Magic is messy—and so is making brooms

We read—and discussed Spell Sweeper—in my creative writing workshop with tweens and teens this weekend, so a natural activity was to imagine our own magical brooms and write about them.

Check out these amazing creations!

As you can see, there is a lot of “hair-cutting” that occurs to get the brooms to the desired length and shape. By the end, it looked like wow had experienced an ill-advised encounter with Rapunzel!

This is a pretty simple activity that involves basic supplies: sticks for handles, twine for the straw, some black thread, and white glue (paint optional). For full instructions, check out the Teacher Resource Guide that is available on my website.

I can’t wait to read the stories that accompany these brooms!

As for the book discussion itself, well I really work hard on my students to be honest in their appraisals of books. It’s especially hard to do when the creator is standing in front of you, so in previous years I never led lit circles on my own books for that reason. But then I decided that it’s a better idea that they read their instructor’s work, so now we tackle it as best we can. We rate our books out of ten, and I’m happy to report that my book received an average score of 8.15/10. (Actually, I’m extremely happy with that because it proves that they were indeed honest).

I will mention that Zuki, the magical fox creature (kitsune) was by far the favourite character.

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Creativity unleashed!

Whew! Just wrapped up the last of my creative writing summer camps: Galaxy, Fantasy, and Shipwreck were the three themes, so I explored many different genres and approaches to writing.

First, I’m SO proud of all my students. Look out world—there’s a wave of talented young writers coming your way! Above is a picture of the three anthologies of the students’ work, one for each camp, that we created for the kids.

Second, thank you to my teaching partners Stacey Matson and Marcie Nestman! Couldn’t have done it without you. 

Finally, I’m simply grateful for the opportunities to continue teaching the thing I love most: creativity. The pandemic has been challenging, but has also given me the impetus to expand my bag of tricks, learning new ways to engage students over Zoom, and to work with students not only in my own backyard in Vancouver, but across Canada, the US, Korea, China, Singapore, Australia . . . 

What’s next? A few weeks off to recharge, spend time with family, and to focus on some personal writing projects. Oh, and Spell Sweeper, my latest middle-grade books, is coming out in three and half months—in some ways, that feels like an eternity, but I know it’ll be here before I know it.

Cover reveals for my amazing teen writers

Nothing motivates like a deadline!

This past week, I wrapped up a fifteen-week creative writing program for teen writers in which they wrote their own individual novels.

This was quite the challenge! Usually our programs give 18-25 weeks for such an endeavor, but this was a special one-off term. Still, somehow, my students were able to write their books, design their covers, and create some magic along the way.

Perhaps I say this at the end of every program I teach, but I really resonated with this group. Maybe it’s because we all felt we were on the same page: shy, introverted, awkward . . . and best at expressing ourselves through writing.

As we planned for our final presentation (via Zoom, of course), there was a lot of handwringing, anxiety, and stress. (Some of it even came from the students!). I finally decided to let them off the hook, and promised that I would do all the speaking as long as they wrote the scripts to go with each of their books. But when they saw that I was going to post their biography photos on each slide along with their book covers, I was assailed by another round of stress, so I evened the playing field and made sure to start the presentation with a series of awkward photos of me as a child (I mean, that’s kind of redundant—every photo of me as a child is awkward), as well as the covers of the books I wrote when I was their age.

Their book covers look SO much better than the ones I did as a kid, that’s for sure:

Ah, I will miss them, this clever crew of creatives!

Creative kids = creative covers

I’m so proud of the kids! Despite all the extra challenges this past term, everyone finished up a book in my two creative writing classes that I teach through CWC.

Like so many classes,  we were forced to transition to teaching through online platforms halfway through the term due to COVID. Teaching anything creative is hard to do on screen, but we muddled through. The hardest part, though? Designing and illustrating covers for our books.

Usually, when I’m in class, I can literally lean over the student’s workspace and help them sketch or tidy up a design. I often have them work on “thumbnail” sketches first so that they can fine-tune a design before investing a lot of time on a final illustration. I still asked the students take this approach so that I could at least look at their designs—this time, though, I just couldn’t literally get in there and make amendments.

Still, many students succeeded in coming up with excellent designs and/or illustrations. Of course, I have many kids who are fabulous illustrators. For those who aren’t comfortable with their artistic abilities, they decided to draw on the stock photo libraries available through pexels.com and pixabay.com. In these cases, though, the students still had to design their cover, which including deciding upon the right placement of the photo, choosing the font, and thinking about overall impact.

So, here are some of the great covers designed by my students. We’ve got mysteries, science fiction, fantasy quests, and thrillers . . . quite the collection!

The books will go for printing this summer (we print our books perfect-bound, so that they even have proper spines) and they will arrive in our students’ hands in the next couple of months. For them, it feels like forever, I know!

The Creative Writing for Children Society (CWC) is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the creativity, confidence and writing capacity of children through well-tailored writing programs, delivered in-class and through digital platforms. In our programs, students from around the world write and illustrate their own books, which are professionally desktop published. Founded in 2004, CWC is based in Vancouver, BC.

Activities for Kids: Small solutions for BIG problems

I’m posting my latest activity for all us of kids big and small stuck at home. So far, I’ve posted an activity to build a shrink ray and peg figures, along with the handouts to map a miniature person’s trek across a room in the house. It’s my attempt to make us perceive our current confined settings as bigger than they actually are!

Continuing the theme, I’m introducing another angle to this set of activities.

Creature Attack!

Whenever I’ve asked my students to map out an epic journey across a single room in the house, I then surprise them by springing a new challenge upon their characters: an attack by a deadly creature!

Well, it’s not SO deadly if you are normal sized, but for miniature characters, beetles, centipedes, and frogs are quite perilous!

What you will need:

• Paper and writing supplies
• Plastic critters (available at any dollar store, or also in your nearby toybox!)—spiders, snakes, beetles, grasshoppers, frogs, cockroaches—you name it!
• Small “tools”:
  • Buttons
  • Bottle caps
  • Coins
  • Drink umbrellas
  • Birthday candles
  • Plastic spoons
  • Popsicle sticks
  • Spools of thread
  • Toothpicks
  • Crayons
  • Clothespins
  • Elastic bands
  • Paperclips
  • In other words, anything you have lying around the home that a miniature character could “repurpose”

I like to begin this activity by putting all the critters in “Bag #1” then having the students picking one out “blindly.” This introduces an extra element of fun and surprise.

Then, I put all the “tools” into Bag #2 and ask the students to pick out two or three of them.

Now, we’ve got the problem (the critter) and the solution (the tool), and we just have to figure out how the character can use the tools to escape and survive. This is fun problem-solving!

If you’ve been following along with these activities and already mapped out the setting, then this confrontation with the critter can take place in that epic landscape (like in the middle of a shag-rug forest)!

At the very bottom, I’ve posted a handout so that kids can brainstorm some solutions. And here are some photos from some of the past classes where I’ve rolled out this project.

And here is the Big Problem — Small Solution handout:

If you have writers in your family, this set of activities provides a lot of inspiration! But I have one other creative output that you can do with this set of projects, which I will post in the coming days. Stay safe, stay well, and stay tuned . . .

 

Our magical creature camp in Korea

I’m just catching up on organizing photos after our whirlwind trip to Korea and Japan this past summer—which means I’m finally getting around to blogging about the Magical Creatures creative writing camp that I taught along with my actor/playwright wife Marcie Nestman and fellow children’s author Kallie George.

Marcie and I are used to spending time in Asia—personally, I’ve been there over thirty times, most of it to teach creative writing camps or workshops. What WAS new this time was that we took our one-year-old son, Hiro, with us. So, seasoned travelers that we are, we had a very different type of adventure!

A magical theme

Since Kallie and I both recently released books featuring magical creatures—Kallie’s Wings of Olympus and my The Secret of Zoone—we thought that would make the best theme for our camp.

Of course, there are plenty of books and films featuring magical creatures, so this was a great way to connect with and inspire our students.

 

The magical menagerie art exhibit

In The Secret of Zoone, one of the characters references the “Multiversal Menagerie,” an art exhibit featuring paintings of different creatures from across the multiverse. I thought I would take a cue from that and have my students do a creative writing project in which they produced artwork of a creature then wrote the information card that goes with it.

You see, I have this belief that not every writing assignment has to be a proper story. I worry that my students get so focused on plot, that they forget other elements of writing—such as description, setting, character development and BEING CREATIVE. I call this “plot paralysis” because students get so caught up in that ONE part of writing that they start ignoring everything else.

Projects like the multiverses menagerie are meant to help the students wriggle free of the shackles of plot and just have fun.

Our project started with brainstorming creatures  . . .

Afterwards, the students turned their attention to final artwork. Some students chose to draw, some students chose to sculpt, and others chose to do both.

The Eye of the Dragon

Another project I rolled out at camp involved writing a scene in which a character finds or steals a magical gem that gives that character the power of connecting with a creature. The students got to choose the aspect of that connection—it could be transforming into the creature, controlling it, or even seeing through its eyes.

Step one, however, was painting the gem of power!

I really love this project because it is relatively simple, but produces stunning results. In fact, many of my students end up wearing their jewelry afterwards (it’s easy enough to glue the gems to a metal ring or amulet).

The gems themselves are glass cabochons, which you can get in different shapes (such as oval or round) and the paint is simple nail polish. This project is very forgiving—even those students who don’t consider themselves artistic can create abstract designs. Also, if you make a mistake, a little nail polish remover helps you start over!

Here are some of the gorgeous designs produced by my students:

 

The magical market

We delivered many other projects at the camp, but there is one other event I wanted to blog about—and that is our magical market night. Our camps our long—often six or seven days, and we find we need some sort of event in the middle to help break it up and provide a “boost.”

We usually host a tournament or some other team-building exercises; this time, Marcie had the brilliant idea of putting on a magical market. This was brilliant for a few reasons—not the least of which was that we could do it outdoors and avoid the intense summer heat and humidity. Also, we corralled our older students into coming up with the ideas for the stalls, and then running them during the event itself.

So, we ended up having all sorts of fun stations consisting of games, face painting, fortune telling, and—my favorite—food! We invented a new fizzy drink by combining soda water and pop rocks and also had glow-in-the-dark cotton candy. We gave the students fake jewels to use as currency, so they got to stroll our market and decide how to spend their loot.

Marcie had led a project in which the students designed their own lanterns for a made-up magical creature holiday, so we already had some decorations ready to go.

It was a HUGE success!

 

 

Book covers from the workshop of dreams

I’m just wrapping up production of the books written and illustrated by the students who took the Spring Term of my Dream Workshop program that is run through Creative Writing for Children.

In many cases, the students provided their own artwork. In others, the students chose royalty-free stock photos, but in those cases, they still had to design their cover, which meant providing instructions on how to crop the photo and which fonts to use.

I’m so proud of my students! The books will go for printing soon and will be in their hot little hands in the next few months.

Diving into our imaginations at Dragon Masters camp

I had the joy of starting off the new year in a fun way: by leading a “Dragon Masters” camp for tweens.

The camp was hosted by the Creative Writing for Children Society (CWC) and involved sculpting dragon scales, painting gemstones, drawing fantastical creatures, and—of course—writing about dragons, too!

One of the best aspects of this three-day camp is that I had only 15 students, which meant that we could really immerse ourselves in the activities and I had a lot of one-on-one time with each one of the kids. Many of them had worked with me in the past, so it was a fun way to reconnect with them.

“I Am” poetry

The first activity we worked on was a pair of point-of- view poems. Students brainstormed two characters, one a thief trying to steal something from a dragon’s lair, and the other a dragon who was being threatened by the theft. The students wrote one poem from each perspective.

To help with this activity, we sculpted our own dragon scales, prompting many of the students to choose this as the item that the thief would steal from the creature. Of course, the students had to come up with a reason for the theft and the response from the dragon.

One thing about sculpting, is that it’s good thinking time for writers! While the kids sculpted, they could work out some ideas for their writing. But, of course, the sculpting project in itself was a lot of fun.

Sculpting dragon scales

Here are some photos of the scales in progress. We started with plastic shapes cut from a soda bottle, then plastered them. Some students opted to sculpt ridges or shapes into their design; others decided to do a flat surface, leaving the detailing for the next phase.

We actually had to let the scales dry overnight, but by the next morning they were ready for the students to add more detail by bejweling them (if they chose). By using acrylic gems, the students were able to add intricate detail and give their scales texture. By using the strips of acrylic gems (available at any dollar store), you can gain some uniformity, too.

Afterwards, we painted the scales with mod podge, to help bind everything together.

The last step was painting. I find that painting everything with a black base provides a rich undercoat; once this coat is dry, students can dry brush on a variety of metallic colors to help achieve that dragonish feel.

Of course, each student had a very specific idea for what their dragons looked like, or the type of environment they lived in, so their scales were design to match these concepts.

Here are a few of the completed projects:

Developing a story

After the students had explored the point-of-view poems, I had them choose one of the points of view, either the dragon or the thief, and then develop that perspective into a longer, more conventional story.

The poems were more about capturing character emotion, but the story provided the students with an opportunity to flesh out a plot.

I led the students in some brainstorming exercises and provided them with some vocabulary words to help invigorate their stories. (Honestly, I’m tired of my students overusing the word “run” so we worked hard on developing a list of alternate ways to describe how characters such as dragons and thieves might move.)

Gems of sorcery

One of the other projects that we worked on was painting glass cabochons to look like magical gems. The idea here was that these gems could be found in a dragon’s lair or a character could already be in possession of them and use them to train or communicate with a dragon.

The project is pretty simple; all you have to do is paint on the backside of the cabochons with fingernail paint. Abstract designs work well and are easy to do, though some of my students tried their hand at painting dragon eyes.

Welcome to the Dragon Races

One of the challenges of teaching a camp is making sure students always have something to work on. Everyone creates at a different pace, and I like to have everyone work organically, which means instead of developing a checklist of projects that MUST be completed, I just have a cauldron of projects to choose from once we start getting close to the end.

For the final day of our camp, I brought in my own custom-made dragon eggs to inspire extra stories about dragon’s hatching.

And, finally, for those students who had written, sculpted, and painted everything I had them finish off by imagining there was a dragon race coming up and had them illustrate posters.

This turned out to be a really successful camp. I want to thank the organizers and my two assistants, Jamie and Chelsea, who helped the kids work on their art projects and did a lot of the clean up. Jamie and Chelsea have been students of mine in the past and it’s really gratifying to see them step into a different role.

Next step? We’ve collected all the students’ writing and drawings and we’ll be publishing them in a short anthology.

The kids are all right: in which my students get published

I’m just wrapping up another term of creative writing classes for tweens and teens through CWC (the creative writing for children society).

Publishing books for kids

One of the unique things about our program is that we publish our students’ writing in the form of professionally-bound books.

In the Fall term, we publish anthologies, and I’ve recently mocked up the cover that we plan to use for the individual classes:

Digital publication on amazon

Our Spring term is a little different. In that term, each students get to work on publishing an individual book. Many kids choose to write a chapter novel, though we also have some who choose to work on a collection of short stories or poems.

Certain students who have been with our program for multiple terms choose to also publish their books on amazon, so I thought I would share the covers and purchase links of those students who published books in 2018.

All proceeds go to support education of kids in developing countries (CWC is currently providing financial support for several teenaged girls in Guatemala, helping them complete their high school education).

Without further adieu, here is our latest series of books . . .

Realm, by Chloe Kang

The first time I met Chloe I knew she was a writer. You’ll never see her without a book clutched in her hands and her enthusiasm for writing bursts from every pore. She’s a lover of fantasy, so it’s no surprise that she crafted a book about a character stuck in a pixelated realm . . .

BUY THIS BOOK

Mosaic, by Yongsuh Lee

Youngsuh Lee and was inspired by her volunteering with immigrant children from Southeast Asia in Seoul and observing the changing fabric of Korean society.

BUY THIS BOOK

Undefined, by Cassandra Feltrin

Cassandra is a gifted middle-school student who wrote a dystopian thriller. She’s just one of those students that seems to shine in everything she does.

BUY THIS BOOK

Unconditional, by Rosie (Jimin) You

Rosie, one of our long-time students in Korea, wrote a book of poetry. She was always a very poetic soul, even as a young kid, and now she’s coming into her own as a teenager.

The other neat thing about this book is that Rosie took all the photographs that appear alongside her words.

BUY THIS BOOK

Twisted, by Avary Fawcett

Avary is one of your current young stars, skilled at twists, turns, and clever characterizations.

BUY THIS BOOK

The 10 Dimensions, by Brian Leong

Brian is one of our youngest authors to be published. He is a passionate advocate for kids in developing countries, so is really pleased that all proceeds for his book will go to help those in need.

BUY THIS BOOK

Salvatore, by Andrew Marzec

Andrew is another one of our long-time students. I first met him and his twin sister when they were only in Grade 3 and their passion for writing and creativity was on full display then. Now, they are teenagers!

BUY THIS BOOK

Living In Secrets, by Rachel Kwon

Rachel is another one of our current CWC stars; a thoughtful young writer always striving to improve her craft. I am so proud to have been her mentor.

BUY THIS BOOK

The Darkness is Just the Light in Hiding, by Elyse Nah

Elyse is one of our long-time students based in Oregon—and she’s an extremely gifted writer. She has a natural storytelling voice and a talent for creating memorable characters.

BUY THIS BOOK

Murder with Lies, by Sarah Marzec

Sarah is yet another one of our long-time students—I first met her and her twin brother when she was only in Grade 3! She is a talented and thoughtful writer.

Propping up our stories: creating characters with prop-building

I’ve been doing a lot of prop-building lately—for example, crafting dragon eggs. Since prop-building is such an important part of my writing process, it’s something I like to bring to my students as well.

Getting away from the screen

One of the great things about prop-building is that it allows me to work on my book without staring at the screen. Let’s face it: Writing is hard and often exhausting. Sometimes, I feel like I have no words left in my brain, but I still have the desire to playin my world.

I’ve found that prop-building is a way to accomplish that. Working with tangible objects, working with my hands, has helped me to sort out plot problems. It’s kind of like doing the dishes and being suddenly struck by a eureka moment. Of course, when you wash dishes, all you get is clean dishes. When you build a prop, you get a tangible item from an imaginary world.

Nightmare Bottles

I’ve been working with a group of tween and teen writers this spring and one of the things I’ve tried to do is bring in the prop-building angle.

One of our first projects was to build “nightmare bottles.” This involves creating a character and metaphorically putting their fears in a bottle. Of course, this could provide fuel for a story in its own right, but the main purpose here was just to coax the kids into some brainstorming time.

Here’s some of their creations . . .

 

Character Kits

The main prop-building project I introduced this term was to create a personal kit for each character. This could also be metaphorical or could actually appear in the students’ stories. I’m big on inventing interesting “tools” for my characters and, especially if you are writing a fantasy book, I think you have a lot of opportunities to add extra sizzle to your story.

For this project, the students get to decorate and paint the kits themselves, then fill them with a variety of mini-props that fit their specific characters’ journeys.

This project has also tasked my students with a different approach to creativity. I’ve been trying to make sure they solve some of the problems they face.For example, one of my students wanted to build a spy kit with a gun. I looked around for toy guns and felt the creativity being sapped right out of me. I decided we could do something more original and unique. So, instead of buying a pre-made toy pistol, I bought tiny water guns and told the student to use it as a base for building something more unique.

He took one look at the brightly colored water guns and scoffed. I couldn’t convince him what a little paint a few cannibalized odds and ends could do. There was nothing I could do to change his mind, so I went home and built my own gun.

Admittedly, my gadget turned out part steampunk, part alien ray gun, but I hope I’ve made my point! And, now, I have something more unique and interesting that I can use—yep, I decided this can belong to a character who’s currently running around causing havoc in one of my own stories.

That’s the power of prop-building!