Some characters!

For our final session of Writing Club with 5th and 6th class, we indulged in our love of monsters and gore.
After a game of picture exquisite corpse (that gave us the delightful Flumpkin among other creatures), we brainstormed about all the monsters we knew about before launching into some serious, detailed character building. Beware the banshee and the lightbulb-eating woman! Coming soon to a haunted house near you...

Well done to all and thanks again for the great stories and the great laughs!

Words and pics

We had another brilliant session of Writing Club last week where we looked for inspiration in pictures taken from books and magazines. By asking questions of each image and making up the answers ourselves (and our answers were always right of course!), we managed to dig out the seeds of a story: adventures down holes that grew deeper and deeper; stories of gigantic fish terrorising whole cities; of killer flowers; family murders (murders feature a lot in our stories!); mad nurses; banshees; tornadoes; unnerving expeditions up Mount Everest and much more.

The writers indulged in their love of horror and managed to make the most innocent-looking illustration feel heavy with menace! blood! zombies! It's been brilliant seeing them tapping into their imagination (they all have heaps of it!) to completely transform the mood of a picture and make it 'reveal' a hidden story.
Well done, guys!

Of fairy tales, story plans and witch's knickers

Writing Club is back for a third and final sequence this year. 5th and 6th class are at the helm this time and they are full of stories to tell and write. They are also (many of them) full of a love for horror, crime and gore, which makes for some very interesting reads...
The first week we started with what we all knew quite well - fairy tales - and had a look at how we could use them to write our own stories.
First, we threw  a random word into the world of the fairy tale (say, an elephant in the story of Blue Beard or a pair of knickers in Hansel and Gretel), and reinvented the story with this new element. Each tale remained quite recognisable and yet very different.

The Forbidden room in Blue Beard's castle. Brrr...

We then went one step further. Looking at what other writers had done with Little Red Riding Hood, we realised that one change could be enough to transform the whole thing: change the place (set it in Inchicore!), the time (set it in the future!), the main character (make the hero bad and the villain good!) or the ending (they all lived unhappily ever after) and you will end up with a very different story. So we did just that, reinventing Cinderella in 1916 Dublin or Snow White as a murder mystery...

During Week 2, we had a look at structure: how stories work. And we noticed that stories often used the same elements (a hero, a villain, a helper, a revelation, a message, a battle, a victory, etc...) and yet they don't appear the same on the surface. Using 25 'action' cards ('Leaves', 'Decides', 'Test', 'Chase'...), each writer picked the events they wanted to feature in their story and went on to produce an original piece. Even though we used the same set of actions, all the stories were very different, involving horrible planets where you had to kill people by law, Justin Bieber, the Joker, an unlucky charm and much more.

Thanks to all who took part, it's been a hoot. See you next week!

Taking our chances

More writing club madness over the last two weeks. We had great fun discovering the role of chance in creativity with games such as Chinese Whispers and Exquisite Corpse. We also looked at how constraints could force the creative juices to flow when each writer was given a random beginning to work from and an ending to work towards.

 And we also looked at how to use our everyday reality as material for an adventure or a mystery. For this, we drew maps of our surroundings (the school, the classroom, the table we were sitting at) which we then transformed by adding and changing elements on a sheet of tracing paper: exit the secretary's office, welcome to the unicorn stables! the dragon pens! the secret passages!
Well done all!

Travelling by imagination

In Week 2 of the Writing Club for 3rd and 4th, we took a look at a crazy poem by Michael Rosen called 'Orange':
Help!
I'm stuck in an orange.
I can't get out.
It's really orange in here,
And wet.

We wondered if it made sense or not, and even though we agreed it was bananas (ha ha), we could still picture it in our heads and it made a kind of sense. We then had a chat about how we could make people who had never seen an orange (the same way that we had never seen a person stuck in one) get what an orange is like. For that we used our 5 senses and tried to describe precisely this fleshy, juicy, spotty, peely, acidic fruit.
That led us to write some fun riddles about other things, from dogs to snakes to pencil cases, before moving on to our ongoing project of a 'travel journal'.

After travelling by memory last week, we used our imaginations this time to get us to weird and wonderful places: Singing Street, Wifi Land, Sugar Land, and lots more. We thought about the people who lived there, the rules they lived under, the food they ate, what they saw from their window, what the weather was like and so on. Our five senses came in handy once again to make these invented places feel 'real'.

We even started writing postcards from over there, but time ran away with us...
See you all next week for more writing explorations!

Writing club is back!

This time the group is made up of a dozen of 3rd and 4th class writers. In our first session, we let ourselves be inspired by various illustrations from magazines and books. Even in only a few minutes, the ideas came gushing out and the style and interest of each writer started showing.

There were some brilliant mind maps, folk tales and adventure stories being sketched and fleshed out. While we were at it, we had conversations about the difficulty of making choices when you are plotting or writing a story. Something all present could relate to!

We then moved on to our long-term project of putting together a travel journal. As we're not going to go anywhere in the next few weeks, we're going to have to use other means of transportation than planes and boats and hot air balloons.

This week, we travelled by memory and tried to remember everything about a great trip (near or far) we had taken in the past. Using drawing and writing, we made a great start on our 'journals' and once again each author's voice shone even in those early stages.
See you all next week!

Writing Club: the end!

Another action-packed day for our last session with the 1st and 2nd class writers. We continued looking at how little changes could totally transform a story with a game of rumours.
And we did some brain gymnastics by trying to find a path between a story beginning and an ending, both drawn out of a hat. Some of the resulting random combos were harder to link up than others, but every one tried their best and came up with really interesting stories.

Every body then went home with all of their writing and some new ideas for future stories.
Well done all, it was an absolute pleasure!

Writing Club, onwards and forwards

Week 3 of Writing Club with 1st and 2nd class, and it really feels like a club. We know where we're at, what we're doing and more or less where we're going. But of course, there's always going to be surprises along the way and things never quite go according to plan...
We experimented with that very idea with our first game this week. We played Chinese Whispers and with over 10 of us repeating (only once!) a silly sentence full of alliterations and tricky words, the end result was quite... interesting!

On the left, the original. On the right, the VERY original result.

We then went back to our long-term project and used everything we had produced so far to do a bit of planning (plotting). We looked at the main things that need to happen a story: a beginning, a middle and an end, and we paid particular attention to the middle: the problem, the solution, and wondered: is one of each enough or is it too easy?

Most of the writers used all this thinking to continue on with their story (and finish it!) while others revised their plans and decided to use a different setting, a different problem or, in extreme cases, different characters. It's part of the game, after all: you're allowed to change your mind!
A lot of writing was done and we even got started on our book covers!

Writing Club: the story continues

Back with the Writing Clubbers from 1st and 2nd class this week for more fun and crazyness!
As a warm-up and to shake the school day out, we played a game of narrative chairs. Never heard of narrative chairs? It's like musical chairs, but with a story instead of a song. In this case, we listened to The Exquisite Corpse Adventure  which you can read and listen to here.

Keeping in that vein, we then played two games of exquisite corpses, one with pictures and the other with words, which pushed us sneakily into grammatical territory... and toilet humour. Those two things are not mutually exclusive!

We had great fun trying to make sense of the nonsensical sentences we produced by writing one word each without knowing what came before or after each player's contribution. And even with something as random and weird, the beginnings of stories were already fizzing.

Finally we went back to our long-term project and looked at it from the point of view of setting. We were thinking about places where our stories could take place, drawing maps and jotting down ideas. We talked about setting our adventures in gardens, jungles, trains, in France, in Legoland, in Disneyland, in brains and drains... Each place featured details that may turn into plot points: baddies, obstacles, tornadoes, secret tunnels... It is as if the stories were already writing themselves.
Well done all and see you next week!

Writing Club, Day 1

Now that was exciting! Earlier this week we had our first ever meeting of the new Writing Club. A dozen budding writers from 1st and 2nd class gathered for an hour of writing fun and games that even involved drawing, racing, stolen horses, drowning cats, sad rabbits and much more!

We used our own lives for inspiration as well as some intriguing pictures from some great books.

Some things we talked about:

• there is no right or wrong when you write your own story: you decide what is working for you, as long as it makes sense!
• don't kill your hero in the first page: otherwise it's going to be a very short story! (Unless you're writing a ghost or a zombie story, of course :) )
• the more questions you ask, the more answers you make up, the more your story grows;








• one picture can spark many different stories;
• farts. Yes, we talked about having farts in your stories. Is it ok or not? We decided that we were allowed one per story. So be sure to make it a good one!

With all of this in mind, we were ready for our next adventure...

TO BE CONTINUED!...