Over to you, Nadine and Claire…
We’re now 5th years from Mount Carmel school North Kings Inn Street in Dublin.
When we were in Transition Year we wrote a book of short stories. It was a suprise when our English teacher told the twenty-two of us that we were heading down to the organisation Fighting Words, the creative writing centre, for a year to work with Roddy Doyle and other volunteers.
When we got there we were told we could write our own individual stories, or continue on from a drama scene that we made up that day. At the end of the first day we all decided amongst ourselves that we’d like to write our own short stories.
The begining of our journey, for most of us, started in September, but for two late comers it started in Janurary. We all started with a blank piece of paper and our creative ideas overflowed.
On the first day we all sat in two rows in front of a projector. We were introduced to Roddy Doyle, Orla and the volunteers, and were told what we would be doing. Two girls had to go up and do a little drama, and if we wanted we could carry on from where they left off, or we could create our own stories. I think everyone went with doing their own story.
Some days we didn’t want to write, or go over what we had already written. We got fustrated at times, editing every little detail. Soon we started typing them up and even then we had scribbles and new ideas written all over the printed pages.
We were consistent and kept fixing pages and editing to make ourselves happy what was on each page.
When it got sent to the editor the process became real to us all. We started to think of individual titles for the book, we ended up with roughly around 200! So one day Roddy Doyle came in and we all sat around, crossing out ideas that wouldnt suit the type of book we were producing. After a long hard day of getting rid of and adding titles, we came up with the name ‘Yet To Be Told’.
After the editing process was introduced and the title was picked, Daragh the designer for our book cover came in with suggestions. He told us how he could picture the title ‘Yet To Be Told’ as a cover. Our teacher, Ms O’Hagan, gave us a task of designing our own cover to give to Daragh to give him a helping hand on what way we would like our own book to look. When Daragh came back after seeing our ideas he gave us his final designs of the cover. With another long day of agreeing and disagreeing we came up with the final cover with a vote of showing hands.
As the weeks went on we continued writing our stories. We were finishing up at this stage. It was around mid April, so as the deadline was coming to a close we managed to finish ours on time.
So when every duty was done we then took a trip to the printers on a very fancy bus. We thought we were in first class! When we got to the printers we put on florescent jackets. We took a tour around the printers, seen all the different types of machines and of course we seen our stories. It was exciting to think that in a matter of weeks we’d be published authors. When we were finished our tour we got refreshments, and souvenirs of calenders.
It was about two weeks later when we got our book. That day in Fighting Words was possibly the most exciting one, but the wait for them to arrive was unbearable, so most of the class sat in a circle and played Chinese whispers just to pass time.
When we got the book for the first time we sat there in amazement that we had actually completed a book by ourselves.
Fighting Words is a creative writing centre, established by Roddy Doyle and Sean Love. It opened in January 2009 and aims to help students of all ages to develop their writing skills and to explore their love of writing. All tutoring is free.
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