Thought I’d switch it up a bit – something new. I tutor a nine-year-old boy from China, now living in Melbourne, Australia. Every week we read a few pages of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, because he is really into magical adventure stories and he’d never heard of Narnia. He speaks English at a level that’s close to native but his parents want me to help him with his writing.

Every week, 10am a Saturday (7pm in Melbourne, and winter), we chat a little, then read about Narnia (we’re almost at the bit where Edmund meets the White Witch), and then we do some creative writing. I type for him – I just ask him what I should write. I give him prompts I think he’ll like – Zeus giving directions to Olympus; writing a letter to advise a friend who’s just inherited a billion dollars; writing to a wizard to request use of his book of spells. Then I just let him run with it – gently suggesting ideas if he gets stuck, or asking him questions to help open up new avenues he can wander down. ‘What would he say next?’ ‘What would the room look like?’ ‘How do you think they would react to that?’ – that sort of thing.

Recently he told me he’s really into Star Wars, so we’ve been writing a story over the last couple of weeks with no real direction – I’ve mostly sat back and let him go wild, taking the story in whatever direction he likes. Our lessons are among the happiest hours of my week. Today we wrote the second instalment of the Darth Vader story, and several times it made me laugh out loud. I thought it would be pretty cool to put it here because it really gave me a chuckle. Several times I had no idea where he was going with the story and then he suddenly veered in a direction that genuinely surprised me and tied things together.

Here it is – from the wonderful imagination of a nine-year-old. I particularly like the idea of Darth Vader being awkward and clumsy and panicked – it made me laugh a lot. The ‘ah moi gawd’ bit was not me – that’s how he told me to spell it. Enjoy!

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After many miles of travelling across the unknown galaxy of the Milky Way, Darth Vader’s ship registered a strange planet. He used the Force to detect life on this unknown blue-green planet, and he decided it would be worth investigating.

Boom!

As he was flying closer to observe, his ship was suddenly covered in lava.

“Ah moi gawd!” said Darth Vader. 

He had landed his ship on top of a mountain that seemed to be made out of a hot flowing liquid. He had not realised that this mountain was, in fact, a volcano in Hawaii.

Abandoning his ship, Darth Vader rushed to find civilisation, before the lava burned him. After running an extremely long distance, he came across a large group of humans who were very similar to the humans in his galaxy. Most of them were doing what he would have done if he were stuck on Tatooine: barely surviving, and farming. Darth Vader decided to go and speak to one of them.

After almost everyone had run away, there was one person left who did not seem frightened of his appearance at all.

“Why is everyone running away from you?” said the person. “How are you here?”

The person looked just like Darth Vader’s son, Luke Skywalker.

“How did you get here?” said Darth Vader.

“I was born in this world. I got a job as the actor for Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.”

Darth Vader started to go a little bit cuckoo, and took out his lightsaber.

“No! You’re pretending to be a fake Luke Skywalker. But actually you’re the real one!”

Fake Luke Skywalker ran away, chased by real Darth Vader, all the way to a nearby airport. He climbed into a plane on the runway, and Darth Vader boarded as well. He found himself in an air-conditioned room that seemed to go on forever.

In the large room, there were lots of different types of seats in rows. Almost every single seat was occupied by humans. Most of them were totally different. There were already some people staring at Darth Vader, so before all the attention turned to him, he sat down. Then came a tall person who said, “Sir, you are sitting in my seat.”

Darth Vader, shocked, took out his lightsaber and began cutting the plane into bits. Fake Luke Skywalker decided to see what all the commotion was about. He came to the front of the plane where Darth Vader was seated and took out his fake lightsaber. When they started duelling, Fake Luke Skywalker discovered that his lightsaber actually worked!

As Darth Vader stood up to attack, the whole plane gasped, and everyone tried to run away. They couldn’t run away because the plane was on the runway, and then it lifted off the ground and began to fly. The whole plane, including Fake Luke Skywalker and Real Darth Vader went crazy, and started running around trying to find the emergency parachutes. The plane had lost half of its fuel, so once someone found the parachutes, the whole plane decided to put them on and jump off.

Once all the passengers had jumped off, and the plane had crashed, Real Darth Vader and Fake Luke Skywalker started duelling again – in the air! Then their parachutes opened, but Darth Vader ripped his own parachute in half, because he didn’t know what it was, and thought it was a baby elephant that had lost weight.

Darth Vader saw that he was about to fall onto his ship, which was still burning on top of the volcano. Quickly, he used the Force to save himself. He said, “Okay, Force. Save me!”

KABLAMMM!!!

He landed right next to the volcano, where the lava and the sea were combining.

“Ahhh!” he yelled, as the mixed lava-water stained everywhere.

Fake Luke Skywalker landed safely on top of a nearby mountain, and spotted Real Darth Vader in no time. Suddenly, someone came up to Darth Vader and asked “Is that your Halloween costume?”

“What’s Halloween?” Darth Vader growled, as he scrambled around asking about Halloween.

Then, the same tall man who asked Darth Vader to get out of his seat said, “It’s a festival where people dress up in different costumes, and it looks like I forgot to.”

Then, Darth Vader spotted someone who looked just like him on one of those giant rooms that seem to go on forever (a plane), getting off and saying:

“Oh right. I thought it was Halloween today, but then I was like ‘no, it isn’t’.”

This… was the actor… for Darth Vader.

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It’s fun, isn’t it?