Finding the key to surviving Year Twelve

If adolescence isn’t hard enough to cope with, then surviving the final year of high school is certainly one of life’s major challenges.

All Saints, an independent high school in Perth Western Australia, is striving to give their final year students the key to success and survival by holding a one-day workshop before the start of first term. This is a new initiative and is being trialled this year.

The day will include lots of good information and advice to students on such things as study techniques, how to use memory effectively, and how to change negative thinking into positive thinking.

I have been invited to kick start the day with a keynote address, to motivate the kids, and I’m really looking forward to it.

I think the school is really concerned about helping their students get through their big year. I only wish this sort of thing had been around in my time! I could have done with better study techniques!

You can read more about my presentation here 

This was the big one for me. I set myself the huge goal of coming up with a story to send to this creme dela creme of writing competitions. I know I have no hope of winning it: I just needed to meet this goal as a way of advancing my writing and improving my style. At least it will get read!

The hardest things I had to overcome were:

1.  finding a story line;
2. writing for adults, not children - I couldn’t handle having no young characters at all, so stuck one in as a minor character; and
3. meeting the max word length of 5,000 words.

After a lot of sleepless nights, tormenting myself over the plot, squeezing myself into my characters’ minds, I finally got there!

So it’s done, ready to go, and I’m happy with it. I’ll do the right thing and sit on it for a week, as all writers should, because then any glaring errors will jump out.

I’ve set myself many writing goals, including entering competitions, and this has vastly improved my writing techniques for one, and my ability to churn out more and more. I would recommend making a weekly list of goals - realistic ones of course - as a way of advancing your own writing.

At least I’m adding to my list of short stories that I can send out to other competitions. This, in itself, is reward enough.   

When I write stories for children, the first thing I must do is develop believable characters. Kids these days are so different to the kids of my day, and I’m very aware of the gap. I struggle to understand the latest gadgets they use to play interactive games, the “virtual reality” games they swoon over on the computer, let alone the complex language of text messaging.

But do the characters in my stories have to be so generation x or y, or whatever the latest classification is? Do some of the pleasures of my childhood still exist in kids today?

The answer is yes! Just the other day, my friend (same age as me, and no, I’m not telling) brought around his daughter and son aged 11 and 8 years. I offered the kids a drink and they chose cold milo. And that’s when I got excited. The 11 year old girl eats/drinks her milo exactly the same way I did as a kid, and still do, when the child inside me gets out. You put the milo in first, pour over the milk, and watch the milo come to the top. The fascinating thing is that the milo is still dry. So you dunk it under with a spoon and eat the now wet clumps of yummy milo. You take your time over this and you must never, never dig out the stuff that has stayed on the bottom. That’s for last. You drink the milk and then eat the stuff at the bottom. Yum!

I was so pleased to se that old traditions don’t always die out. Kids these days love having their milo the way kids in my day did. Yippee! I can use that in my stories, and my character will be believable.  

 

How many times have you heard the phrase “face your fear”? As a social worker, I’ve handed that phrase out many times, and I still hand it out to my friends.

But recently, I was the recipient of this seemingly harmless little phrase, and I didn’t find it at all useful or uplifting.

I was staying on a farm in the south west of Western Australia over Christmas with my mother. As it was warm and there was plenty of bush on the property, I made a firm statement right from the start that we’d only walk in the open paddocks where it was possible to see snakes, if they were around. I have a huge fear of snakes, which was magnified on this trip because I had Lucy, my guide dog with me. Labradors are pretty clueless when it comes to wriggly things on the ground. I could just see her running up to a snake to check it out.

Well, everything was going well until the supposed marked bush walk we took started to deteriorate. The track actually disappeared, the bush closed in, and we were soon stomping through really dense scrub, over logs - which I imagined were the homes of at least one big snake - and climbing through dense grass trees. Lucy was out front on a long lead. I kept telling myself, as my pulse rose and rose, that if she sensed a snake, she’d stop dead. But at the same time, I felt so responsible for her and worried that she’d get bitten. I high stepped through the grass, stomped my feet hard to make lots of noise and tried walking on air.

One hour and twenty terrifying minutes later, we arrived back at our chalet. Even though we heard no rustlings around us, and saw absolutely nothing in the form of wriggly and bitey things, my fear of snakes has not changed. I have no idea why we escaped without at least a sighting. Maybe someone was looking after us?

That little soiree hasn’t given me any more confidence to walk in the bush in summer. I’ll be keeping away from long grass and dense bush from now on.