The 45 Minute Comic Strip Challenge …plus Crackin’ Crits

Last month, we had great fun returning to The Mitchell Library, this time for the Young Writers Conference, which was part of the excellent Aye Write! festival. We’ve been doing events for the Glasgow-based book festival for the last 4 years in row, and this year was as fantastic as ever (you can read more about it and see other fab authors who were involved here).

The Scottish Book Trust invited us to conduct a workshop with 25 pupils and help them all to create one giant comic strip in just 45 minutes. Take off the time it takes for introductions and to settle down, and they really had under 40 minutes. It was a genuine challenge, but the pupils did manage to do it! See their multiple hands in action in the photo below. The wonderful people at the Scottish Book Trust also asked us to write a blog about our experience on their website: http://www.scottishbooktrust.com/blog/2013/05/young-writers-conference-45-minute-comic-strip-challenge

In early May we also conducted four author visits for Crackin’ Crits. In week one, we talked to two classes of P7s about our Louis graphic novels and how we work on them. The following week we returned and this time the groups were filmed interviewing us, each pupil having one or two (or sometimes a good dozen) questions. It’s a fantastic format and was great fun to do! One of the classes had been so inspired by our first session that they spent the week creating their own one page comic that they brought back to show us. They were so brilliant we have to post a few here: