01 October 2022

Enzariam Island Continued & The Death of Shakespeare

7-10 - This weeks junior’s blog was written by Alice who lead an amazing session this week while Holly was away

The young writers group continued their world-building this week, adding layers to the magical land where sea dragons have glittering blue scales, waterfalls flow with chocolate and danger awaits in certain places on the island – though even this depends on if you are the hunter or the hunted!

Our writers began the session with an improvisation practice to wake up the imagination, naming things in the room as something entirely different to what they actually were: bins became telephones, people became bananas, tissues turned to hips and hamsters!

Once we had opened up our perception a bit, we turned to the vision of the island, working in groups to write down as much as we could remember from the week before under the titles “I know…I think…I wonder”. Aliens appeared hiding close to a volcano, inside out trees had green trunks and brown leaves. The writers spoke of haunted forests and a great stone that protects the people of Enzariam Island, a wondrous realm where some monsters simply want to be friends, while others want to eat people!

With our ideas on the page we then created a group acrostic poem with the word ENZARIAM being our starting point. These poems don’t have to rhyme, though they can, and each line can be as short or as long as the writer wants. Some writers played with alliteration to create a sense of pace & dynamic rhythm to their poem, others focused on shorter lines describing a character or two who lived on Enzariam (Hello, stripey koala at the Zoo of Chaos!). We had more spooky, ominous poems describing dangers of the island and some that told of the fantastical dragons and also infestations of unusual creatures on Enzariam.

We ended by sharing our poems in a group – some had even done drawings and maps to go with their creative writing. It’s certain that the young writers are growing a vivid fictional world…we look forward to meeting the characters who live there next week!

11-15 & 15-18

1st October

Welcome to Autumn! This week we began with a ‘fill in the blanks’ warm-up, with the writers having to complete the following lines:

Yesterday I lost my --- and found my ---
With them I became –-
I’ve always wanted to be --- . I love ---
You can have lots of --- that will make you all ---
Who’s afraid of ---? I am, but --- isn’t.

Each group then explored a new play that Rohan is currently developing. Some read ‘The Death of Shakespeare’ and, similar to one of our workshops last year, discussed what was happening in each scene. The Young Writers were challenged to identify all the different forms of punctuation within the play, and choose three pieces that they could change (a ? to an ! for example). We saw how much a single piece of punctuation can change the meaning of a line.

Next up we all chose a scene from the play and drew a single image to describe that scene. What was necessary for the scene to make sense? What was and wasn’t important? We also adapted a couple of scenes into prose and created specific characters to help add detail to the first scene (where multiple characters talk like a chorus).

Working with our older group (15-18), having already read ‘The Death of Shakespeare’ we instead looked at the opening scene of ‘Getting Closer’, another short play about climate change which opens with an industrialist gifting his daughter a lump of coal. We read the scene and, like last week, used facts and questions to get a better understanding of what was happening. We summarised the plot and then considered the difference between that and the story of the scene:

Plot: The Queen died and then the King died.

Story: The Queen died and then the King died of a broken heart.

We found the idea of theatrical gestures/dramatic questions very exciting, digging into the themes of the scene and the writer’s aims with the play. What could happen in the next scene? We were very excited by the idea that the next scene didn’t have to be set in the 1800s but could happen in the modern day – the seed of an issue and the tree we see today. We all came away with a better understanding of how plays can explore form in fresh and imaginative ways.

Next week we’ll be looking at writing for TV…

Recommendations from the Room: The Fire Child by Sean Thomas (Book), Stone Cold by Robert Swindells (Book), Cloud Nine and Top Girls by Caryl Churchill (Plays)

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Enzariam Island Continued & The Death of Shakespeare