Gareth Rubin, Journalist and Author, Inspire Aspire Creative Writing Workshop 9 July 2019 

Gareth Rubin, Journalist and Author came in to run a creative writing workshop with our year 12 English Language students.

Gareth is a Journalist with 25 years experience of writing for newspapers. He decided to get into creative writing five years ago and published his first book, Liberation Square with Penguin in April 2019.

Gareth was kind enough to set a pre-event task for students to read a chapter of his published book which Liberation Square. During today’s one hour session he set the scene of Soviet occupied London - the main character being a guard on the wrong side of ‘the wall’ in 1952.

Students were given half an hour task to create a piece of creative writing to develop the guard’s story. They were instructed to make the main character quite distinctive in order to give the reader something to be interested in. Students were reminded by Gareth to think about what would interest them in novels throughout the process such as the importance of intrigue. Students were also told that it is essential to be sympathetic to a character to make the reader ‘buy into’ the story whether that person is a goodie or a baddie.

Several students were selected to read their extracts of their new creative pieces. James, Jonathan, Mahnoor, Muhammad and Natasha offered interesting and varied accounts which Gareth then scaffolded further. This allowed the students to think about character development; scandals how to offer more information about the main character to make it more interesting to the reader and conflicts.

In the plenary, our year 12’s were then offered the opportunity to further develop their stories by predicting what is going to happen next for the main character i.e. his/her back story/significant conflict(s) and with who?

We thank Gareth for the time he took to visit our school. However it should be noted that the students contributions were markedly good. This is testament to their dedicated teacher’s, Miss Clump and Mrs Whitehead who have enabled students to show confidence in their ability to both create such original, inventive pieces and to read these to an accomplished author.