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10 February 2026

Posted by Harley Truslove

Rom-Coms!

Romantic writing was the theme this evening, as Valentine’s is on the horizon! There was a prize up for grabs too: Valentine’s sweeties and cupcakes as well as the writer of the week award.

We began with some fill-in fun. Writers gave us actors reuniting just before walking down the red carpet; co-stars flubbing a romance scene; a dark and mysterious stranger who steals crocs; and a fish mutant meet-cute. 

Ali got us to discuss rom-com tropes we could pull on for our next task: spilling or dropping something, one of the main characters already being in a toxic relationship, fake dating, and many more (see our list!) Our writers then had to choose some of these tropes and write a rom-com outline of their own.

They gave us: 

- a high school romance. A preppy girl has a crush on a nerd, though her friends mock her. She is crushed by a falling light at the high school dance as she approaches him but, if she can dance with her crush on the Valentine’s Day party, death will resurrect her so they may be together. 

- two actors working on a film about two actors working on a rom com, so they have to pretend to be a couple. After the film wraps they end up that they’re very close, fall in love even after a misunderstanding, then they decide to live together in the mountains in the same house they did in the film. 

- a nerdy woman from Yorkshire who moves to New York to start a job. Careless Whisper begins to play when she meets a handsome man in Central Park who memorises her coffee order. He also gets his shirt off. They click, but it seems like he already has a girlfriend - though this is a misunderstanding! They reconcile. After a thirty year time skip, the two are married and she is a CEO.

- a rebellious princess, Elia, who has been sneaking around with a commoner, so her parents lock her away. The princess keeps managing to escape but she begins to fall in love with a lady’s maid inside the castle instead. Elia isn’t sure about running away with the maid even after being caught by her furious father, but a romantic confession sees them escape the kingdom together and live happily ever after. 


We finished off by writing a sample paragraph from our stories. Everyone did such a wonderful job that the sweeties were shared, but our writer of the week was Chloe, who made us laugh and gave us a wonderful love story!

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