The Whole Story

The Whole Story is a project-based course that provides a wonderful opportunity for keen young writers to spend consecutive days honing their writing skills – all under the expert eye of a creative writing mentor. Whether your child is a novelist in the making, or they have brilliant story and character ideas but can’t yet get much down on paper, this course has been designed to equip them with strategies to become more confident and inspired writers. We aim to spark their imaginations and enthuse them with a love for writing and reading: writing is, after all, fundamentally great fun!
On The Whole Story course, we teach children how to effectively structure a story based on a classic literary genre, such as mystery, adventure or fantasy fiction. Our writing resources, designed by our in-house professional writers, provide a narrative framework from which the children craft their stories. In a small group setting that allows children to focus and interact constructively, their writing tutor will provide guidance, advice and individual feedback to each child. At the end of the course, you will receive a detailed written feedback for your child highlighting their strengths, progress made and suggested areas for improvement.

Course content

In each session, children will learn and practice different elements of story plotting while building their story:

1. The exposition (i): Set up the problem, develop a compelling character and start creating your main plot.
2. The exposition (ii): World building – Develop a powerful setting.
3. Rising Action & Climax (i): Create an effective midpoint – find the point of no return.
4. Rising Action & Climax (ii): Raise the stakes.
5. Falling Action & Resolution: Final conflict. Obligatory scene and denouement.

Children spend three hours each day working on their story, providing them the space and time to develop an understanding of how to weave more complex narratives into their work, and allowing them to become confident in structuring their stories clearly from start to end. 

Children are encouraged to develop their critical thinking and peer-review skills throughout the course – developing not only their writing, but also their ability to articulate constructive feedback. Expressing yourself through writing is just one way of learning how to communicate effectively and with empathy. Each of our workshops contains elements of collaboration, discussion and debate in order to cultivate the broader life skills that will set our writers up as sophisticated and compassionate learners/thinkers.