It’s so inspiring to see how the Year 8 students at Keilor Downs College have taken a simple idea and transformed it into an amazing piece of writing over the four week period I’ve been working with them. Their stories and poetry submissions for our anthology are already coming in and they are fabulous. So many unique ideas, characters and settings are emerging. Students have until 20 May to submit their writing pieces, and/or illustrations. Next step is to edit the pieces and compile them into the anthology. Everyone whose writing or illustrating is included in the anthology will get a co ..read more

I’m entering week 4 of my author-in-residence at Keilor Downs College and seeing so many great stories and writers emerging. We’re working on finishing the stories and getting them ready to submit. I’ve been sharing with students, what the editing process is like for an author and encouraging them to consider using more active and specific words to make their writing stronger. We’re also talking about techniques we use like reading our work aloud or getting someone else to read it to ensure that our ideas make sense and translate to compelling writing on the page ..read more

I’m loving seeing the characters and stories develop from the imaginations of the Year 8 students at Keilor Downs College. There’s an amazing array of settings, characters and themes. Some stories are set in our current world, others in a future world we can only imagine. For their story settings, students are journeying all over the world in their imaginations to select their story settings. Once the students have finished their writing pieces, they will be emailed to their class teachers, and I’ll get to read all of them and work with Head of Library, Milena Gates and other staff to coll ..read more

This week in my author residency I was able to make use of my journalism and web content writing experience, conducting mock interviews with football superstar, the late Pelé, for the Year 11 VM Literacy classes. The activity was to demonstrate to students how you’d conduct an interview, including what questions to ask. We talked about how to make the person you are interviewing feel comfortable so that they’ll share more personal, more interesting information with you. After each interview, I showed students how I would take the information to turn it into a post or news article, taking th ..read more

This week our Year 8 Keilor Downs College writers are working on developing the middle and endings of their stories. I have been sharing with them how I introduced new story events and increased what was at stake for my character Ruben in Beyond Belief to make the middle of the story more compelling. They are now applying the ‘raising the stakes’ principle to their own stories. The students have been sharing their story ideas and beginnings with me. They are developing great characters and stories and I can’t wait to read them. Thank you to Creative Victoria and The Creative Learning Partn ..read more

As part of my author residency at Keilor Downs College, I had a wonderful experience working with Year 12 art students talking about book design, book illustration and how words and pictures work together to tell a story. We spoke about the journey of a book from idea to publication, how an artist is assigned to a book and the collaborative process. We spoke about how the way an author and illustrator develop characters are similar but different. It was agreed that getting to the emotional heart of a character is important when developing them, whether it’s visually or through words. We spo ..read more

As part of my author-in-residence at Keilor Downs College, I’ve been sharing my experiences as a journalist with the Year 11 VM Literacy classes. Their current curriculum involves interviewing someone and creating a post about them, so we chatted about interview techniques and how to find out interesting information from the person you’re interviewing. We talked about asking open-ended and follow up questions, and asking the easy questions first to make the subject of the interview feel comfortable. Then you can ask the harder questions. The answers to these are often the most interesting ..read more

Being author-in-residence at Keilor Downs College continues to be an inspiring and rewarding experience. Last week the Year 8 students developed some amazing characters inspired by a photo that they chose and we talked about why they selected that particular image as inspiration for their writing pieces. The characters they have created are many and varied, from people their own age to men and women in their 70s and 80s. This week we have been working on building a world for their characters to inhabit including forms of transportation, geographical features, and the rules and infrastructure ..read more

This was my real world view when I set off this morning for Week 2 of my Creative Learning Partnerships author residency with Year 8 students at Keilor Downs College. It reminded me to immerse myself, to look around and absorb everything I could see, hear, feel and smell … the kind of details that help me build a world that readers can picture when they read my books. Today, I’ve been working with the Year 8 students helping them create a story world for their characters to inhabit, a world that will cause things to happen in their stories, a world that will put their characters to the test ..read more

This week as part of my Creative Learning Partnerships’ author residency, I’ve worked with seven classes of Year 8 students at Keilor Downs College sharing how I create characters for books like Beyond Belief. We’ve been discussing how vulnerability, admirability and credibility combine to create characters that readers connect with. Of course characters don’t have to be completely admirable but there has to be something that readers like about them. And vulnerability is something that helps us build compassion for characters and care what happens to them. It has been so rewarding working wi ..read more