We invited author Daniel Ingram-Brown to the college to deliver a workshop for selected year 9 & 10 learners on the creative writing process and forming a story. 

Daniel is an award-winning author from Yorkshire. He has achieved a Master’s in Creative Writing and Drama in Education and has over fifteen years’ experience delivering workshops at primary and secondary schools across the country. 

During the workshop, Daniel discussed the settings of his books and how they often work to inspire the starting points for the narrative. He discussed how building a setting can help readers to understand the physical places where the story takes unfolds whist also informing the tone of the piece. To demonstrate this, Daniel showed learners a map of his latest novel ‘Bea’s Witch.’  
He then read out an extract from his to the class and encouraged the learners to share and discussed the different places mentioned throughout his reading and how the role they played in setting the scene and tone.   

Learners also enjoyed writing tasks led by the author. During the first task, learners were challenged to write about a familiar setting in first person as fast as they could for four minutes. Daniel then tasked the learners to read back what they had written and cross things out and edit sentences. Learners were encouraged to read out loud to themselves in order to better grasp the words they had written. For the final task, learners were challenged to pick and object and that’s not supposed to be in their scene and incorporate it into the writing piece. This task encouraged readers to use setting and objects as a way to progress their stories into fantasy and heightened realism.  

Through this workshop, learners gained the valued perspective of an accomplished author and the writing process that has contributed to his success. As well as delivering an amazing creative workshop, Daniel also joined our whole year 9 group for a talk about his career as an author. He read excerpts from his book and had an interactive Q&A with learners. 

‘Learners were very engaged in the workshop utilising their creative writing skills which is also necessary for their GCSE being one of the key components. During the talk, there were many intriguing questions relating to career choices in English,’ Aminul, English Teacher.