[On-screen text: Getting started with writing with Gorge Ivanoff]
Speaker: George Ivanoff:
Happy Education Week, everyone.
[On-screen text: Name: George Ivanoff Title: Writes Stuff]
My name is George Ivanoff, and I'm an author, which means I write stuff.
I write everything from short stories to novels, from fiction to nonfiction for a wide variety of age groups.
You might have heard of some of my books.
[Author holds up books]
I've written the interactive You Choose series; The nonfiction survival guides; and my latest book is Monster Island.
The nonfiction survival guides, and my latest book is Monster Island.
But enough about me. It's time to get into the workshop.
So today I'm going to talk about getting started because one of the most often asked questions I get as an author is:
Where do you get your ideas?
Where does your inspiration come from?
How do you even know how to start?
Well, for me, everything begins with genre.
Now, genre simply means the type of story that you're writing.
It might be science fiction or fantasy or comedy or action adventure.
These are all different types of genres, and I reckon that you should be writing the sort of stuff that you like reading.
So, for me, that's mostly science fiction, fantasy, horror and action adventure.
Now I've read the occasional romance novel, but I don't read a lot of that sort of stuff.
So, I'm not going to go out and write a romance novel.
So, I stick to the genres that I know that I love reading.
So I reckon that's a good starting place for anyone who is starting out writing.
Now, as for the actual ideas, they are literally everywhere.
They are all around you. They are in the things that you do.
The people that you meet, the stuff that happens around you, the things that you are interested in doing, and a great place to start are your own experiences, the things that have happened to you.
Now, the thing about those experiences is that you take them, and then you build on them.
You exaggerate them, maybe, even blow them up out of all proportion.
And you do that by asking questions.
And the most powerful question at a writer's disposal is “what if?”
With a what if, You can take the most ordinary situation and make it extraordinary.
You can take the most boring occurrence and turn it into something amazing, something worth writing a story about.
So I'm going to give you an example.
[Speaker holds up book titled ‘Creepy Crawly Chaos’ ]
Creepy Crawly Chaos.
Now, this all started with my own fear of spiders.
I'm terrified of spiders.
But with one particular incident, I was in the back of a car and I just happened to glance to my side and there was this massive huntsmen on the window.
And I started panicking and trying to get my seatbelt off and threw myself over to the other side of the car and then looked back and realized that the so it couldn't actually get me.
So I took that scene and used it for the opening scene of this book.
But, I asked some ‘what if’ questions.
What if I wasn't in a car?
But what if I was in a research centre full of amazingly dangerous spiders and this happened to me.
But then what if the spider got out and that led to this book?
So really, it's that easy to take something from your own lives and turn it into a story.
And that's what I want you guys to try now.
I want you to think of an ordinary situation from your lives, maybe even this situation.
Sitting there watching some author babble on at you on a video.
What could you do to turn this situation into a story?
Now, I'm not expecting you to actually write a story now.
I just want you to think about it, and write a few ‘what if’ questions that might be able to turn the situation into a story.
All right. I'm going to give you a few minutes to do that.
You can pause the video and have a go.
[On-screen text: Pause the video now! What are some ‘What if’ questions that can transform an everyday situation into a captivating story?]
Now, the whole idea of asking what if questions can also be applied to the things that interest you, rather than the things that happen to you.
So everyone has something that they love doing, something that interests them more than anything else.
It might be reading. It might be playing a particular sport. It might be a musical instrument.
Might be singing in a choir. It might be building models, it might be stamp collecting.
It could be anything.
You can take that interest and use it as inspiration for story writing as well.
This is something that I do a lot of.
Now I'm kind of interested in computer games.
When I was a kid, I spent way too much time at home on my Atari home playing Space Invaders instead of doing, you know, things like homework.
So I still have that interest in video games.
I probably don't play as much anymore because my kids hog the PS4 at home.
So you know, about the only thing I really play obsessively is Pokemon Go on my mobile phone.
But, the idea is that I like computer games.
I took that interest and started asking some ‘what if’ questions.
What if the characters inside a computer game thought that they were real people?
What if they thought that their bizarre computer game environment was the real world?
And then, what if they discovered that they were just characters in a game?
And that led to a trilogy of books called the Games Trilogy.
[Speaker holds up book titled ‘Game On!’ ]
Again, you can do this with any interest.
Let's say you're interested in footy. Aussie Rules footy.
Then it's just a matter of taking that interest, adding a genre and asking a what if question to get you going.
So, you know, I'm into science fiction so football, science fiction.
What if the entire Collingwood football team was abducted by aliens?
There, you've got the beginning of the story.
So now I want you to give it a go.
So have a think about what it is that you love doing.
What is it that interests you more than anything else?
Write that interest down and then start thinking of some what if questions to turn that interest into a story.
Alright, you can pause the video again now and have a go at it.
[On-screen text: Pause the video now! Choose a subject or topic that interests you, then write a list of “what if” questions that can help you transform it into a fascinating story.]
Okay.
Now, another really good way of getting ideas is to borrow them from books that you read, from films that you watch, from TV shows that you're interested in.
So there is nothing wrong with getting inspired by what other people have written.
You might watch a film or read a book and go, oh wow, that is such a cool idea.
I want to write a story using that idea.
The trick is then, not to just do exactly the same as that book or film.
You take the idea and then do something a little bit different with it.
Again, this is something that I do a lot of.
I'm a huge Doctor Who fan, so I am constantly getting inspired by different episodes of that series and using them as ideas to to generate a whole book or even just individual scenes within a book that I'm writing.
But probably one of the most obvious cases would be the first of the You Choose books, The Treasure of Dead Man's Cove.
[Speaker holds up book titled ‘You Choose…The Treasure of Dead Man's Cove]
This book is directly inspired by one of my all time favourite movies.
There was a film in the 1980s called The Goonies, which was about a bunch of kids who get a treasure map and try to find some buried treasure.
I loved that movie as a kid. I still love that movie As a grown up. I watch it at least once a year. I love it a lot.
So when I came to writing the You Choose Books, I thought, Oh, pirate treasure and following a treasure map would be a great first story. And so I got inspired by the film.
Of course, I did things differently from the film.
In the film, the Pirate who buried the Treasure has only got one eye and has got the other eye.
When they find his skull, there is no eye socket. It's completely, you know, closed over with bone.
I liked that idea, but I kind of flipped it. So in mine, the dead pirate had an enlarged eye socket
instead of no eye socket.
In fact, it was so enlarged that when he was a baby and first born, his eyeball just fell out of the eye socket.
And it's been blank ever since. And when he became a pirate, he kept his prized possession, this massive ruby in the eye socket behind his eyepatch so that no one could find it.
So inspired by The Goonies, but turning things around and making the ideas my own in order to write my own story about it.
So now I want you guys to have a go at that.
Have a think about what your favourite book is or your favourite film or your favourite TV show, and ask yourself, what is the central theme of that story?
What is the core of that story?
And write that down.
Once you've got that written down, have a think about what you could do to play with the idea, to change it, to make it your own.
Again, I'm not expecting you to write a full story now.
Just write a few notes and do some brainstorming, because brainstorming is a really important part of the writing process.
I never actually start writing the story until I have got pages and pages of notes and ideas.
So that's what I want you to have a go at now.
You can pause the video again, shut me up and have a go at writing this.
[On-screen text: Pause the video now: Think about your favourite story and identify it’s central theme. Then, brainstorm ways to modify and personalise the theme to create your own unique story]
Well, that brings us to the end of this little writing workshop.
I hope you guys got some good ideas from it and that you enjoyed it, because I really do believe the writing should be fun.
Anyway, Happy Education Week and thank you for joining me today.
My name’s George Ivanoff, and often I'm saying bye.
[End of transcript]
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