Littlescribe! 2021 Mini-Writing Festival
In Week 3, 10 students from Year 7 – 9 Newman Gifted Selective Education classes participated in the Littlescribe 2021 Mini-Writing Festival. Given the quick transition to remote learning, the festival was agile enough to become virtual to ensure students were still able to learn and connect with prominent Australian authors.
Each day over 300 students from primary and secondary schools across Australia came together to learn from these authors and illustrators in order to improve their writing skills and take their stories to the next level.
On Monday 26 July, students heard from Kirli Saunders who spoke about connecting to Country through writing including poetry. We were challenged to paint a picture with our words to allow audiences to easily travel to the worlds we are creating in our stories. She also encouraged us to collaborate with other writers and incorporate techniques like imagery to improve our writing. Author James Foley also attended and created live illustrations based on what Kirli was speaking about. It was great to see how an illustrator can quickly turn words into drawings on the spot!
Tuesday saw a workshop led by Andrew Daddo who highlighted the best techniques to create vivid worlds in our writing. He showed how drawing out your ideas can help a writer add more detail and see the story from the audience’s perspective.
On Wednesday Nat Amoore spoke to students about dialogue and script writing. Script writing is obviously important in plays and movies but it is also crucial to fiction writing as well.
There are 3 key parts of dialogue:
- Vocabulary – this can tell the audience a lot about the character and where they are from by the words they use.
- The things they say – it is important to consider what words a character would use. What words would a knight use, what words would a spy use or what words would a teenager use. The right words can make the character more authentic and realistic.
- The way they say them – Dialogue can show how characters interact and relate to each other. They way a character talks to their friend is different to how they would speak to their parent
Thursday’s workshop with John Heffernan developed our skills in building suspense in writing. By adding suspense to a story, you are able to hook the audience and get them to keep reading as they are intrigued by the story. Suspense gives the audience chances to keep guessing and creating their own ideas about the characters and allows the author to change direction and shock the reader!
After watching James Foley illustrate for the other authors all week, on Friday 30 July we finally had the chance to hear from James and learn about his writing experience. We completed an activity where we had to work out the difference between personification and anthropomorphism. He talked about anthropomorphism as an opportunity to widen the scope of characters in a story as well as having stories without human characters at all. This allows our creativity to be explored beyond the normal human experience found in written work.
Overall, it was a great week of learning from different Australian authors and hearing about their experiences and their writing process. It was exciting to still participate in workshops in a virtual domain and a wonderful opportunity for our gifted students to keep developing their skills even when remote learning.
