Email from Kate De Goldi

Dear Lynne and all magnificent Raroa writers,

Thank you so much for the Scissors e-book. I'm overwhelmed and hugely impressed - by the students' astonishing imaginative interpretations and their teacher's vital encouragement in continuing and elaborating the 'Scissors' exercise. Thank you all! It's a marvellous thing for me to see such enthusiasm and boundless creativity at work - wonderful to know that the small seeds planted during my visit have such a beautiful blossoming. I love how different each of the contributions are - in rhythm, shape and tone. And each of the pieces is alive and pulsing with its own singular insights and expression - and the vocabularies at work are truly impressive. It's a great idea to have the scissors 'position' (open, inverted, etc) shown visually - and the different handholds that make for subtly different interpretations. (Freya's silhouetted pic is very evocative). But most of all, what blows me away is how infinite (seemingly) the interpretations are - and how every time new writers look at a scissors yet more fresh and surprising things are seen. Scissors really are the item that keeps on giving (more and more metaphor)!

A confused clown, a famished baby bird (love those adjectives; they really amp up the mental picture); a two-headed boy, heads swaying (gulp), shoelaces tied in a bow (but not flimsy, such a nice qualification); oddly-shaped motorbikes (the adjective makes you wonder and think), swords clashing again (love the end of that poem bringing us back to the beginning); a man trapped, primed, a stylized duck head (such precise words, so visual - and each just a little bit unsettling); colouring hills and mountains abroad, death's idea of relaxation (such surprising and somehow mysterious ideas which make you return to think some more); confusionclouds (great verb), the lounge chair reclines poolside (great personification - suddenly you see a sleek, bikinied chair with pencilled eyebrows and a fruity cocktail); a barber's silver weapon (suddenly there's a story glimpsed - a homicidal hairdresserI), a decision making hand game (another story suggested; what could that gamebe?); the celery and the orange in harmony (brilliant; hilarious; so unexpected), it embraces me on the beach (a loving deck chair? Love how it's not quite clear, but still alluring); a pair of lovers, sharp yet sweet (great paradox; mature insight!), the crooked cross, bent by grief (there's a world in that taut sentence - wonderful, wonderful)...

And that's just a little bit of what I love...thank you so much, Lynne, Freya, Tom L, Isabella R, Alex L, Ruby G, Rion A, Stella R, Sophie T and Rebecca E...

all power to your pens and keyboards

NO EW this week

There will be no EW class this week (Week 7) due to the School Runathon.

SO

Keep enjoying your writing, keep seeking and giving feedback 

using your learning about EFFECTIVE feedback.  

And please share anything with me that you would like feedback on.

Remember:

• the 'Ode to Librarians' competition closes on 11 September
• Submissions to the next Vox magazine (where Freya is to be published)October 23
• Submissions to the Starling Journal October 20

Fight for Glory By Holly I

Competition: Ode to Librarians

Write An Ode to Librarians

The School for Young Writers invites you to express your thoughts and feelings about the people who make reading, learning and entertainment possible: yes, LIBRARIANS! To celebrate these unsung heroes of literacy we invite you to write: An Ode to Librarians

The School for Young Writers, in conjunction with LIANZA, has launched a poetry competition. An Ode to Librarians has three age categories: Years 3-5; Years 6-8 ; and Years 9-11. The deadline is 11^th September.

What’s an ode? 
It’s a poetic form dating back to ancient Greece. Pindaric Odes (celebrating heroic individuals, nations or abstract ideas) and Homeric Odes (celebrating people, virtues, and aspects of society or nature) have all sorts of rules, so we’ll keep it simple! Nowadays odes are much less formal poems of moderate length, rhymed or unrhymed, and often humorous. A related term is the Apostrophe. This is not the pesky punctuation mark that many people don’t use properly! In a literary sense, it’s a poem of praise directly addressed to a person, a place, an idea or an object. 

Give your character a goal - not a desire!

Some thoughts from writer, K :M Weiland

Writers hear a lot of talk about how characters have to want something. If they don’t want something and want it desperately, then aren’t they just going to lie there on the page? Aren’t they going to be passive and boring?

Totally. Absolutely. Categorically.

A character who wants for nothing has either:

a) already gotten everything he wants

or

b) given up on life.

Neither makes for a very dynamic character. But here’s the thing. Desire alone does not make for either a great story or a great character. Desire is itself passive.

Think about it. We all want things. I want to be able to sing like Jackie Evancho. I want to have climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. I want a fennec fox. But do you see me signing up for singing lessons, booking a ticket to Tanzania, or figuring out where on God’s green earth you even buy a fennec? These are all passive desires. I want them. But I don’t want them badly enough to actually do something about them.

In short, they are desires. But they’re not goals. In order to drive a story, your character must move beyond desire to an active goal.

I’m in the midst of reading a fantasy about a character who really, really, really wants to kill another character. But it’s a passive desire. He never does anything about it. All he does is sit around and moon about the awful things this other character did to him. And the result? It’s doing nothing to move the plot forward. The other result? When the plot’s not moving, it doesn’t take long for a desire to grow repetitious very quickly.

Take a look at your character’s desires. Is he forming them into concrete goals? Is he moving forward in pursuit of those goals? If he is, then you know your plot is moving right along with him!

Poems Inspired by KAte De Goldi's Workshop

Homework before 19 August

Following on from Kate De Goldi's answer to May's question about planning...

The beginning and the ending are two halves of the same whole. Once you’ve set up a powerful question in your story’s opening, you have to follow through by deliberately answering it in the finale.

The moment you answer this question, your story is going to be effectively over. Answer it too soon, and what’s left of your plot and your characters will die a slow and lingering (and boring) death.

Knowing your ending will strengthen your plot, your theme, and your character development.

http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com

Go to your Ext Writing Folder for the activity. You will need to do some thinking and some note-making.

Kate De Goldi's Workshop!

And here are some notes from the Workshop, including recommended 'reads', quotes and the writing exercises we did.

Please add your notes or comments to the doc.

After today, Mrs Dunn's aim is to read at least 3 of the books Kate recommended that writers should read.  

What did the Workshop inspire you to do?

Make a comment below.