Welcome to another awesome Creative Writing Project on Mushroom.
This article describes the process my grade 6 students used to create
Enchantia: Legends & Tales of Good & Bad
The aim of this project is to work as a group to produce a fantasy novel.
This creative process works as follows:
- Each participant creates a part of a map of a fantasy world (e.g. an enchanted elf forest, or a royal castle with an army of heroic warriors, or an ogre’s cave, or a dragon’s lair, etc.). Everybody shares their part of the map with the group.
- As a group we discuss how the different parts of the map should be put together to make our fantasy world. Then we need to agree a name for our fantasy world.
- Each participant creates a character who lives in the part of the map they created (e.g. an elf, a mighty warrior, a princess, an ogre, etc.). Describe this character – appearance and personality traits – and share with the group.
- Each participant thinks up a story arc for their character. This story should start in their ‘home’ part of the map and the character needs to move to at least one other part of the map. In this way, the different characters can meet each other in the final story.
- Participants discuss how their characters might interact.
- Participants decide what parts of the individual story arcs to include in the final group fantasy story and which parts to exclude or minimise.
- Each participant takes responsibility for writing one chapter of the emerging story. This requires frequent communication with the group to ensure that the chapters flow seamlessly. Importan: At this stage every participant forfeits ownership of their character and will be writing about the experiences of other characters. It is important that participants are not too possessive of their characters, but it is also important that the writers respect the character traits described in step 3.
- Once the draft chapters have been written, share with the group and give feedback on the drafts.
- Finalise the order of the chapters.
- Repeat steps 8 and 9 as required.
- Once everybody is happy with the book, your wonderful teacher will assemble the final book as a shareable pdf. Participants can design the cover, agree a title for the book, and offer illustrations.
- Celebrate publication of the final project 🙂
If you haven’t already done so, check out this example: Enchantia: Legends & Tales of Good & Bad
