Summer Creative Writing Course: Characters Coming to Life (Ages 8-13)

Sarah E Williams (www.writtenwithwilliams.com) presents this limited five session writing course for children aged 8-13. In each two hour session healthy drinks and snacks will be provided. By the end of these five sessions each child will understand lots of different writing techniques, how to plan and will have done a lot of fun writing exercises!

Spaces are limited to six places for this course. We run various childrens courses and sessions in The Blue House Bookshop. Keep an eye out for our other sessions and let us know if you'd like to see anything in particular!

The structure of this course is as follows:

Session one: introduction. What makes a great character! Bring along books with your favourite characters in to the first session and we'll look at what makes them great. We'll play some games to create characters together, including some drawing games.

Session two: character personalities. Let's look at how to bring our characters to life! We'll learning about the 'show, don't tell' method - using description and action to show the reader more than you say!

Session three: character arcs. In this session we'll look at the heroes journey and how characters can change throughout a story and find out how character flaws and strengths both add up to make a character interesting.

Session four: character interaction - acting and being acted on. How characters interact with the world around them - or how they react to what happens? We need to have characters that both act and react throughout a story

Session five: putting your character ino a story! This is where all our plans and exercises become a story! We will come into this session with a good idea of what it takes to write a story, then we'll spend time writing together through exercises and telling stories of our own!

Sarah E Williams is an experienced creative writing tutor. For over three years she has been teaching creative writing to children an adults alike via online platforms. Since moving to York she has taught various adult in-person sessions and is now collaborating with The Blue House Bookshop in order to bring her love of writing to younger students too. She brings excitement and enthusiasm to each class and helps every child believe that they can succeed in writing while enjoying the process.

Host or Publisher Sarah Williams