LITERARY POINTERS SHARED WITH CHILDREN
By Jane Smith
Practice makes perfect is an old saying which is true when it comes to writing, a New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards finalist said yesterday.
Waimate author Ken Catran is in Dunedin holding children’s writing workshops as part of the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Festival this week.
“I tell them two things: do a lot of reading, and practise writing. If you practise you are always going to get better at it,” he said.
There were simple rules for writing which included planning the story, developing characters carefully, knowing where the story was headed, and writing towards the finish.
Mr Catran worked with 20 children from Tahuna Normal Intermediate, Kaikorai Valley College, Liberton Christian School and Arthur Street School at the Dunedin Public Library yesterday morning, before holding a similar workshop at Macandrew Intermediate in the afternoon.
Liberton Christian School student Alicia F. (12) enjoyed the session, and said they were taught “how to get ideas by taking things we enjoy reading about and things we enjoy doing and putting them together and write books about that.”
Mr Catran said workshops kept him in touch with children and encouraged them to read and write.
A prolific writer with 23 books to his credit, he has six books being published this year, including one backgrounding the history of the characters on popular TV show The Tribe, which took him eight weeks to write.
Modern children wanted stories that challenged them, he said.
“You can’t preach to them because they are tuned in to subtle messages from watching TV, but you can challenge them. What would happen if you were in this situation? What would you do?”
Mr Catran is the first author to have two books short-listed in the same category in the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards.
Both Voyage with Jason, which recounts the search for the golden fleece by the ancient Greek hero Jason, and Talking to Blue, about a young boy’s relationship with a serial killer, are finalists in the senior fiction section of the awards.
“But that doesn’t guarantee I’m going to win,” he chuckled.
Otago Daily Times, March 29, 2001
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