Creative Writing Exercises - Leicestershire County Council

Alien Landing
You will need: or group of objects
What to do:
• Show the objects to the participants. Don’t dwell on their past, current or
potential use.
Exercises given by Kerry Featherstone
Section C
Short Writing
& Discussion
• In a 10 minute discussion, concentrate on tactile descriptions, materials, size, shape
and weight.
• Ask the participants to imagine that aliens have attacked earth. By random teleporting,
they arrive in a room which contains these objects.
Using the laser lights growing in their foreheads, they illuminate the objects,
which they have never seen before… what do they make of these things?
• This can either be written as narrative, or poetry, and in the first or third person.
• Try to encourage as much inventiveness as possible in the responses:
Murder!
if the aliens come from a planet with no atmosphere, then a bike pump won’t
make much sense to them… is it a weapon? Is the hairbrush a musical
instrument that vibrates in the air, causing ultra-sonic tunes?
You will need: or group of objects
What to do:
• Write a murder story, in which the chosen object
is the murder weapon.
• Participants can either decide on characters, setting
and motivation, or you can supply these details.
Variations:
Victorian food preparation, H9.30
• Ask the participants to describe how they might use the same object to: save someone’s
life, break out of prison, hunt caribou, hold up a train…
• The writing might be a poem celebrating the greatness of the object by looking at all of
these uses in a stanza each, or a prose fiction featuring the object as the star of the story.
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