Rebecca Sheraton reports on Maria Gill's visit and Melanie Hill's Poetry PD Session

Maria Gill and Poetry PD
On 3 September 2016 Write Links was visited by New Zealand children’s author Maria Gill. Maria is the author of over 40 books and is an expert at writing non-fiction. She is a former school teacher and she also has a Journalism degree.
Maria’s most recent book titled ANZAC Heroes, which is published by Scholastic, features the stories of Australia’s and New Zealand’s most decorated servicemen and servicewomen from WWI and WWII. She won the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year prize in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. Congratulations!
Maria shared her advice about writing professionally.
She encouraged authors to write for educational publishers as this provides a steady income, in addition to trade publishers.
Maria has self-published several titles under her own imprint called Long White Cloud Books. Once your book goes out of print, printing the title under your own imprint is an option.
She also said school visits are a great way to interact with your audience and make money as a professional author.
Thank you for coming to visit us Maria and we hope to see you again some time.
Writing with Rhythm and Rhyme and Using Form
Melanie Hill presented another great professional development on poetry. Melanie has always loved poetry and studied military poetry while at university.
She had us awed by the technicality involved in making rhyming poetry so musical to the reader.
Here are Melanie’s Keys to Success for writing rhyming poetry:

• Regular practice
• Listening to poetry daily or several times a week
• Looking for it (scanning your poetry)
• Writing poetry down and studying other people’s poetry
• Reading it out loud.

First of all Melanie introduced us to the world of Meter, the use of stressed and unstressed syllables to form a rhythm. There are many different types, the most common being Iambic, Trochee, Anapest and Dactyl. She had us tapping and clapping along to work out where the stressed syllables are in these meters.
We also learned how to vary meter using a Spondee and Pyrrhic and Catalectic, an incomplete meter.
Then we learnt how to work out the Metrical Feet: the number of repeated meter patterns in a line.

• Monometer – 1 foot
• Dimeter – 2 feet
• Trimeter – 3 feet
• Tetrameter – 4 feet
• Pentameter – 5 feet
• Hexameter – 6 feet
• Heptameter – 7 feet
• Octameter – 8 feet

Melanie taught us a technique called Scansion to study rhyming poetry and identify the meter and metrical feet in a line of poetry. We learned a stressed syllables you use a / and for unstressed syllables you use a u above it. If you are typing it out a stressed syllable you type in CAPS and unstressed you type normally. To separate the metrical feet you use an I.
Scansion takes practice and Melanie recommended we:

• Start with single words
• Move to phrases or lines
• Learn from the greats and check your Scansion skills by Googling the results
• Try it on Nursery Rhymes.

Melanie also taught us about rhyming patterns called Perfect Rhyme. This is where the last stressed vowel is the same in both words, e.g. fly/pie, day/play, high/fly. The consonants before the vowel can be the different. Picture books are written in perfect rhyme and Melanie recommended studying and reading many rhyming picture books.
While doing your Scansion, Melanie recommends marking the rhyme scheme at the end of a line.
There are some Rhyme Crimes that must be avoided:

• Slant rhyme, which are words that are near rhymes, but not a perfect match.
• Misplacing the stress
• Be aware of how words are pronounced in different countries
• Forcing a rhyme
• Making a line too long
• Lines that don’t move the story along
• Letting a rhyme dictate the story
• Predictable rhymes.

We also learned about the Form of poems: number of lines, stanzas, line length, meter, rhyme scheme, word or syllable count and shape.
Writing Tips
Melanie uses a journal. Before she writes a poem she decides on the theme of the poem, the meter, number of metrical feet in a line and the rhyme scheme.
She brainstorms rhyming words and anything to do with the poem on the left page.
On the right page Melanie writes the lines. She marks up each line using Scansion. She can then identify if she then needs to edit the lines as she writes the poem.
Recommended resources for writing poetry

• Using a Rhyming Dictionary (It isn’t cheating!)
• Australian Children’s Poetry website by Teena Raffa-Mulligan. You can receive daily poems and also a writing prompt on a Monday via email.
• Study Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson
• Listen to Harry Baker, the world champion slam poet
• Journal to write your poetry in.

Now to go and write some poetry! Thanks Melanie for your poetry expertise.