Descriptive Dreamings and Character Creating!

Descriptive Fantasy Writing - Junior Writers 7-10

This week we did some descriptive fantasy writing.

Starting off with describing a photo of a forest on the board we each made a word bank to describe what we could see when we all had our words we used fantasy ideas to turn them into similes and metaphors.

The forest was lost like an old shoe
The mountains were rising with steam - like hot springs
The trees scraped at my face like claws
Mysterious like a problem
White mist like dragons breath

When we had some descriptive sentences about the forest our writers were asked to write a short 1st person story about waking up in the forest for the first time.

Here are some of the ideas they came up with, as well as some beautiful drawings.

When I woke I was under a pine tree. I saw 20 other people. Then I realized I was in a forest! We all had weapons like bows, arrows and daggers.

After hearing back our short stories the writers listened to a piece of music and had to imagine a world and free write about what they could see. Next week we hope to use our writers ideas to create our own junior writers fantasy world map!

Here are some of the writers ideas, we will explore all of them more next week.

The music we used was Bundle of Joy from the Pixar film Inside Out.

This week we also want to say a big well done to Flo, who showed us some of the wonderful work about Theseus and The Minotaur she had been writing at school. Here is a picture of Flo’s project. We love reading our young writer’s stories!

11-14 & 15-18 Groups - Creating Characters using Mike Leigh’s writing exercises

Week three already! We’ve had a brilliant start to the term and it was lovely to welcome even more new faces to this session, which was focusing on character.

As part of our warm-up, each young writer had to think about three people from their lives who could inspire an interesting character – friends, family, teachers, or even random people on the bus. What makes those people fascinating? Their appearance? Personality quirks? All the young writers then wrote down these three people on a piece of paper – like in a triangle.

Next up, we got on our feet and demonstrated the next stage of devising characters – Holly placed her three people on chairs around the room. She then found places in the triangle and reimagined characters based on where they were. So, a character could burst out of a meeting between a random old man and Holly’s old teacher to become an insular, high-status individual walking a nice dog. The YWs then repeated the exercise, either ‘onstage’ or on paper to create a composite character. They had to devise these characters’ wants, fears, and secrets, then work with a partner to create five memories that their characters shared.

Once we had all these exciting and realistic characters, we then threw them into our favourite game: ‘Werewolf’. Each writer received a card giving them a role in the game – Werewolf, Minion, Seer, Healer, or Villager. The two werewolves had to try and defeat all the other players without being discovered. On this occasion, the werewolves were beaten by the villagers so everyone had a happy ending!

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Descriptive Dreamings and Character Creating!