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20 September 2025

Junior & Young Writers: Week 1 Dialogue

Week 1. Dialogue  

This week, we explored writing dialogue. It was a session full of dialogue as we debriefed our summers and got settled back into the flow of our Saturday writing sessions :)  

Weekly check-ins:  

Describe your summer break as a sea creature 

Elsie - an octopus: a week of meeting lots of new people, lots of connections! 

Juno - Dolphins: a super fast trip to France  

Evan - A blobfish: weird  

Henry - Poison goldfish: death of pet fishes!  

Jaxon - Piranas: seen from a boat trip on holiday in Greece!  

Indy - A dancing crab: two holidays, one in the UK and one in Canada  

William - A Shole of fish: A Scottish holiday spent reuniting with family friends from France 

who are also Williams penpals  


What are you reading?  

Jaxon - Winnie the Pooh  

Henry - Harry potter and the goblet of fire  

Evan - Graphic novel mega robo bros  

Juno - Warrior cats fire & ice  

Elsie - 117 story treehouse  

Willam - This way round the galaxy  

Indy - Guinness book or world records 2025  


Next, we played a game of book trivia where Frankie asked us these questions: 

1. What books do the following characters belong to? 

Greg and Rodrick Heffley and Rowley Jefferson. 

2. Who Wrote the Hobbit? 

3. Which books are set in the fictional world Narnia? 

4. Who is the main Goddess in Who Let the Gods Out? 

5. How many Harry pottery books are there? 

6. Who wrote Billionaire Boy? 

7. Who is Frankenstein the name of? 

(find the answers at the end of the blog!  


Exercise: Writing Dialogue  

After the quiz we had a picture prompt and spent a few minutes using the characters from the picture to write a short dialogue with no more than 4 lines for each character. 

We asked these questions when thinking about what to write:  

Is there any subtext? 

Can you create tension through only dialogue? 

Can you play with pacing in a scene? 

SUBTEXT– the hidden meaning/message in the text that the audience can grasp 

without being explicitly told. 

TENSION – It doesn’t need to be anger; it can be anxious or romantic or another 

kind of tension! 

PACING – Do the characters say everything all at once? Or is it spread out? Do 

Do they leave things unsaid? 


Exercise: Remixing Dialogue 

After writing we re-wrote the same dialogue choosing 1 of 3 different ways (angry, comedic, suspenseful). 

We will be using this writing technique next week when we think about creating our own comic book!  


QUIZ ANSWERS: 

1. Diary of a Wimpy Kid 

2. J. R. R. Tolkien 

3. The Chronicles of Narnia 

4. Virgo 

5. 7 (8, including screen play) 

6. David Walliams 

7. Dr Frankenstein! The monster doesn’t have a name 


A really lovely start to the term, it was great to be back with everyone. Keep writing! 

Amelia   

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