NEW ZEALAND POST
NATIONAL SCHOOLS
POETRY AWARDS and
writing festival 2009
“Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”
Robert Frost
Welcome to The Writing Kit
This Writing Kit is a resource for teachers to help get Year 11-13 students excited about
creative writing. The Kit contains exercises and examples as well as tips for writing poetry
and prose. You may want to use these as starters for entries to the Poetry Awards or, if your
school teaches creative writing as part of its curriculum, you may want to borrow some of our
exercises to get students started on their internal assessments.
For further tips on writing, we would urge you to read the judges’ reports and writing
resources from previous years’ Poetry Awards and Writing Festivals. These can be found
online at www.victoria.ac.nz/modernletters/activities
We have left the sheets unbound so that teachers can easily photocopy pages that will be of
use to budding writers.
The Writing Kit is created by the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University
with the generous support of New Zealand Post.
Ten top tips for editing your work
These tips are good ideas for students to think about when it comes to editing their work.
They might help them to think more critically about their own writing – what works and
what doesn’t, and why. They would also be helpful basic rules for students to keep in mind if
critiquing other student’s writing in a workshop process.
1. The best writing is simple.
Don’t be too ambitious or overwrite in order to make your work urgent or emotional. If
the work is good, it will do this for itself.
2. Beware of adjectives.
Use them sparingly. You can be more effective by using verbs and letting the action do
the work. Whenever you see that you have used two adjectives together, make sure that
they are earning their keep. As a general rule of thumb, two adjectives weaken each
other, and you should choose the stronger of the two.
3. Don’t put in every step you take
You don’t need to detail the ‘and then… and then…’ of your story. Trust your reader.
Alfred Hitchcock used the MacGuffin in his films – a plot device that motivated the
characters or moved the story forward but whose details were of little importance.
4. Use your natural voice, otherwise the writing will sound forced and stiff.
Ask yourself: would I say this to my friends, or would it make me sound silly? It will in the
writing too. The American short fiction writer Grace Paley said: ‘Literature has something
to do with language. There’s probably a natural grammar at the tip of your tongue. You
may not believe it, but if you say what’s on your mind in the language that comes from
your parents and your street and your friends you’ll probably say something beautiful.’
5. Show, don’t tell.
If you tell me that someone is sad, but I don’t feel it, then your writing is not working.
Let me see how they are sad.
6. Beware of rainbows, stars, eyes, tears.
They lead to sentimentality.
7. Avoid easy words:
‘Suddenly’; ‘quite’; ‘really’; ‘always’.
8. Be careful with your point of view.
A very common mistake is to have a story told in the first person, but have the speaker
describe herself from a third person point of view. For example: ‘I stroke my long blonde
hair,’ which is a rather odd thing for someone to say about herself. Rather, she might
say, ‘I stroke my hair.’
9. Never underestimate the power of the short sentence.
Mix up your sentence lengths.
10. Make every word earn its place.
Eliminate every word that is not working hard to drive your writing on.
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Writing exercises
These exercises can be used as a way to start a poem or story. The ‘famous person’ exercise
was used as a preparation exercise for the New Zealand Post National Schools Writing
Festival 2008. We’ve included an example of a student’s poem that came from the exercise
and a Festival teacher’s comments as to why this poem was one of the more successful
poems in her class.
The Famous Person exercise – poetry
‘The time Auntie Anne met David Beckham’
Write a poem about a family member meeting a famous person (not necessarily
David Beckham).
The encounter can be real or imaginary, but should be plausible – no meeting between
Cousin Bill and Genghis Khan. The family member, not the famous person, should be the
protagonist of the poem, and it is his or her consciousness that the poem should try to enter
and understand.
The writer of the poem should be a removed presence. They should understand the inner
workings of the family member’s mind but always see the family member as a character that
is referred to in the third person (as ‘my father’ and not as ‘Dad’, in other words). The famous
person can be anyone in the arts, politics, entertainment or sports.
(This exercise is adapted from an exercise by David Wojahn in The Practice of Poetry, edited by
Robin Behn and Chase Twichell, HarperCollins, 1992.)
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Example
‘When My Cousin Met Someone Famous’
by Finn Teppett, Year 12
She was sweating!
My cousin never sweats, so obviously
She had been doing some impromptu running.
That was the first thing I noticed about her.
“I touched him!” she yelled, secondly.
She never yells.
Or she only yells when something is really important.
Or when she thinks it is something we all need to know.
“He laughed” she giggled
“When I screamed.”
I didn’t find out who it was that she met.
When I was about to ask, I opened my mouth.
She saw this, and left to tell the next person
On her journey down the hall.
Teacher comments by Festival writing teacher Marty Schofield
What works about this poem is that it is driven by verbs to give a feeling of ecstatic blind
glee. There are some plain words working hard in this poem to create lots of movement and
energy so that even though the poem doesn’t sound like it is language led, it is. There is a
strong sense of control in the poem and the story is told very economically – something that
isn’t achieved without editing and reworking.
Some poems try and ram their points home – this one doesn’t. It’s a complex little portrait
that isn’t weighed down with too many details – it’s good to remember that what you leave
out is as important as what you leave in.
The spirit of the speaker is in the observations – it’s funny, and I feel as if I would like to
know these people.
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James Brown’s formal restraints exercise - poetry
New Zealand poet James Brown says he finds it useful to have form and subject restraints
when writing. Having such restraints force you away from habits such as writing in regular
AABBCC rhymes which (unless your name is Wordsworth) often make a poem sound
rather dull.
These restraints are helpful in that they give you a form to hang your poem on. James
says, ‘I like poems where something happens – this helps to avoid a poem becoming just a
description of things or feelings.’
Exercise
Write a poem in seven (or more) unrhymed couplets that mentions or alludes to heat or
water (or both) in each couplet. The poem should also include (in any order) an apple, a scar,
a bulge, and a bicycle.
Example
James K. Baxter’s Jerusalem Sonnets are written in seven unrhymed couplets (which James
Brown calls ‘the New Zealand sonnet’). Dinah Hawken also used this form in her sequence
‘Writing Home’, which appears in Oh there you are tui! New and selected poems (Victoria
University Press, 2001). Here’s the first of Baxter’s Jerusalem Sonnets.
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The small grey cloudy louse that nests in my beard
Is not, as some have called it, ‘a pearl of God’ –
No, it is a fiery tormentor
Waking me at two a.m.
Or thereabouts, when the lights are still on
In the houses in the pa, to go across thick grass
Wet with rain, feet cold, to kneel
For an hour or two in front of the red flickering
Tabernacle light – what He sees inside
My meandering mind I can only guess –
A madman, a nobody, a raconteur
Whom He can joke with – ‘Lord,’ I ask Him,
‘Do You or don’t You expect me to put up with lice?’
His silent laugh still shakes the hills at dawn.
Selected Poems: James K. Baxter (Oxford University Press, 1982)
(Poem reprinted with kind permission of the Baxter estate)
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My Pet writing exercise – prose
Fiction writer, dramatist and sometime poet, Damien Wilkins, provided the following
exercise. This exercise was also used by poet Cliff Fell to write his long poem ‘Ophelia’
about a pet baboon. You can read this poem in The Adulterer’s Bible (Victoria University
Press, 2003).
Exercise
Write a piece of fiction on the subject ‘My Pet’. If you like, you can give your piece
another title.
The crucial requirement is that this must be a pet you have never owned. It can be anything
from a kitten to a dinosaur, from a fly to a dragon. Describe what your pet looks like, how you
acquired it, what it eats and where it sleeps, what tricks it can do, and how it gets on with
your family, friends, neighbours, or the people at work. What are its politics? Does it have
strong religious beliefs?
Write your piece in three parts – numbered 1, 2, and 3; or with individual titles. One of your
three sections should concentrate on telling a story.
Length: no more than 1000 words.
Notes
An imaginary pet may seem like a frivolous subject but fiction can be serious in lots of ways
and one way is by being playful. This exercise encourages writers to move away from using
their own lives as material for their fiction. And while it allows the writer to be as inventive
as he/she likes, it also asks that this inventiveness be firmly grounded in details. The world
of the pet may be wildly imaginative but the reader must be convinced and held by a vivid
use of language. How are we persuaded by what is unlikely? How do we come to believe in
something that never happened?
(This exercise is from Bill Manhire who adapted it from an exercise by the American novelist
Alison Lurie.)
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A word from New Zealand Post
We are extremely excited to work with Victoria University for the third year and bring
the New Zealand Post National Schools Poetry Awards and Writing Festival to young
New Zealanders.
For centuries people have told stories and expressed emotions through the powerful rhythm
and tempo of poetry. It remains a compelling medium today, be it in the form of traditional or
contemporary verse, song lyrics or the gritty realism of hip hop. With the New Zealand Post
National Schools Poetry Awards and Writing Festival, Kiwi youth have a great opportunity to
be part of the continuing evolution of poetry.
This year all entries are judged in two different categories – Best Poem and Best Lyric.
Judging is in the capable hands of former New Zealand Poet Laureate, Jenny Bornholdt, who
will assess the Best Poem, and Jason Kerrison, who will select a poem from the Best Lyric
category for recording as a song. Jason is well known to New Zealand music fans, and to
New Zealand Post, as the singer/songwriter of multiple New Zealand Music Award winning
band Opshop, which provided the music for our popular advertising campaign.
As teachers providing inspiration and guidance, you help students bring their poetry to life.
I hope that you will support these Awards and Writing Festival by encouraging your students
to enter their works.
Regards
John Allen
Chief Executive
New Zealand Post Group
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