MATERIALS NEEDED
A small notebook that doesn’t look at all like a school book - a book that can be carried easily and personalized.


FORMAT
Most writers keep working notebooks - pieces of paper tend to get lost or thrown out. Sketches, bits of newspaper clippings, notes, anything of personal interest can be included.

What is recorded?
- Date
- Snippets of conversation
- Sensory comments- about setting
- Personal reactions to the situation
- The unusual in the situation/person/object


FOR EXAMPLE:

Here is the background to the writing of my title poem in my collection Redback Mansion.

Poems often need to be composted.
Inspiration happens when a writer is about her everyday life. For me it is often the meshing of two often unrelated ideas.

I was putting washing on the line and I noticed a redback spider nest- sticky web and the shells of victims caught beneath the last rung of the backyard gate. This immediately made me think of suits of armour lining a hallway. A poem was already beginning its composting process from raw, unrelated material to a poem with a surprise, a double meaning.

Notebook entry: 24/11/2000 Backyard gate/redback spider nest

Shells of victims from a redback nest.

Caught in a sticky web like trophies on display

Like suits of armour.


There, that’s all that’s needed. Now allow the composting process to begin. A poem or a piece of prose writing could result from this - or the idea could remain dormant and used a year, two years from now. Ideas or feelings or conversation or unusual happenings are never wasted.

HOW CAN THIS IDEA BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM?

Challenge the children to write three surprising things that they saw or heard or dreamt or remembered, each day - preferably at the end of the day.

Try and focus on specifics like:
- What did it look like?
- What did it smell like?
- What did it feel like?
- What did it sound like?
- What did it taste like?


This is journal keeping with a difference- there are surprising moments in every ordinary day just waiting to be recorded and composting with other material.

Try it for a few weeks - see what happens - poets and writers are naturally curious about the world, about people, about the natural environment, this exercise will help children to answer that all consuming question: Where do your ideas come from and also train them to look at the world from a writer’s viewpoint.

ENJOY. REMEMBER REAL LIFE IS STRANGER THAN FICTION.

Lorraine Marwood’s collection of children’s poetry ‘Redback Mansion’ was published in 2002 by Five Islands Press. She is a well published poet; her poems regularly appear in School Magazine, New South Wales.
Redback Mansion ISBN 0 86418 768 8 is available from your local bookshop or through Five Islands Press, PO Box U34, Wollongong University 2500 rrp $13.95

REDBACK MANSION

The red velvet is welcome
is on the butler’s back.
He watches every visitor,
allows most an entrance
and when they’re admiring
the way the wind is stopped
by three leaves and four twigs,
he strikes.

The last visitor asks about
the suits of armour lining
the hallway,
but Redback just dusts
away a cobweb and eyes
the visitor for regimental size.

Those beetle wings would look
wonderful just here, and Redback points
with one leg
and spins a death thread
with another.



Published by Practically Primary February 2003