Creative Writing Workshop Instructors: Alisha Patel and Fatheha Rahman

Email: creativewritingworkshop@oulook.com Twitter: @cwworkshop

Story-Writing: End of Sessions Report

Start Date: 16 April 2016End Date: 14 May 2016Place: Yellow Pavilion, Olympic Way, Wembley, HA9 0XJTime: 6.30pm – 8.30pm (2 hours)

Session Description:Introduction (attending: 3)Creating Settings and Scenes (attending: 1)Creating Characters (attending: 2)Creating Conflict and Relationships (attending: 1)Read and Review (attending: 6)

This was the very first Creative Writing Workshop for an introduction to Story Writing and we’re happy to report that our pilot sessions, we feel, have been a success. Our aims were to open minds and free imaginations, and we did just that with the people who have attended our classes.

In terms of popularity, throughout the five weeks we’ve had one regular participant who attended all the sessions, though the other participants are more scattered in their attendance. This may have been caused by the location and time of our sessions – as they often clashed with events at Wembley Stadium nearby, some of our participants want to avoid the pandemonium (crowd safety, police involvement, etc.). We are not disappointed by the numbers, we didn’t want more that 10 people in the class to begin with and we expected the interest in our idea to be slow to start. However, with six people joining the final session, we were delightfully surprised at how eager they were to join in with the activities as well as their eagerness to continue with our second program in Poetry Writing. Lastly, we were also visited by a recently-published author and publishing company owner in our final session, Molly Looby, who was more than happy to leave her details and see our project as it was at the time.

In terms of progress, many of our participants have learnt the basic characteristics involved in story writing and are capable of expanding their imagination to write their fictions. In the case of our most regular attendant, Participant I has shown keen interest in creative writing – calling it “oddly therapeutic” – and has exceeded our expectations in his creative capabilities, given that he’d never quite written a fiction for leisure or wellbeing before. Others have contributed interesting ideas, Participant SW has given a number of ideas in building on characters – such as taking a fictional character to lunch. All in all, ramblings and fleeting ideas have turned into much more solid images in the minds of our students and they are entirely capable of starting their own stories, and we hope to hear of these soon in our Read and Review sessions. Our fifth session brought us many surprising inputs from all our participants and they all passed the challenge of writing a short story in 30 minutes.

Fatheha Rahman 1 June 2016

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