Hero photograph
Celia is a nationally recognised young writer.
 
Photo by Sera King

Writer reaps rewards for exploring reindeer's view

Sera King —

Year 11 writer Celia Allen has recently has two of her pieces of writing published in the nationally-acclaimed Re-Draft magazine, a collection of teenagers’ writing from around the country.

This isn’t the first time Celia has been published; in fact, she’s had that honour every year since she started at Nayland in Year 9. 

Celia writes both short stories and poems and enjoys adopting interesting perspectives in her writing. Her ideas come from all kinds of places. 

“Last year me and my Mum were playing in a brass band that was going around retirement homes and playing Christmas carols and they were the older kind of ones and I just thought (...) ‘what would Rudolph actually think of the lyrics?’ This led to her recent piece titled 'Deerly Departed', attached  below.

The planet Pluto has also been her muse, as she explored the idea of Pluto being “mifffed” that he wasn’t a planet anymore, while her poem ‘Heads and Tails’ adopts the viewpoint of various colours. “I sort of thought about colours and their opinions, like if a colour was a person, what would they be like? And then it just sort of happened,” she said.

Celia finds working towards a competition, with the promise of publication, helps to give her the drive to write. However, she’s not planning on making her writing her first career choice just yet. “I think I’d like to become an engineer first and then [have] writing as a second sort of thing and then if it does get really good, I can switch over.”

“I think a lot of authors have done it that way because it gives them knowledge to work off and then they can write about what they already know,” Celia continued.

Celia’s preference would be to write “funny stories” in a comedy-type genre, though she’s aware it’s not normally recognised as a genre of its own in the writing world. “I feel like I just sort of got sick of all the teenage the-world-is-going-to-end stories, so I’d probably write something that doesn’t fit into that.”

Check out a couple of Celia’s pieces of writing for yourself by opening the attachments below.