Aleesah Darlison regrets listening to people who told her she’d never get published. The accomplished children’s author popped into Metford Public School on Tuesday for a writing workshop where she encouraged children to pursue their writing dreams.
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She took a group of years 3 to 6 students through the process of writing their own book, illustrating it, creating a title and reading aloud to the class.
What the kids came up with were pages of monsters, bullies, animals and school adventures.
“They were very creative at Metford, we had one boy who had a perfect voice, only had once sentence per page – that’s always good – he wrote a story about a hawk that couldn’t fly,” Ms Darlison said.
She said the workshop aim was to expand children’s vocabulary and inform them about character and story development.
“I love visiting all my readers, a lot of the kids believe, as I did, that writing is too hard to get into and you never get published. I tell the kids if they follow their dreams they can achieve them.
“Children are interested in reading if you get them young enough, we especially lose boys to computer games around year 5 and 6.”
Ms Darlison speaks from experience. She established a career in marketing after being told in high school that getting work published was too difficult.
“I tell the kids they can follow and achieve their dreams,” she said.
After several years trying, she was eventually published two years ago and has since released 15 children’s books.