Creative Writing with Paul Stafford - Years 5-6 - Regional Schools

Participants in this workshop will learn how to write short stories. Paul will share strategies for where easiest to find and identify content, scaffold it into a story plan, research, draft and create lively and compelling narratives.

Practices involved in this workshop:

• Ideas - how to trap and train them: Turning off the ‘that’s a dumb idea’ voice and learning how to meld two (or more) ‘dumb’ ideas into a killer idea. Encourages strong cohort collaboration, free sharing of ideas and critical thinking skills.
• Story planning - dot points become paragraphs become chapters.
• Redrafting - why it’s so important.
• How to leverage the one idea into multiple formats – e.g., from narrative to script to short film/radio play/stage play/video game.

About the Author

Paul Stafford is a children’s book author (Penguin/Random House & New Holland Australia) who has worked in schools across Australia as a literacy consultant since 1999. His particular passion is historical fiction, and this led him to establish History Here, a whole-of-community filmmaking project that encourages students to interrogate & reinterpret the stories that define their lived environment. The program was selected to showcase the projects funded by the Office of Premier & Cabinet’s Community Grants program.

Paul’s experience with videoconferencing began in 2007 when he was approached by DART Connections to adapt his award-winning boys’ writing club, The Dead Bones Society, which met after hours at the Australian Fossil & Mineral Museum. This adaptation to a web-platform allowed rural and remote schools access to this unique community resource and won the inaugural Museums and Galleries National Award and the 2010 IMAGinE awards. The program, Scattered Bones, ran 2007-2017.