Auckland Writer's Festival

My Work-Shop Experience at the 2017 Auckland Writer’s Festival

Yesterday, a load of chosen students from multiple schools including Clendon Park School, went to the 2017 Auckland Writer’s Festival.

Daisy, Tyler, Adirua, Mafile’o and I all had a Work-shop lesson with Renata Hopkins, Author of the fairy-tale ‘The Cry Baby’. In the work-shop, Renata gave us a worksheet with multiple tasks on it. The first task, she taught us was Fairy-tale styled story starters. (E.g. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away….) She told us about some famous story starters like the Star Wars opening crawl, then we had to make as many story starters as we could in 4-mins. The ones I made were: In a world where swords, shields and flintlocks lasted forever…, In a time when it’s never-ending wars, nuclear explosions and killing of innocents… and In a world where it’s a never-ending nuclear wasteland…

The nest task was to write a rhyme that includes an enchanted item (Charm, curse, spell or a riddle. We learnt about some famous ones like from Jack and The Bean Stalk.

(Fi, Fi, Fo, Fum

I smell the blood of an Englishman

Be he alive, be he dead

I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.)

And then we had to make one ourselves. But I did not complete mine, as we didn’t have enough writing time.

After the second lesson, we had to describe an enchanted object that acts has a portal to another world. Renata told us about a fairy-tale called ‘The Faery Handbag’ where a woman skinned a dog and made a purse out of it and it turned into a portal to another world.

The last lesson was called ‘Trickster heroes walk among us’. What we had to do was to transport a hero or villain in a world that they do not know of and put them in a setting against the ‘new gods’ (Social Media and Celebrities etc.…)

(e.g. “He showed up half-way through the term. He told us his name was Maui but we would call him ‘M’. He said that he was a Demi-God too, but he was always talking crazy like that, always cracking us up. Here’s when I realised he wasn’t kidding.”)  What I wrote was: Our friend Sunset at CH (Canterlot High) said she had magical powers that no one wanted to see, nobody believed her and thought she was plain crazy and just laughed when she told someone or one of her friends. But really… This is when everyone learnt that she wasn’t kidding at all…

After all the lessons, I got Renata Hopkins to sign my journal and then Daisy, Tyler, Adirua, Mafile’o and I went to the next session in the theatre. It was an awesome day.

Jordan, R1