Interview with Finegan Kruckemeyer - Part One: 'it can be nice to write just for the sake of writing'

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Del curso dictado por Commonwealth Education Trust

Writing for Young Readers: Opening the Treasure Chest

785 calificaciones

Commonwealth Education Trust

Writing for Young Readers: Opening the Treasure Chest

785 calificaciones

This course is for curious students and aspiring authors with a passion for writing for young readers. Participate in a dynamic online community of writers as you experiment with your own writing and develop your voice. This course will guide you with a combination of video lectures, online readings, peer reviews, and guest appearances from world-renowned children’s authors. As you work through the writing exercises, you will give and receive feedback from your peers and gain tools and techniques for improving your writing. During this course you will identify stories that matter to you, explore cultural significance and boundaries, and shape your identity as a writer; become familiar with standard elements of narrative (character, setting, plot, theme, language, dialogue, point of view); reflect on your own work and practice essential self-editing skills; see the different ways in which words and art interact, and the possibilities of longer narrative forms; come away with practical insights into publishing options; and create a plan for pursuing your enthusiasm for writing. By the end of the course, you will have ten to twelve extracts of writing that you can develop into a portfolio. Join a dynamic community of many voices from around the world. Find inspiration in your own voice, heart, and place so that you can tell the stories for young readers you’ve always wanted to tell.

De la lección

Genre, Form, and Audience

In this module we will give you an overview of genres and forms that are popular for young readers. We will then move on to a discussion of audience – who your readers are and how you can make your work appealing to your chosen audience. By the end of the module you will have a good sense of the wide range of genres and forms available to you and some techniques that you can use to make the most of the genre or form you are working in.

Interview with Finegan Kruckemeyer - Part One: 'it can be nice to write just for the sake of writing'8:41

Interview with Finegan Kruckemeyer - Part Two: 'my favourite authors have permeated my brain'6:29

Interview with Finegan Kruckemeyer - Part Three: 'it truly is a magical feeling'5:04

Conoce a los instructores

David Hill
Author
Maria Gill
Author
Alex Alexandrou
Dr

>> I'm now going to be talking to Finegan Kruckemeyer.

Fin writes in a very special form, he writes plays.

He's written a large number of plays for young children, which have been

performed in a variety of countries and is going to be a great pleasure to talk to.

Finegan, hello.

>> Hi, how are you?

>> I'm well, thanks.

And I'm talking to you, of course, in your home in Tasmania that big island

off the South of Australia, where you live and you write your plays.

In the module that the folks have been studying, Fin.

We've been looking at the idea of forms of literature, such as poems,

stories, picture books.

Now you write in this very special form of plays.

Why do you write mostly plays?

Do you think that there's something special which plays can do?

>> Not necessarily more special than any other mediums in terms of

being a taker in of words, I think most of my history has been given

to reading books and kind of learning to love words in other forms.

But it turned out, when I was starting to put the words out to see how best

I could share them with an audience, whether a visible or a far away one.

But yeah, plays were the natural form that my writing seemed to lend itself to.

Historically, I went through a youth theater.

When I was a child, I developed a lot of theatre from about ten years old and

went to weekly workshops and then a very nice director at one point in my life,

who maybe knew I wasn't the strongest actor, but knew my love was there and

knew my love for words.

Said in this next show, instead of being in it, why don't you write it?

And she gave me the very polite and went intention shift into writing and

since then my career has just evolved in that way.

>> Excellent.

Have you tried writing in other forms?

I mean, have you tried writing poetry,

prose fiction anything apart from your plays?

>> In truth, I think I do more than I acknowledge.

Often my plays, although they are delivered from a stage to a seated

audience in front, they are often direct address and person narratives.

So when you look at the play as it exists on a script,

it's not too dissimilar to a piece of produced fiction.

It has the same unfolding narrative scene from a single narrators perspective.

So, I think it really is a bordering entity in

terms of moving between those two mediums.

And now, I've had the very lovely joy now that my career is a bit more

established to see it move the other.

When if my words, which started on a stage are being looked at by film producers and

by publishers who are interested in asking me to make that jump,

so to place them in the context of a book.

>> Well, let's- >> I want you to write them again,

write them anew as a work for television or film and that's very exciting.

>> Yes.

That's also very interesting,

because one of the things we've been saying in this module is that a good idea.

Maybe something, which you can use perhaps as a play and

then use part of it in a story or even perhaps in a poem.

So you seem to be saying also that a really good idea can be used

in a variety of forms in a play, in a story, other forms as well.

>> Yes, that's right.

Absolutely.

And I think it can sometimes be an impediment to the evolution of an idea,

if we worry too much about the means of distribution, about the form it should

take before we think about the kernel of the idea itself and

the potentiality within that kernel.

Sometimes, it can be nice just to write for

the sake of writing and to be driven by the needs of the story themselves.

And then only retrospectively to say, okay, this is play I'm writing.

Yeah, sometimes we can cut ourselves off at the pass,

if we too quickly force it to sit in a particular framework.

>> Yes.

Now as well as talking about forms of writing in this module,

we've been talking about genres.

The idea of fantasy, realistic writing, historical writing and so on.

Now I know you've written a very successful play about pirate, for example,

but would you say that your writing content fits into any particular genre?

Would you see yourself as a writer of fantasy or

of realistic plays or a mixture?

How would you classify yourself?

>> Sure, I think I aspired to the notion of the mixture, just because as

a writer or an artist in general or even a human, it's nice to push yourself.

It's nice to recognize one form that you've been sitting quite comfortably

in and then see where else you might go.

Personally, that's always been a pleasure.

In terms of the recurring star, whatever that might be,

I think maybe it's magical realism.

So the powerful allegorical nature of a magical realist story,

which means that you're dealing with some fantastical notions.

There may be elements of magic,

there may be characters who aren't wholly of the human world.

An animal may have the capabilities of speech.

But within that, despite these things,

the bedrock of the story is still a very known and real one.

The world should feel very tangible and a watching audience should be

able to see it for the allegorical reflections of their own real world.

I think fantasy, which is truly escapist, which goes to far-flung places and

leaves the real world behind is not so much my bag.

But ones which are essentially existing in human terrain, but

have the permission to venture off where they need to.

That feels like quite a nice compromise.

>> Yes.

>> The magical realism.

>> Great.

Because we have been saying to folk on this course that a combination of genres

and a combination of forms can often be very successful.

Fin, a number of the folk taking this course Just beginning to write,

writing for the first time.

And probably one of their problems is deciding,

whether they want to write plays, stories, poems, etc.

Have you got any advice you'd like to give to writers who are just beginning and

who are trying to make their mind up what it is they should be writing?

>> Sure.

I am reticent and I realize it's ironic in this context to give too much advice,

as I think the thing I love the most in all the writers,

I love on these bookshelves behind me.

It's their personal voice.

It's the take that they have on the art of telling a story and that variation,

that deviation from a form is

the thing which excites me most about these wonderful heroes of mine.

And equally in artists I'm meeting who are just beginning that journey,

I think the fact that the student population I'm speaking to now is

interested in writing and is committed to the art of telling a story,

already that's the first box ticked.

The fact that you have that passion and innate need to tell a story means that you

are a writer, irrespective of the form that it might take.

And beyond that, I would just say that initially,

while the act of writing may be something about paying homage to our heroes and

trying to emulate the styles, we love in other things we've read.

Eventually, you have to make the jump into celebrating your own voice and

that shift is a very exciting thing.

So no, I would welcome any stylistic choice a writer might make, so

long as they acknowledged it in the first part as a formative,

burgeoning thing, where they're experimenting and being brave.

And then once they've found their voice,

something that they are truly committing to.

I love that sense of confident voice in a writer.

>> And you do seem to be saying that one of the best ways to find what you're best

at is simply to write and write and it tends to sort of sort itself out.

Good.

>> The majority of writers I've spoken to or

I'm lucky enough to be friends with them.

Yeah, we all seem to follow quite a simple maxim,

which is the art of writing is what makes one a better writer.

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