20 May 2023

Posted by Claire Hillier

Character Building & Murder Mysteries

When: Saturday 20th May 2023

Where: The Lighthouse Poole

Who: (lead) Rohan Gotobed, (Assistant) Claire Hillier

Welcome to the Saturday Morning Session,

Today we were looking at character development.

We started with an exercise; of the subjects below, how many associations can we come up with that began with the letter C?

● Transport

● Superheroes

● Ice cream (chocolate chip = double word score!)

● Famous writers

● Famous characters

We began thinking about our favorite stories, TV shows, movies and books - in particular, who we see as our top characters. We talked about why we like them.

Rohan then asked the group to do a writing exercise. Working on the stories the class has already been drafting, choosing a character and writing their profile.

We looked through a series of questions to answer about this character. Questions like:

● What animal would they be?

● What colour would they be?

● Do they have a secret?

The writers came up with some great and interesting answers, getting to know their main story characters a lot better following this exercise. We heard a few excellent stories from the group.

Next time, we will be writing poems for the ‘Stories from Our Streets’ project.

20.05.23: ArtfulScribe - Young Writers @ The Lighthouse Poole

When: Saturday 20th May 2023

Where: The Lighthouse Poole

Who: (lead) Rohan Gotobed, (Assistant) Claire Hillier

Welcome to the Saturday Session,

Today we were looking at character development, as a murder mystery game!!!

The session opened with everyone choosing a character from the post-it notes on the Captain’s table. Rohan set the scene - we were all passengers aboard a cruise liner. We each had a character to play.

Characters:

● The amazing rat catcher

● The depressed surgeon

● The clever student

● The terrified ghost hunter

● The strange beekeeper

● The rebellious treasure hunter

● The mysterious magician

● The clever student

● The lousy vampire hunter

● The brilliant army general

● The nervous teacher

● The stupid lifeguard

● The brave pilot

● The sneaky journalist

● The suspicious astronomer

● The bossy fisherman

● The devious archeologist

● The jealous vicar

● The noble politician

● The lovesick butler

● The frustrated musician

● The robbed librarian

● The vain actor

● The envious YouTuber

● The cheating athlete

● The secret superhero

● The disgraceful tailor

When the characters had been picked, the group were set writing exercises to give themselves backstory and flesh out their reasons for being on the cruise, their likes/dislikes, their dreams.

Then they had to interact with the other passengers seated at their tables - getting to know each other and seeing if they were connected in any way.

Suddenly… du, du, duh… A murder was announced! The noble politician - we called him David Brown - was found dead on the ship.

The group were asked to consider their connection to David Brown - the noble politician. Specifically thinking about

How/if they knew him?
What possible motive they could have for murdering him?
How would they do it?
Weapon of choice?

In secret, 3 ‘team murder’ characters were identified (to themselves and each other, but not to the rest of the passengers)

An investigation began. Passengers could accuse each other. Questioning and suspicion ran rife.

Then more murders started happening! And whole table poisoning! Was nobody safe? As the tension increased one was almost thrown overboard after being accused - for being too giggly.

Eventually a line-up of accused characters had to deliver their alibi and defense speeches. The group then had to decide who was telling the truth, and who might be the murderer/spy/poisoner. The 3 villains were in the lineup, but only the murderer was correctly identified, the other 2 got away with murder!

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Character Building & Murder Mysteries