Junior & Young Writers: Week 3 [Wild Words] - Conflict Buffet

For our third week of Forest Arts Writers, Antosh and I started off our junior session with a

warm-up. We all drew an animal and a meal we imagined this animal would bring to a

birthday party.

Antosh drew Borris, the alligator, who had whipped up some spaghetti bolognese to bring to

the buffet. Elsie drew Donkey Kong, who brought a runaway banana. Indie had Le Bob the

dragon, who brought some delicious dead rats. Tabatha had a whole gang of animals, but

Misty, the ghost lion, represented her herd at the party and brought some ghost curry. Evan’s

snake JiiiimBobbbbb brought an assortment of king pineapple, meatballs and a banana.

Noah’s character was called Big Mama Bob, a mythical demon creature who brought a fire

apple. Henry’s Human/Chicken/Turtle called SnottyMan rather appropriately brought a plate

of snot. Hamish had a crocodile viper hybrid who brought a zombie to eat. Juno created

Midnight, the kitty dragon who, despite her small size, brought an entire live cow. Finally,

Henry chose the mythical El Chupa Cabra (a diseased dog) and brought a bag of raw goat-

yum.

Next, we all spent time imagining what would happen if the animals we had created were all

at the same party: Would there be any problems? Who would they meet? What could

happen? The idea was to explore conflict between characters, and conflict is what we got!

Getting off to a similar start for the Young Writers group, we described our week as an

animal and had some very colourful descriptions: Poppy chose a sloth to represent a slow

and tiring week. Ava, however, chose a kangaroo as her week had been chaotic. Chloe

described a pigeon standing around doing nothing, as that’s what she felt her week had

entailed. Catherine’s week was summarised as a hippo in a zoo with a child who tried to pet

the hippo and had their head bitten off- She was the child. Daisy also had a slow week and

chose a snail. Berry chose a pig to represent her week- a pig about to get slaughtered.

After a colourful and entertaining start, we revisited our game of consequential poems from

the previous week, but this time, we all started with the same line. Nearly all of our poems

took a very dark and amusing turn, and some even sounded quite well put together.

For our main activity, we looked at several types of literary conflict:

Character vs Self

Character vs Character

Character vs Nature

Character vs Supernatural

Character vs Technology

Character vs Society

The task was to create a character, or multiple, and place them in one of these types of

conflicts. A few prompts from Antosh included: ‘What world do they live in?’ and ‘What is

your characters desire/goal?’. As the group started planning and writing their stories, we also

discussed ‘catharsis’, the use of writing to figure out and release feelings, as a few people in

the group realised their writing often reflected their realities. For example, Poppy found

herself writing about school, and Daisy wrote about a future encounter with a rather

annoying person.

more next week :)

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