Strangus Derangus
The Curious Case of the Sweet and Spicy Sweetshop
By Royal Appointment
Bat and the End of Everything
Dhara’s Revolution
The Misadventures of a Diamond Thief
When Jiya Met Urmila
My Year in Workshops: 2023
Gobi Goes Viral
The Very Glum Life of Tootoolu Toop
The Canary Caper
An Alien in the Jam Factory
Trunk Call for Ajju
When the World Went Dark
A Pinch of Magic
The Diary as Story
In just a few weeks, yet another writing programme will come to an end! Yesterday was the third and last guest session of the season–a creative writing workshop with children’s book author Sowmya Rajendran.
I love it when guests reinforce something I’ve been talking about for a while. During yesterday’s session, it was ‘write what you know’. Of course, I do give children the opposite advice too–write what you don’t know–but the point, for me, is to bring stories into familiar contexts.
When Sowmya told us about how her book Mayil Will Not Be Quiet was born, she stressed that she and her co-author Niveditha Subramaniam wanted to write a book about being a child in India. What is it like to go to an Indian school? What sort of conversations do we have at home? This idea is well worth repeating, especially as most children continue to write stories about Michael and Felicity, who live in Massachusetts (which, of course, many cannot spell)!
Sowmya spoke about the importance of an authentic voice because finally, it’s the voice that will keep the reader invested in the story. Step by step, she led us through the process of making the diarist’s voice feel real. For one, we must have a clear idea of the character. For another, we need to look at the character’s social circle because naturally, a diary would be full of stories about people around this character.
From character and form to little quirks and doodles, Sowmya helped us make our epistolary story believable. It’s with conflict that a story really becomes a story, and that’s what we explored through yet another writing activity.
Just like that, we’ve had three rewarding guest sessions, creative thinking, and a lot of writing. The last writing programmes of the year with fourteen young writers are racing to an end!
Stories: Comic-Page Style
What a rewarding session we had with Nandita Basu! At workshops like this one, I think I learn as much as the young writers who sign up.
Step by step, Nandita led us through the creation of one page of narrative that brings together text and illustration in the style of a graphic novel. We launched straight into the workshop with an interesting prompt that made all of us think. We’ve all wronged someone at some point in our lives; there’s been a time when we were needlessly nasty to someone who didn’t deserve it. This formed the basis of the plot we went on to sketch over the next hour.
Layouts, structure, characters, setting, conflict, emotion … in a single hour, Nandita led us through the whole lot. How important is background when setting the context of our story? Is it all right to make stick figures rather than fully detailed characters? How large or small should the characters be in a given box?
Ten minutes at a time, Nandita led us through the creation of a one-page story. We created the setting and conflict first, and then moved on to emotion and the climax of the story.
Nandita urged us not to rush, but to take our time to finish. I’m waiting to see what the participants came up with!
Green Stuff and Nonsense
What a fun session we had on green writing with Bijal Vachharajani! In a single hour, we spoke of a million creatures from elephants to frogs, ferrets to spiders, lion-tailed macaques to slugs that aren’t slugs.
Bijal’s workshop was a guest session at my writing programme. We’ve just reached the end of our poetry module, so it was the perfect time to invite a guest to do a workshop for us, and I thought of Bijal because the Art is Everywhere series – which Bijal has co-authored – is one of my favourite sets of rhyming verse. I loved how she led us through the workshop yesterday, beginning with a free writing exercise for us to shed our inhibitions and get writing and then moving on to more structured writing.
In the central element of the workshop, Bijal showed us seven images (all taken by one of her co-authors Radha Rangarajan), and asked us to write two lines of poetry about each one. Here are the animals we wrote about:
- Jumping spider
- Asian elephant
- Baya weaver bird
- Lion-tailed macaque
- Bush frog
- Mudskipper
- Ghost crab
I loved what the children shared!
Guest sessions add a vibrancy to the writing programme. The best ones sparkle and stand out, making us excited to write again. The next guest session is already in the pipeline, and it promises to be just as much fun!
Kittu’s Very Mad Day
Unfair
Earwig and the Witch
Kolam Kanna
Moin and the Monster
Because of Winn-Dixie
A Giant Leap
A Flamingo in My Garden
The Great Escape
Art Workshop with Kripa
Each time a new writing programme begins, I feel it whizzes by. Twelve weeks are nearly over, and here we are, after our last guest session of the programme, an art workshop with art educator and children’s illustrator, Kripa. It was such a treat!
I’ve been looking at Kripa’s art for a while, and I love it. Her tea journal, her little dough babies, her city sketches … each picture she shares on social media is stunning. Art and writing go together, no matter how much I may say that I cannot draw at all, and that is why I invited Kripa to conduct an art workshop for us.
Watching all the children fill their pages with colour warmed me up. It’s a joy to watch them engage in the reflective experience of creating art, and I loved how Kripa guided them through it. The title of the workshop itself is lovely, isn’t it?
Purple sea and pink sky,
Nothing in art is a lie.
Kripa began by showing us her gorgeous artwork featuring the sky and the sea. Often, we restrict ourselves to traditional colours when we draw. The sky is blue, the sea is blue-green, and land is brown. Yesterday’s session was about experimenting with these colours, by using bold, unconventional colours to express ourselves.
I also loved Kripa’s first and most important rule: don’t erase. There are no mistakes! She asked the children to imagine that their eraser had fallen into the sea, or better, that the eraser had not been invented yet.
Beginning with a single horizontal line, Kripa taught them about positive space and negative space. Using non-traditional colours, the children explored mixed media to create seascapes of their own. Even as they worked, Kripa spoke about strokes, both for oil pastels and for poster colours, encouraging the children to create layers.
And voila! In an hour, each of the children had a work of art to show. I’m waiting for them to finish their pieces and send me pictures, but the little we saw was lovely too.
With that, another set of workshops comes to an end. But before I know it, October will be here, and I’ll be planning my next set of guest sessions …