Help!

Picture yourself in the audience. You're a teenager (say 14, the median). You're excited, but easily bored. You're not here to listen to some person talk about creativity. You want to feel valued and special and full of potential. So a good angle might be to point out that every single brilliantly creative person was once 'sitting where they are now' (figuratively speaking) - was once a person full of dreams and uncertainties just like them - and take it from there. The rest writes itself. Make it about them.

Hi Carrie. I like Bob's idea of using the richness of our language as the basis for a talk. I do know a Swedish writer who actually prefers to write in English. He loves that we have 20 different words for a water course running through the landscape, or 15 different words for of a clump of trees. In Sweden they have their word for a stream but we have their word from the Vikings and we also have the Danish word and the Latin from the Romans. We have words of Greek origin, Germanic and the French words the Norman's introduced. Since a writer's job is to impart the maximum amount of information, using the minimum number of words; finding just the RIGHT word can save you a paragraph of description... and could even tell your reader a bit about the age or accent of a character. Most of us say Badger, but what type of person might say Brock instead?

Carrie, I would focus on the wondrous fact that in writing in English, there are many similar but alternative words for any situation but there is in fact only one that is either "stiffly correct", or "poetic" to the lilt of the writing, or " apt" to the dialogue (for example in the character's age, origin or situation at that point in the book). You can take examples from the writer's bible - "Roget's Thesaurus" to illustrate to the kids - perhaps initially giving them a challenge to give you 20 words meaning "good" & 20 for "bad". Next give them a mini situation & characters where this given vocabulary will limit the possible (or best) words down to perhaps a choice of three. Get the kids involved by debating their choices & why. Chuck in a sudden "development" in the scene which makes them follow a different path to changing the optimum word . Depending on the kids' & interest you have hopefully stimulated this can be repeated with suggestions from the kids to another pair of key world & then their alternatives. A brief demo of how the Roget's works would be good for aspiring young writers. Let the kids do the work - they'll find you much more interesting if their minds are stretched instead of just being sat & "taught" at .

10 out of 10 for asking, nothing for getting it wrong. No one knows everything and sometimes the most talented and gifted need help to be the creative genius they are. True genius is knowing when to ask, success is having the courage to do so