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07 November 2023

Posted by Carla Hall

Amendment

In this weeks session of Mayflower Creative Writers, we brought along one of our favourite books.

  • These Violent Delights, by Chloe Gong
  • The Magic Faraway Tree, by Enid Blyton
  • The Heroes of Olympus: The Blood of Olympus, by Rick Riordan
  • Smith, by Leon Garfield 
  • My Sister is A Dog, by Ali Sparkes
  • His Dark Materials: The Northern Lights, by Phillip Pullman
We summarised our chosen book to the group which we would later attempt to amend.

For practice, we played the Countdown game - make a sentence by using the mixture of consonants and vowels as the first letter of each word. We did this three times, once with a 15 second timer and twice with a sixty second timer. 

Answers included:
  • A headline to change the head of a political party
  • A bumbling fool asking the Queen's guard why evil men scream.
We then amended our sentences, by adding connectives, dialogue or additional context.

Next, we used the beginning and the end of a sentence as writing prompts. 

The bride was led down the aisle...they left together.                                          
The bullet left the gun... the soldier fell to the ground.

Despite only one prompt hinting at violence with a gun, the responses were aggressive:

  • The bride and her mother murdered the husband 
  • The bride murdered the husband and dragged his dead body behind her out of the church
  • The bride was a ghost who murdered the husband so they could be together forever.
  • The bullet shot the solider, whom fell to the ground
  • The bullet was shot by a person with magical powers which killed the solider
The main task for this week was to find three things in a chapter of our chosen book that we could amend. What would happen if: a character who was supposed to leave the scene, stayed; the scene was set somewhere entirely different; a scene went on for hours instead of minutes?

(Less aggressive) answers to these prompts included:
  • Lyra visited a mirror maze instead of Oxford College
  • A dog and his owner stayed in the rain for hours, much to the owners dismay
  • A ghost continued to haunt the characters on their story

Finally, we got into pairs and read each other our written responses. The responses were varied, but needless to say, violence prevailed. 



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