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30 April 2024

Posted by Harley Truslove

New Term & Elevator Scripts

The wonderful Ali Sparkes was leading the group today, so we started with one of her worksheets where our writers had to fill in the gaps:


Emma burst into the kitchen holding a ___

She stared at Sam and then she yelled ___

Sam got up. He was wearing his ___ so he felt___

He opened his mouth and ___

Emma ____


The running theme seemed to be cats, with three of them appearing across the work of our six different writers. Glockenspiels, cardboard spacemen, and two house fires also featured.




Moving on, we discussed how we felt when we walk around art galleries. There were various responses, from incredibly enthusiastic to less excited when dad wanders off and gets lost…


Ali handed out stickers of three different famous paintings (Mona Lisa, The Girl With A Pearl Earring, and American Gothic) and challenged our writers to come up with stories about the subjects of those paintings in whichever manner they chose. 


We had a wonderful selection of pieces including:


Mona Lisa being stuck in a capitalistic hellscape and musing about the sadness of her existence; “Martha” complaining about her husband “John” and his prized pitchfork in American Gothic; and the story of The Girl With A Pearl Earring going from her younger years in a Greek village and transferring into the view of painting herself.




Next up in our jam-packed session, Ali laid out a series of characters on slips of paper and challenged the group to pick one which appealed to them, then put the writers in groups of three. The idea was if the people they had chosen were all stuck in an elevator, how would the scene play out? The writers were given ten minutes to write a script and it was a rather energetic exercise.


Our two elevator groups were:


A stockbroker who was also a psychopath

A dinner lady who was also a compulsive thief

Circus performer 


And


A delivery rider for Dominos pizza

A young heiress and horse rider

A full time vampire



Finally, with the last few minutes of the session, our writers were put into pairs and given a five paragraph story and challenged to improve its prose.


Altogether it was a very lively session, and a wonderfully energetic start to the term! Thank you Ali!

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