Middle Grade Fiction with Gabrielle Wang

At the recent packed annual SCWIBI Queensland  Professional Development Workshop, I  appreciated Gabrielle Wang sharing her creative process with us. She gave us some inventive and wonderful ideas to improve our work in second drafts and shared her personal story of the importance of perseverance and the value of a mentor and challenge.  Do visit Gabrielle’s site to find out more about her books, and buy or borrow them!  They are fantastic and I can’t wait to read more.

Sheryl Gwyther, SCWIBI coordinator for Queensland,  and Gabrielle are pictured above sharing a concertina book with us. In this book Gabrielle told the story of a treasured object visually.  The true story of the object from real life was created first, but then she invented a story inspired by it, on the flip side. This process produced an idea for a story I am going to begin writing today! Gabrielle said that that you can use this same process to map chapters of a middle grade book and then she showed us one of her books mapped out visually.  The key is to use no words, but just see the story like a movie in your head, and draw your pictures based on that.  You do not have to be an artist for this to be useful. Gabrielle likes working organically so that not everything is pre-planned before she writes, but can be inspired by everyday events.  However, the visual planning ensures that she sees the story unfold in her head and carries it there and can intuitively respond to how the characters unfold.

I love being a member of SCWIBI, and learning from skilled and enthusiastic people about their writing process and their challenges and victories in writing, publishing and life.  The support from this and groups like Write Links has assisted me in developing as a writer and finding like minded people who are passionate about writing and reading literacy for young people and children.

The image above is taken by Danielle Freeland, who kindly took this group photograph with nearly everyone above’s phone for them.  She is a wonderful writer herself.  Thanks Danielle!   It was wonderful to  catch up with writers from the Gold Coast, and Sunshine Coast on the day as well.  A big thank you to Sheryl for organizing this for members and Gabrielle for visiting from Melbourne.  A brilliant day!