Teach Primary 18.8

Chapter 3, pages 26–27 www.teachwire.net | 43 26-27 Imagine if someone said they had something important to tell you. You would soon wake up! It’s natural, and shows us the close relationship Nush and Arian have. In this dialogue I use Nush’s speech to fill Arian in on what she’s been doing. It's a great technique for conveying important information for your reader. What I’ve done here is to slow the dialogue down a bit and show Nush thinking about how to proceed. There’s a gap here and it might be that she is a bit unsure what to say next. It’s a good technique to add an extra layer of meaning to the relationship. I often break up my dialogue with a little bit of action. It helps the reader to get a picture of the character in their head. We can just imagine the way Arian flops against the pillow, adding extra emphasis to his sleepiness. I’ve used just the sort of word you would to complain about being woken up! After all the persuading Arian ends the conversation with a joke. Jokes are great ways to defuse a tense or scary scene. Here, Nush is desperate to get Arian to agree to her plan and the way he jokes about it relaxes the situation and gives the reader a moment to take a breath. It also gives us some more information about his character. I burst into his room, leaping on to the snoring bundle of bedclothes. ‘Hey!’ he complains, waking bleary-eyed and grumpy. He yanks the covers back over his head. ‘It can’t be morning already.’ ‘No, of course it’s not morning yet, sleepyhead.’ I give him a playful punch. ‘I’ve got something important to tell you.’ ‘It better be good. I was in the middle of a pretty amazing dream just then.’ He sits up slowly and flops against the soft pillows. ‘I’ve just been to see Majee. We sat in the lotus chair and she told me the story of the family emerald again.’ ‘You’ve woken me up to tell me that?’ ‘No – not just that. It’s to do with the trip to England.’ The idea is firing my chest and my words tumble faster than the holy River Ganga. ‘You have to let me go instead of you. Tonight, when Majee told me the story of Lakshmi’s emerald, I had an idea.’ Arian lets out a sleepy sigh. ‘Which is what, exactly?’ ‘If I can go to England instead of you, I can rescue the emerald, like I said. I have all the skills needed to find it – lock-picking, climbing, riding away with it on horseback! Well, what do you say?’ ‘I say your schemes are bigger than your boots,’ jokes Arian. Extract from T E ACH RE AD I NG & WR I T I NG