Write a Book in a Day 

On Friday 8th September, 75 students from Year 7 to Year 11, participated in the annual Write a Book in a Day. This twelve-hour event is organised through The Kids’ Cancer Project and has a dual purpose: it is a fundraising event to raise money for research into childhood cancer treatments and the stories produced are also added to a virtual library for patients in hospital to read.

Students were on-site bright and early, as the event began just before 8am with teams of between five and ten participants planning their 3500 to 5000-word novels. Each team was given parameters for their story which included two human characters, one non-human character, a setting and an issue, as well as five randomly generated words which had to be included too. Some of these parameters forced teams to take extremely creative and innovative approaches to incorporate such non-human characters as a flower pot and a beach umbrella and settings like an art gallery and Uluru.

We had 9 teams participate and have so far raised over $2933 - over a thousand of which has been raised exclusively by our wonderful Year 7 team, Ink and Wonder. There are a few teams who haven’t yet reached their fundraising goals and in order to be judged, they need to raise $240 per team by the 30th September. If you are interested in sponsoring an individual student or a team, please go to https://writeabookinaday.com/sponsor-a-student. Search for Ballarat High School and you will find links to each students’ sponsorship page and team links.

To keep the students going in the later part of the day we had a Pizza Dinner. We would like to thank Domino's Pizza in Victoria Street, Ballarat East, for their sponsorship, enabling us to contribute even more to The Kids’ Cancer Project. We are very grateful for their support and hope they will consider sponsoring us again next year.

Thank you to all the staff who helped on the day, even the ones who popped in briefly to provide words of encouragement to our budding authors and illustrators. Special thanks to Celina Brown and Kamala Burns for working with teams throughout the day providing them with encouragement and support. And sincere gratitude to Patrick Stewart and Ashalyn Kelly, who stayed with us until after 8pm to help us make the day a success.

All teams completed their books within the 12-hour deadline and hard copies of the completed books will be available to read in the library next term. They can also be accessed digitally via this link.

Our Year 12 team, Always Write will be participating in this event this Friday (15th September), giving up their class-free study day to take part in our annual tradition and produce a book. We wish them lots of luck. This team won nationally in 2020 with their novel Locked Behind Closed Doors – which we don’t think was an explicit reference to lockdowns but that was the circumstances under which they took part!

Olivia French and Loretta Kelly - Write a Book in a Day Convenors