The allure of gold has been an underlying cause for many of the biggest world events. Included in that is the formation of BC and our new project!

I’m back for the new year and our first project is all about the British Columbian gold rushes, as well as the impact they had on the people involved and British Columbia as a whole. We had actually started this project last year, but never had enough time to finish. This means that we went into this project with a little bit of knowledge already built up. 

The final project was a historical fiction short story about a group that came to British Columbia. The driving question for this book was —> How did the discovery of gold shape our province and its people? I quite like how it turned out, , mainly because I think it really shows how the gold rush affected the people in my story.

You can read my finished short story 👉here👈

Before we could jump into writing my story, we had to learn what had actually happened. Despite the knowledge I already had, there was still quite a lot of building knowledge needed before I felt comfortable writing a story

We started our building knowledge with a little bit of review on the gold rush in general. This research included the Cariboo gold rush, Fraser Canyon war, Chilcotin war, as well as documentaries to create a full picture of 1850s life in BC. One of the activities we did to help re-enforce this knowledge was to fill out a workbook about life during the Cariboo gold rush. 

I found this activity quite hard, as for a lot of the questions there was not a lot of information on the topics. This meant that we had to fill in the blanks and use what we already knew to make predictions on things like what accommodations were available during a trip to the gold fields. While I did find this quite challenging, it was also very good practice before we wrote our novel, as that would require even more historical thinking to read between the lines, and extrapolate what really happened. 

One of the other parts of this project was cause and consequence. We have already worked a lot with cause and consequence before so it wasn’t anything new. That being said, it was still a challenge to figure out  the underlying causes, as well as piece together long term consequences of events. Doing this also made me realize how much I had improved, since my first attempt at cause and consequence, as I am quite happy with how deep my answers were.

To write the story, we first had to figure out our overall story arch. We did this in two ways, the first one being the basic story spine. This let me figure out the basic plot points and challenges my characters would face. However we also filled out a story checklist with all the important points of a good story. This second activity was interesting, as it really made you think of the story in a bit more detail, and also makes sure you don’t miss any important aspects that make up a good story. Down the road I would consider using this more often to double check and fine tune stories to make them as good as possible. 

Overall the short story came together fairly smoothly. I used a pages template for the formatting which in my opinion looks really nice. The story also went through peer critiques with Alicia and Eric, which really helped make the story easier to understand. 

One thing that did bother me with the story is the ethical questions that came with representing a group without permission. This is the reason why I put a disclaimer at the start of the story. Although it was technically fiction, it was still based history and while I tried to be as accurate as possible with my research, there were many things still up to my interpretations. This created a chance to incorrectly representing another group, something I wanted to avoid even if it was supposed to be fiction.

Ultimately for the first big project of the year it went pretty smoothly. It was nice to get back into the rhythm of things with a pretty simple project without any major hiccups or revisions along the way. Moving forward I practiced and learned how to create a good story, with even more tools like the checklist to help revise and fine tune ideas. I also walked away with a brand new app called Craft, that I’m excited to explore  and expand on in future projects. Anyways, that’s all I have for this project.

See you next time,

Nolan📖