Storymakers offers two-hour workshops, a six-week story writing course and a regular (fortnightly) writing club. Held in Sevenoaks, all are suitable for children aged 8 years and above.

I have just added some new workshops to the list, with dates running up to the end of the year. Please have a look at what is on offer and if there is anything that takes your fancy, head to the booking page to choose a place.

Remember, the workshops are limited to six places and as they are such small groups, I must operate a cancellation policy of 48 hours, to allow time to offer the unwanted place to someone else. Thanks for your understanding on this.

Workshops

Choose from the following workshops, all held on Saturdays, 3-5pm at a cost of £10 per child.

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.

Courses

Six-week story writing course – held on Saturdays, 2-3pm at a cost of £45 per child.

Over the course of six weeks, we will work through the process of writing a short story, from coming up with a great idea, developing your characters, finding the right setting and choosing your point of view. Our aim is a length of 500 words that if you want to, you can enter into Radio 2’s 500-word competition.

Writing Club

Storymakers offers a writing club for those wishing to work on their writing skills on a more regular basis. Held on a fortnightly basis, the group meets Saturdays, 5-6pm at a cost of £45 per term (based on six meet-ups).