The book below is the result of a three week project and subsequent proofreading and editing. Although the whole reads a little disjointedly, probably due to the sheer number of minds working on this story in a relatively short period of time, the ideas are interesting and most are well written. Some students even started illustrating their work 🙂
I was challenged at the start of this project whether to veto one of the student’s characters as inappropriate (see the first chapter). In the interest of empowering student creativity, I allowed the character to be used on the proviso that it is was unambiguously the baddie.
Click here for more details of the project...
The steps we followed to create this fantasy novel were as follows:
Create a map of part of the fantasy world.
Work together to agree how the different maps would fit together to finalise the map of the fantasy world.
Name the fantasy world (through a series of suggestions and voting, we agreed on Enchantia).
Each student created a fantasy character with a vague storyline that involved travelling across the fantasy world. Students needed to use the map. They also had to leave blanks in their character’s stories where they might intersect with other students’ characters.
Next we had several rounds of discussion, reading and editing through which the students worked together to identify how their stories would intersect.
Each student was responsible for writing a chapter of the final novel using the relevant bits of the individual character stories they had created. This part, where they were supposed to let go of their individual characters/stories and work on a coherent text was less successful and really needed more time, so you can expect to see lots of character introductions who do not really contribute to the main plotline thereafter.
Students discussed and agreed the final order of the chapters and spent time editing and proofreading the book.
