Students at Pleasant Valley Middle School were at it again this summer — writing the fall play.

This year’s play is titled “Camp Odyssey: A Pirate Legacy.”

Drama Club advisers Alexandria Gibb, teacher of the gifted, and Amanda Altemose, a language arts teacher, have been running the summer writing camp for four years. The camp meets for 10 days in early August.

This year, they had 23 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students sign up to try their hand in crafting the story from scratch, with just a few basic ideas to get them started. Two veteran writers — now going into ninth grade — also provided some guidance to the group, Gibb said.

Come November, the play will take the stage, and the words will come to life.

Altemose said the story is about a summer camp that is closing unless the campers and counselors can find the original deed. The cook, who is one of the original pirates kept alive by a immortal cup, tells the campers the deed is hidden in a treasure.

As in any good story, there are challenges. These campers have to find clues that will lead them to initials carved into tree. At the tree, there is a locked box with a code they have to solve, Altemose said. Complicated.

The students provided specifics about the characters.

Jasper Finn, an eighth grader who has been to writing camp before, said each cabin at the camp has a pirate ghost that haunts it. The one at her group’s cabin is named Trenchfoot.

Each cabin also has a name. Theirs is called Scylla.

“Each cabin is named after a mythical monster, specifically what Odysseus met on his journey,” Finn explained. The cabin names are from Homer’s “Odyssey.”

Over at cabin Calypso, the ghost is named Clawhand, who is very annoyed by the campers, said Juliana Torres, a seventh-grade writer. It’s her first time at the writing camp.

“He has telekinesis,” said Scarlett Atwal, also a first-time writer at the camp in seventh grade “He throws Archie’s apple.”

The girls and their co-writer Meghan Warden, a veteran writer in eighth grade, laugh about the character Archie.

“We love Archie,” Torres said. “Archie has such a vibe.”

“Focusing on Archie was a necessary part of the process,” Atwal said.

The girls also love the Dwagon; yes, spelled that way.

“A misspelled word turns into a whole personality,” Warden said. She said that she accidentally misspelled dragon in a paper to Gibb and Altemose, but her group went with it and created a character that is a baby dragon, but the other campers don’t think it really exists.

The writing camp is really important to the kids.

They gave a bunch of reasons why they like it:

• Enjoy writing.

• Dream of being an author.

• Love the theater.

• To get out of the house and do something.

• Meet people with similar interests.

• Make friends with kids in older grades.

• Good way to get to know the school.

• Helps them express their emotions — just to name a few.

“Being in summer camp has made me more creative,” Warden said.

The camp is funded through a grant from the Pleasant Valley Education Foundation, Gibb said.

The play will take the stage on Nov. 14 and 15, so save the date.

“It’s really cool to see the final product,” said eighth grader Lily Sullivan.