Workshops

What an informative session we had with Anupama Dalmia!

Anupama began by discussing what blogging is. From there, we went on to so much more – blog formats (including vlogs and micro-blogs), finding your niche, and starting your own free blog. She then introduced the children to SEO and the backend, showing them how easy it is to start the process of blogging.

Importantly, she answered the question of why blogging could be a good idea – to build a discipline around writing. Once we start blogging, there is often a sense of accountability, the idea that writing and posting content is something that we need to do regularly and systematically. Where do we begin? How do we get noticed? What can we do to increase the reach of our blog posts? Anupama discussed all this and more in a single hour!

When guest speakers repeat something I keep saying in class, I’m always happy. For instance, I often ask children what the purpose of their piece is. What do they want the reader to feel? What are they trying to do with their writing? Anupama phrased it as WIIFM – what’s in it for me? As the audience, this is the question we ask. Why should I read your blog? It’s important to be able to answer that!

With this workshop on blogging (guest session #24!), we’re now drawing to the end of another writing programme. In October, the twentieth batch of my online writing programme will begin!

Practice. What a difference practice makes! Right through yesterday’s guest session on character design, I marvelled at how swiftly Priyankar Gupta created his characters. Talking all the time, explaining what he was doing, he was able to draw not one, but six full forms in fifteen minutes!

Characters, both human and non-human, are led by three parts of the body – the chest, the nose and the pelvis.
An inquisitive person tends to hunch. The whole body structure is led by the nose. 
A confident person is led by the chest. This is why people in the army, or even dancers, tend to have accentuated chests. 
All of us also have an aspect of us that is lazy, one that likes to sit and watch the world go by. This sort of character is led by the pelvis.

Once Priyankar had shared a few sample drawings, he asked us to draw characters of our own. Soon, the children shared sketches of chickens and grandmothers, pencils and teachers. And as the participants shared their work, we discussed the breaking of archetypes in subtle and not so subtle ways.

Priyankar ended the session with a quote from Neil Gaiman – make good art. No matter how you feel, draw. If you’re happy, angry, bored, annoyed … draw. For someone who’s barely drawn anything for years, it was an important reminder.

Draw. That’s it.

How I love guest sessions! Yesterday’s workshop on nonsense verse with Anushka Ravishankar was a treat. It’s delightful how serious nonsense verse is! Full of contradictions, full of rules (of what nonsense verse is not), and full of surprises, we learned so much and wrote nonsense poems of our own too. 

Essentially, nonsense writing is a serious kind of writing which makes no sense. Does this seem contradictory? That’s where the humour of nonsense lies. While gibberish is not nonsense, we learned how we could use made-up words as part of a larger text, like in the poem ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll. I agree with Anushka when she says that it’s a shame that so many of Carroll’s words are now in the dictionary. They were never supposed to make sense!

We had a FULL batch yesterday, and the participants had dozens of questions, ideas, and poems to share. From Sukumar Ray to Shel Silverstein, we explored a range of writers, listening to all kinds of nonsense poetry.

For me, the best part was the very clear and organised set of techniques Anushka shared with us. How do we actually go about writing nonsense verse? When is it nonsense verse and when is it gibberish or fantasy? How can we straddle sense and nonsense so that our poems almost make sense?

Anushka ended the session with an exercise on nonsense verse, which was especially lovely, for it revealed how well the participants caught on to the sense of nonsense!

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!

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!