SIS Write a Book in a Day

SIS Book in a Day

On  25 July, we drove to John Paul College – the boys tried to stop me saying that we sang Let it Go and Piano Man on the way there. The day was the first of our SIS Book in a Day sessions, it was a day of workshops. Each of the students was involved in two different sessions, while I taught a class on the seven plots. I asked them to explain to you what they learned.

Von (artist):

Illustration - I learned to work better with a fixed idea of the character and draw it. We were given text to transform into illustration.

Crafting characters - I learned to create a character more efficiently. We brainstormed the aspects, qualities, enemies, features of the character.

Seb (another artist):

I chose to partake in illustration and creating characters. I learnt how to use story boards and quick sketches to plan our characters to ensure that our drawings are up to the standards of the publisher. In the afternoon I went to Creating Characters. They taught us about describing our characters. We wrote down the hair colour, eye colour etc. We had to create a life for our characters and mine was a girl who got bullied for her looks but she explained her dark history where her dad physically abused her and her mother, she got lung cancer from her dad who always smoked around her.

Oscar:

One of our workshop choices was Starting the Story. They learnt about the acronym START. This acronym gives you 5 different ways to start your story:

Shocking

Talking

Action

Ridiculous

Transformation

And here’s something I came up with:

The house was on fire.

I awoke in a fit of coughs as I dived onto the hard wooden ground and felt around for my glasses. As I clasped them onto my face the room around me was transformed into a mess of smoke everywhere. I looked - it was burning. I could feel it in my spine. I had to get out before it was too late. As I tried to scream for help, I felt my throat sieze up in pain. As smoke filled my lungs, I crawled my way through the door.

Ethan:

I did Planning the Plot and Character Creation. In planning the plot we first had to write a 14 word story about my life. Here was mine:

I was born, sent to the principal’s office, moved to Dubai, came home and here.

We then had to choose one line and write more details about that line. Finally, we did “I am still waiting” where we had to write “I am still waiting” followed by something.

I then did 'Creating your Character' where we first talked about some superheroes and their struggles. We created a character and we had to put in all sorts of things like their challenges, height, companies and one superpower - NOT A FICTIONAL SUPERPOWER - a real one like photographic memory or if they were really good at speaking. I learned that writing is a lot more complex than I originally thought and that it is okay to just write down on a page.

Tom:

I did the Kickstarting your Short Story workshop with Danielle Binks where we learnt how to create stories in a short amount of time and how we could get ideas from everything around us  and also how to create a good short story. Which was highly educational. I also did a workshop with Mr Perry about finding the plot and deciding which plot matched which movie. For example the different types of plots were overcoming the monster, rebirth and tragedy etc. Altogether it was a great day and I took a lot of important information out of it. – Tom 8.3

Mathew:

I did crafting characters and short stories, they were both very fun. I learnt that short stories have a certain aspect to them; the character is either wanting something badly but having trouble doing it ie. Red riding Hood going to her grandma’s house but is having trouble with the wolf. This relates to me about how short stories are different to novels which have about three arcs whereas short stories have one.

Dalton:

Finding the plot: We learned how to write a story, parts of a story and the different types of stories. We also had to write outlines for these different types of stories.

Character building: we learned about how a backstory of a character can make a huge impact on a story. We discussed about different books and movies about character building.

Cathal:

The ones I chose to do were Illustrating and Creating Characters. I learnt about how Illustrators do their pictures in storyboards. The Creating a Character was alright. We got to create a character and give it traits, powers, and emotions. We wrote in 3rd and 1st person perspectives of how they would be described. We finished up by writing a challenge that they had to face.  My character had to experience her Parents going in Debt, and having to move away.

Damian Perry

Technology Leader