Starting a Story - Catherine MacPhail

It’s the simple things that give us the best ideas for stories. I was walking along the street and I heard a boy talking on his mobile phone. All I could hear him saying was, ‘I know, I know, this is my last chance.’

I thought, ‘Last chance for what?’ You think about it:

His last chance to pay back money he owes? How is he going to get that money?
His last chance to get his place on the football team? What if he has a rival who will stop at nothing to keep him out of the team?

How many stories could you come up with using just those words? Last Chance. Here is the one I came up with:

What if you were always in trouble? It was never really your fault, and a school trip was your last chance to prove yourself. What if it was a school trip you didn’t want to go on, to a remote island, dominated by a crumbling lighthouse (I love lighthouses), with your least favourite teacher, and boys you didn’t like? You’re warned not to go near that lighthouse, but in the end, something is going to force you to ignore that warning.

What I have just written is a short synopsis of my book Point Danger.

That is how all my books start. Look at the synopsis. I already have the high points of the story:

The journey to the island (On a boat? Could there be a storm?)
The lighthouse dominating the skyline.
The description of the teacher.
The boys he doesn’t like.
What is going to make him disobey the teacher and go near the lighthouse?
And what is he going to find inside?
And most importantly, I have my hero, the boy who wishes he was anywhere else but here.
And in my head I heard a voice say, ‘I hate school trips.’ It was MacDuff.

I really believe that once you’ve got the voice, the character comes alive. And MacDuff came alive right then. I knew exactly what he would say about his teacher, Mr Hoss.

Perfect name, by the way – with a face like his, he should be wearing a saddle.

I knew what he would say when they reached the ‘hotel’.

‘This is a hut. H-U-T.’ I spelt it out.

In fact, because I could hear his voice, I could put MacDuff in any situation and I knew what he would say and how he would say it.

Here’s something for you to try:

Chelsea (remember, her with the chewing gum hair?) asks MacDuff to her birthday party. I know what he would say. Do you?

Chelsea? Asking me to her party? After what I did to her hair? Oh no, I don’t trust her. She’s up to something.

So go ahead. Write about what happens at the party, in MacDuff’s voice.

Cathy MacPhail has written over forty books for children, as well as plays for radio and short stories. She has a reputation for 'gritty realism’, but loves writing funny books as well as ghost stories. Her first book, Run Zan Run, was inspired by the bullying her daughter suffered in high school. Many of her books have won awards, and she loves visiting schools to talk to her readers. She still lives in Greenock, in Scotland, where she was born.

Click to download the free classroom writing exercise that Cathy MacPhail has written, Starting a Story.

Don’t forget about the free Point Danger activities as well: a classroom speed quiz and a look at plotting tension in the book.

Comics – the gateway to reading

Every single week when I was a child there was no other experience like holding in my own hand the latest and unread issue of my favourite comic. It was called Boys World, and that feeling of trembling excitement every Friday when it dropped through the letterbox was pure delight. For me and all my friends that feeling bordered on the euphoric. What brilliance! A profusion of stories, funny and serious, heroes and villains and adventures. And it was ALL mine to devour. Now that really is reading for pleasure!

Photo by Johnny Ring,
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The loss of these wonderful publications was and remains a tragedy for the country and its children. The real pity is that we didn’t realise the massive cultural platform they provided. They were, and are, one of the foundations of much of our modern day literary culture. I am a book editor and I would say at least half my story sense, if I have any … came from comics. That’s why so many top authors now pay tribute to them.

"It was as much through The Eagle and Classics Illustrated, those wonderfully evocative comic books of the Classics, that I first came to a love of stories. I loved the speed of the stories, the breathless excitement I felt as I turned the page. I am now a story maker myself, so I owe a lot to my ‘comic beginnings!’ What matters hugely is that children should be excited by stories, in whatever form, whether in books, CDs, comics, movies - it doesn’t matter. For many children comics are a way in, a way to become a reader. That’s what they were for me.”
Michael Morpurgo

“Comics formed a vital and vigorous part of my childhood reading. The Eagle was the main British comic, of course – to anyone born just after the war, as I was, it came as a great burst of life and fun and colour in a rather drab world.. I still feel the thrill that made me tremble with excitement when the weekly comic arrived with the papers. I’d seize it with avidity and retreat to some corner of the garden and fling myself down and devour it like a hyena. There was something so clean and powerful about the storytelling in a comic – so direct, so swift and easy, as if the delight and excitement of the story passed immediately into my blood.”
Philip Pullman

As the founder of The Phoenix I often talk about how reading comics is just as beneficial, if not more so, than any other kind of reading.

According to the research comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of reading, and they produce wonderful things; increased vocabulary, improved comprehension of social, linguistic and cultural conventions, firing of imaginations. Comics offer a particularly flexible, stimulating form of narrative, they allow you to read in a way that nothing else does – you can look back, retrace the visual clues, follow different details. It’s depictive art. They are as complex and as valuable as any kind of reading and excellent for promoting visual literacy too.

When we lost those comics of decades passed, we did not appreciate their almost unparalleled ability to nurture and grow new readers. What a brilliant catalyst comics are for growing readers, and writers, thinkers and creators. Unlike so many reading experiences that children encounter, comics are first and foremost about fun and entertainment. They are relaxed reading. Pure enjoyment. And it’s only through enjoyment that we get a real love of words and stories.

David Fickling is a children's book editor and publisher. He started his career with Oxford University Press in 1977, moving on to Transworld and then on to become Publishing Director of Scholastic UK. Most recently, in January 2012, David founded and launched The Phoenix, the weekly story comic for children.

 Above all, David loves great stories.

David Fickling lives with his wife in Oxford, England.

Drawing Stories with Neill Cameron

A uniquely brilliant thing about comics is simply that they tell a story through drawings. This makes the experience of reading a comic a fantastic collaboration between the creator and the reader, who has to use their own imagination to join those pictures together into a story.

There's something wonderfully immediate and universal about how this works; you can look at a series of images and you almost can't help seeing it as a story; it's something your brain just does automatically.

Obviously text is an important part of comics, too – from dialogue to narration to all the fun and brilliant things you can do with sound effects – but to me the most important thing is telling a story with pictures.

Ideally to me you should be able to look at a page of comics and be able to basically tell what's going on without even needing to look at the words.

HOW TO CREATE A HERO

My OTHER favourite thing about comics is that anyone can make them. Seriously – anyone. You don't have to be an amazingly talented artist. You don't even need to be able to read or write! If you can draw a stick figure, you can tell a story with comics, and EVERYONE can draw a stick figure. Even two-year-olds. Even my MUM.

I've actually come up with a handy rule for creating comics characters, so if you ever find yourself getting stuck, just apply this handy rule:

The Principle of the Multiplication of Awesomeness, or 'Cameron's Law'.

For example:

This is sort of a joke, but also sort of profoundly true. The point is that you want to create a character that is interesting, or funny, and give them different sides to their nature – sides that may be in conflict – is a great way of doing that.

I like to imagine this is what was going on in my friend and co-writer Daniel Hartwell's head when he came up with the idea for our story The Pirates of Pangaea in the first place. Our lead character, Sophie, is a very nice, polite and well-brought-up young English girl from the 18th century who finds herself on a strange and terrifying new continent filled with pirates, and dinosaurs, and pirates riding dinosaurs - and finds that she fits right in. And that riding a Tyrannosaurus Rex is pretty awesome fun.

This is a handy bonus side-effect of Cameron's Law, which is that it makes for things which are SUPER FUN TO DRAW! I love drawing pirates and I (deeply, deeply) love drawing dinosaurs, and in any ordinary story I would be lucky to get to draw either one of those things. But I get to spend my days drawing pirates RIDING AROUND ON dinosaurs. And let me tell you, life does not get much sweeter than that. – Neill

Don’t forget you can download this free comic-writing activity for your secondary school classroom, from beloved author Alan Gibbons. Get students writing and reading!

Neill Cameron is a professional comics writer and illustrator. He is the creator of Mo-Bot High, The Pirates of Pangaea (with Daniel Hartwell) and How To Make (Awesome) Comics, amongst other things. His work can regularly be seen in weekly children's comic The Phoenix. 

Neill also travels the country teaching comics workshops in schools, libraries, museums and really any public space he can get away with it. 

Neill quite likes making comics.

Writing 'The Edge' - Alan Gibbons

Writing about issues such as domestic violence, you always risk sounding preachy. It is easy to let your desire to do the subject justice take over the narrative.

When I started writing The Edge, I knew that the story had to come first. If you overload it with worthy ideas, it can become sluggish and wordy. So how was I going to keep it ‘pacey’ and involving for my teenage readers?

I am a huge movie buff, so the answer was staring me in the face in the form of film’s use of cutting from one character to another. This is a staple of the thriller and horror genres. There is a shot of somebody walking along a dark, rain-swept street. He turns and sees a silhouetted figure. The camera peers at the quarry over the shoulder of the pursuer. You hear their breathing, see the revolver in his hand. Then it is back to the quarry, his quickening pace, his growing panic.

The Edge is a chase, the pursuit of Cathy and Danny by the abusive Chris. That set the tone of the whole novel. The opening chapter begins with Cathy shaking Danny awake. They are about to flee, but Chris is suspicious. From that point on the narrative is developed in a series of mini-chapters – essentially scenes. The emphasis is on pace and the rhythms of flight and pursuit.

There is a second reason for the format of multiple-narration. I had read several novels about bullying and victimisation that I found too black-and-white. The reader empathised solely with the object of terror. The story was reduced to good guy, bad guy. I found that far too simplistic. By seeing through the eyes of Danny, his mother, his grandparents, Danny’s estranged father, even the monstrous Chris, the novel makes demands of the reader. You confront ambiguities. You see the way people justify their actions, even when those actions are terrifyingly damaging. In other words, the multiple narrators allowed me to make the story more subtle and nuanced.

Can one narrative style combine both pace and subtlety? Read The Edge and judge for yourself.
Now, get writing.

Download this free writing activity PowerPoint for your classroom and try your hand at writing the first chapter of The Edge 2: A sequel. 

Alan Gibbons trained as a teacher and through working with young people discovered his literary voice. He started writing fiction for his pupils and published his first novel in 1993. Alan has also appeared on the BBC education programme Writer’s Block, the Blue Peter Book Awards, radio 4’s Front Row, and is a regular contributor to TES, Junior Education, Carousel, Books for Keeps and other journals.

The influence of comics

When I started cooperating with my son Robbie on The Name is Kade and Gladiator, we were both aware that young readers now have a lot more competition for their time than when I was a kid in the Fifties or even when Rob was growing up in the Nineties.

The impact of digital platforms and TV is everywhere. There are social networking sites. There is YouTube. There is Manga and the graphic novel.

That sent us looking for immediate, fast-paced ways of conveying a narrative, forms that combined text and image in a way that swept the reader along.

One of my early influences was the Marvel comics of the 1960s, featuring lots of speech bubbles and an emphasis on colour and dynamic action.

Dialogue is absolutely central to this kind of storytelling. It has to be crisp, sharp and, if possible, funny. This is most evident in The Name is Kade with its updating of the first-person narrator detective story and noirish feel.

The lone hero marching into a hostile pool hall is transported from 1940s America to outer space in a genre that could be described as 25th Century Gumshoe.

The sentences form a short, staccato accompaniment to Eoin Coveney’s strikingly effective illustrations.

The timeslip tale Gladiator uses Matt Timson’s dramatic illustrations to similar effect. We didn’t want anything twee or childish in stories for today’s teenagers. The metamorphosis from boy to man in the story gave Matt free rein to capture the terrifying reality of gladiatorial combat.

I think both illustrators helped us, the authors, to achieve our aim: a robust, action-packed, visual tale that could compete with the many possible distractions in a young reader’s life.
Anyway, that is how Rob and I made our version of the modern comic, but why not design your own?

Download this free writing activity to do in class.

Alan Gibbons trained as a teacher and through working with young people discovered his literary voice. He started writing fiction for his pupils and published his first novel in 1993. Alan has also appeared on the BBC education programme Writer’s Block, the Blue Peter Book Awards, radio 4’s Front Row, and is a regular contributor to TES, Junior Education, Carousel, Books for Keeps and other journals.