Young Writers – Week 8 (The Art of Writing) – Sequel Stories

Hi Writers!

In this week’s workshop we explored sequel stories and all wrote a short plan or story as a sequel to

our favourite book(s)!

In our check-in, we described our week as a film:

 Berry said her week had been like The Titanic: boring!

 Poppy M described her week as like Frozen – she’d been letting stuff go

 Poppy C’s week had been like Mathilda – crazy and all over the place

 Claire said her week had been like The Wizard of Oz as she’d woken up in a new situation

and was trying to find new qualities and a way home, and she advised that we pay no

attention to the man behind the curtain

 Sukie’s week had been like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert – they’d helped with their friend’s

solo drag theatre show the night before.

In our reading check-in we had a lot of variety again:

 Poppy C: a book about the Twin Towers

 Berry: ‘First Class Murder’

 Poppy M: ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’

We played three improv games to start the workshop - taking it in turns to say our names and where

we come from, embodying whatever emotions we felt about our hometowns; making up non-

human languages and practising our body language and nonverbal communication, and playing with

different emotions using vowel sounds.

We read some example summaries of famous books, including ‘The Lion, the Witch and the

Wardrobe’, ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ and ‘Murder Most Unladylike’, and discussed what genres each

book included, from fantasy and adventure to realism and mystery.

We spoke about what makes a good sequel – Berry suggested that it should keep some characters

but also introduce new ones, and Poppy M said it should be as good as (or better than) the first

book.

We also looked at the Writer’s Digest 7 Rules for Writing Sequels:

https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/7-rules-writing-sequels

Then we looked at the books everyone had brought in to write sequels for:

 Berry: ‘The Last Bear’ by Hannah Gould

 Poppy M: ‘Death In The Spotlight’ by Robin Stevens

 Poppy C: ‘Slime’ by David Walliams

We spent a while on our first writing exercise before sharing our sequel stories, which were all

slightly different from the original ideas everyone had had – showing just how much our ideas can

evolve even as we are writing them down.

Berry wrote a sequel that combined both ‘The Last Bear’ and ‘The Lost Whale’, while Poppy M wrote

a side story for ‘Murder Most Unladylike’ and Poppy C wrote a ‘Harry Potter’ alternative storyline.

To end the session, we all wrote a poem for our mothers for Mother’s Day, making sure to include

gratitude, good memories, similes, hope for the future and an apology, as well as an ‘If I could, I

would give you…’

We shared a lot of laughter and talked about the power of in-jokes and the

bravery of performing poetry that is for yourself or for a specific person, even knowing it might not

all be understood in its fullness by the audience, as well as the art of tailoring a poem to different

audiences on different occasions.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone next week for our session on Choose Your Own

Adventure stories!

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Young Writers – Week 8 (The Art of Writing) – Sequel Stories