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Regular news and insight from our many poets, writers, educators and facilitators

05 November 2024

Posted by Harley Truslove

Character Work & Collages

Ali gave our writers a worksheet to start off the session about their half term holiday, of which only the first sentence was filled out: “well I’m not sure I should actually commit this to paper…. Because…”


It was a small group tonight, so one of our writers gave us a story in the form of a diary with the main character getting gradually more unwell until waking up in a strange field on the seventh day. Another wrote the tale of a child wandering off in a funfair and spotting a strange man with dark glasses. An excellent start to two mysteries for sure!


We then moved onto some work about finding a character, as we want to work towards a larger group piece to share at the end of this semester. Ali gave us all magazines and challenged our writers to find an interesting face and item and make a collage about this character. She then gave us a list of things to work out about them:


Name

Age

Birthplace

Special Item

Strength 

Weakness

Dark Secret


Our group made some wonderful collages and also came up with some very interesting characters. Another writer had joined us by this point, so we had a woman with a secret acting degree and two witches! Once again we were wowed by the synergy in the group when nobody discussed their characters before this point. One character believed in her craft, and the other was only putting it on as a scam, so there could be some very interesting conflict there.


We discussed where these characters could meet, pulling on a session earlier in the year when we did a similar exercise. We pitched a seance, or a village fayre where people were setting up stalls. For the moment the group decided on a festival tent where everyone had to be rushed into to escape from the horrible weather, and our writers wrote a short piece where their characters were telling the group about themselves in order to flesh out the way their characters spoke.

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