Writing – a Journey and a Destination
There are two ways of writing. One is with a destination in mind – you’re writing for a specific purpose – an article, a report, an assessment. The other is where you focus on the writing itself, exploring side streets and little-used paths as they occur. In this kind of writing, your focus is on the journey, not the destination.
At secondary schools in New Zealand, nearly all writing is of the first kind. Tests, essays, opinion pieces, reports, summaries. Often, the only place a student gets to explore writing at all is in English – and even there, they’re usually operating under constraints imposed by the teacher.
There’s no reflection on the teachers here – they’re all driven by a desire to see students succeed against NCEA criteria. But where does that leave the passionate writer? The budding poet or journalist, novelist or scriptwriter?
It’s these people – these passionate teenage writers who have few chances to explore writing – that our ‘Write Now’ conference is aimed at. Over the course of the weekend, writing will be celebrated as pleasurable, rewarding and worthwhile – and as an end in itself. It will be valued.
We’re not excluding the ‘destination’ kind of writing, however. You’ll be hearing (among others) from a political writer and a university lecturer in film and script writing, and we’re hoping you’ll relish exploring these text types as well. In upcoming blogs, we’re going to tell you more about our fabulous keynote speakers.
Our conference offers a chance for young adults to embrace their inner writers and reward them with a smorgasbord of speakers and workshops. We’d like delegates to enjoy the journey of writing, and maybe to travel towards destinations they hadn’t considered.
Find out more about our conference soon.
EVENT UPDATE: Balancing school life for students has become a bit of a mountain during these difficult times, so we have made the decision to postpone our inaugural Write Now Student Conference until 2023.
Please read the blogs and do register your interest for next year’s event now so we can keep you in the loop.
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