Every year Wigtown Book Festival holds school events during the week. This year was no different with all the local schools bussing in hundreds of pupils to take part in all sorts of events.
I was lucky enough to be offered a place on a very popular writer’s workshop run by: Maggi Gibson, Alan Durant and Hugh Bryden.
We were given the following choices of workshop: comedy, storytelling, poetry, creative writing and bookmaking. Each of the authors stood up and told us all what their workshop would be about. I choose creative writing with Maggi Gibson (author of Seriously Sassy).
Over the next few hours we learnt how to create characters by picturing them in our heads, imagining a whole life for them including tiny details like: their favourite food, the names of their best friends, if they had any brothers and sisters, favourite hobbies, favourite colour, favourite animal, what they liked to wear and even things that they hated.
I really enjoyed brainstorming every single detail about my new character, which by now, was becoming almost real – I even had a name for her and knew what challenges she was going to face in the book. By doing this simple exercise the whole book was almost written for me.
I hope that something similar happens next year for the first years. I’m sure they will enjoy it as much as we did.