WRITE CLUB
Subscribe to my Substack to get regular posts on how to teach children creative writing, a series of short stories you can read with your children (discussion prompts included), access to the new chapters of my serial fiction “Tunnels”.
THE CLUB
If you would like to join, please fill out the form at the bottom of the page and you will be added to the waitlist.
The club (for 9-11 year olds) is designed as fun but hard work, and it has been developed through my background as a primary school teacher, tutor and aspiring author. In essence, I love creative writing now but was not that keen as a child, and so my goal in Write Club is to show children how it can be the most enjoyable and rewarding process.
Each session runs on a similar format but is unique in its focus, style and goals. We begin by looking at a text written by myself so that I can focus it on certain techniques we want to look at. Then, we break it down by the techniques used: metaphor, simile, personification etc (I also throw in some of my own techniques, including ‘the scale of fear’ or the ‘monster’s technique’). As well as this, we look at structure, grammar, punctuation and characterisation. At the end of each session the children then spend 25-30 minutes writing either their own version of the story, their own story, a descriptive piece, or a continuation of a story. This is something that would be expected in most 11+ exams.
However, the real goal of Write Club is to show them how writing is built on detail and description. Often children want to focus on a plot, which becomes confusing and complicated, as they are trying to reproduce something such as Harry Potter in the space of 30 minutes! This is not possible for any author, even JK herself! So my aim is to show them how there is joy and beauty in the construction of description and detail, and that the story is really not that important.
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