February 8th Meeting & February Writing Task

Saturday 8^th February saw our session fall on National Libraries Day. Some of our members attended Wolverhampton Central Library for a talk on the importance of libraries to a writer, before heading off to our February workshop, on Writing for Young People.

Kuli and Nirmal took us through their presentation which covered different techniques for writing for young people, and how it differs to writing for adults. We had some discussions about books we’d enjoyed as young people (not THAT long ago!) and tried to remember what we were like back then. We realised that young people act in specific ways and have specific experiences, and this means you have to tailor your writing towards them using dialogue and situations they relate to.

For example, teenagers are self-absorbent and have relatively little perspective on the world and how their experiences fit into it as a whole. Therefore, they are prone to exaggeration and drama. To appeal to this audience with your writing, you have to ensure you capture this in the characters, dialogue and plot.

We then compiled a character profile for a young person who could be central to a story (read the full brief here), and started to build a plot for them. This is used as the basis for this month’s writing task, which is to write a story for young people. You can write a short story based on your character, or aim for a longer story (30 – 40,000 words) and bring us an excerpt next month.

There are some competitions coming up which might be of interest to writers, including the Manchester Writing for Children Prize, which would make use of the techniques we learned on Saturday. See a full list here on the Poetry Library website.

We welcomed two new members in February, as well as a returning member, Eileen. It’s great to see the group expanding, bringing new talent to the table. Hopefully we’ll see you again next month, girls J

Don’t forget you can come along to our March session on Saturday 8^th March for a workshop on Inspiration & Ideas.