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04 October 2025

Posted by Melissa Dehn

Junior and Young Writers: Week 3 - Character Building

This week’s Forest Arts Young and Junior Writers’ sessions were full of creativity, laughter and peculiar characters. Despite the relentless flu season, many familiar faces showed up. Everyone was asked to describe their week with an autumnal word – everyone’s weeks had been quite diverse, spanning from “pumpkin spice latte” to “conkers”.

To warm up, the writers did a few exercises, such as Buzzy Bees and a picture writing prompt. The picture, which depicted a tall, rocky building, a vast, barren landscape and a lone figure, inspired a variety of ideas: human-worship, time-travel and aliens.

Frankie emphasised the importance of character building and backstory, particularly in stories and games. Subsequently, the writers were asked to first design two characters, a protagonist and their arch-nemesis, paying close attention to their appearance, strengths, weaknesses, quirks and how the characters and their wants were linked. This seemed to inspire all of the writers, all coming up with imaginative characters and many with accompanying drawings.  

As a final task, the Junior writers did the One Word Story exercise, resulting in fun and silliness, as well as a story about dirty socks washing themselves. The Young Writers played against each other as the characters they had created, including a fake-messiah child with painted buttons instead of money, a shapeshifting eagle-human plotting to overthrow the government and an unmemorable man with large eyes instead of a head who just really wanted to open a sandwich shop.

The writers were reminded of the upcoming New Forest showcase and asked to start preparing any work they might want to present on stage, either individually or as a group. 

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