Exploring Creative Writing

We were sure that anyone can write. If we weren't sure of this before, it was proved to us by the thousands of 12–17 year olds who attended our creative writing workshops.

In 1995, one of us started editing a children's pullout supplement to Newstime, a local English Daily of the Eenadu Group. The children's pages were named ‘Explorer’. In its first year and a half, it carried stories and poems and other contributions from children, but sometimes we weren't sure that the writing was original. Yet, we were sure that these children could, on their own, with a bit of guidance, write just as well. We thought, ‘Let's get the children together, show them how to write, and see what happens!’ That was the beginning of our children's creative writing workshops.

At first, we gathered a few groups of students, gave them some start-up approaches and ideas about writing and left them to it. They wrote their hearts out. Explorer's pages now had authentic and entirely original stuff!

Emboldened, we took the workshops to schools, about one school a month. We would ask for a batch of thirty students in each school, and a room to use for nine hours – three hours each, on three consecutive days. Over eight years, the Explorer workshop went to about a hundred schools.