20 January 2024

Posted by Sukie & Claire

Young Writers - Week 2 (The Art of Writing) - Genre & Setting

Hi Writers!

In this week’s workshop we focused on setting and genre, and how these can be played with or

intertwined to create exciting new stories.

In our check-in, we described our week as a type of doughnut, cake or pastry.

 Berry said her week had been like eating a bit too much birthday cake and feeling queasy

afterwards as it’s been so busy, but she was looking forward to the icing of the weekend.

 Poppy M described her week as a croissant – plain, but OK.

 Poppy C’s week had been like an orange doughnut – a bit wild due to a packed rehearsal

schedule

 Claire said her week had been a salted caramel doughnut – a mix of sweet and salty, good

and bad

 Sukie’s week had been like a doughnut covered in sprinkles – hundreds and thousands of

things going on.

From our reading check-in, we discovered a shared love of murder mysteries in what everyone had

been reading over the last week…

 Poppy C: Murder in the Museum

 Berry: Murder Most Unladylike

 Poppy M: Murder In The Spotlight

We read an excerpt from ‘A Spoonful of Murder’ from the ‘Murder Most Unladylike’ series by Robin

Stevens:

‘Somehow, even though Daisy and I had seen the body with our own eyes, I did not quite

believe that the crime was real until we came back home from the doctor’s office this

afternoon.

Before that moment, it all just seemed like a bad dream, the very worst sort – like the one I

have some times where we’re investigating a case and I realize, like a slow shiver going up

the back of my neck, that the murderer is after Daisy, and there is nothing I can do about it.

But, unlike those dreams, this time I cannot wake up, no matter how hard I pinch myself. And

I know that I ought to have been able to stop what happened.

Daisy says that this is nonsense. She says, wrinkling her nose, that I could not have stopped

anything – and, in fact, if I had been on the spot, I might have ended up murdered too. Like

much of what Daisy says, this is true, though not particularly comforting. But all the same, I

cannot shake the feeling that I’ve failed.

You see, I have come back to Hong Kong. Here it is beautiful and bright, the air is warm and

heavy and I am at home. No one looks at me oddly. I’m not strange, and that is a wonderful

feeling, like opening up your hand and realizing that you have been clenching the muscles of

it for far too long.

But, all the same, some things have changed in un comfortable ways. I have been in England

for almost two years, and while I was there I learned how to be not only an English

schoolgirl and a best friend but also a detective. That is what the friendship between Daisy

and me is all about, after all. We are secretly detectives, and have solved five murder cases

so far, and, although it is not exactly true to say that we helped the victims, we did at least

find out the truth about their deaths when the police could not.

But in Hong Kong I am with my family, who remember me as the smaller, younger Hazel I

was when I stepped onto the boat to go to Deepdean. It’s harder to be brave and grownup

and sensible when all I’m expected to be is dutiful, a good daughter and a good older sister.

It’s particularly hard to be the second, because— But I am getting ahead of myself. Daisy

says to tell things in order as much as possible, and she is right. At least I have not forgotten

how to lay out a case in a new notebook, the one Daisy gave me for Christmas.

All I will say before I go back to the moment when everything started – this journey, this

crime – is that a terrible thing has happened, a thing that the Detective Society must

investigate. And we will – but this time I am stuck in the very middle of the case. I am not just

a detective, I’m a witness. And I think that I might even be a suspect.’

After discussing the different genres of fiction, including science fiction, crime, fantasy, historical,

contemporary, romance, horror and realism, we played a Murder Mystery Generator game where

together we pulled out three characters from the character envelope at random, plus two settings

and two crimes.

We wound up with:

 An aspiring baker/chef

 A focused painter

 An extraordinary firefighter

 COVID lockdown

 A space station in the future

 Runs a crime gang

 Murder

Everyone wrote a story based on these prompts, and we were amazed by how different all of them

were!

Berry’s firefighter was the murderer, who killed the baker because he stood in the way of their goal

to put out the sun.

Poppy M’s chef was the murderer, who killed the chief engineer after feeling unappreciated and put

down for too long, though it took Sergeant Petersbury a long time to discover the truth after many

red herrings, involving a hat pin, a missing chef’s hat, and a seemingly watertight alibi.

Poppy C’s first-person narrative included an unreliable narrator with an ulterior motive – whilst

being elected to solve the murder of the firefighter, they were eventually revealed to be planting

false evidence and to be the killer themself!

After that we each took our own set of one character, one setting and one genre, and created our

own stories based on them.

Poppy C pulled ‘practical ballerina’, ‘horror’ and ‘a convenient park’. Her story was of a ballerina

walking home late after class, who spots a shadow in the park and, for a while, thinks nothing of it.

But then she notices the shadow is following her, getting closer and closer, until she flees in terror.

When she finally stops, she cannot see it anywhere…

Berry pulled ‘elderly person’, ‘magical library’ and ‘adventure’. An elderly man pulls a book from a

shelf in a magical library, which falls to the floor and opens to a page with an image of a wolf. He

disappears and turns into the wolf inside the story of Little Red Riding Hood. He makes his way

through the wood and finds her, but Little Red Riding Hood scares him off with a gun. He flees until

he meets the woodcutter, who believes his tale and offers him somewhere to stay, but is allergic to

wolves and falls into anaphylactic shock…

Poppy M pulled ‘trusting teacher’, ‘Western’ and ‘rural party’. A teacher goes to a fancy dress party

dressed up as a cowboy, but as the party is next door to a soft play where there is a school trip being

led by her headmaster, she is forced to hide in the bathroom to escape from being seen…

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone next week for our session on plot!

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Young Writers - Week 2 (The Art of Writing) - Genre & Setting