Telling Tales: Journeys in Creative Writing

Young writers are invited on a journey of adventure and creativity in this effective and brightly illustrated guide. Setting off with Ms Adjective the Adventurer, plus (useful supporting character) Fluffy the dog, they will make their way through eighteen different story settings, each one offering fun writing challenges and prompts. To escape the sweltering dunes of Desert Valley for example, they need to describe finding something to drink, maybe cutting open a cactus, discovering an oasis or hitching a ride on a giant vulture to a supermarket. The challenge in Animal Kingdom is to write a conversation with a made-up animal, in a made-up language. At times you are invited to write a description of something very familiar, at other times to let your imagination loose. Each adventure setting also features a ‘Fab Fiver’, a list of five useful words or phrases likely to expand the reader’s vocabulary, while ‘Adventure Clues’ provide useful information to help with writing. I was delighted to learn that a ‘smack’ is the collective term for a group of jellyfish, and pleased to see a comment on the Punctuation Park scenario that ‘although it’s useful to understand grammar and punctuation, it’s not that important in Creative Writing’, though the Adventure Clue does provide a clear description of apostrophes and when to use them. The book is engaging, useful and with its friendly, encouraging tone, likely to get all children to the Story Summit, whether writing comes naturally to them or not.