Island School student reviews Adrian Tilley’s school visit
“On Friday 18 March we had a visit from Mr Tilley who has just published his second novel. He ran a number of workshops with Year 7 students on creative writing. Mr Tilley gave each student one sentence of a story and he showed us how to add to the sentence to make a story and how to build up suspense and make the problem even worse to create even more tension. The first sentence we looked at was “The bomb shook the room where I was working.” My partner (Hallie Tsui) and I made up a character who was a 12 year old spy who was doing her Geography homework when the bomb blew up.
When we read out our different stories Mr Tilley showed us how we could turn a single line into a great story. He taught us, as well, that the opening sentence in a story is very important. We also had fun learning about different character types, such as bad guy/girl and librarian.
We then wrote scripts and everyone else had to guess which character types we were pretending to be. We had a fantastic time with Mr Tilley. He was funny and could make great jokes out of what we were doing. He also taught us a lot about creative writing and I learnt many new ways to write an exciting story. I also enjoyed working with my partner and having the opportunity of writing on my own. It was also exciting to listen to and learn from a newly published author.”
- Caitlin Fowlds (7N), Island School
Image courtesy of Island School
