptwriters. I often write the first draft of scenes in pure dialogue, and I can reach the end of the scene without ever deciding if these characters are indoors or outdoors, under the sea or on the moon, wearing wetsuits or PJs.

I hate writing physical description of places, people or actions and I usually have to go back when I’ve finished the scene and fill all that in. I like spoken words and the stuff going on inside the character’s head, but not so much the external world.

Whereas I’ve found writers who hate writing dialogue tend to be quite good at world-building and will write whole scenes where you can smell every flower and feel every fold of fabric and see every blade of grass, and stuff does happen but there isn’t a word of dialogue in the whole scene.

I have never been good at world-building which is why I couldn’t write fantasy. I like the normal world because I can assume readers know what it looks like and how it functions and I don’t have to bother explaining it too much. The reason fantasy books are allowed to be so much longer than non-fantasy books is because they have to create unfamiliar worlds for the reader.

There’s a writer in our group who is so brilliant at world building and visualising things that she not only writes fantasy worlds, she also draws them. One day she was showing me some sketches for a planet she’d invented. It was a sort of exploded globe with flat disks in the middle (see what I mean about my powers of description), and I said, ‘Wow, that’s amazing! Do the disks in the middle spin?’

She shook her head and said, ‘No. They were going to, but then I realised that would interfere with the plumbing.’

‘You’ve thought about the plumbing! I can write a whole scene and I don’t know if my characters are indoors or out and you’ve thought about the plumbing?!!!’

Anyway, this girl is an amazing writer and has the most incredible imagination I’ve ever come across, but she hates writing dialogue and will avoid it if at all possible. But you usually need a bit of both in a story. Pages of unbroken text can be off-putting for a reader and pages of solid dialogue can leave them feeling distanced from the world of the story.

I found some tips online for writing dialogue to help my young writer, so I’m posting them here for all your dialogue-avoiders too. I like it when things are broken down into bullet points so these are lists of “Tips for Writing Dialogue” that you can print out for your group in case anyone’s struggling with it:

• Sarah Webb is an Irish children’s writer and powerhouse promoter of children’s lit and she’s posted her 10 Tips for Dialogue here.
• NY Book Editors 5 Tips for Good Dialogue
• 5 tips from a screenwriter on writing dialogue
• This “6 Tips for Dialogue” article also has a section on how to format dialogue, but that’s really aimed at professional writers and I never comment on this with my writers unless they ask. In fact, most of the adult writers I know still don’t know how to format dialogue, but no book ever got turned down by a publisher because the writer put the commas in the wrong place. Leave that to the English classes and let them enjoy the writing.

And my own advice is just to pay attention to how dialogue is done in books. The thing about good dialogue is it’s invisible. The reason we use ‘she said,’ rather than, ‘she pronounced in a grating monotone’, is that it doesn’t draw attention to itself, allowing the reader to forget that they’re reading something and more fully enter that world. But the result is, we don’t notice how it’s done and then when we come to writing it, we think we don’t know how to do it. So reading a book and paying attention to the dialogue is a great way to learn how to do it. Yay, reading!

 

I mentioned in an earlier post that there are probably writing forms that your young writers have never heard of, but which might be the key to unlocking their writing. Conversely, there might be genres of storytelling which your young writers are familiar with that you’ve never heard of or thought of as stories.

We’re so used to rolling our eyes at ‘screen time’ that I think we tend to pit it in direct opposition to all that’s good and holy, (i.e. page time).

But TV, movies, comics, video games and D&D are all forms of storytelling. If you actually play any of those fantasy computer games, you quickly realise they have more complicated world buildings and casts than Lord of the Rings. And story structure is surprisingly universal across all these forms of storytelling so you can learn a lot from all of them.

And someone has to write all those computer games, and it isn’t robots or programmers who’ve never read a book, it’s quite often published fiction writers who create this stuff. (Joanne Harris, who wrote Chocolat, has written for computer games.)

If your writers are interested in writing for computer games, there’s an article about it here.

And 4 articles about Game Writing here.

So when my young writers go off on a rant about the latest computer game or their last D&D game I just try to keep up. Sometimes this involves a lot of smiling and nodding on my part but I’d never suggest to them that the place they get their stories from isn’t as good as the place I get mine.

They can even inspire them to write! Fan fiction (Fan Fic) means using existing characters from novels, TV, movies, games etc and writing stories about them and it’s another thing that gets looked down on, as though it’s not proper creativity. Like they’ve turned up on Bake Off with frozen filo.

It’s not plagiarism (authors have no problem with Fan Fic of their work, as long as no one’s trying to cash in on it) and it’s not lazy. Much like frozen filo, it’s a way in for the nervous writer. With the characters and world-building taken care of, they can focus on creating beautiful sentences and intricate plots.

And it’s a sign that they’ve deeply engaged with fictional people and they don’t want the story to end. I think that’s wonderful and it’s what stories at their best do.

In Stephen King’s famous book on writing, On Writing (clever title there, Steve), he remembers being asked by a teacher when he was a kid why he was wasting his god given talent on ‘junk’. Junk being sci-fi/horror/fantasy. He carried the guilt of that for years, feeling he was wasting his time on horror, playing down his own achievements because they were ‘just’ genre fiction. Stephen King!

I hope we’re a bit more enlightened now, but are we treating things like Fan Fic, movies, TV and gaming like our grandparents would have treated Sci-Fi in our terror lest books go out of fashion?

Fan Fic can be as creative as any other writing and there are loads of websites dedicated to it where you can post your stories and other people can follow you and post comments. I have one writer who posts a lot and has thousands of readers, which is a real boost for her confidence.

And if you’re worried that your students never seem to read books, just ask them if they’re reading any Fan Fic. Many of my young writers spend HOURS every week reading Fan Fic, but we think they’re not reading at all just because it’s just not on our radar. At our group last night someone wrote a poem inspired by a novel they read on a Fan Fic site!

So if your writers are struggling to get started in their writing, you could suggest they take their favourite characters from a book or TV and put them in a story. And direct them to some Fan Fic sites if they want to post online or read some Fan Fic.

I went to the experts and asked my young writers to recommend the best Fan Fic sites and this is what they said:

Archive of our own (AO3) – This was their favourite. You can read and publish Fan Fic or original stuff. It’s free and easy to use.

Quotev – Much like AO3 but doesn’t have an advanced tagging system.

Wattpad – This got mixed reviews. It seems to be for younger writers but they felt it didn’t handle warnings for ‘adult content’ as well as other sites.

Fanfiction.net – They were not impressed with this one.

 

I asked them about the risk of ‘trolling’ and negative comments from users but they said that, while it does sometimes happen, it’s rare and the Fan Fic communities tend to be kind and supportive and will jump all over trolls.

I also asked about adult content. Adults do write for these sites too, so there could be adult content, and there’s no way to set parental controls, but writers tag their stories with ‘ratings’ and ‘warnings’ to guide readers, and my writers felt it wasn’t a problem, you just avoid anything marked ‘adult’. But just be aware of this if you’re introducing them to the sites. (But they don’t need to use the sites to write their own.)

This article is another helpful guide to the issues and the lingo for parents and educators. 

So who would you write Fan Fic about? What story did you not want to end?

     

When your young writers are stuck, or want to know how to improve their story, or why it’s not working or why the plot is unbelievable, or why the dialogue is clunky, and they look at you like

And you’re like

Don’t worry. The answer is this:

Character

Doesn’t matter what the problem, 99% of the time the answer is character. Character is everything.

When they think their plot isn’t working, the answer is character. Plot is character. Things only happen in a story because a character wants something or fears something or does something. That’s all plot is. It all stems from character. So if the plot isn’t working or you don’t know what happens next, it’s because you don’t know your character well enough.

If the dialogue isn’t working, the answer is character. Characters have distinctive voices of their own and if the dialogue isn’t working, it’s because you can’t hear your character well enough.

If the story feels flat and won’t come to life, the answer is character. Characters live in particular worlds and if you can’t bring vivid detail into the writing, it’s because you can’t see your character’s world well enough.

So a really good trick when someone’s stuck with a story, or just wants to brainstorm ideas for a new story, is to use a character questionnaire.

This is just a list of questions that you ask your character. They may not appear to have anything to do with the story initially but they can end up being integral to the plot. Remember that JK Rowling knew LOADS more about her characters than ever ended up in the books. A writer has to know their characters inside out, and then choose what to put on the page.

Interrogating your characters can be quite addictive and there are loads of character questionnaires and interviews online that you can use. Some kids love creating characters, I have one girl who keeps whole notebooks about her characters, with drawings and images and notes, and does online personality tests for them. Others will come at the plot from a different angle, but I think if you’re having a problem with your writing, examining your characters is often a good way to tackle it. It’s always the first thing I do when I’m stuck and I find it really good for generating new ideas.

So here’s a simple Character Questionnaire (click to download) you can print out and give to your writers. And it works for all characters, not just your main character/protagonist. Every character can have a backstory and a personality.

I always keep a stack of copies handy for anyone starting a new piece or stuck on an old one. Not all the questions will apply to their character, depending on genre, but that’s OK. And they shouldn’t spend too long agonising over the answers, it’s just for brainstorming purposes and they can always leave answers out or come back to them.

Hope it’s helpful!

 

         

I’ve had lots of emails this week from people saying they’re considering starting up a group, which I am THRILLED about!

Some start up advice: I think it’s great when the kids feel that the club is ‘their’ club. It’s hard to freely express yourself if you don’t feel comfortable and in control. It’s like trying to relax in someone else’s house. So I think it’s lovely for kids to feel that the club is their ‘tribe’. It makes the members closer friends, and I know our group has become a safe space for some of them where they can be themselves in a way they don’t feel comfortable being in school, and that’s an incredible gift to give anyone.

So here are some ways you can encourage the kids to take ownership of the group:

Let them choose their own group name

You can give them some examples to choose from and let them suggest their own. For inspiration, some famous writing groups and their famous members include:

• The Bloomsbury Group (Woolf & Co)
• The Dill Pickle Club (William Carlos Williams)
• Stratford-on-Odeon (Hemingway, Joyce, Pound, Stein and Fitzgerald)
• The Inklings (Tolkien and Lewis)
• The February House (Auden, McCullers)
• The Factory (Ginsberg and Bob Dylan)

Some suggestions I got online:

• The Scribble Society
• Masters of Text
• Always Write
• Plot Twists
• Novice Narrators
• From Left to Write
• The Pencil Pack
• Full of Words
• Storytellers
• Unblocked
• Penning Pals
• Write On
• Wordsmiths
• Best Sellers
• Authors Anonymous
• The Writers League
• Scribe Tribe
• Right 2 Write
• Freedom of Speech
• Writing Warriors
• WordPlay
• From Pen to Paper

 

Make a group contract

I don’t really want to fill anyone’s life with more rules, or spend my time enforcing them, so we really just have one hard and fast rule at our club which is:

It’s up to you what you write, and whether you write, but you can’t interrupt anyone else’s writing time.

That seems to cover most issues, but it can be helpful, ice-breaking, and fun for a new group to create their own group contract. It lets the kids feel ownership of the group and also sets expectations for behaviour and reassures them that they have freedom here that they mightn’t in the classroom and that the group will be directed by themselves. You could spend a session discussing what they want out of the group and drawing it up on an A3 sheet, decorating it with Sharpies or whatever they prefer.

It’s up to them and you what you include, they can be silly or serious. Just some possible examples:

• This group is a safe space for all people and we welcome anyone who wants to write
• All feedback will be kind and helpful
• Shoes need not be worn
• You can sit where you like
• If you don’t want to write today, you can read instead
• When someone is sharing their work we listen respectfully
• Headphones are allowed
• Confidentiality Clause: What happens in writing group, stays in writing group
• No one will be forced to read their work
• Members can ask another member or group leader to read their work aloud for them
• Nom de plumes are permitted
• Choice of name and pronoun will be respected by the group
• We are a supportive community of writers
• Members may ask for one-to-one feedback from a group leader at any time
• Snacks are for sharing
• No one will be judged for their choice of snacks
• Any member has the right to ask the group to be quieter

Regarding this last one, we have a thing, suggested by one of our members, where if someone feels the room is too noisy, they can raise their hand and make a sign with their fingers:

And everyone will respect that and be quieter. When you see the sign, you do it too, so the message gets passed around. This is great for shy kids who may not be confident raising their voice in a group. This was suggested by one of our members and I use it too if they’re talking and I want their attention.

 

Merch!

If you have some funds, make badges with the group name on that they can wear around school (free advertising for your group!) or personalised pencils.

 

Put them in charge

I had an email this week from a school where the kids run the club! It was started by staff but some of the older writers took over and two have gone on to do creative writing at uni, which is just amazing!

I’d recommend starting the club with an adult in charge, just to establish what a meeting should look like, but if the kids are comfortable and working well together I don’t see why they shouldn’t eventually run things themselves. There’s nothing I do at my group that they couldn’t do themselves since really we just turn up, write, read and pat each other on the back.

 

AGM

If you want to, have an annual meeting where you discuss how things are going and if there’s anything they’d like to change or try. Involve them in any decisions, stressing that this is their club. The guideline I go by is that it’s my duty to make sure the club has a conducive atmosphere for kids who want to write. If anything is disrupting that then I feel no guilt whatsoever about putting my foot down over it, but otherwise, I discuss any decisions or changes with the group.

Do remember that all AGMs should be accompanied by copious amounts of cake. (And I challenge you to match this Tea Party thrown by the Victoria College Belfast.)

 

If you have any other suggestions that have worked for you, do let me know!

It’s SO cool that there are some new writing groups being set up as we speak! As someone who didn’t have a writing group at school when I was a teen (*sniff*), I know there are some kids at your school right now who will be SO grateful for this. On their behalf, thank you, thank you, thank you!!

    
 

 

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and that there were lots of New Year’s resolutions along the lines of ‘Will start a creative writing club in school.’

Today I have another quick conversation starter based on the opening lines of books. But first, now that we’re all settled back into the new term (no? Still eating chocolate Santas in your PJs? Is that just me?) can I let everyone know that I have some shiny (and free) resource packs to send out to schools for their writing groups!

These have some helpful books and tools for young people writing stories, Flash Fiction and Postcard Stories. They are funded by the Arts Council NI and I have 25 packs to give away so let me know if you’d like one.

I’d also love to come and meet your writers. So if you’re starting up a writing club or you already have one and would like a free visit from over-enthusiastic YA author to chat to your kids about writing, listen to their stories, give them feedback, answer any questions they have etc, then please do get in contact with me. Or if you’d just like a resources pack, that’s fine too.

Unfortunately, unlike Santa, I won’t be able to get around every school in NI so I’ll see how many requests I get and try to spread the visits and resources around the country as much as possible. This is all free, thanks to Arts Council NI and QUB funding, so big big thank you to them.

And if you’re interested in using the blog for tips and advice, remember, you can subscribe in the sidebar to get notifications when new posts go up.

So, First Lines…

In our group we have a whole hour just for writing, but that can be quite a long time for the younger members so I’ll sometimes make it shorter by doing a little 10 minute thing at the start. Maybe give them a poem or story I thought was good (they love reading anything written by someone their own age especially), or an article about writing, or Top Tips from a writer etc. These aren’t structured exercises and I don’t demand that they do anything specific, I just let them look at them and if it starts a conversation, great.

Something I did recently was to get them to think about first lines. The first line of a story is pretty important because it has to suck you in.

But instead of lecturing them about that, I put my stack of YA novels (and some adult and classics) in the middle of the table, told them to pick 4 they hadn’t read, look at the first line of each and pick their favourite.

I thought it was interesting that while we were doing this someone said they were having trouble choosing between two books and someone else said, in the weary voice of someone who’s endured 11 years of education already, ‘Just pick the one you could write a story about because that’s where this is going.’

It’s like you’re trying to sneak vegetables into their food. They are onto you and they know all your tricks. This is why I don’t do ‘writing exercises’. It really doesn’t matter how fun or exciting the exercise is; if it smells like education, you’re done for. You could take them to Disneyland, they’d just stand there yawning and waiting for the handout to fill in.

I assured her that this was not a writing exercise, that I don’t really do writing exercises (they’re as boring for me as they are for you, kids!) and no one was going to be made to write anything, this was just about picking our favourite first lines.

Reassured, we all chose our favourite first line, read it aloud to the group and said why we liked it. This provoked a bit of discussion about first lines and then we all went and wrote whatever we liked, as always. Hopefully with better first lines than ever! (And the writer who looked completely depressed by the idea of being ‘made’ to write something, became completely engrossed in writing a beautiful story that was all her own and read it to the group at the end.)

You could suggest a few minutes before the end that they look at their own first sentence and make sure it’s killer.

This is just a really simple conversation generator that might even sneak in some writing skills, or encourage them to read one of the books.

Hope this is helpful, and do get in touch if you’re interested in the resources/visits, and do use the comments section to ask questions or share ideas from your own writing groups. I bet that collectively, we have a massive pool of knowledge and wisdom that can inspire writing groups all over the country and beyond! *resists Buzz Lightyear meme*

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