Hannah Alkaf day 1/day2

Writing a good story takes planning, understanding of the context, audience and a purpose that you wish to fulfill.

Today instead of a normal Language and Literature lesson to work on our WF, we listened to a talk that Hannah Alkaf, a visiting author had for us.

Hannah Alkaf is an author that has written many books and is an acclaimed author that comes from Malaysia, her books have a similar theme that involves around Malaysia, including culture and race.  In the talk she had with us, she taught us ways to write better, one point that was brought up was that writing needs a spine, this would be the purpose and the message attempted to be conveyed.  From her writing, I learned that when you write about something you have to fully immerse yourself in the context and understand the purpose.  Something that really struck me from Ms.Alkaf speaking was to connect your story.  If it didn’t matter to you it wouldn’t matter to you; to make a story engaging. YOu have to connect it to powerful ideas and experiences.

 

On the second day of Writer’s fortnight, we listened to Hannah Alkaf talks about her own work.  An interesting point she brought us was “race” in stories and books, in many popular, iconic books, the protagonists were white or black and rarely covered minorities.  That is why in her books Hannah Alkaf chose to look at characters from her country, by representing her own culture in her books she goes against most writers choosing white characters as protganoists.