50 Creative Writing sessions for a lunchtime/after-school club

Here are 50 separate Creative Writing sessions I have made, designed for a lunchtime or after school club. They have been made with Sixth Formers in mind, but most of the activities are accessible enough for younger (GCSE-age) students as well, though teacher discretion is advised as some of the literary extracts and film clips are more suitable for the older students.

Each session contains some preliminary stimulus materials to read and watch (extracts from novels, poems, film scenes, paintings, photographs, etc.) and then related writing activities for the second half of the session. Obviously the extracts and scenes I have selected are very much catered to my own tastes, and teachers may want to adapt these materials by replacing extracts or clips with their own favourite examples of great writing.

The sessions cover a wide range of topics. I like to constantly vary the genre and form of writing to challenge the students to try writing outside of their usual comfort zones. Here are some of the topics covered:

• Novel conventions and structure
• Narrative elements (characters, settings, premises)
• Poetry, and the conventions of specific poetic forms
• Genre conventions
• Retellings of classic myths and folklore
• Screenwriting and dialogue writing for plays/films
• Wordplay challenges (such as lipograms in PPT 39)
• A few slightly wacky sessions (fixing the bad prose of The Da Vinci Code in PPT 45!)

Also included are various Word documents with extracts corresponding to some of the sessions.

Hopefully this will provide a useful starting point for any teacher thinking of running a school or college creative writing club.