Story Cubes & Cranborne Chase Competition

Saturday 30th September

Junior Writers:

This week we took a break from working on the competition and tried our drawing skills instead. A lot of the writers are also keen artists and impress us with their drawings every week.

So this week we made Story Cubes. The writers had to come up with a

Hero, Villain, Problem, Setting and item to be used as inspiration for a story and then draw each thing on one side of the cube. Once they finished they swapped cubes and each came up with stories to match each others pictures.

Young Writers:

Today we took our 15-18s to see ‘Faith Healer’ by Brian Friel, which was being performed at Lighthouse by the London Touring Company. Thank you for the free tickets! We had an amazing time and will be chatting all about it next time.

Exercise 1:

Choose one of the following prompts from the ‘story cube’. Either ‘describe a character trying to get into an exclusive club’ or ‘describe your most memorable family holiday and why’.

Exercise 2:

Watch the following videos and discuss.

As today’s workshop was inspired by different perspectives and observations, we watched a couple of videos to highlight what we notice and don’t notice. There’s a ‘Selective Attention Test’, where you are instructed to count how many times a ball is passed, generally missing the giant gorilla that appears on screen at one point. There’s a ‘Whodunnit’ video, where you are distracted by a mystery as over 20 changes happen onscreen in thirty seconds. And finally, we watched a Guardian advert from the 1980s which shows a specific incident from three different angles, with only the third and final one revealing the entire scenario. After discussing each of the videos, the YWs had to write the Guardian advert from the perspective of one of the characters within it. How do they see things differently?

Exercise 3:

Choose a photo of Cranborne Chase. Make a list of all the colours in it. All the Living Things in it. All the non-living things in it. What is the weather like? What season is it? What would it be like in another season? What time of day is it? What is the most boring thing in the image? What is the most interesting thing in the image?

We are creating entries for the Cranborne Chase’s Creative Writing Competition, currently running until the middle of October. After being presented with a dozen different images of places in Cranborne Chase, the YWs chose an image and considered lots of different things about the specific location.

Exercise 4:

Write about this place from your own perspective. Then, write about this place from the perspective of a property developer. Finally, write about this place from the perspective of an alien.

After these exercises, everyone had time to continue developing any of their pieces about the scene, or to write something different. By the end of the workshop, we had lots of great pieces inspired by the outstanding natural beauty of Cranborne and East Dorset.

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Story Cubes & Cranborne Chase Competition