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    How the Aliens From Alpha Centauri Invaded My Maths Class and Turned Me: Into a Writer...and How You Can Be One Too
    How the Aliens From Alpha Centauri Invaded My Maths Class and Turned Me: Into a Writer...and How You Can Be One Too
    How the Aliens From Alpha Centauri Invaded My Maths Class and Turned Me: Into a Writer...and How You Can Be One Too
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    How the Aliens From Alpha Centauri Invaded My Maths Class and Turned Me: Into a Writer...and How You Can Be One Too

    By Jackie French

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    About this ebook

    Do you like to fly to the moons of Saturn or visit talking wombats Do you like to daydream Do you eat chocolate Have you ever wondered how your favourite authors create the fantastic worlds their characters inhabit And have you ever wanted to write yourself Jackie French, one of Australia's most popular and renowned children's authors, helps you to unleash the full power of your creative imagination. Everything is covered from how not to write the beginning of your story to ways you can make your stories fatter and juicier. Hovercrafts, orphaned cats, horrible maths teachers - you never thought writing could be so much fun. Characters made from compost or aliens in your maths class - you too can be a writer. Ages 10+
    Do you like to fly to the moons of Saturn or visit talking wombats? Do you like to daydream? Do you eat chocolate? Have you ever wondered how your favourite authors create the fantastic worlds their characters inhabit? And have you ever wanted to write yourself? Jackie French, one of Australiaᱠmost popular and renowned childrenᱠauthors, helps you to unleash the full power of your creative imagination. Everything is covered from how not to write the beginning of your story to ways you can make your stories fatter and juicier. Hovercrafts, orphaned cats, horrible maths teachers - you never thought writing could be so much fun. Characters made from compost or aliens in your maths class - you too can be a writer.Ages 10+
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers Australia
    Release dateSep 1, 2010
    ISBN9780730450603
    How the Aliens From Alpha Centauri Invaded My Maths Class and Turned Me: Into a Writer...and How You Can Be One Too
    Author

    Jackie French

    Jackie French AM is an award-winning writer, wombat negotiator, the 2014–2015 Australian Children's Laureate and the 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. In 2016 Jackie became a Member of the Order of Australia for her contribution to children's literature and her advocacy for youth literacy. She is regarded as one of Australia's most popular children's authors and writes across all genres — from picture books, history, fantasy, ecology and sci-fi to her much loved historical fiction for a variety of age groups. ‘A book can change a child's life. A book can change the world' was the primary philosophy behind Jackie's two-year term as Laureate. jackiefrench.com facebook.com/authorjackiefrench

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      Book preview

      How the Aliens From Alpha Centauri Invaded My Maths Class and Turned Me - Jackie French

      Introduction

      image 1

      When I was a child everyone told stories – my parents, my grandparents, Mr Doo next door…

      They told stories of the time Uncle Laurie pulled out all the flowers so he could water their roots, stories about the time Cath put a bead up her nose and they had to take her down to the hospital on Christmas Day to get it out.

      Or just stories – the funny thing that happened at work, you wouldn’t believe it really; or the things you see when you haven’t got your gun…

      There was no TV in those days. There was more time too. And people talked and yarned and sang sometimes as well…and everyone told stories.

      Some were funny. Some were boring. Sometimes I’d heard them so often I felt like screaming ‘Don’t tell me the one about the dead cow again!!!!’ (But I didn’t. I was polite.)

      But I grew up believing that everyone could tell stories.

      Humans are natural storytellers. Stories are the way our ancestors handed down information from generation to generation – just telling stories round the campfire.

      A story can take you into another world when you’re bored or scared or just braindead after a hard day at school and want somewhere relaxing to veg out.

      People don’t tell stories much any more. We watch TV instead so we all hear exactly the same stories every night.

      It’s boring.

      I’d like to see stories become part of our lives again – stories you tell and laugh about, even if you never write them down.

      This is a book to show you how to write stories or to tell stories or to write better stories. Or ONE way to write stories anyway. Grandma always said there was more than one way to skin a cat and there are many ways to tell a story too.

      I’ve got the best job in the world. I get paid to daydream. I get paid just to sit here at the computer telling myself stories and writing them down.

      (I spent most of last week on a hovercraft over a lake of liquid mercury on one of the moons of Saturn and it was BEAUTIFUL and I really recommend you go there sometime. When you’re telling a story you can do ANYTHING and go ANYWHERE.)

      Writing a good story is one of the headiest experiences I know. Whenever my husband Bryan sees me wandering round and round the garden going ‘Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow’ he knows I’ve finished a story.

      It is FUN – but until you know how to do it, it probably just seems like hard work.

      Writing is like riding a bicycle. The first time I rode a bike I thought ‘This is HELL!!!!! All I can do is hold on tight and hope I don’t fall offfffffffffffff…’ (and then I did). Three weeks later I was riding my bike and singing, looking around, waving, and it was fun.

      It’s the same with writing. The more you do it the easier it gets – and the more fun it is. But like riding a bike it’s a heck of a lot easier if someone shows you how.

      So I will.

      1

      The Aliens in my Maths Class

      This is how aliens from Alpha Centauri invaded my maths class, captured my maths teacher and turned me into a writer.

      I never liked maths. I didn’t like my maths teacher either.

      She was shorter than I am now but even fatter and she really did have a wart on her nose. It was the first wart I’d ever seen on anyone’s face and that was interesting, but there’s a limit to how much you can look at someone’s wart so even that wasn’t enough to make me enjoy my maths class.

      There’s a law in Australia called the law of defamation which says – basically – that if you put someone in a story and embarrass them they can sue you for a lot of money.

      So I’m going to pretend that my maths teacher’s name was Miss Emmeline – which it wasn’t – and that she had black hair in tiny curls as though someone had tipped them up over her head and they were all running down her face (actually she had grey hair like an old bit of steel wool that had been used for scrubbing saucepans, but if I tell you that someone may recognise her and she’d sue).

      Miss Emmeline was often angry. With students like me that wasn’t surprising – any maths teacher would get niggly with me in the class – but there were some good students in the class too who really wanted to learn maths. (I found out later that I’m dyslexic – which is another story altogether – but one of the symptoms is that, no matter how hard I tried or Miss Emmeline tried, I wasn’t ever going to be very good at mental arithmetic. But in those days no one had heard of learning difficulties, certainly not me or Miss Emmeline.)

      To get back to the story – and the aliens…

      When Miss Emmeline got angry she’d throw the chalk across the room. Sometimes it hit the far wall and once it went out the window and once it landed in the mouth of a kid who was talking down the back, which was funny but still not enough to keep me concentrating on the maths chalked on the board.

      So I looked out the window instead.

      There wasn’t much to see out the window, just a concrete wall about a metre away with a line of green damp down it and the odd sparrow perched on top looking for crusts from yesterday’s lunches. Up on top of the wall was the playground, but even if I could have seen it there wouldn’t have been much to look at. It was grey and bitumened over and, of course, in school time there was no one playing on it, just the school cleaner despondently picking up papers.

      (A

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