Merry Christmas!

As it’s nearly Christmas I thought I’d recount a Christmas workshop I ran a couple of weeks ago for my creative writing society. The exercises are very silly but they’re a bit of fun and we had some great responses.

Warm up – A free write. If anyone doesn’t know what this is and didn’t read my last post, free writing is when you write for a certain amount of time, say five minutes, without planning, stopping or editing. For this exercise, the free write started with the phrase ‘Rudolph’s nose was green’.

Exercise 1 – Write a letter to Santa from your favourite fictional character.

Exercise 2 – Write a treatment/summary of a sequel to your favourite Christmas film. You could also write a short story that is a sequel to a Christmas film, if you preferred.

Exercise 3 – Change one word in the title of a Christmas song and to re-write the lyrics accordingly.

Exercise 4 – Write a Martian poem about Christmas. Martian poetry was a movement in British poetry in the late 70s and early 80s  which sought to defamiliarise and see the world in a new way. However, I thought it would be more fun to take the term literally and write a poem about Christmas from a Martian’s perspective.

Exercise 5 – Write a typical Christmas scene in which something is reversed. For example, you could write a scene in which the parents believe in Santa but the children don’t. Or, if you wanted to go down a darker route, a scene where the turkeys are hunting the humans to be eaten on Christmas Day.

Exercise 6 – Write an acrostic Christmas poem. An acrostic is a poem in which the first letter of each line, spells out a word or a message. In this case, the first letter of each line would spell out CHRISTMAS.

I promise, it will be back to serious posts next week. But I hope some of you enjoyed this. If you do try any of them out, please feel free to share the outcome in the comments. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas. Thank you so much for reading.