Hello and welcome to Storymakers, the creative writing club for budding authors.
Rose and Billy Bud are ready to welcome you to our weekly creative writing workshops and more regularly, for our story writing courses.
Storymakers offers two-hour workshops, a six-week story writing course and a regular (fortnightly) writing club. All are suitable for children aged 8 years and above.
Workshops
Where do story ideas come from?
In this workshop, we look at how to find story ideas from the everyday. This is a practical workshop, aimed at exercising the senses, so they can hone in to what is around us. It’s also a great way to improve those descriptive writing skills.
Story development
What do you do with those story ideas once you find them? In this workshop, we look at story structure, to understand how to turn our own ideas into a story. We also look at the key elements we need to bring the story to life, such as character and setting.
Picture book workshop
What was it about your favourite bedtime story that made you want to read it over and over again? In this workshop, we’ll take a look at how to use simple language to the greatest effect in order to put together our own bedtime story or picture book. No artistic skills required, but we will take a practical approach, thinking about the layout and how the illustrations would fit around the text.
Comic strip writing
Can you lay out your ideas, storyboard style and add just the right amount of text to make an interesting story? Some practical skills required, but your artistic talents need not extend beyond stick men. Comic strip writing is all about the dialogue and not forgetting the all-important use of onomatopoeia – Kapow! Boom!
Play in a day
When you write speech in your stories, do your characters sound real? One way of finding out, as well as practising your dialogue-writing technique, is to put together a mini play. You don’t need to be a budding actor to do this, but being able to read the lines is an important way of seeing how real-sounding your characters are. This workshop will also help you see how characters show emotion. Learning how to describe these emotions is an invaluable skill in your writing.
Make your own book trailer
Working in pairs, we are going to start by making our own book blurbs. Summarising our stories in a way that makes others want to read them will help us see if we truly have a great idea. We will then set out our blurbs in the form of a storyboard, collect suitable images and work text around them so we can create a short video clip. You can bring your own iPads, if you have them, but this is not essential.
For details of upcoming workshops, please contact me.
Courses
Story Writing Course
This course covers ideas, character development, plotting and planning, viewpoint, language and descriptions and settings.
It is ideal for children aged 7+ who love writing and would like to learn more about how to refine their ideas and turn them into a story. My aim would be for each child to produce a 500 word story at the end of this course that they can enter into the BBC 500 words competition.
Writer Buds
Termly writing club for ages 7-10 years
Each term we’ll cover different styles of writing, all set to specific themes, working on building confidence in writing and harnessing imagination and creativity in a fun and safe setting.
The Young Writers
For children in year 6 and upwards wishing to work on their creative writing skills over a longer period, I have a fortnightly writing club, also on a Saturday at 5-6pm.
Contact me for more information.