Creative writing and creative reading: using humour and real life to tell stories.

As a parent of a 15-year-old, I know that teenagers should be reading and writing a lot more than they do – so my aim is to inspire kids to get excited about reading and writing. Using extracts from my highschool novel SCUM and humourous newspaper columns I have written, I hope to show young people how their own lives are an endless source of material for stories, and how humour is a great way to tell those stories.

Topics:

• How to write something funny
• How to mine your own life for material
• How the truth is usually more interesting than something made up
• Not to be afraid to break rules and go crazy and even be a (little) bit rude
• How to use lots of different writing tools to structure your own personal stories