Cole Beauchamp writes for a living and fits in writing fiction when she can. She longs for the day when energy is green, sauvignon blanc is cheap and her children pick up their bathroom towels. Yesterday I sat with four children, two boys, two girls, helping them write an ending to a story. Their questions came thick and fast: “How do you spell ‘immediately’?” vs “What would happen if a bomb fell on an electricity pylon?” vs *silence and staring at paper* vs “I want to write about a haunted house”. We had 20 minutes to finish a story we’d started an hour earlier. And we did it. But not by me “teaching”. The premise of the session is to tease out the children’s ideas, to ask open-ended questions like “What do you want to happen next?” or “How do you think they’re feeling?” or “Can you imagine what that looked like?” And to encourage them to put pencil to paper and write it down. It was hard at times, balancing the n...
I write therefore I am