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:
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.
Scansion takes practice and Melanie recommended we:
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:
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
2 Comments
|
Archives
February 2019
Categories
All
|